Sometimes you just have to let situations play themselves out. This is partly why there hasn’t been a blog update on this website for months. The ongoing inactivity of Newcastle United in the transfer market might be irritating and frustrating but I refuse to join in with the minute by minute “Buy somebody! No not him!” hysteria being played out by my black and white family on Twitter. I’ll admit to hoping for QPR’s relegation last season entirely on the grounds of wanting Loic Remy to end up where he should have been before bloody Redknapp hijacked the deal in January. However, those waters have been considerably muddied by a legal issue that I’m not touching with another man’s barge pole.
The relentless tedium of the Suarez, Bale and Rooney speculation has made all football based newspapers and websites easily avoidable; suffice to say I hope all three are forced to remain at their present clubs in a state of bitter resentment. All my own present agitation and impatient rage is of no interest to anyone because it is based on selling one house and buying another house – a situation I swore never to repeat years ago.
However sometimes you look up, recognise that an extreme peril is about to crash into a blissfully unaware victim, and simply must shout a warning.
Greg Dyke, the new chairman of the FA, has been in the papers and on TV and radio all weekend saying the World Cup in Qatar 2022 can’t be played in the summer because of the extreme heat. “I don’t know how many people have been to Qatar in June,” he said, “I have. The one thing that I can tell you is you can’t play a football tournament in Qatar in June” (The Times 10/8/2013). Mr Dyke goes on to suggest that the tournament has to be moved to another place in geography or time. We of course knew all this just like we all suspect we know why and how this decision was reached in the first place.
However my own belief is that the international governing bodies have not only been greedy here but are in the process of deviously and fundamentally changing the very essence of European football and that some of our lives are in danger as a consequence: check this out from UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino (Mail online) talking about football being played in the winter, “You see people in the stadiums with hats and scarves. Why did England, who brought us this beautiful game, decide that football is for the winter and not for the summer? Cricket. The month of June, which is the most beautiful month to play football, is hardly ever used except for the Euros and the World Cup.”
Infantino is of course adding his unwelcome voice to FIFA president Sepp Blatter and UEFA chief Michel Platini, who are to blame for the seemingly ding-bat decision to have the World Cup of 2022 played in Qatar in the first place. That’s Qatar; where the players and fans will burst into flames like vampires when exposed to the extreme summer sun. Where it is illegal to be homosexual and where you can be flogged for drinking alcohol.
FIFA / UEFA will ignore the gay issue because they clearly have no intention of joining the rest of us in the 21st century any time in the next 9 years and they will get a permit so fans can drink in stadiums (providing it is a named brand of a sponsor obviously) because the World Cup being in Qatar isn’t the real issue. These f***ers are serious about shifting the entire footballing calendar so the World Cup can be played in a slightly less scorchy time in Qatar – our winter. So obviously our domestic leagues here in Europe would have to be played in the summer. Which might be a laugh as a one off, except Infantino and Platini seem to want the shift to be more permanent and are keen on blaming England for what has, it turns out, been a terrible inconvenience to the rest of the world for over 100 years.
Damn right we play football in the winter, damn right we watch football in the winter; that way we don’t kill ourselves with drink, drugs and boredom in the winter. Why do you think we invented football (and Christmas) in the first place? People moan about the gap between football seasons being too long now. Can you imagine if the three months between football seasons were December, January and February? I seriously doubt that some of us would make it to Spring. Wimbledon, sitting outside pubs, cricket, music festivals and motorcycle racing may not mean much to some football supporters but compared to “nothing at all” they all certainly help.
In my less than humble opinion that’s what FIFA are trying to do here; they are trying to make football a summer sport– and they are hoping we all sleepwalk right into it.