Well, not many of us can say that anymore.
In his epic novel La Peste (The Plague), Camus depicts Raymond Rambert, a journalist who is visiting Oran to research a story on living conditions in the Arab quarter of the town, as a character trapped in a city with which he feels he has no connection. The week’s machinations in the Premier League gas bubble have left many of us with similar sentiments.
Do we belong here? Does any relevant connection remain?
In the existential waiting room that we all inhabit right now, it is perhaps restorative to ponder a while how we might all change as a result of the Covid-19 health crisis and, in particular, as this is what draws us to this particular forum, what football might do to right some of its evident wrongs in any future world we are granted clean breathing air in.
So far, it has been something of a mixed bag, and scrutinising individual cases (Jesus Christ, Tottenham; for God’s sake, Richard Branson, oh no, Liverpool) doesn’t really solve anything. We all know who are doing their stuff and who aren’t. We certainly don’t need Sky News, Matt Hancock and the crack team from the Sunday Times to single out particular clubs, who don’t fit their agenda, to help us form our opinions. I hope.
On a more general note, however, we might want to ask ourselves where we go from here, presuming there will be a place to launch ourselves from once this purge has had its way with us.
The opinions fly thick and fast. There are those who think this is God’s work, or the devil’s, or that it is Mother Earth scolding us for blatantly ignoring all of her beseeching messages to calm down a bit in our rape and pillage of the planet’s resources. Is it a punishment for those who believe these things are sent as a punishment? That would be neat. For all of us then whatever we might believe, the current state of affairs has delivered a pregnant moment to pause and think.
Like Camus on contemplating absurdism and what our response to it might be, a deeper reflection on ourselves and our way of life is likely to end in heavy existential angst. Most of what we do is worthless, trivial and selfish, we will probably decide. Bordering on the absurd, our habits and routines are not much more sophisticated than the hamster running around his wheel thinking he might be on the way to the peanut kiosk on the beachfront at Fleetwood.
Being forced to self-isolate tends to sharpen the senses, allow us to prioritise anew. Do we have enough to eat? Do I feel ok? Are my close ones safe? How can I participate meaningfully in keeping communities going and boosting the flagging fortunes of those less well-placed? How can I show my appreciation for those people I always presume are just there but never really value properly? All these thoughts now reach us before "who wrote this latest baseless attack on my football club?" and "Is Kevin de Bruyne fit?"
The cleaners, the doctors, the nurses, the drivers, the refuse collectors, the delivery folk, the support staff, those bringing us reliable news and information, those transporting us to and fro, in and out, those keeping us fed, those keeping us safe, those keeping us informed, those keeping supply chains running, the chap that put the Dalek on the street the other day.
Who would have thought we would one day rue the passing of the milk delivery?
Into none of these categories falls Daniel Levy. I begin with the Tottenham chairman solely on the grounds that his acts are the latest to appear before our eyes from the Planet Altruism that is football. There are plenty of others and you can consider them too if you have the energy.
On Tuesday, Tottenham Hotspur announced, via chairman Levy, sitting freshly atop his self-awarded £3m bonus for the (albeit tardy) completion of the new Tottenham Hotspur stadium, that "people need to wake up to the enormity of the coronavirus pandemic”. It is not clear whether he was nibbling on one of the 234 different kinds of cheese to be found in the new stadium’s Cheese Foyer at the time or not and, if so, whether it was one of the particularly malodourous French ones that can cause hallucination, but what is clear is that Levy’s pint is filling from the bottom up. Football’s pint is also filling from the bottom up. Despite technology at Spurs, this has almost always been the case.
By now, the details of the situation are well known: in order to make sure everyone at the club was fully awake, Levy announced that 550 non-playing staff would take a 20% pay cut. Levy himself will be involved in this scheme, meaning some of the £7m he earned in the last calendar year will be taken back.
No biological honey on his toast this week then.
It is not known whether Tottenham’s owner, Joe Lewis -apparently worth roughly (it is sometimes a little tricky to get to the final, precise figure when there are so many noughts making your eyes blur) £4.35bn (this from the Sunday Times Rich List, who rejoice in this kind of vulgarity)- will be hit by the same in-house procedure. Levy’s Trumpist addendum that even his Tottenham “the 8th richest club in the world according to Deloittes rich list” have been hit hard holds little sway. We really don’t care about the state of your media partners, Daniel, or whether the club’s cheese is going off or even that Tottenham lie 8th in the grossest of league tables. And whilst we are looking at you and your ideas in these crisis times, dipping into the government’s emergency furlough scheme when you are running a multi-million pound business is in all probability not the kind of struggling business Boris Johnson and the guys and girls at HM Treasury had in mind, when they announced the emergency aid package.
