Originally published on Talking Sports on 05/06/11Nine years to the day after two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the world was changed forever, I did something that would rock the foundations of many people’s worlds to a similar extent – I gave up watching football.
That last bit might be a gross exaggeration, but this kind of hyperbole is typical of the elevated status that football has come to occupy in the 21st century – just pick up any tabloid today and try not to laugh while reading the overly-dramatic back-page stories about, well, nothing really – and is the main reason why, in September 2010, I decided I could not be arsed with it anymore.
I lasted a few months and then eventually got sucked back in – partially because it made it easier to talk to hairdressers and boring men at work functions – but it got me wondering what had ever attracted me to football in the first place.
Playing football every day in the playground as a kid probably had a part in it, plus the fact that most of my mates were football fans, but then I’ve never been one to be swung by public opinion (I am happy to say that I have never read a Dan Brown book and didn’t watch a single second of the latest series of MasterChef).
So like a veteran fisherman I grab hold of my memory-fishing rod and toss it deep into the recesses of my hippocampus. As I feel the tug of something bulky and fairly old, I rip it through the rest of my mushy brain (made mushy by drinking too much beer while watching football in pubs, I might add) – past this superb own goal by Forest Green’s Wayne Hatswell
this ridiculous Saudi Arabia goal in the 1994 World Cup
and other cherished football memories – and then find a dancing pensioner (well, almost) sticking out the top of my skull.
Yes, Roger Milla. He must be the reason I got taken in by football.
Italia ’90 was my first real football memory. It came before the obese publicity/cash machine that is the Premier League and, in my head at least, embodies the pure reckless joy that football has the ability to foster but is now so utterly denuded of.
If anyone personified that pure reckless joy it was Roger Milla. Despite his being 38, I, like so many others, felt drawn to him because he played football like it was played in the playground. He didn’t seem self-conscious, or particularly technically able, he looked scruffy and he took delight in everything he did on the pitch, as became most evident when he scored and went to dance around the corner flag – an act that may well provoke a booking for time wasting in today’s Premier League.
I won’t bore you with a chronological walk through his Italia ’90 – you can relive his best bits on YouTube – but will say that he had me in hysterics when he robbed Rene Higuita, Colombia’s showboating keeper, of the ball about 40 yards out and went on to slot into an open net.
Higuita was a bit of a laugh too, and one of the tournament’s highlights, but in many ways he embodied the arrogance of the most repugnant footballers (and most of today’s millionaire players) – and when Milla robbed him of the ball, it was like reckless playground football was taking the game back from pompous corporatism and saying: “Oi, football is supposed to be a laugh, a bit of fun – keep it that way.”
Shame the corporates didn’t listen.
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