Scoring High Marking Deep

By John Sheldon

On a foggy Saturday afternoon George Best turned with the ball in the centre circle and ran route one toward the opposition goal. Ron Chopper Harris scythed Best at the knee, but Best rode the tackle and ran on, beating two more defenders and the goalkeeper to score an amazing goal. This quality of action is lost in millennial football as players fall to the ground before contact is made. The taming of football has removed the sporting element from the game as physical contact is deleted from the activity on the pitch. This removal of authenticity is not an accident but is an institutional plan to sanitise the game into a commercial entertainment, suitable only for television, media, and sponsorship. This process of ruin started in the 1980s when the government attempted to control the constructed problem of hooliganism which culminated in the tragedy of Hillsborough. This was the point when people looked at football and planned the elimination of violence but also the destruction of the game as an authentic sport.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398431270

Book preview

About the Author

John Sheldon works and studies in London as a psychiatric and emergency nurse and has had articles published on a variety of mental health subjects including self-harm.

John experienced a change in life direction after undergoing hypnotherapy and recovery from addiction which caused him to question what is important in life. This experience led to a philosophical study of institutional self-harm, to which his lost and regained love of football has been applied for the purpose of this book.

Dedication

Dedicated to all those people in recovery, whose authenticity inspired the writing of this book.

Copyright Information ©

John Sheldon 2022

The right of John Sheldon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398431263 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398431270 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

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Chapter 1

Fixture: Knife V Skin

Self-harm is popular. Seen to be a problem by powerless loved ones and onlookers, self-harm is a solution for those adopting the dual role of perpetrator and victim. When life becomes difficult it is natural to seek easy or easier alternatives and it is at the very time that our demands are met, as life is perceived to be easier, that we are confronted with unforeseen and unexpected obstacles. It is at times of ease and comfort that we are forced to succumb to hardships that reveal themselves in a demanding psychological role as a risk to sanity and life. For many it is difficult to consider anything worse than an easy life and, even after becoming aware of self-inflicted problems and pain, a stubbornness arises to doggedly wade through the cement. It is as though the concept of an easy life is thought to be desired, but the truth of a painful life of hardship is what is truly aspired to. An easy life is not enough for us. A life of pain and hardship, bordering on self-destruction, is what is deemed necessary to provide fulfilment and satisfaction.

Self-harm is an achievement of civilisation, an inner clearing out of meaningless deadwood, a journey to rock bottom to reach a place where a process of meaningful recovery and renewal can be embarked upon. In negation of the value of life, self-harm challenges the deepest held belief that life is precious. But a paradox arises as self-harm becomes momentous in creating a deep focus on the desire to save that which is being lost.

In its flaw inspiring as well as awe inspiring nature, humanity experiences as many annihilations from within through self-harm as from without. But self-harm is not unique to individual human beings. Human institutions, from small associations to nations, can also adopt the role of self-harmer, making decisions and taking actions that are harmful to the institution as well as the people in it.

Chapter 2

Fixture: Past V Present

A perfect combination for me at eight years of age was daylight and a football, as the days lasted longer than any school term and the sun hung in a permanent suspension over the railway tracks on the horizon. Football in the park was the only option, not because of lack of opportunity, but because of evaluation and choice. Football and then more football. If value does not exist in the object valued, but in the passion of desire, then the ball was everything, a beauty, responding obediently to the instructions of my boot as teams evolved around us with anyone who wanted to enter, playing and playing, with the ball and myself as the only permanent fixtures.

One evening, as the night loomed around and the final whistle was contemplated, some older boys entered the park, forcibly taking the ball from us, kicking it to each other in an aggressive disconnection of passion and with a power that questioned the ball’s survival. As a mother having her baby taken, I watched my neonate carelessly kicked around the park. Flying unattached over the fence the ball crashed into the confused bushes beyond and a silence rested on the park as the brambles were negotiated and the ball retrieved from its branch high crucifixion. Never to be kicked again the ball was returned in a funeral procession and handed to me in its gasping, deflated, limp and dying state. And I felt like I was dying too. Never to be recovered, punctured beyond repair, held as a dead loved pet, I carried the ball home in mourning. It’s just a ball, said everyone. Get another one. I did get another ball, but that ball was never replaced.

