Footballers.
Mon, 5. December 2011
What Cheeses Me Off - 5
I have followed the English Premier League since I was about ten years old. This is the most elite competion in the most beautiful sport in the world and it has been enriched so much, over the last decade or two, by an influx of top quality foreign players, with amazing skills, from all over the world.
Yet some of these foreign players seem to have introduced a disturbing habit that has now spread to some of the English players. I am referring to the overt religious displays that have become so boringly common in every match.
They walk onto the field and give the sign of the cross. They do it again every time they score a goal. Are they just trying to flaunt their religion? convert people? or are they actually praying to their imaginary bloke in the sky to help them play better? "Come on god, help us beat the other lot, help me score a goal."
Footballers are not renowned for their high intelligence (you only need to look at their Twitter contributions to confirm that) but they ought to be able to work out for themselves what is wrong with this strategy:
1. God is imaginary.
2. If their god happened to be real, would he really care? He doesn't care about people starving in Africa or drowning in tsunamis, so why would he care about the result of a football match?
3. Why would his god be interested in a telepathic message from a player seeking the power to score a hat-trick, when he is quite happily watching over people being buried alive in an earthquake or volcanic eruption somewhere else; or perhaps he's really, really, really busy placing cancer cells in human bodies or giving children malaria?
4. Praying to be given extra powers over the next ninety minutes is a form of attempted cheating. "Let's get god on our side and we'll have an extra player!"
5. Ask yourself, what does the god do if a player on the other team prays just as hard to win? It must leave him in a bit of a dilemma, so does he wait to see who prays the most? or does he just let them sort it out themselves? If the latter, then maybe he does that all the time.
6. They are highly talented and yet they still want their god's supernatural powers to help give them the edge over the others.
7. If unconvinced, go to 1.
Today I watched the "Highlights Show" in disbelief, as the situation deteriorated. First, I saw one goalscorer point to the sky, like many of them do, then sink to his knees and clasp his hands together in silent prayer, as if he was in church somewhere, instead of a football stadium. "Thanks a lot, god, for scoring my goal, you're on my side, I love you.....etc."
This was soon followed in a later match by another goal-scorer disdainfully discarding his shirt - the shirt with the proud badge of the team he just scored for - to display a white under-shirt with the words "I belong to Jesus" scawled on it. It's disrespectful to the shirt, it's disrespectful to the club and it's disrespectful to the fans. It would also be disrespectful to Jesus (if he wasn't dead).
More than that, it's just plain nausiating.