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    #51
    When Bill Shankly said that football wasn't a matter of life or death it was more important than that, he was of course being ironic. Someone on the Shrimperzone summed it for me when they said that they don't care whether the club are relegated this season, all they want is for every single Southend fan to be there next season. All of our older supporters, all of our vulnerable supporters of all ages, I just want them to be there next season. Southend might go bust over this and a few months ago I would have been mortified. Today I couldn't care less because if that does happen, we'll reform and start again in the Essex Senior League with as many of our supporters there as possible.

    I'm going out for long walks as well. I live only a minute fro the seafront but I leave that to the children and old folks to enjoy. I drive 10 minutes and walk a bit more of the seawall each day and have done about 35 miles this week.. On one side I have a muddy creek and on the other I have farmland with me walking on a 20ft high embankment. Today I walked for 7 miles and passed three people. We gave each other a wide berth, with smiles and a few waves, but it's my method of coping.

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      #52
      I had a video meeting on Thursday to discuss ho my club will survive this and other recent events which involved talks about planning permission appeals, delayed AGMs and constitution reviews. These are hard going enough without going through the medium of my umpteenth video meeting of the day but this time I haven't got any actual football as a silver lining. So, yes, I am missing it.

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        #53
        I will miss it. I'm just not there yet for two reasons: (1) I have been working all day for the past couple weeks to deal with shifts at my university that start on Monday so I really haven't had a lot of time to focus on anything else. (2) I've been sitting on some Colombian and Ecuadoran league games so I am watching those from midnight to 3am when I am finally done working. So, I have something relatively recent to take the place of what would be the end of the current season in Europe and the middle of the Libertadores and Sudamericana.

        I understand that I'm in the US and rights fees sold to the US and Asia have had a major impact on the English game, but I guess I don't understand what is a common theme expressed in this thread and regularly repeated on OTF about being angry by the hype, Sky's approach to coverage, footaballers as a mega-stars, and similar comments. Beyond having kick-off times moved (which is a totally understandable annoyance for football fans) and the annoying attempts to turn pre-game and half-time into a rock concert, all the rest of it is avoidable. If you're watching on TV, skip the pre-game, get some food during half-time or set an alert on your phone and do something else for 12 minutes, stop watching when the game ends. Don't waste your time on Sky Transfer Centre news or Guardian headlines or sports news shows. Just watch the game. It's easy to do. Then there's no hype impact; you're simply paying attention to 22 players playing a game and the drama that unfolds during that 90 minutes. And if you are going to games, supporting your club, how does any of this media coverage impact you; you're free from the pre-game, half-time, etc. Yes, ticket prices have skyrocketed but so have movie prices, satellite tv, concert tickets, housing, mobile phone charges, airfare.

        At one point I found myself getting annoyed at the 12-month cycle but then I started skipping the Gold Cup, I pay no attention to pre-season friendlies, and even the Euros have become bloated so I tune in when I want and tune out when I want. Easy. This approach means that I really love watching football and I'm sure I will miss it when I finish watching games on my DVR or HD files that friends have sent me. But I've been watching (or listening when a game is on the background while I work) at minimum 10 games a week for at least 15 years since satellite coverage radically expanded in the US. I'm as excited about the game now as I was when I first discovered it in 1977 or 1978. I can spend 20 minutes scrolling through Netflix or Prime trying to find something to watch and most of the time whatever I watch, I would describe as "ok" (i.e., basically forgettable). I'd much rather watch football and so I will miss it soon enough.

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          #54
          I take your point, but VAR affects the 90 minutes and some commentary time is often devoted to off-field shit like transfer rumours. Hype is reflected in how the coaches over-react to everything and pressure the officials.

          The competitions themselves have become too predictable: e.g. all the Champions League last 16 this season were from the big leagues.

