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The World Cup: J'accuse!

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22:58 / 10.05.06

I promised myself I'd be out of the country by the time that this sorry parade of ordure came round again, but it doesn't look as if I'm going to make it.

Accordingly, and without wishing to derail the sentiments of those who find this cathedral of ... wank, I suppose, in some way amusing, a thread for people who really, really hate the world cup, and whose hearts aren't going to be swayed by the antics of, say, the latest plucky bores from who knows, wherever.

Jake, Colossus of Clout

02:49 / 11.05.06

This thread seems a little mean-spirited, no?

I haven't a clue about the World Cup and could care less, but this forum seems geared towards discussing specific games and sports topics, not starting threads aimed only at trashing them. Why not air your grievances with the World Cup in one of the existing WC threads, instead of creating a thread devoted only to ripping on it?

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

05:22 / 11.05.06

Well yes it's mean spirited. The topic abstract sez it's a high snark thread.

I live in the U.S. so coverage is somewhat scarce. Even so, I feel like getting my irrational hatred on: fuck the world cup.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:30 / 11.05.06

Conversation thread. We may as well change its name to "Hating the World Cup 101 (Sex and Relationships)", while we're at it.

Gendudehashadenough

07:48 / 11.05.06

Or we could call it "Why we in the "I'd rather bob in hard on a dead dog's chopper than deal with any of this' don't give a fuck about futbolers, but would still like to make it with their wives 101"

or

"Why Barbeballers hate juggling soccer balls 101"

08:03 / 11.05.06

I fucking hate the world cup and the attendant assumption that *everyone* loves football really.

Bollocks. There is too much football already.

08:13 / 11.05.06

Reduces pressure on health and social services throught the competition, which will be good news for moi. Unfortunately, when England are eventually trounced, things bounce back and then some.

I'm just grateful I don't live in Germany.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:30 / 11.05.06

Oh, Granny. You'd been making so much progress - being able to leave the house once a day, and not just to go and buy GIN; talking to the neighbours on the way; listening to something other than "Teh Libs"... It's difficult to see you sliding back, it really is. I guess the recent sacking hurt you more than you'd admit.

sleaze, the "attendant assumption" could hardly be made by anyone who has been reading Barbelith for the past few years and is thus familiar with the fact that it really does split the board down the middle into those who enjoy the big international competitions every other summer (and is there really "too much football already" outside of that? - I find it remarkably easy to avoid). With any luck we can all live and let live, can't we?

Historical footnotes:

Dao Jones! Haus fights alone! A slightly mental thread from the 2002 World Cup.

Euro 2004: as much a Barbelith event as Big Brother, really.

08:31 / 11.05.06

What world cup? Dude, turn off your TV and come down to the seaside, Brighton festival is on.

08:40 / 11.05.06

I'll be watching the world cup and doing festival things.

'Cause there's room in the world for both.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:41 / 11.05.06

Ah - thus began my détente with Jason McAteer:

"He came up to me and shouted 'you're going with the flow!'. I thought, all right then, and asked what else goes with the flow. 'Dead fish!' Well, P-R-O-F-O-U-N-D. The Messiah has spoken!"

I didn't even think McAteer could *spell* profound...

If he manages Tranmere to the play-offs next season, he'll give me a play-off semi...

08:59 / 11.05.06

"Thirty years of hurt". Fuck right off.

09:34 / 11.05.06

I'm just grateful I don't [live] in Germany. Well you might, Xoc.

My flatmates ... the doormat's now a WM (Weltmeisterschaft) welcome mat. She's got two mugs in general use, one decorated with the entire German team, the other with the flag (the colour of an exploding oil tanker). He's also got two mugs, one with a version of the Union Flag or Jack or whatever you call it, and the other the Cross of Saint George. There's a whole, huge Union Flag, and a German one and also a small German flag in a vase that used to hold flowers. There's a tin can in the loo which contains a role of toilet paper printed with the flags of all the competing nations but England. For instructional purposes. This hasn't yet been used due to the fact that Germany's flag is also on it. It's a situation calling for considerable tact. She's also got a camping chair on the balcony. It's got a holder for one's beer and the German colours in various FIFA registered WM designs all over it. They're visiting the UK shortly before the World Cup will start and he hopes to pick up a similar chair, a suitably English one, while he's there. There's a WM blanket and various WM books for his children and a Kicker table (table football?) too, which is great fun.

It used to be such a nice flat.

Nevertheless I'm sure I'll enjoy the competition once it starts, especially if some smaller countries do well. The Irish women managed to hold the Germans, who are very good, down to a 1-0 win yesterday, which was great. I've got a tricolour (the Irish flag) in my closet, by the way. I'm probably only bitter because I've no use for it (this time).