Many years later, as forgetting replaced remembering and bright ambition succumbed to life problems, the ball was no more in my memory of recall, buried deep in the cavernous mind of the boy now a man. Emotional and mental problems, thought to be exacerbated by other humans, perceived as solved, returned quickly like funfair games and various solutions were attempted to resolve the state of unknowing, a condition of knowing there is a problem, but not knowing what it is. Therapy was suggested by hypnotherapy recommended, and I lay on the couch with a reluctant willingness before a state of extreme hypnosis was induced to a point of speech slurring. My first topic of involuntary therapeutic conversation was my burst dead football from all those decades ago, the ball long forgotten, and all the time it was just a plaything anyway. The depth of hurt caused by this spherical deflation was initially unfathomable and inexplorable, as it existed beyond any experiential conscious awareness. I recognise clearly that I still grieve that football today, the love that was just a ball.

Disgruntled neighbours include those who have had enough of footballs kicked over the garden fence, flattening prized geraniums, breaking greenhouse windows. Neighbours who put a knife through the ball and return it with glee at its deflated state are fortunately rare but do exist. Everyone has a burst ball over the fence that needs explorative emotional tools to rediscover. Initial forays into help or self-help succeed in most of life’s fixes, be it therapy, drugs, alcohol, or relationships, but usually fail later because of the need to revert to that which is comfortable and familiar, even if that comfort is brought by self-harm, self-loathing and self-destruction.

Humans largely pass-through life outwardly exhibited as beings without problems and, over millennia of emotional evolution, have become highly skilled in the art of hiding pain. Often so well disguised, even the owner of the problem may not be aware of its presence. Reason loves the absurd and problems unidentified internally or externally can present in surprising or disturbing ways. A smile pierced by the words ‘I’m fine’ can transform unpredictably into apparently meaningless outbursts, episodes of violence or actions of self-harm. Problems churn inside until a breaking point is reached at either a high or low threshold, at which time external or internal help is sought through methods that exist on a spectrum of healthy to unhealthy, from socially acceptable to socially deviant.

Help is sought from a boundless pool of resources, from conscious to subconscious to unconscious, from tangible to intangible, from human to animal to mineral, from physical to metaphysical and spiritual. A person may, at any stage of seeking help, be unaware that they are seeking help, with chosen methods seeming strange to both the person seeking help and to any observer. It is in the initial period of a new emotional or mental difficulty that a method or methods of resolution are selected, and it is in this prodromal stage that harm may be sought either against others or against the self. If a football player or a football fan experiences emotional relief through engaging in a period of abusive muddy spirituality, interspersed by withdrawal symptoms for the off-season, then this may never be acknowledged by the central character because it is a working method that needs no investigation nor challenge. But to the observer who seeks help in other ways, football, once a masculine self-help domain of silent physicality, may seem peculiar or even unhealthy. The removal of physicality and the millennial emasculation of football has not opened the mouths of those involved in order to speak their truth but has brought normally vocal people and fans into a vulnerable category of the non-vocal.

The Football Journey:

1850–1914 Gentry Football Paradigm (Birth)

1914–1990 Authentic Football Paradigm (Childhood)

1990–2020 Millennial Football Paradigm (Adolescence)

Sport, like art, is fundamental to human existence in its expression of feeling, and football has an indispensable value to those who engage in its seasonal ferocity. The beautiful game grew with humanity, from a few warriors kicking around a skull into the authentic competition of the last century. The late twentieth-century saw a twilight age of authentic football, a time of muddy pitches, hard tackles, standing in the stands, unhealthy food, physical action, abuse, confrontation and violence. The passion on the pitch was exemplified by players refusing to fall to the ground no matter how hard the tackle. Authentic fans of the twentieth-century were greeted with unhealthy food and an uncensored abuse. When footballers boozed in recreation and when players like Cruyff smoked a cigarette at half-time there was no judgment except that of the presentation of the skill on the pitch.

