Football does not matter.
Week after week the events that unfold during ninety minutes of football action are analysed excessively, with meaning extracted and hypothesised from everything as mundane as innocuous body language of a participant to the meaningless post-match garble of a player or manager.
Football does not matter.
Exaggerated importance is placed on every minute happening. Hyperbole takes centre stage and very often defining moments in the game lead to vitriolic and vociferous written and verbal retribution from irate fans and onlookers on the wrong side of a contentious refereeing decision or a marginal result that goes against a team.
Football does not matter.
Every day pantomime villains are created and lambasted from the stands with spiteful hatred spewing down from the onlooking disapproving masses. Often, the jeers and boos will follow these players for their careers. Those who are guilty of taking an all too easy tumble in order to win a penalty deemed a shameful, disgraceful, disgusting cheat who should be hounded and pilloried.
It does not matter. None of it does.
Every once in a while, the sheer horror of an incident brought about by the deplorable ability of the human race to be so inhumane to one another puts everything into perspective. The 129 (and rising) dead in Paris, 44 dead in Beirut and 26 in Baghdad this week from heinous acts of terror places so much of our everyday lives in to the realms of obsolete.
From a football perspective on Friday night, eyes were fixed on a round of international games looking ahead to the European Championships in France next summer. As France entertained Germany at the Stade de France in the north of Paris, the atrocities were unfurling metres from the field of play.
Chilling footage circulated of the audible explosions during the game that left three people dead at the stadium, as hundreds of others were being brutally murdered across the city. In an instant, the hyperbolic and pantomime hostility that can exist between sets of football supporters, clubs and nations evaporated. In an instant, thousands of innocent lives were irrevocably changed forever.
Football does not matter. Human lives matter.
I was nervously attempting to piece together the goings on in a fog strewn pitch in Zenica, where the Republic of Ireland were tackling a fancied Bosnian side in the first of their qualification games for a spot in France next summer. My day at work was not productive, was not overly eventful. My trepidation and anxiety about what Irish side would line up in the face of an injury crisis was priority number one, regularly abandoning my duties to scour Google and Twitter for any indication of team news that would prepare me for what I expected to be a rollercoaster ride. The game finished 1-1. Does it really matter?
Twitter was awash with reports of the developing horror in France as I strolled home, and simultaneously I cast my mind to the Bosnia game reflecting on the troubled recent history the hosts in Zenica had themselves. When Bosnia qualified for the World Cup two years ago, much was extrapolated about the importance of football within society and how their on field success given their violent history was a galvanising factor in a bright, optimistic and positive new Bosnia.
But my thoughts were not related to football. My thoughts raced to the thousands who died in a senseless conflict in the nineties that spawned from the rising nationalism of their neighbours and deep-rooted religious hatred in the region. At the forefront of my mind were the deserted Muslims of Srebrenica, abandoned at their most desperate hour to face mass execution at the hands of a repugnantly evil Serb general and army.
As my pace quickened in order to get home and turn on BBC News, so too did my cycle of reflection. Iraq’s shock triumph against all the odds at the 2007 Asian Cup popped into my head. Iraq, ravaged by religious conflict and external savagery throughout those years, triumphing at the continent’s grandest stage. Sure, there was importance attached to this in the context of the country’s chequered past and rightly so. But what mattered was all those lives needlessly lost in the six years preceding that sporting victory, and indeed in the years that immediately followed it. The relentless slaughtering of hundreds of thousands of people lost in the name of religion and global grandstanding in Iraq.
Football does not matter.
While it can no doubt be a universally uniting factor given it’ mass popularity, in reality it remains a tiny insignificant part of the fibre that really matters. Football will do what it does well over the next number of days. It will observe the utmost of respect for the victims of the atrocities in Paris, and lets not forget, Lebanon and Iraq.
The England and France game on Tuesday night will resonate on an emotional level, and will afford a 90,000 strong crowd at Wembley the opportunity to embrace their French counterparts, demonstrating the humanity and moral decency that truly matters. The human affection that was chillingly absent during those horrific hours on Friday night. Football will extend it’s hand to the victims and their families to express solidarity and share their grief in the wake of these atrocities.
You will no doubt at some point in the future see someone churn out the old Bill Shankly line of football being more important than life or death. Tell your loved ones how much they mean to you this weekend, and treat people with the decency and morality they deserve.
The pantomime villains and football soap operas will still be there and always will be in some form. You simply never know when your family or your friends will be cruelly snatched from you without warning. That is what matters above all.
