My grandmother loved Match of the Day; hated the goal celebrations.
“All that kissing and cuddling,” she scornfully called it.
Which is why death’s merciful side should not be overlooked.
She left us in 1987, and so was spared the nonsense that has consumed the game since. Insatiable greed, football clubs as billionaires’ playthings and the Cock-Up Central that is VAR.
As for the ‘evolution’ of goal celebrations since the ’80s, heaven knows what she’d have made of the pouting, cupped ears and other self-indulgences that accompany the feat nowadays. Something tells me she’d have started seeing Mick Channon’s windmill routine as iconic of purer times.
And while I’d welcome her back tomorrow, I’m pleased she wasn’t with me on Saturday, when I beheld a particular aspect of the ‘matchday experience’ at King’s Lynn FC.
Because when it comes to explaining why the person in charge of a football club’s PA system sees fit to drown out crowd celebrations for every home goal with vacuous music at full volume, I wouldn’t know where to start.
Although I have my theories. Someone’s holidayed in the States, I suspect, gone to a basketball game and flown back to Norfolk with what he or she imagined was a Really Good Idea.
No it’s not.
The best advice I ever read on visiting America was that you must never lose sight of the fact that you’re in a foreign country. Some of what they have over there works over here and some of it doesn’t.
There’s a reason the word ‘razzamatazz’ never appears in a sentence that isn’t referring to America or its people. Razzamatazz is generally how Americans are wired.
I’ve been served ice cream in Boston by a street vendor whose spiel was of stand-up comedy calibre. I’ve sat next to a likeable old crank on a Greyhound bus who delivered dialogue like he was Walter Matthau in a movie.
But that’s them. It’s not us. You can’t bring razzamatazz to King’s Lynn, any more than you can to Kilmarnock or Merthyr Tydfil. It goes down like fingernails on a cultural blackboard.
One of the gimmicks with which Sky Sports announced its pact with top-flight English football 30 years ago were cheerleaders. It was the least surprising development in football’s ‘new dawn’ that they were dropped faster than a handful of lava.
Had it just been about ambience last Saturday, though, I wouldn’t be writing this. What really irked about the musical gate-crashing was what it does for the fans.
Working people, most of them, they’ve had five days straight of being expected to keep their heads down, shut up and graft. Free of their boss, spouse and kids, they get a 90-minute window on Saturday afternoons for unbridled raging and exulting.
It is their time. Footballers can score and officials can adjudge but the reaction to both is all down to the people in the stands. Their moment; their contribution.
Surely an essential part of that catharsis is being able hear themselves? Not being drowned out by a tsunami of third-rate Muzak the moment the net bulges.
In fairness, King’s Lynn is by no means the first football club to go down this route but it’s part of a trend that prompts a wider question.
At what point did we decide that atmosphere at sporting events could no longer be solely entrusted to the audience but had to be manufactured instead, with the help of fireworks, loudspeakers that could wake the dead and enough renditions of Simply the Best to make you want to tear your own ears off?
And why was that?
Taking a Pen. - thoughts of a small-time sports writer 