Waldorf and Statler Chew The Fat
Oct 17th, 2007 by 'holic
As if I didn’t already know Arsenal mean much more to me than the England side these days, it came home to me again at the weekend. I had arranged to play golf with an old friend this afternoon without realising the alternative attraction. ‘Do you want to play another day?’ he asked when discovering the fixture. I didn’t.
Feeling guilty when we met up, I apologised. ‘We could play the first thirteen and come in to watch the second-half if you like?’ That provoked the first old boys grumble of the day. ‘Watch Sky?’ he asked incredulously. ‘I’m buggered if I’ll watch that. Should be on terrestrial television if it’s a major qualifier’.
I should explain that Trev is a football man, a good full-back in his day by all accounts. The one thing us footballers discover as we move around the country is who could play a bit when they were younger!
‘You don’t watch much these days then Trev?’ I ask with hesitation. ‘Oh yes. I never miss the highlights on Saturdays’ and I make a special point of watching your lot nowadays.’ There is extra meaning to that admission. Trev is a Swindon boy, and in that part of the world we are still regarded as the team they beat to win the League Cup in 1969. You may think that was nearly forty years ago, but in the West Country it was just yesterday!
Over the course of eighteen holes, if you will pardon the pun, we cover all the ‘old buggers’ groans about football today. The key is undoubtedly that you just don’t see groups of kids playing football on any spare bit of grass these days.
We both stop short of bemoaning the lack of street games with a tennis ball, understanding that there is just a wee bit more traffic around than when we got away with it in the sixties.
There is something of a point to our grumbling, and most youth coaches at the lower league clubs will agree with us. We aren’t producing the number of young footballers we used to because there are too many alternative attractions.
Those that do still have that ambition are hampered by rules restricting the distance they can travel to get professional coaching. That’s the reason that fortunes are spent on the Walcotts’ and Bales’ of this world.
The obvious outcome of that is manifesting itself in the lower leagues now. ‘I wouldn’t cross the road to watch Swindon these days’ admits Trev, who actually wouldn’t need to do much more than cross the road to get there. ‘They are dreadful’.
As we complete our afternoon’s exercise the ‘nineteenth hole’ is emptying. ‘Bloody shambles’ is probably the only printable comment we are treated to as we ascend the stairs. The mood of the departing is not good.
So Trev and I, who haven’t even seen the game, now concur that the system is completely cocked up, and this is a sign of things to come for England. There was a time when the pair of us, bristling with indignation, would have debated the solutions over our pints’.
‘So are you going to watch Arsenal on Saturday then?’ he asks. ‘Oh yes mate’, and all is well with the world again. Even for Trev.
One Response to “Waldorf and Statler Chew The Fat”
The difference is Arsene was prepared to be patient and to re-build Arsenal from the ground up. I’m not sure that the English F.A. has the patience or ability to do the same for the national team.