Tag Archives: sport

The Golden Age of Chris

The thing everyone likes about skills is they get better over time. Refining and smoothing your talents to become a master of your craft, to put novices and the young to shame and possibly even pick up an award or two. ‘Honing’ they call it, which sounds a bit like an Australian having a wank.

But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. Form is temporary, but even class is fickle. And as I turned over my card to reveal a three of clubs, the realisation dawned.

I’m fucking rubbish. The Golden Age of Chris is over.

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Anything but clubs

I look across the peaceful fields of England and a calmness overwhelms me. Rolling through the countryside in a train to some beacon of urban grandeur – Stevenage say, or Taunton – I wonder how our nation can feel so cramped, so busy, when there are glorious grassy plains as far as the eye can see.

As I rumble through these ancient green lands with so many stories to tell, of lords and serfs, farmers and shepherds, men and women of toil and endeavour, I spy two people meandering across the verdant terrain.

The fury is immediate and profound. Golfers.

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The wooden spoon

Times like these, a man needs a good laugh.

There I was, nursing what turned out to be an unnecessary guilty complex after a Thursday night went wrong. On the sofa, Saturday afternoon – there was no Friday – feeling sorry for myself and being glared at across the room as if my existential dread weren’t already the size of Dion Dublin’s cock. Yes, it’s Homes Under the Hammer. Self-flagellation. Which is probably a doddle for Dion Dublin.

The news comes on the TV. India and Pakistan continue their merry dance-of-the-soon-irradiated. There’s something to do with Hillsborough, like most days. Jeremy Corbyn storms past journalists shouting ‘Good morning and goodbye!’ like a senile Truman Burbank.

Surely the sports news can save us. It can! Look! Women playing rugby!

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Touching me, touching you

You are a filthy paedophile.

You must be – why else would you be singing gaily along with every litre of lung capacity to a song about the delights of an 11-year-old girl? You’re doing an awful lot of ‘touching’ of a pre-pubescent teen – ‘reaching out, touching me, touching you’. Bill Wyman shakes his head in disapproval and Tom O’Carroll senses his time has come at last.

But it’s fine. You carry on parading your nasty sexual perversions in front of thousands of sports fans, each of whom is merrily doing the same in some kind of bacchanalian wankathon in a concrete bowl. I’ll slip out muttering that you’re all twisted ghouls, somehow making myself the killjoy in the process.

Because I really, really fucking hate Sweet Caroline. And apparently I’m completely alone.

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The next boat back to Tuvalu

FIFA has certainly had a rough patch of late. Dodgy deals behind closed doors, confederation presidents handling suspiciously overstuffed briefcases, botched bribery attempts from the chronically awkward Brits (bless them), more expensive Swiss watches than even Salvador Dalí would know what to do with and a couple of incredibly misguided venue choices for the next two footballing extravaganzas. Could it get any worse?

Amazingly, yes.

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Disregard for cool

The world needs to hear this: skateboarding isn’t fucking cool.

With the announcement that skateboarding is now going to be in the Olympics and various celebrities skateboarding around their private jets before they board them to get away from their fans, I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone of the worth of standing on a plank on wheels. Skateboarding is actually so tragic that it should make someone dressed as a Storm Trooper at a cosplay convention look like Johnny Depp. And he is the coolest man on earth, known fact.

I am sure to the outside world that skateboarding looks cool. It has an underground vibe to it, breaking into places, skateboarding, being arrested and then being released from custody only to do it all over again the next weekend, before going back to a job you hate on Monday because you spent so much time skating during school that you failed every exam you did and ended up writing for a blog that screams at the world, that got a little too personal at the end there.

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The pride of Tom Daley

Recently I endured the painful experience of being forcibly pinned down by my best friend.

He isn’t usually given to violence, or sexual deviance with older women but, in his defence, he had discovered me throwing the contents of my handbag at the television. On reflection this was probably quite a disturbing sight for him. He had recorded several episodes of his favourite programmes on the Sky box and was in imminent danger of not having a screen to watch them on – again.

He didn’t seem particularly surprised to find me in such a rage. This was probably because he’d presumed that I had been watching the Chelsea match and was suffering from a serious bout of indignant rage following Diego Costa’s late winner against West Ham. I wouldn’t normally give a shit about West Ham’s result but I had placed a small wager on them winning the league this season (lunacy I know) and anyway, I fucking hate Diego Costa.

