by Ian Herring »
14 Sep 2009 11:51
You can’t stop time. But you can examine ‘progress’. One of the things I considered might happen when RFC moved from Elm Park to its more business-friendly surroundings was that the possibility of success would increase (borne out to be true) but that as the next generation of fans came in, they would embrace the same mentality you could see in other clubs supporters elsewhere.
I have little time for those of the newer fans who seem to think it’s clever or smart to deride the older fans or those that may not have been brought up in times where football and your local football club appeared to have a much different meaning than it seems to now.
There’s a reason for that, of course. Many of them have not tasted a club, a culture of football, a meaning of the world ‘locality’ and ‘place’ that for many fans, made their association with their club deeply emotional and meaningful. Or, for those with short attention spans or the cretins that use the phrase ‘I’m not reading all that’, something they cared about. At all. In any way.
And what I feared would happen has. In comes a generation of ‘bleaters’ and ‘whiners’ who look with the fixed glazed eye of the junkie at the table of disgusting gluttons who made their own market in conjunction with the whoredom of Sky and others. An absolute shit-house world in relation to the once fantastic sport we had on offer in this country. Cheap, affordable to all, accessible, and played by men, watched by more adult crowds, by ‘real’ people.
Then you see Manchester City, who like Mr. Creosote, expand their belt and move their newly-bloated belly to ‘the table’ to gorge with the others. Another corpulent greed-merchant sidles up to the truffles and the foie-gras feasting. Funded by money nothing to do with Manchester, or the north-west, and with no agenda related to that city other than trading easily on the back of its substantial, and decent support. Possibly, with an agenda of using City as a marketing tool back in the Middle East.
I’m not saying that football should be all about local altruism and the ‘community’. It has to sustain itself. But what is important to the fans that have seen the sport before it became what it is now – a fully-plasticised vehicle for blatant marketing and profit crossed with the pantomime – is that it has roots in its town or city, or its place, its region.
You ‘newbies’ can deride some of us ‘dinosaurs’ all you like. But age-wise, you have grown up in a society where you may have spent most of your formative years in front of a screen, or ‘cuddling’ each other in the street, wearing toddler-style clothing and thinking that ‘branding’ is something integral to sport. Or you have watched much of your games from the floor in bars, looking up at a screen again. Occasionally you will come to games, and ‘participate’, if you can. Waving your arms up and down to Tom Hark, holding up your pieces of plastic, sucking it all up as good consumers.
Then you will spout the ‘racist’ card , if someone dares to say something along the line of ‘I’d rather Reading were relegated than be owned by Arabs’. A semantic jumped upon because that is what has made football, and seemingly England, these days, the anaesthetised and PC-obsessed shell it has become today.
What would be wonderful would be if you could be taken back in time for a week, to a time when the sport ‘belonged’ to us, the fans. Yes, it was occasionally violent, and dirty, and people swore. But it belonged to its towns and cities, and places and regions. Now? Small enclaves these days. Dying out. Soon to be gone. But that meant something, to many people.
The question remains, what on earth do ‘Arabs’ have to do with Reading Football Club? Nothing, in old terms. In the modern, whored-out plate of spineless, anodyne shite this sport has become, fully-marketed and segmented up into its various revenue streams and outlets. Probably, everything.
But don’t pull the race card on older fans who have seen the sport in its other form, and who probably have seen and experienced more ‘racism’ than you’ve ever seen and will do in your bedroom-cossetted, sports-bar punctuated lives.
‘I’m not reading all that!’
Maybe if people had an attention span longer than a flea’s cock these days, you wouldn’t have a ‘customer-base’ prepared to whore its arse to all-comers so we can ‘sit’ at the same table as the other bloaters in the Premiership.
I’ll go a step further. I’d rather not have a club at all if what it was meant to be was some ‘financial-churn’ device for balance sheets. Wherever the owners come from. It’s already plastic enough.
I don’t want Arabs at Reading. Not because I’m a racist. Because they are simply nothing to do with the area or town at all. At least Madejski is and was.
Those that remain will get what they deserve. A whore of a football club that is nothing more than a vehicle for agents and players to exploit and an organisation that has no more feel for a town, an area and its people than Microsoft or Oracle. Faceless, passionless, shite. Still, I can see you all now, sat around the new ‘owners’ as they don the club shirt and baseball cap, shaking hands, nodding and grinning excitedly at your pictures in the Evening Scrote.
Good grief.
