It’s football and I’ll swear if I want to
One of the most irritating things about watching football (no, not that organised American pantomime on steroids) — apart from stumbling across a game in which John “I’ve studied football for nearly forty years and I still don’t know what’s happening” Motson is commentating — is the habit of commentators to apologise when swearing is heard from the crowd. Or on the pitch. Or beside the pitch.
The TV companies put microphones all around the pitch so we can hear tackles and grunts and the referee’s whistle as if we were pitch side ourselves. They put cameras everywhere, so we can see goals so many times that even the best teeter towards becoming boring. The commentators talk up the great atmosphere when the crowd chant and sing.
But we’re supposed to find swearing a surprise. And, of course, there must be all those innocents watching who believe that football is a swear-free zone.
My dad took me to my first game in the 1960s and I heard language there that I found both thrilling and wonderfully funny. I’ve been going to football off and on ever since and I think if I attended a game without the rich and crude vocabulary of the angry and bitter and resigned fan the game would be less interesting.
Yes, TV is different. But so much of the match experience is made anodyne already with the mindless punditry and even-handed commentary and the pretence that it all really matters and is not just about money these days that swearing leaking into our living rooms is a welcome reminder of the more elemental side of the sport and that real fans still attend from time to time. I welcome it.
So, when the commentator apologises for ‘any bad language you may just have heard’, the only response is to shout loudly, “Fuck right off, you twat.”