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            #55
            Originally posted by danielmak View Post
            I understand that I'm in the US and rights fees sold to the US and Asia have had a major impact on the English game, but I guess I don't understand what is a common theme expressed in this thread and regularly repeated on OTF about being angry by the hype, Sky's approach to coverage, footaballers as a mega-stars, and similar comments. Beyond having kick-off times moved (which is a totally understandable annoyance for football fans) and the annoying attempts to turn pre-game and half-time into a rock concert, all the rest of it is avoidable. If you're watching on TV, skip the pre-game, get some food during half-time or set an alert on your phone and do something else for 12 minutes, stop watching when the game ends. Don't waste your time on Sky Transfer Centre news or Guardian headlines or sports news shows. Just watch the game. It's easy to do. Then there's no hype impact; you're simply paying attention to 22 players playing a game and the drama that unfolds during that 90 minutes. And if you are going to games, supporting your club, how does any of this media coverage impact you; you're free from the pre-game, half-time, etc. Yes, ticket prices have skyrocketed but so have movie prices, satellite tv, concert tickets, housing, mobile phone charges, airfare..
            Without trying to be a non-league snob about this (and probably failing), watching Bath City (and Wales games to a lesser degree) completely negates all the hype etc. I retreated from the Premier League when Tan Ud got promoted and have never watched it since, I gave on the Champions League finally when ITV didn't get all the games and only watch Wales as far as internationals go. Obviously, there is the fact that I can just buy tickets on the turnstiles (although I have a season ticket), sit or stand when and where I want and can still see the goal replays (albeit about a day later on the internet). I watched MOTD the other day and the VAR made it unwatchable (albeit I can see that watching a live game would dilute the influence on that).

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              #56
              Originally posted by Ray de Galles View Post
              It seems to me that when people on here are saying they "don't miss football" they actually mean they don't miss all the extraneous bullshit that has attached itself to elite football and doesn't really exist, or at least is markedly reduced, at other levels of the game.
              No, not really. I don't miss Cambridge United or Royston Town playing at all, either. I'm not really bothered at all by the temporary disappearance of spectator sport from the world. It's fun but... inessential. As Steve Pinker once said of music, it's cheesecake. Very nice, but for me it could cease to exist and I would go on happily enough. But I don't expect my experience to be shared by all, of course. Some people genuinely couldn't live without music.

              Whether I feel like this in a months time is unclear. Because so far, unlike EIM, I'm not missing normality much, either. The lockdown rules are inconvenient at times. But nothing beyond that. I suspect being as busy as I've ever been is somewhat obscuring me to other people's experiences and boredom.

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                #57
                Perhaps oddly, I quite like the "extraneous bullshit that has attached itself to elite football". Not as much as I enjoy the football itself, mind. But what's wrong with us - and media punters - talking about the game? We don't have this problem when discussing books, or films, or art, or anything else we experience and then want to share our experiences about.

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                  #58
                  "Talking about the game" isn't what I mean, we all partake in and enjoy that on here. I'm referring to people and media outlets who are more interested in stuff like transfer rumours, talking points, banter, betting, managerial "mind games" blah, blah, blah than the actual game.
                  Last edited by Ray de Galles; 29-03-2020, 08:06.

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                    #59
                    It's because a significant amount of the discussion is bollocks, both empirically and factually. And you don't have a built-in bias where most of the writing is based on keeping the fans of Dan Brown happy because he's sold more books.

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                      #60
                      Yes most of the discussion is manufacturered outrage, like a lot of the general media to be fair.

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                        #61
                        Janik is as wrong about football as Pinker is about music. Don't get me wrong, going to football is as much if not more about the travelling to the game and drinking in the pubs and attending with your mates (same with watching and playing gigs, I suppose) as the actual game. As someone once brilliantly said "football is often the sit to the com". However, that doesn't take away from the fact that quite often the football is fucking brilliant (again, the same as watching or playing gigs).

                        That cliched "a bad day at _____ is better than a good day at the office" platitude really is true about football
                        Last edited by Bored Of Education; 28-03-2020, 23:24.

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                          #62
                          Actually, when a bad day at football involved a real possibility of getting a kicking, perhaps not.

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                            #63
                            Originally posted by Ray de Galles View Post
                            "Talking about the game" isn't what I mean, we all partake in and enjoy that on here. I'm referring about people and media outlets who are more interested in stuff like transfer rumours, talking points, banter, betting, managerial "mind games" blah, blah, blah than the actual game.

                            I agree with all of this. There are a lot of people talking about football for a living. Most do so in a way that in the best case isn't interesting and in the worst case is nausea-inducing. But there are also a lot of people talking about football in ways that make watching or attending matches more interesting and fun: WSC/WSC podcast, BBC World Football Phone-in podcast is not about the hype, fanzines and blogs written by people who are fans. In fact, the tweet from Glendenning that kicked off this thread is the perfect example for me of what to avoid. I found that listening to the guardian podcast left me feeling kind of empty: most of the guys on there were trying so hard to show that they didn't care about football while they made money talking about football. There was a kind of smarmy, too cool for this whole thing vibe about that podcast so it was the first one I stopped listening to when I wanted to free up time for other things. I found that listening to podcasts made by people who were not embarrassed to talk about how much they loved football spoke to me as a fan in more meaningful ways.


