The future, brought to you by Ask Jeeves
This can go one of two ways. In 80 years’ time, the reader of the future takes one look at this blog and is utterly baffled by talk of pandemics, lockdowns and The Queen’s Nose*. Or else said reader of the future becomes all at once furious, seething over the trivialities of a) having a blog and b) dealing only with pandemics, lockdowns and fondly remembering ‘90s TV shows that showcase Gary Mabbutt scoring a hat-trick.
Remember those time capsules that were all the rage in the 90s up to 2000? When we realised that the planes weren’t going to fall out of the sky and genuine fear of the Y2K bug morphed into a punch line**? In 1998 (bear with us), Blue Peter presenters Richard Bacon and Katy Hill buried a time capsule underneath the Millennium Dome which, although supposed to be excavated in 2050, was dug up by some builders in 2017. Among other things, the capsule contained a Tamagotchi, photos of Princess Diana and the Oblivion ride at Alton Towers, and a France ’98 World Cup football. It is no coincidence that between us, Rob and I have owned all of these items at one time or another.
If anything, we see this blog post very much like one of those time capsules. Terribly dated, but with a nice little novelty factor. When a bloke with a metal detector digs up a laptop buried in Greenwich 80 years earlier and asks Jeeves*** (which retakes its number one search engine title in around 2050) “What did the most underrated football blog 100 years ago write about the pandemic in 2020?”, this post will inevitably pop up on their screen.
It is, therefore, our duty to inform the reader of the future what was going on with the football in 2020 during a pandemic. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, but here goes.
The virtual quiz
When the football disappeared on March 10, it left a vacuum. But football doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we hear you say. No, it doesn’t. And what does nostalgia like best? Yep. How else can you explain the rise of the virtual football quiz? We used to be a nation of shopkeepers, now it’s a nation of quizmasters. Well – shopkeepers and racists, but more of that later.
We are now at the business end of our own football quiz league and a few things we’ve learned is that football fans in their mid-30s know A LOT about all-time Premier League top scorers, can identify Regi Blinker from a Merlin sticker photo and can at least muster an educated guess at which iteration of Joey Barton included a moustache (a round called ‘Moustache or not’ since you ask).
The pubs may have closed and the football may have stopped, but one British institution prevailed. And it has been a welcome return to the structure and habits that football reassuringly offers. And it includes a league table. Here’s to the virtual quiz; all at once a symbol of normalcy in extraordinary circumstances.
Wikipedia wormholes
Reminiscing over times when football was better is certainly nothing new at Spongers HQ; we edited a book on it after all. But what of the siren song of Wikipedia after watching old football clips? In the age of the nasty knee-jerk reaction, of irrational hysteria, there’s something reassuring about going two-footed down a Wikipedia wormhole.
Rea-life example of wormhole associated with watching old football:
See the delicious Dennis Bergkamp goal against Brazil at France ’98 on @90sfootball on Twitter. Remember how brilliant The Netherlands were at France ’98. Google ‘The Netherlands France ‘98’. Click on ‘1998 FIFA World Cup’. Scroll down to ‘Semi-finals’. Click ‘Semi-finals’. Quickly see the France 2-1 Croatia result and remember that Lilian Thuram, who you loved, scored a brace in that game. Ignore that because it’s not what you came for. Click ‘1-1’ next to Brazil and Netherlands. Ronald de Boer missed a penalty? Don’t remember that. Click ‘R. de Boer’. Scroll down. Ronald de Boer played for Rangers? Ah, I sort of remember that now. See ‘he is the older twin brother of Frank de Boer’. Make a mental note in case this crops up in this week’s football quiz. Click on ‘Frank de Boer’; he was always the better player out of the two. Scroll down. He played for Rangers as well? Do I remember that? Not sure. Make mental note in case this crops up in this week’s football quiz. See that under the ‘Teams managed’ sub-heading he currently manages ‘Atlanta United’. Didn’t know this. Scroll down. See the ‘Players’ section shows current squad and Atlanta United have an English lad playing for them. Click on ‘Anton Walkes’. See he once played for Portsmouth. Make mental note (not for quiz, just because, you know). See he scored an own goal on his debut against New York Red Bulls. Click on ‘New York Red Bulls’. Scroll down to ‘Notable players’. Both Wright Phillips boys played for them? Make mental note (possibly for quiz, you never know). Look at the clock on laptop. 20 minutes has gone by. Roberto Donadoni? Yes please. Cli …
The future reader will likely have to take my word for this sequence of events, seeing as Ask Jeeves is the search engine of choice and you’ll be lucky to get as far as the second de Boer.
