Twittery fingers and angry worlds

First, a confession. I was not happy with the score after ninety minutes at Anfield last Sunday. I was not happy with the referee. I was not happy with those aspects of the universe that came together, and conspired against me and the team I support. 

It was 12.30am on the Australian East Coast when the match between Liverpool and Manchester United finished and, as you might have gathered, I was not happy. In my semi-conscious state, halfway between a dream and the blindingly green glow of the television in the dark, it would have been only too easy for me to open up Twitter and spew forth a stream of fury and vitriol, making some brutal reference to the referee’s medical history and having a go at Alex Ferguson because he’s got an old man’s face. Rather, I noted that I quite liked Suso’s hair, replied to a few words of encouragement with ‘Pfff’, and went to bed.

Some people had more of an opportunity to think clearly – not everyone watches the Premier League at midnight – and chose to do something altogether different to myself. You’ve likely seen the results of these explosions of inexplicable malevolence. ‘God forgive me for saying this but I hope that cancer comes back and does its job on Mark Halsey this time,’ said one particularly aggrieved Liverpool supporter. ‘Fuck off Mark Halsey I hope your mum gets cancer,’ wrote another. It’s not nice, is it?

I wasn’t so sure that Glen Johnson tackling his own goalkeeper was worthy of a penalty, and Jonjo Shelvey may not have been sent off had the referee seen the incident in super-slow motion from an angle that he couldn’t possibly have had access to under the current laws of the game, but it takes a different kind of beast to take these seeming injustices and use them as a cover for wishing cancer on a man.

I am in no position to speculate on the precise nature of fandom 20, 40 or 50 years ago, but the advent of social media as it exists today has given birth to an entirely new type of supporter; one which can hide behind the Internet, which I understand to be pretty wide, but awfully thin. It’s a veil that also allows people to be angrier, it seems, though this anger too often spills over into real life, where there are actual trees and actual clouds and actual people with actual emotions, and actual children who actually hear the vile things that people say. 

Mark Halsey, rather unfortunately, found himself in a position in which he had come through throat cancer to make a decision in a football match which some people thought was right, and others thought was wrong. If he were overweight, or gay, or black, the reaction would have been the same, but the words would have been swapped around. It’s difficult to imagine someone so twisted as to will cancer to return, and so I would hope that these people are simply irretrievably stupid, rather than inhumane.

Football is more important now than it has ever been, yet it is still as pointless as the day it was conceived. We don’t need to go into the complete futility of sport right now (let’s save that for the Apocalypse), but for some reason it keeps getting more and more significant, and plays a far greater role in our lives. A referee doesn’t simply fail to award a foul, he ROBS a team of the game, CONDEMNS them to a loss, SENTENCES them to a lesser position in the standings, DESTROYS their hopes for the season, and SHATTERS the fabric of the cosmos with a crooked grin. And then Manchester United win.

Much of this has to do with the emotional grip we let football have on us. Losing has always hurt, but knowing that the world has watched you lose really hurts. It goes further, too. We feel constantly wronged by football, because ultimately nothing can go exactly the way we want it to. We are angry when an opposition player dives to fool the referee, and angrier when it is given as a foul. We are angry when we think the ball has gone out, even if it hasn’t, and we are angry when there is too much time added on at the end of a game. Helpless, we turn on the referee, and get angry with him instead.

Our anger is then compounded a thousand times over. Because Jonny Evans didn’t stand up, tap Mark Halsey on the shoulder and ask if he too could be shown a red card, he’ll be abused by Liverpool fans to the end of time. Thomas Ince, son of Paul, is booed when he plays at Upton Park. Nobody likes Luis Suarez, and hey – that Lucas Neill was a bit of a jerk, wasn’t he? Rather than splintering these incidents into their individual hundreds or thousands, all too often we prefer to slap them together with a club, and hate that even more. Halsey got in the way of two teams of divers, cheats, racists and non-racists, sex addicts and footballers, and suffered for it.

Football is in danger of being defined by this perpetual hatred. Everyone hates at least one player, manager, club or country. Alan Jacobs puts forward the thesis that ‘No referee lives, or has ever lived, or ever will live, whom someone will not think deserving of Death by the Ray of Archimedes.’ To a point we can blame the hate-fuelled nature of modern professional football on the media, who are only too keen to play on the tribalism that makes the game fun until we’re reaching for our swords and daggers, and plunging them into the television set whenever news about John Terry comes on.

Mostly though, it’s a seeming inability to be reasonable, and accept the game as just that; a game. And it’s a universal game, too – there is more than just your team. There is right, and wrong, and a club in Argentina called Atlético Douglas Haig, and somewhere, available to those who don’t want to completely sacrifice good reason to visceral and blind emotion, there is rationality and sensitivity.

Given the week’s events in the lead up to the match at Anfield, one might have imagined people could be more understanding of this. It’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on in the crowd when you’re watching on television, but I was given a fairly good indication when the co-commentator said after the Hillsborough memorial had finished, ‘Well, it’s all fair game now.’

Those who booed Patrice Evra, sung about Hillsborough, Heysel or Munich, or abused Mark Halsey after the match need to take a step back, or a deep breath, or a ‘chill pill’ or a long, hard look in the mirror – whatever works. Some things are not simply ‘fair game’. 

Sumber : http://www.thefootballramble.com/indepth/entry/twittery-fingers-and-angry-worlds