onionbagblog

West Ham Vs Millwall and the boys up for a ruck: C’mon - even Stevie Wonder could have seen this one coming. But in the land of the media blind, the one eyed knobber is King. Which is why we have on Wednesday morning, much hand wringing from BIG media as it tries to get to grips with the return of the English Disease.

Hey fellas, listen carefully: Football working class hooliganism *shhh* - it never went away.

What has changed in the past two decades is the embourgeoisement of football (yeah, I’ve got a degree in sociology, and I’m going to bloody use it.) Sanitise the beautiful / ugly game with TV matches re-branded as events, players as pop stars and supporters as the… supporting cast, and football loses its appeal. It did for me, anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh woe and a return for the good old-fashioned days of running from The Millwall after Neil Warnock’s Notts County had an unlikely 5-0 away win down at the old Lane. But it was, y’know, rather exciting at the time.

I was also rather young at the time, and being caught up in a ruck with other lads from a different part of the country, trying to pull one over the police, is exactly the kind of thing that gets a young man about town rather excited. Nowadays and an evening in with a bottle of bolly and a flick through of the New Statesman seems to help me sleep at night.

I can plot the downward trajectory and isolate exactly where I lost all interest in football - August 1992 and the first live Sky match as Liverpool came down to the City Ground. This is the exact moment when football went from being a passion to becoming part of the showbiz catwalk.

Across the river in the Fair City and the peak appears to have been reached this week with The Pies agreeing to pay the thirty four year-old Sol Campbell £10m over the next five years. Dear old Jimmy Sirrel wouldn’t have even given the big man a free bus pass, so that he could travel along to the game with his gaffer.

A return to city centre run-ins every Saturday afternoon isn’t the answer. But boys will be boys, and a bit of a Mexican stand off instead of a crappy Mexican wave might actually liven up some of the s**** Sky serve up on a Sunday afternoon.

The Nu Football Hooliganism (ha!) just might end up saving the game. Carling can’t be too happy being associated with the Hoolie Cup; I can’t see the Sky execs enjoying the gritty side of the game either. The only downside is that it can’t be too long before some knobber Tory politician fancies making a name for himself with a call for ID cards.

I’m personally hoping for a re-match, with West Ham drawn away at the New Den in the FA Cup come the start of the New Year. Now that’s a fixture I would happily pay to watch on TV.