WE DREAM the same dream, we want the same thing – oooh. So sang Belinda Carlisle. But was that a love song about compatibility, or a nightmare vision of the future where everyone thinks and speaks and acts in identical fashion? I rather think it's the latter and I've got grim news for Belinda, she of the thrilling pop cheekbones: the future is already here, the future is football.
There must be a finishing school for footballers. It'll be a leaking, draughty mansion like the one used for Ladettes To Ladies. That's the reality show which instructs girl gangs on the correct way to greet a fellow member on her return from the tan
ning studio ("How now brown cow?"). The footballer version isn't trying to move its pupils up a social strata, simply regulate their behaviour, and it has to exist.
How else do we explain why all players, to a man, applaud bad passes – and I mean really chronic ones, the overhit, ball boy-winding kind? Footballers have a special kind of clapping, too: it's a side-clap, with the hands close to one ear. Maybe their clapping tutor – an ex-pro, presumably – told them that only Play School presenters can clap directly above their heads and not look gormless.
When players take on water there's a similar funny, twisting manoeuvre so their head is at 45 degrees to the rest of their body. And then when the game is over, and all the misdirected balls have been collected from tower-block roofs and garage forecourts, they'll stand in front of a sponsor's hoarding and describe for the benefit of TV how this hopelessly one-sided affair was a close-run thing... and as they're doing this every single last one of them will tug their right ear.
All of this would suggest that at least the players have been paying attention in class. But now I suspect there's been some cheating, probably conferring by text-message. Otherwise why have so many of them voted for Merouane Zemmama's goal for Hibs against St Mirren recently as the season's best?
It wasn't even the best by a Hibs player (at least three by Steven Fletcher were superior). One, maybe two, of the four Motherwell put past Hibs in the CIS Cup were better (I'll always choose a team goal over a long drive, and especially one struck unchallenged into the middle of the net). And I'm only thinking here of goals involving my team. Surely Rangers, our great and noble SPL champions-elect, must have scored some absolute stormers. (No? Oh well, never mind).
The nub of this problem will almost certainly be the word "recently". Zemmama's strike would have been fresh in the mind at the deadline for nominations. You get this kind of lazy voting everywhere. All-Time Best Album polls feature too many records from the previous 12 months. And those 100 Greatest... list programmes include newish comedy moments or whatever to hook in younger viewers with short attention spans.
By that rule, the footballers should be criticised, too. After all, they're only required to have a historical perspective going back as far as last August. But think about this for a moment: they play in the longest drawn-out league in history. Every club's next game but one is against Motherwell. (Even Motherwell have two outstanding fixtures against themselves). Our cup final will take place after the Champions League has been won. And on and on and bloody on the season will rumble and lurch.
It's threatening players' summer holidays and could yet cause earthquakes and floods. Stephen Hawking may have written A Brief History Of Time but he's running scared of The SPL Yearbook: 2007-8. That other brilliant mind, Belinda Carlisle, claims heaven is a place on earth. No it's not; it's Scotland doing something else on Saturdays (and Sundays and Wednesdays and Thursdays). Our footballers play so many games it's little wonder their memories are shot to bits. We should be grateful they can still remember to do the really important things, like yanking on their lugs.
The full article contains 695 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
