Football insults your intelligence.
Glove off, squarely across your face. How’s that for getting your attention?
Now, I’m not particularly saying you’re a twit, but, really, I would be dishonest if I wasn’t insinuating a statement in keeping with that line of thought.
On second thoughts, let’s call you a twit. Nothing personal, just that, sometimes you have to fling the grandiose and the politically-correct out the window to do the context justice. The Capuchin monkeys of the familae Cebiade would avow that sentiment. Nothing says “brusque, succinct” quite like riposte-poo-projectiles flying through the air.
But, I digress.
Dichotomy – that’s what reality and football are.
Two distinctly different parallels that bend and wring every last ounce of rationality that happens to be sucked in to the space between. Namely, ours.
From the inescapable irony of Fantasy Football – where players’ valuations are a fraction of what they are. To the apotheosis and the indulgence one gets for kicking a ball around slightly better than the rest of them. Everything exaggerated than the last, aberrations symptomatic of the times.
You exhaust yourself with names who might never wear the shirt. The names, ones you adorn proudly across your back, shed skin, lie. Every year is “the year”. There are more letdowns than gratification.
For the uninitiated, the obsession makes very little sense.
The uninitiated, may have never loved.
Unconditional, irrational, unapologetic love.
For all the flaws, for all the disappointments, and eventualities, you have something that makes you believe that it’ll be there forever. A constant – with a potential to bring you joy unimagined, or contentment when it does, in between all the doldrums and the lows. It makes you feel (most importantly) like you belong.
There’s an unspoken bond. A tether that we bind ourselves to willingly for those ninety minutes, that yanks at our heartstrings.
We feel the inches that separate glory and ignominy. We cry their tears, we exalt in their ecstasy. Every crunching tackle. And through the course, eventually, we ride thorough every emotion imaginable. We will them to do miracles. And remind ourselves how ‘impossible’ was just another word we outgrew.
Now, we are all twits. Incorrigible, miserable twits – Not the sharpest tools in the sheds, because we leave ourselves open to emotions that compromise us. But, we, for the most part, are bloody well content for it.
Football – it’s a lot like love.
Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
Vladimir: Yes, yes, we’re magicians.
– Waiting for Godot
Srijandeep Das is a part of the @Football_P family. You can follow him at @LFC_360.