Watching old football
Why the over-abundance of old football clips? The very obvious answer is that there is no football, so any football will do. But that’s not quite it. I wouldn’t be interested if they showed Man City shellacking Watford in last year’s FA Cup final, or if they showed the 2016 Charity Shield when United beat Leicester 2-1. I did find myself watching the England v Cameroon Italia ’90 game on the Beeb the other week, though. And if they were showing the ’92 Charity Shield when a Cantona-inspired Leeds beat Liverpool 4-3, I’d have watched that as well.
Rather than any football, it is old football. Nothing offers that narcotic allure quite as well as the nostalgia attached to watching old football; for ‘old’ football, read anything that is from 15 years ago or beyond. The hypothetical ‘they’ say that things were better in their day. Of course, they were because you were young, had two working knees, Woolworths still sold pick n mix and you didn’t have to worry about things like pandemics, statues or Wikipedia wormholes.
With football’s hiatus in the UK running into the months, it is little surprise that nostalgia has emerged as the content of choice to fill the void. Italia ’90? Check. USA '94? Euro ’96? Check. The only thing missing is the communality. Have you ever tried clapping while sat on your own? It is unsettling, bordering on perverse.
We’ve already covered the fact that the appreciative applause when order resumes after a scrappy bit of play sees the ball played out to the full back in space has been replaced by the clapping en masse at 8pm on a Thursday. This is what happens when you take away the football. Everyone likes a good old clap and the old football has an actual crowd, actually clapping, therefore, it is better.
Social change
If there is one thing that the pandemic and ensuing lockdown have shown us, it is the power of the collective to achieve goals that wouldn’t have been made possible singularly. After all, the ‘football lads’ needed thousands to protect all the statues. And protect they did, even after it became very apparent that precisely no-one was coming for all the statues, and offers little to no explanation as to why they decided to have a go at the coppers who were protecting the very statues that they’d got all frothy-mouthed about being protected in the first place.
There was the decision of Liverpool, among others, to bin plans to furlough around 200 non-playing staff after a huge backlash. It probably wasn’t wise for the seventh-richest football club in the world, who had just announced a pre-tax profit of £42m, to attempt to save themselves £1.5m through the furlough scheme, considering the club’s wage bill stood at £310m last season. Supporters groups were furious and local MPs Dan Carden and Ian Byrne plus the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, all got involved the force the club’s hand and sanity (and fairness) prevailed.
Speaking of U-turns, hands up who thought at the beginning of lockdown, a 22-year-old England international would upend the government's attempts to stop feeding poor and vulnerable children over the summer? Prior to this, Marcus Rashford had helped raise over £20m during lockdown to feed three million kids. Rashford showed more moral leadership in a few days than the Tories have in 10 years concerning child poverty. That this Tory government would be happy to see kids starve tells you all you need to know. But, hey, what do we know, liberal media elite that we are.
It was Camus who said: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” The goalkeeper on Renford Rejects wore a long-sleeved t-shirt adorning this quote, which takes us full circle to Sachin Nakrani’s tweet on Renford Rejects, which prompted our penultimate blog post. Football eh. The opiate of the masses. And if you have dug up this post you can remind us of it – we’ll be the ones walking up and down our gardens to raise money for something called ‘universal healthcare’, as we approach our hundredth birthdays. And if you don’t get that reference you can always Ask Jeeves.
*Kids TV programme, originally aired in 1995. Rub a 50p coin, 10 wishes.
**An actual thing.
https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/
***Rather than Googling things, people would ask Jeeves on the eponymous Ask Jeeves
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94784/why-everyone-stopped-asking-jeeves.In the future, of course, normal service will be resumed, but Jeeves will be a robot, and so will all the people.
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