In 1969, as absorbed crowds watched matches on muddy pitches instead of plasma screens, George Best turned on a sixpence in the centre circle and ran route one toward the opposition goal. A defender, Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, not called ‘Chopper’ for his flower arranging abilities, scythed Best at knee height. But Best rode the tackle, running on to beat two more defenders and the goalkeeper to score a great goal. Such an event is rarely possible today as players seek to fall to the ground before the tackle is made. George Best was a football king and an alcoholic who could not stop drinking even after a liver transplant. Best was the first overtly big money earner in English football, the first pop star footballer exhibiting celebrity in a life that portrayed extremes of joy to pain, self-care to self-harm, a star who exposed the subtle nature of glory in football by questioning whether there is any point in being a king if you cannot drink and smoke. Unlike millennial footballers who have a publicity team for protection from inappropriate off-the-pitch exposure, as with all vulnerable firsts, the errors and flaws of Best’s professional and glamorous situation were exposed in the man himself. The big forgotten difference between Best and the millennial footballer is that Best never dived nor cheated on the pitch, an entire career forged in authenticity. Millennial players get paid millions to do what Best never did. If George Best and other great players of the past had been conned into thinking that taking a dive on the first tackle was the best way of gaining an advantage, then football and history would have been denied the glorious nature and fruits of their footballing skill. Assessing how many great opportunities and great football moments have been lost due to millennial diving would be a painful undertaking akin to counting dead bodies after a nuclear war.

The desire of external agencies to control sport has led to the creation of the ‘sports science’ industry. The term ‘sport science’ is an oxymoron. Sport must be unpredictable for humans to gain anything from it, acting as it bridges between the known and the unknown, the physical and the metaphysical, between the earthly and the spiritual. Science is about control and prediction, about understanding the way something is constructed, changes and interacts and then applying that understanding in a way that may benefit, or not, the owner of that scientific knowledge, most usually for pecuniary advantage. Science is moving people toward a physical understanding of the universe at the expense of a human understanding. The more scientific the football, then the more alienated its people and fans become. Restrictions on behaviour and language at football matches, a science of fandom, are part of the agenda to destroy football as an authentic outlet. By challenging people who swear, fight, or hurl abuse, a system of reinforcement of the power of the action is taking place, leading people to seek opportunity to engage in the specific banned action. A result of a child being banned from saying a specific word is the child seeking opportunities to say the word. As truth is the goal of the rational, so beauty is the goal of the irrational. As a tyranny of reason consumes football in its desire to become a formalised and controlled source of a massive income it is opposed by football itself in its purpose of facilitating a state of becoming temporarily unreasonable.

The word ‘athletic’ derives from the Greek root ‘athl’, meaning struggle and misery, but relates to activity that is engaged in and watched not only willingly, but with pleasure and fulfilment. In ancient Greece and Rome athletics and ball games were popular in the arenas, played alongside gladiatorial events. The organisers understood that exhibitions of violence in the arena deterred barbarism within the state. Every authentic sporting experience leaves participants, fans, and observers, with a sense of arriving empty and leaving fulfilled. Football in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more than any other sport, fulfilled a cathartic role, providing an image of what enchantment means in terms of religious passion.

Homo sapiens became aware of being gifted two legs to play football for those in the heavens to watch as the growth of secularism in the nineteenth-century demanded a spiritual replacement for God. As the rise of a football congregation juxtaposed the decline of formal traditional religion, humans stopped watching God as God started watching football. Despite the demise of the gods in secular human life, atheistic football fans will willingly kneel in prayer if the tactic is proved to be a match winner, and maybe even if it is not.

Seeking to traverse the spiritual gap between the lived life and the desired life, human beings exist in a permanent state of denial that can only be traversed by the bridges of conflict and beauty, both necessary ingredients of football. But the millennial transition into a business-based entertainment is replacing value with price, presenting football lovers with a dissolving authenticity. Football exists independently of humanity and millennial football is a failed attempt by humanity to take possession of the sporting ideal.

Chapter 3

Fixture: Foot V Hand

The success of human development is usually credited to the brain but was mostly facilitated by the hand in its role as the greatest precision tool in the universe. Successful sports and games must generate problems and conundrums for participants, to encourage creativity and teamwork, and the greatest problems are created by taking away the best and most important tools. The removal of the use of the hand in outfield play, limiting creative tools to all other body parts, but retaining it as a tool of prevention for the goalkeeper, was a touch of genius, creating the maximum problem for achievement of goals with the maximum defence in goal prevention. The most spectacular saves, generated by much outfield effort,