They probably won't have been expecting to pay 80% of Liverpool's non-playing staff's salaries either. You really just can't find a good news story around when you need one, although some will work harder than others to put a positive gloss on things, just to keep the nation's morale high.
You can polish a turd as long as you don't mind getting stuff under your finger nails. (always wash your hands thoroughly afterwards, singing, well, you know the drill by now).
What about those on salaries so high they could each forgo a camouflage Hummer to arrange some shopping deliveries for the elderly community of the Tottenham High Road. Before we explode with indignation, it might be worth remembering that Spain, where Barcelona's squad have agreed to take a huge pay cut, are much further along this crisis line than the UK is. People have had longer to come to terms and to rationalise their own response, although there is clearly no point taking your time to rationalise your response and then responding as Tottenham and Liverpool have...
Gordon Taylor, for decades a barometer of how football folk approach life’s great causes, has already said his members will block any multilateral deferral of wages. Not the least of Mr Taylor’s shortcomings has been the inability to judge when was an opportune moment to retire from his post.
There will be plenty of players embarrassed by Taylor's response and they will determine their own response in the next few days if their union cannot do that for them.
Meanwhile our own Premier League bigwigs have been busy conference-calling each other through the night to come up with hair-brained schemes to “get the Premier League done” in any form necessary, including the frankly hideous prospect of a massive wave of football matches being played in concertinaed form, players staying en masse in lock-down viral free Premier Inns and a raft of behind closed doors matches being put on simultaneously in London and the South Midlands. The thought of medics being dragged away from hospitals that are so overworked they are spilling patients out into tents on their front concourses in order to watch over Dejan Lovren for 90 minutes in case he pulls a hamstring is frankly hideous.
Trying one’s utmost to put on what is evidently not a show for public morale but a dogged attempt to save having to repay tv cash for not fully delivering the product as the contract stated is not the best look at the moment. Self-interest and greed is not a new theme in football, however. What on earth would make humble Burnley club together with the likes of Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal to deliver a plea to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to keep City out of Europe?
Football has been busy eating itself for several decades. Covid-19 has done us all the favour of hurrying up the process whereby we see it for what it is. In the great scheme of things, we can actually do without the white noise of the football press, the endless fabricated transfer speculation, the moral-lite world of agents and advisers, the haggling for million dollar cuts and the gasping and the whooping that accompanies every fart and every burp in our national sport.
The £25m play-off final, the £70m goalkeeper, the £5 pie, the £12 souvenir match programme. The record profit announcement that then follows.
The last seismic sock in the teeth of this proportion fell upon our heads in 1939. Hitler’s whim that Poland might look nice on his mantlepiece reduced the new football season to dust. Large gatherings were banned, as they are now. The war footing meant that players not only had to curtail their athletic pursuits but were conscripted into the army instead. Imagine that, Corporal Harry Winks and Not Quite Private Enough Jack Grealish. Gas masks were carried by spectators at all times and the employment of officials to disperse larger crowds was also deemed fruitful.
History goes around in tight little circles.
One wonders, when serious things befall us (and by this, I mean things more serious than losing in the last minute at West Brom or shipping your star forward to Juventus), how some will manage to relativize. The Daily Express, in particular, must be in something of a lather, having succumbed to literally hundreds of front pages down the years saying killer storms would be the end of us and, more recently, that an early judicial block on Brexit was “the day democracy died”. It is quite possible that organs such as the Express have already obliterated their stockpile of hyperbole to such an extent that they are now left to wipe their leaky bottoms on their own discarded back issues.
We have travelled a long way since powdered eggs, however. Our new creature comforts come at a massive cost to the planet. Passion fruit and mangos fly in from deepest Peru. mobile phones drop in from China, cars slide off the ramps from Korea and footballers wing in from Argentina; golf trips are to Dubai instead of the pitch and putt at Timperley. The world is suddenly a small place, but we have also undermined it, made it fragile.
Perhaps now things might change and, just for a while, they may stay changed. For the good of everyone, we must all alter our ways. This has not just been the deprivation of our rights to party and a chance to make ourselves look ridiculous pushing shopping trollies filled to the brim with toilet paper. It is not just an unforeseen but temporary curtailment of our narcissistic lives of puff pastry and caramel frappuccinos. The self-indulgent shallowness of what we have created should be reconsidered. The hollow drum that is modern football must follow suit. It has gone deeper now than paying €175 for a match ticket in the Champions League only to be treated like a two-bit nobody when you try to enter the ground. The time has come to stop milking and start reallocating.
“A little too late and quite a lot too little …” does not have to be the phrase to mark 2020.
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| Extract from cover illustration of La Peste by Albert Camus. |
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nice
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