For me, however, this doesn’t really mean attending too many matches.
I might though, from time to time, venture to pastures unknown, accompanying my dad to watch Stafford Rangers. Before writing this blog, I had a quick look at the new teams in their division, and seeing Shaw Lane Aquaforce amongst them gave me a proper ‘non-League feeling’. Interestingly for me, I note that they’ve got a Gibraltar international in their line-up.
Also, last season I did have a reason for going to a bit of local non-League action, as Stamford moved to their new ground. I went to their first match at the Zeeco Stadium, and then again, on the final day of the season, to see them get their first league win there. The latter contest, against Witton Albion, was an incredible match, with both sides facing relegation going into it. Stamford were two goals down and looked doomed, but they somehow came back to win 3-2. They stayed up and Witton Albion went down.
Stamford celebrate staying up
Obviously, though, I’m interested in football at the highest level as well. I’ve been to some England games, a semi-final of the FA Cup, and the Johnstone's Paint Trophy final in the past twelve months.
However, it is television which provides most of my football intake, hence my mum’s frustration.
With the kick-off to the new season not to be missed, that decided what I would be doing from nine o’clock on Saturday night.
That’s actually a bit earlier than previously, as Channel 5 has acquired Football League highlights, and is showing them in a prime time programme called Football League Tonight.
The first episode had a few teething problems here and there, but the show’s format gave me the biggest surprise. Instead of the running order of matches being determined by division, they were shown all muddled up. I would have expected the Championship to be on first, followed by League One, and then League Two. Of course, working down the divisions in this way doesn’t really work so well now, as fans have to switch over to Match of the Day afterwards, and jump back up to the Premier League. I suppose, from this viewpoint, it would make the most sense for Channel 5 to start off with League Two, and to work their way up, although I doubt that that will happen. Still, it would be better if the matches were shown in some kind of sensible order.
I wanted to see the final Championship matches, so I kept watching until the end. I then had to rewind to see that Aaron Tshibola’s shot for Reading did go over the line. No goal was given, which perhaps cancels out that weird ‘ghost goal’ that Reading ‘scored’ a few years ago against Watford.
I ended up missing the iconic Match of the Day theme, as well as Leicester City’s first two goals. Nevertheless, I was settled in to my night of football, watching the games fly by.
After a while, it was time for Norwich City versus Crystal Palace and some controversy.
Crystal Palace were two goals up, but Norwich City then scored themselves, and were suddenly hunting for an equaliser. It seemingly came when Cameron Jerome skilfully hooked the ball over his head to volley it into the net. But it was disallowed. The referee, Simon Hooper, ruled that Jerome’s foot was high and too close to the defending Joel Ward, and thus a foul. Crystal Palace then went on to score a third, and wrap things up.
The managers seemed to think that Jerome struck a legitimate goal, as did the pundits in the studio. They even showed a clip from last season of Southampton’s Graziano Pellè scoring a goal in a similar fashion.
There’s nothing new about a bit of controversy in the Premier League. Viewers of Match of the Day are used to this kind of thing. There will be some grumbling in Norwich over the next couple of days, but then everything will just return to normal.
So, why take the time to write this blog? A bit of controversy is not out of the ordinary, and nothing is going to change.
I guess, to me, this incident is more controversial than it is to others.
This is not to do with the fact that I was particularly interested in the result of the match. Nor is it to do with the fact that it was Hooper’s first game as a Premier League referee. It is true that he didn’t produce any card for Glenn Murray after he made a challenge early in the game which I’ve seen reds given for. It is also true that Hooper’s decision to disallow Jerome’s effort is the reason why I am writing this blog. However, I am not motivated to write a blog for the sake of criticising first-time referees.
So why do I think that the disallowed goal was so controversial?
It is because I saw a goal being ruled out due to the technique that was used in scoring it, rather than any seriously evident foul play.
To me, this is extremely concerning, especially at this time of year, as I will explain in a moment.
Firstly, I need to establish that I support fouls being given for high boots. The reason for this is that they can be dangerous. However, Jerome had his back to Ward, and his whole body in between his boot and Ward’s head. Therefore, it’s hard for me to say that it was dangerous. When the ball is in the penalty area, footballers tend to take shots. Ward knows this, and when he went towards the ball, he would have been aware of any potential danger.
Of course, soon enough a player is going to be seriously injured by a high boot, and make me look rather foolish. Remember, though, that I support high boots being penalised. The issue is that they need to be dangerous.
Jerome struck the ball so well, but in the position that he was in, other players were bound to be close at hand. When I thought this through, I figured that anyone attempting an overhead kick in the penalty area could now be breaking the rules. In essence, I was considering what it would be like if the entire overhead kick action was to be banned.
A goal scored by a player volleying a ball over their head can be stunning. Some of the greatest and most memorable strikes involve players lifting their boots a long way off the ground. The officials in charge of the sport wouldn’t want to outlaw this kind of action. Would they?
Of course they wouldn’t. This is simply me overreacting.
Yet, as I alluded to earlier, the time of the year at which this took place is also a concerning factor for me.
With the season starting, there are a few new rules and protocols to be observed. For example, the offside rule has been tweaked so that players can now be flagged for attempting to play a ball, even if they don’t touch it.
Though the Jerome incident is not covered by any new law, what if it becomes the new way of dealing with these situations by default? After all, this is the start of the season, where everyone has the mind-set of needing to adopt new regulations. Even if it is unofficial, this would be the perfect time for a new ruling on high boots to be established, and that might well just have happened. Could football become so sanitised that nobody can ever lift their feet above waist height again?
Alright, I’m being a bit wild. Truthfully, I don’t think that anything will change. There will still be spectacular goals, scored from all kinds of incredible angels, and everyone can enjoy watching them for as long as there is football.
This is not to say that I will take nothing away from my contemplation of the first day of the 2015–16 Premier League season. I think that I now realise, more than ever before, that each sport is made up of people performing many different techniques to achieve their aims.
That sounds so feeble to say that, but after spending a whole night thinking about the art of an overhead kick in football, and the need to preserve it as an asset in its sport, I have really come to terms with the wide range of different abilities that athletes can get their bodies to perform, as that is just one example in a single sport.
It is truly extraordinary what the human body can achieve when pushed in pursuit of sporting excellence. While everybody is so obsessed with what the final results will be, and feeling the emotions that only that obsession can bring, there are remarkable feats to be seen. Every single little piece of skill is a skill to be savoured.
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