09:47 / 11.05.06

especially if some smaller countries do well

The highlight of the last big football clanjamphrie for me was when Senegal won against France (IIRC) and we saw two Senegalese running jubilantly through the centre of London with their national flag aloft, making enough noise for twenty. Their happiness seemed to infect everyone they passed as the cars honked their horns and grumpy Londoners smiled and cheered them on.

09:54 / 11.05.06

I promised myself I'd be out of the country by the time that this sorry parade of ordure came round again, but it doesn't look as if I'm going to make it.

But where would you go? It's the fucking World Cup, man.

Put a flag in your window, buy some Budweiser, stick your hand down your underpants and sit back and accept the inevitable.

It's eleven sweating men against eleven in the contemporary gladatorial arena, when every middle-class boy with a street-level name like Theo can be plucked from the obscurity of a five-bedroomed detached house and become a hero on the global stage.

A good football game's just like a comic. Brightly coloured champions with above-normal abilities facing off in a wise-cracking contest of will. It's positively Kirby-esque.

foolish fat finger

10:06 / 11.05.06

the World cup is great for the same reason that watching Tim Henman lose at wimbledon is great- one in the eye for the gits who occasionally bullied me at school.

It's great seeing the hope build up in their foolish faces, until it is finally dashed when England lose, and the oafs go out and smash up the town centre with their red face-paint crosses melting down with sweaty, bitter tears... boo hoo, muthafuckas!

10:09 / 11.05.06

But it's not like the whole universe (!!1!) is at stake in the world cup is it? At the most, a host town will get trashed by our lovely polite English boys. If the World Cup involved Galactus and loads of planets being kicked around the cosmos, then maybe I'd be more interested.

Actually, I fukcing hate the football summers. All this means is that regular TV gets messed with, reasonable, intelligent people talk complete shite for weeks on end about how well (or nt) 'we' are doing (argh!!! shutupshutup! You're not even playing, shutup!!!), and everyone assumes that if you're young and male, you'll be getting drunk on cheap beer and watching the game. Fuck off, you footiecentric cunts.

Phew. That felt good. I may go buy a football and pop it. That would make me feel even better.

10:10 / 11.05.06

Being right at the epicenter, I still haven´t registered any WM vibes. But that´s me: last december, I was 100% immune to all the jingle bells radiation, and was amazed in retrospect how it went right past me (and how I didn´t spend one cent on presents).

Except for the city center (where they turned the tv tower into a football and build a stadium right in front of the parliament), there´s no obvious (again, for me) signs of the coming soccerlypse.

I had imagined, I´d be angry or anxious about it, but now I realize, that I just don´t care.

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:15 / 11.05.06

one in the eye for the gits who occasionally bullied me at school

...And if they could see me at my lovely pride-of-place desk, as I open my payslip to see all those lovely dancing figures, before going home to be with my beautiful girlfriend - see, Si "Basher" Brannigan, see? - and watch Stargate Atlantis on my enormous flat-screen TV - while they have to do heavy manual labour all day before wanking off over the Sunday Sport - then would they not cry even more?

10:17 / 11.05.06

I was a football fan who was bullied by comics readers.

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:18 / 11.05.06

Which is another way of wondering whether we could ever have a conversation about televised sport without the issue of being bullied at school being raised. I sympathise, you understand. I was there. I just think an even bigger victory over What Was Done Unto Me is not to have a Pavlovian aversion to a bit of footie on the telly, y'know?

uncle retrospective

10:41 / 11.05.06

I couldn't give a toss about all this they bulled me in school crap, it now that matters. It's the boring cunts who go on and on about football that make me piss blood. Turning off the TV won't save you, go to the pub to escape? No fucking chance, the braying fuckers have taken the place over. Ok, plan B, find a pub with no TV (harder than it sounds) now the fuckers are all talking about it! Sitting in work, blah, blah, fucking blah, football. People you have told that you don't like football will ask if you saw the match and will look at you like your some kind of freak when you inform them that you would set fire to your face that sit through another 30 seconds of bastard football. Turn on the News, read a paper it's all shouting FOOTBALL!! I hope they all die.
I'm digging a pit and filling it with books and food. I'll see you lot when the WC is over.

All Acting Regiment

10:42 / 11.05.06

World Cup!

uncle retrospective

10:44 / 11.05.06

Oh! What's this shit of stopping music festivals to show matches? I paid a whole lot of fucking money to see some bands, jump about a bit and rock out a bit and it grinds to a halt so morons can watch dolts kick a bag of wind around a pitch.
Fuckers!