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My career as a ballroom dancer

I’ll tell you what’s been grinding my fucking gears recently: ski jumping.

The other week I was channel hopping when I stopped on a trailer for the Eddie the Eagle film. This was followed by the show The Jump.

Now, for those of you who don’t know much about the sporting history of England, especially on a social level, until the 1950s you were not allowed to be a professional sportsman. It was seen as unbecoming for a gentleman to be trying too hard; for example, if you worked on the dock yard, you could not participate in the shot-put as you had an unfair advantage. Even to this day, the English prefer the plucky underdog to the consummate professional.

So the story surrounding Eddie the Eagle befits the English sensibility. For those who don’t know it’s basically Cool Runnings (the story that is, I haven’t seen the film so couldn’t comment on it) and Eddie couldn’t jump for shit.

And then there’s The Jump.

Why the hell am I being made to watch a bunch of over-paid, under-talented leeches have an all expenses paid winter vacation? They can go skiing any fucking time they like, or at least could when they had money and didn’t need to flog their carcasses to pay the plastic surgeon.

I mean, seriously, why do celebrities get to do so many amazing and sometimes life-changing things? In the Jungle, ballroom dancing, they even help them find love. Let’s say I wanted to use the medium of reality TV to boost my career as a ballroom dancer. I’d be forced to slug it out with quite potentially thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of other people. On Strictly it’s about a dozen. It’s like everyone wants to win the Champions League, but celebrities start in the last 16 whereas you or I have to start from the bottom of the Ryman’s.

I wouldn’t mind so much if they’d properly hurt themselves once in a while. But no. It’s just another lump of dirt kicked in our faces, proving that the sole point of such shows is to attract larger and larger audiences by seducing us with a glimpse of these demi-gods of modern society.

Why can’t Joe Bloggs do all that cool shit?  What better way to ensnare an audience than by showing relateable people? I’m not Dean Caine, I’ve never been in a cereal advert or played one of the most iconic characters in all 20th century fiction. I do not relate to those people, it merely stokes my ire.

Surely we all remember The Crystal Maze – which has returned to our lives, albeit as a pay-and-play experience – Fort Boyard and the Krypton Factor? Real people, doing real shit. Since Big Brother and the explosion of celebrity culture and reality TV, we’ve somehow all been lulled into thinking that it’s actually interesting watching these vacuous souls.

Fuck, at least if I watch a soap opera, I’m watching paid professionals, expressing themselves through their vague approximation of art and talent. When I peer into the toilet bowl, I do not find myself spellbound. I am not willing to live my life based on what these ridiculous people say and do. Fuck ski jumping.

Quick feet proper prospect

Thrashing about in a foetid quagmire of death and deceit it may well be, but there’s no denying the world is an interesting place. You may rather take a soldering iron to your eardrums than hear another word about the EU referendum, schools, hospitals and the BBC being privatised or the heavily misguided blowing themselves up, but while the news may be repetitive and miserable there’s always something remarkable or outrageous around the corner to spice life up a bit. US mass shooting? How many!

There are so many compelling and provocative topics to pepper conversation with, and serious debates to tickle the synapses. We could talk about whether it’s worth knotting a series of capes together to string up anyone involved in the making of Batman v Superman, or any of the eight hundred other superhero movies currently signalling the death of cinema. Or whether an elderly Elton John’s been sticking his cock in places he shouldn’t, which is a conversation I overheard the other day, and can never unhear. Turns out it’s the other bloke anyway.

Maybe that’s what some people talk about. It’s not what I talk about, though if I could I would, except the Elton John bit. No, I have to talk about something else.

Football.

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Cashing out

Paul Kaye lives in the same part of London as I do. You’ll know him even if the name isn’t familiar – he was Dennis Pennis, that red-haired red-carpet terrorist who used dubious press privileges to ask Wolf from Gladiators if his Nobbies itched on set and whether Eamonn Holmes had ever shat on a glass table.

I see Paul at the tube station from time to time, on his way to film another intriguing character role in that niche he’s etched out for himself in shows such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Humans. He plays long-faced, greasy-haired, gurning minor villains who inevitably get their comeuppance at some point. He plays them well.

It turns out these roles have been little more than prep work for his finest creation yet. I speak, of course, of ‘Morris’.

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