ATMOSPHERICS etc.

By
Mickey Blue Eyes

Close season can have a funny affect on you. Sometimes you can’t wait for the new season to start. On other occasions it can take a few weeks of action before you get back into the swing of things. It’s all a matter of mood. Hence this pea-shooter attack on insouciant football convenience jargon. It helps pass the time until we have the real thing in play.

Nobody seriously doubts domination of international communications by the English language. However, one of the reasons for this state of affairs has little to do with economic, cultural or military imperialism. It is its historic ability, conscious or not, to adapt and change in the face of new circumstances, even absorb words and whole phrases from other languages and do it apparently much easier than most. This is entirely appropriate for the home of Charles Darwin. Thankfully we do not have an equivalent of the lexical paranoia of L’Academie francaise and its stupid campaign against seventy-five regional dialects in France, which it claims are “an attack on French national identity.” If that nonsense was tried in England by some crackpot London nazi institution there would be a reaction to make the poll tax revolt look like a back entry fist fight. Small wonder, then, that English London-based attempts to crush indigenous Celtic languages and culture were abandoned………eventually. If you behave thus you will deservedly disappear up your own sphincter or die of hardened arteries, as did the defunct British Empire. There’s a lesson for the Americans there but they probably won’t learn it. A sensible human will engage every opportunity to renew and refresh life, including language, not restrict it to antiquated forms of behaviour or mere habit. Achieving a balance can be difficult but it’s far from impossible. Social evolution takes care of the rest.

Conversely, mere linguistic novelties disappear after a period of intense use. Only what is long term useful or desirable is kept. For instance, Latin – dismal, dead Latin – is on its way out of the legal system after a fitful rearguard action lasting centuries. People just don’t want it any more than they want a musty corner shop or a horse-drawn carriage journey on an unmade road. After a while you simply get fed up with being uncomfortable or subject to the same tedious routine. In that sense language is no different from other forms of human activity. Hence the short lived infamy and demise of rap “music,” a form of pop culture equivalent to a quick shit in an open field, or the cul-de-sac of modern jazz where its more marginalised practitioners rant impotently against “commercial music.” I don’t make wagers but even I am willing to bet Mozart and Louis Armstrong last a good deal longer than, say, 50 Cent (and worth it, too) or any of the self-appointed incoherent drugged-up numbskulls in the cul-de-sac. The difference of course is that Wolfgang Amadeus and Louis are genuine and timeless geniuses while the latter, whoever they may be, won’t survive the next stiff breeze through street litter.

But football has always suffered from the affects of convenience language. Currently the three most overused words are “atmosphere,” “passion” and “bitter.” The moment I hear someone use those verbal suppositories I either rush to the toilet and get rid or down my drink at the bar and leave. You know you are in for a wearisome time once the perpetrator gets red-faced traction. You deserve all you get if you stay and listen to a whining litany of footy Newspeak from someone who likely cannot assemble more than four recognisable words before calling him or herself “fuckn werkn class, like” or a mortgaged-to-the-hilt suburban salary slave en route to setting the burglar alarm or watching Sky TV or prattling on about the latest property ripoff purchase of a terrace house in a rundown area. Ask that kind of moron what is really meant by the three words and you will get a look as blank as George Bush’s face. Sometimes it is enough to have you fall from grace, patience exhausted, and utter something as equally tedious as, “Ah FUCK off will yer,” before heading for the door. Sometimes it is the only thing these idiots understand.

Take the word “atmosphere.” It is now applied so often to football crowds I almost expect to see people walking up to the ground in space suits. How often have you watched some TV or radio information clerk eliciting vox pops (yes, yes, I know it’s Latin derivation – vox populi) from fans and the first sentence is “De atmosphere wuz great”? That’s if their team have just won of course. If not, “De atmosphere wuz flat.” And of course the same kind of thing gets used by those time-served, dried-out squads of middle-aged mediocrity we call “TV pundits” or crackpot “internet message board contributors.” You would scream if you thought it would help, which it won’t. You would be as bad as them, or you would end up as a study for Edvard Munch. Friends, it is time to dump the three offending words in the nearest binbag and drop it on David Cameron’s empty head or in the middle of a property auction for shitehawk “developers” at the Adelphi. Do it……..you know it makes sense.