10:46 / 11.05.06

But Fly, can you not accept that for some people, being bullied at school is actually a very big part of their lives? Sure, they may have very boring lives to be continually defined by some playground violence years past, but to many, football represents that sporty elite, the jocks if you will, that alienated, bullied and occaisionally beat the crap out of nerdy comics kids, and the kinds of people that post really detailed and considered posts in the headshop (they is boffs, innit).

But yes, constantly moaning about the nasty kids at school when your in or past your late teens is, well, pathetic.

And, if it's any consolation, I hate tennis too, but usually just because they mess with Neighbours on the beeb during Wimbledon. And I'm shit at that too. Bastards.

10:49 / 11.05.06

while they have to do heavy manual labour all day

Found out yesterday you get paid £200 a day for digging holes in the road thanks, and when you get good at it you can do the work in half a day.
Monday to friday, five hours a day, a grand a week, working outdoors? Who's laughing now, graduate debtors? Hmm? They should have a Labourer's Apprentice TV show.

'Call that a hole? Your brickworking lining is misaligned and your water meter is fitted backwards! I've got no time for slapdash workpeople- YOU'RE FIRED!

But ahem I digress. Of course school bullies love football and sensitive geeks like us hate them for it, otherwise where's the us&them thing for comic fans? Football fans get solidarity against the other team and their fans, geeks get solidarity against football fans, everyone hates the enemy, it's the law. Everyone needs schadenfreude Flyboy, and you know it, identify yourself with a group and go for it. I might get a bunch of mates and paint our faces with X-men and rage around Brighton town screaming about the Civil War and intimidating footie watchers, hur hur. I know for a fact Fraely has a Galactus helmet, it was in the Guardian...

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:53 / 11.05.06

Oh! What's this shit of stopping music festivals to show matches? I paid a whole lot of fucking money to see some bands, jump about a bit and rock out a bit and it grinds to a halt so morons can watch dolts kick a bag of wind around a pitch.
Fuckers!

It's the same "shit" that means there might be bands at a festival whose music you don't like = not everyone dislikes the same things as you, even if they share some of your other tastes. If you can't cope with that, don't go to festivals (I don't, generally).

uncle retrospective

10:59 / 11.05.06

It's the same "shit" that means there might be bands at a festival whose music you don't like = not everyone dislikes the same things as you, even if they share some of your other tastes. If you can't cope with that, don't go to festivals (I don't, generally).

Oh no it's not, almost everything shuts down, I was at Glastonbury the same weekend as England got put out of the WC and all but 2 stages were shut. Fuck that. If it was only one stage I wouldn't give a damn, I'm not that self absorbed.

11:01 / 11.05.06

Turning off the TV won't save you, go to the pub to escape?

Of course, these are the only two options open to humanity. Pub?! or Telly?! And all the channels show football 24-7 from 9/6-9/7/06, yes they dooo.

Why not sit in with a nice book, or indeed comic?

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:02 / 11.05.06

John - see my second post on the bullies subject. I had a horrible time at school. But for me, part of what made the experience horrible was the fact that I was at the mercy of really fucking annoying lapses in logic - i.e. "you're shit at games and good at academic stuff, therefore you must be an asexual shut-in who could never enjoy watching sport either". I'm shit at acting too, it doesn't mean I can't watch fillums.

11:08 / 11.05.06

Also: Don't read the back pages of the paper. Switch the news off before the end. Listen to Radio 3 or 4.

These are my top tips for avoiding football, which should actually be pathetically easy. If, you know, accidentally overhearing people discuss a game or finding out a score actually sends you into paroxysms of misery then I'd suggest your priorities might be fucked up.

Anyway, Re: 2002 and apologies in advance to sleaze, but HAVEN'T YOU HEARD INDIA AND PAKISTAN HAVE PRACTICALLY OBLITERATED EACH OTHER, probably, by now?! They're just little smoking fragments of what was once landmass. It's no laughing matter. Isn't there something better to do in these dank, dark final days of humanity than moan about the World Cup?

11:08 / 11.05.06

Oh no it's not, almost everything shuts down, I was at Glastonbury the same weekend as England got put out of the WC and all but 2 stages were shut.

All the bands were off watching the footy. And laughing. At you.

Just think, if football hadn't been invented all those bullies might have become comics readers instead. I'm crying inside for a utopia that could have been.

11:09 / 11.05.06

'Big Dave' is a window into that world that might have been.

Goodness Gracious Meme

11:10 / 11.05.06

I'll be watching the world cup and doing festival things.

Obviously Boboss is lying.

Do we think he's lying about FOOTBALL or ARTY FESTIVAL THINGS?

11:12 / 11.05.06

Boboss'll be changing fucking nappies.

They might well be nappies emblazoned with the flag of St George, but they'll still be nappies. Possibly full of poo.

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