                            But I hear Satchmo's point above in response to my other post in this thread, even watching some games can make it hard to escape some level of hype and TV network meta-level self importance. I don't really worry about it, though.
                            Last edited by danielmak; 30-03-2020, 19:06.

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                              #64
                              I don’t miss the Premier League. I don’t mean to come across as one of those self-righteous lower league idiots that believes they’re a better person for supporting a small club, mainly because I don’t support anyone these days, but because I am bored of the incessant, never ending moaning and abuse of VAR like it’s some sort of super computer sent to kill football for good.

                              I don’t go to football regularly but I do try to get to a game a month, roughly. I would have probably been at 16th placed Birmingham v 18th placed Huddersfield last week. I am a little gutted I’ve missed the sense of adventure of boarding the train, getting out somewhere different to home, going to a couple of pubs, chatting, what is largely, nonsense with my Dad, comparing bets and then the walk to the ground. The wave of people making the same walk as us in colours, the noises, the smells of onions on a fryer, the police stood about looking bored, the “programmes” shout from the sellers, the click of the turnstiles and the walk to wherever our seat would be.

                              Yesterday I would have been sat on my sofa watching the scores on Soccer Saturday. I might have walked through the forest and watched Epping Town if they had a home game.

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                                #65
                                Originally posted by danielmak View Post
                                In fact, the tweet from Glendenning that kicked off this thread is the perfect example for me of what to avoid. I found that listening to the guardian podcast left me feeling kind of empty: most of the guys on there were trying so hard to show that they didn't care about football while they made money talking about football. There was a kind of smarmy, too cool for this whole thing vibe about that podcast so it was the first one I stopped listening to when I wanted to free up time for other things.
                                I found a similar thing with the podcast, that too often they were so busy trying to take a contrarian position to all the hype that they didn't have actually anything to say about the football itself.

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                                  #66
                                  A year ago today i watched Barry lose to TNS in the Welsh Cup semi final at Newtown. They played really well and lost to 2 late goals. We applauded them off as if they'd won.

                                  I miss football.

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                                    #67
                                    The last sporting event I went to was four weeks ago today, my last football game was a month ago yesterday.

                                    It's bloody crap, not going.

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                                      #68
                                      I watched the whole of Sunderland til I die over this weekend and it should be enough to put anyone off football but it wasn't. I miss the frustration, the occasional great moment but most of all the whole match going routine.

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                                        #69
                                        I commented to a friend two Saturdays ago about the lack of Football. But that was a bit of playing to the gallery as Football matters a lot to her. I didn’t think about it at all yesterday until logging on to OTF in the evening and seeing there were new threads about matches on that date in previous seasons. 3pm came and went without anything being missing to me awareness at the time.

                                        My description of Football’s* meaning for me as cheesecake, lovely but totally inessential, clearly still holds. And note, Bored, this is what it personally means not a general opinion of its value - and that, frankly, is something you cannot have a valid opinion on.

                                        * - actually this holds for all professional spectator sport.

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                                          #70
                                          I'm still not missing it although enjoying watching some old highlights and reading archive material. I think my head is in too much of a spin right now about other issues to care about what happens with the current season.

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                                            #71
                                            Yesterday we ended up cycling past the Eintracht stadium at exactly the time we should have been in there watching them play Freiburg. It didn't seem that strange, though I wondered, 'What would the score be? Where would be in the league now? How many would Bayern have beaten us by in the cup midweek?' But only for a minute or two - it barely feels relevant.

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                                              #72
                                              My last game was 13 weeks ago today, that's a quarter of a bloody year.

                                              Missing it terribly (though right at this moment missing the mid point of the speedway season and the start of the test cricket summer more) even though the domestic season would be over by now. My flight to Azerbaijan for the start of the Euros would have been in nine days.

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                                                #73
                                                I desperately need to see the Millers so that I can say that I've seen them in seven decades. Curse my knees; I could've been to a match already.

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                                                  #74
                                                  The Euros is a tough one because I was expecting the tournament to be poor but also willing to be pleasantly surprised. Now, if the delayed Euros are poor, we won't know for sure if the delay caused that or if it was always going to be poor.

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                                                    #75
                                                    Despite supporting a big club, I've barely noticed the end of football, as I was doing a very good job of ignoring Liverpool's inexorable march to winning what is, to be honest a pisspoor league. But for some reason I still enjoy international tournaments, so missing the Euros is a shame, especially given that the next world cup is so morally bankrupt, I can't even justify watching it on an illegal feed.

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