Saturday, January 05, 2008

Sweet FA Cup

I wasted ninety minutes this afternoon watching a tedious football match.

Of course we do not expect to see a great game every time we sit down to watch one. That is part of the economic and psychological bargain that all sports enthusiasts are tied into. The price of those rare moments of inestimable exhilaration is the corresponding pain of innumerable defeats snatched from the jaws of victory. As I learned in the late 1970s, even Liverpool sometimes lose.

But it was not today's result that upset me. It was the whining excuses of the managers. The pathetic excuses that the players were "tired". Because they had to play two games per week. During the holiday season.

The reason that they get paid so much is because they are in the entertainment industry. So when everyone else has time off that is precisely when they should expect to be playing. That is why an entertainer's renumeration is more related to his audience than to his skill.

So they get paid tens of thousands of pounds every week. Poor buggers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

90 mins wasted?

Could you explain how you usefully occupied yourself during the half-time break?

And 'making a cup of tea' won't cut it. You were going to do that anyway.

;¬)

Rana said...

Yes, actually the whole weekend was "wasted". But the 90 minutes was worse than "expectation".