Thing is, humans are normally at their most honest when they act spontaneously and according to their individual mood or instincts. If they act in a mob the chances are they will degenerate slowly into a pack of slavering dopes controlled by slogans. Hence the democracy of, for instance, a private ballot. This isn’t always so but it happens often enough for this fan to at least distrust the kind of hyped up media muck we get, that one set of fans is more loyal than another, or loves the game more, or “creates more atmosphere.” This fatuous line in rabble rousing has fortunately been rendered even more absurd with the advent of all seater stadia. The media, of course, are not interested in the truth as much as they are interested in selling their product at the largest profit they can gouge. Which is why they pander to the clubs with currently the highest gates. On a more important scale than football if the truth gets through at all it is usually because of the determined courage of individual journalists like John Pilger, the late Paul Foot, Robin Ramsay, Seamus Milne, Peter Sissons, Jon Snow or David Yallop. You would struggle hard to name any footy reporters who could hold up their heads in that sort of company. So when one of them goes on about “atmosphere” you can virtually guarantee the biggest motive is to keep him or herself in a hype job, not love of the game. The more gullible – usually youngest – fans fall for it hook, line and sinker and merely repeat the mantra. “Atmosphere” can then degenerate into the kind of organised horror that very nearly killed off the professional game in the last quarter of the last century. Every now and then it resurfaces, as it did after the UEFA Cup Final in Manchester, in the occasional league match and at too many England international games. How easily it can happen! At which point the guilty reporters flee for the higher ground of monopoly reportage that frees them of responsibility while simultaneously attacking the broader mass of fans. So much for “atmosphere” and media culpability.

Me, I couldn’t much care what level of noise fans make, what songs they sing or whether they want to sit on their hands and keep shtum, let alone think that the number of banners and scarves has any real meaning or indicates a genuine affection for the game. Of themselves, they are harmless fun. Only if the match is good enough will the fans get excited accordingly. Players make good games, not fans. If you find yourself looking at the crowd instead of the game likely it will be because (a) the match is a basket of rotting fish heads, or (b) you have no real interest in footy. For me the spectacle is out on the pitch, not in the crowd. When a football crowd reacts spontaneously – think of The Big Yin’s winner against Man. United a few years ago – the sight can be amazing and much more spectacular than all the banners, all the scarves and all the stupid “humorous” songs on the planet. It is a genuine feeling, not a phony organised pantomime or, worse, a fanatical party rally full of apparachiks chanting the latest line in organised bullshit. Which is why I can’t stand official pitchside cheer leaders and their scripted claptrap. Every time one of ours gets substituted at Goodison I want to saw in half the yoyo with the mic squawking, “Let’s hear it for…….” True fans don’t need a script or a pantomime. All they need is a good game with good players. Artificial hysteria is neither wanted or required.

Then there’s the word “passion.” It covers a multitude of sins by everyone connected with the game. Whatever its definition in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, in football it has come to mean the making of excuses for aberrant or even criminal behaviour. How often have you heard a reporter or fan say, “He only did it because he’s so passionate”? It has even been used to excuse the tiny rump of cowards amongst fans who organise violence and threats against rival fans or even against officials and fans of their “own” club when they can’t get their way. You also hear it used to excuse club managers and officials who manipulate a situation to obtain a player transfer or achieve some other goal. Think too of the number of times a TV camera has panned along fans after a goal has been scored and focussed on some inadequate knobhead wrinkling his nose in a triumphalist sneer, arms extended, fists clenched, all of it as ugly a spectacle as a 1930s nazi rally and just as shameful. Or the manager who says, “I didn’t see it,” even when a foul has been committed by one of his players right under his nose. And what’s worse than hateful barracking by fans of one of their own players? “Passion” my arse, it’s hypocrisy and extreme cynicism and the very worst types at that.

Finally, “bitter.” This word has evolved into nothing more than lazy, distorted nonsense. Mostly it is used by people who are so inarticulate a grunt becomes a major expression of feeling. Degrees of feeling or mood don’t figure for these yoyos. Anyone who disagrees with them or pokes fun at them (ESPECIALLY if you poke fun at them) gets that same old codswallop. Gawd help you if you feel authentic anger or outrage or humour at the absurdity in some subject because current popular English linguistics simply can’t cope with it. Vocabularies are narrowing in ways even George Orwell couldn’t foresee. At this rate all of us will be talking pidgin English fueled by ale-house lager and ale house gossip. Big Brother won’t need a Ministry of Truth because everything will be handed to him on a plate by a bunch of incoherent drunks talking utter gobbledegook about the most recent pop noise-maker and his/her “music,” “brand,” “image” or – and I love this one – “set.” In these circumstances you could properly claim Arnold Wesker wrote “Chips With Everything” forty-five years too early.

Abandonment of those three words and everything that goes with them will enable everyone to enjoy and appreciate the game more without losing excitement or good humour. You could actually end up loving the game and our beautiful language more than you do. Try it.

There. I’m ready for the new season now. Notwithstanding the passionate atmosphere that gets bitter of course. (28/05/08)

Mickey Blue Eyes Index