Will banter bring down the Premier League?
There is only one way to watch football these days, bobbing queasily in a choppy ocean of bantz.
Having woven itself into the fabric of the game, banter has subsumed football, has eaten football.
Where identifying what football club a fellow citizen supports might once have been a civilised ice-breaker, a vehicle for proceeding with reasoned conversation, invariably it is now a precursor to bantz.
“A Liverpool man! Ho ho ho, you’re going to bottle it again, bud.. Heh heh heh…”
If you have nailed any colours to a mast, you will be found by bantz, either with scattergun banter, on places like Twitter, or via the banterer’s favourite distribution channel, WhatsApp.
Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. The Premier League was built on banter. Its founding fathers, such as Tim Lovejoy, forged the football industry’s banter links, before the banter industry, powered by bookmakers, initiated a merger/takeover.
So now the game is defined by bantz.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s chief task was to pull Manchester United out of its ‘banter era’. One Chelsea website accepted wearily, in the wake of the 6-0 defeat by City, that the Blues have now become a ‘banter club’.
It is unfathomable what scale of human advancement could have been achieved, this week alone, were it possible to harness the energy devoted to generating bantz at the expense of Manchester United and Chelsea.
Meanwhile, despite everything Mauricio Pochettino achieves, Spurs are forever just one defeat away from reconnecting with their rich history as a catalyst for bantz. Whatever Arsenal have become, it is extremely banterous. And Liverpool will detonate an unprecedented explosion of banter should they not win the Premier League.
Not that there should be any sympathy for the fans of these teams. They will all, when they time is right, take their place at the vanguard of banter.
It may be the greatest appeal of Manchester City to the sportswashers from the Emirates. That City stand as a sort of subsidised buffer against the traditional sources of bantz. Human rights abuses can seem like a pretty small price to pay for a banter shield against that Liverpool fan you made the life-changing mistake of texting at half-time in Istanbul.
But if City may be net beneficiaries of the barrage of banter, the losers are many.
You’ll have noticed the broken souls bowing out altogether. Swearing to you they’ve gone off Arsenal, or that they “used to follow United, but have lost interest”.
They will usually come up with some spurious theory to explain what’s putting them off, such as the players being paid too much, but it is undoubtedly the bantz.
In the wake of Chelsea’s hiding at City, the banter enthusiast would have been naturally drawn to Trizia Fiorellino’s regular Chelsea column in this paper. Alas Trizia wasn’t in last Monday but she was active on Twitter, retweeting a Blues fan who had washed his hands of it all.
“Oddly enough, this doesn’t really hurt as much as you’d expect. Don’t think the supporters have ever been more unattached to a Chelsea side in the club’s history.”
Perhaps it should be noted as a provision in the Premier League’s accounts, this rise in people cocooning themselves in protective disinterest, unable to handle any longer the slings and arrows of bantz.
Many of the Premier League’s greatest figures were undone by banter — including two more of its founding fathers, Gray and Keyesy. But could bantz eventually bring down the Premier League itself?
There must be an attendant effect on TV viewing figures. Not only among fans protecting themselves, unable to watch a match and safely operate social media at the same time. But in a league so unbalanced towards the top six, will neutrals continue to tune in to games where banter opportunities are scarce?
Perhaps that’s another reason the Premier League had been so keen to push betting opportunities, to compensate for any banter shortfall on these lopsided occasions.
Maybe it is the thirst for banter that will eventually bring about the European Super League we’ve been promised for 40 years. To generate round the clock bantz.
Though it probably won’t turn out to be all that funny. For despite banter’s humourous origins — ‘the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks’ — very little of it has turned out to be funny.
Indeed it is difficult to recall any acclaimed comedian building a lucrative set around confirming that Spurs are Spursy, or Liverpool bottlers, that Pep is a fraud, and that Arsenal have got their Arsenal back.
The bantz has mainly contributed to the heightened hysteria.
So when Ian Wright, no stranger to banter, this week praised Spurs on Twitter, a torrent of abuse swiftly appraised him that admiration for his old rivals was unacceptable in a world governed by banter.
Has it changed the League of Ireland too, this steady importation of bantz?
In the old Chicken League days, they’d have found more to unite than divide them. Whoever you supported, you were a niche enthusiast, an anorak who ‘preferred the early stuff’.
But just as they once aped the songs and accents of the English terraces, they have become intoxicated by bantz. And now Cork v Dundalk is up there with any of them on the bantz-per-capita scale.
The GAA has so far escaped the worst of it. Gaelic football supporters have their revulsion for Gaelic football in common, and their unceasing interest in revising its ‘structures’ to build bonds. While the rugby crowd have their enormous sense of well-being.
And ‘hurling people’, however bitter the rivalry, seem to genuinely enjoy watching the games.
An antiquated concept.
Ricey makes it easier
Declan Rice might have done the dog on it, teasing us all this time, trolling us almost, by dropping hints and giving clues and cryptically liking and unliking tweets.
But at least he’s belatedly doing the right thing. As word emerges, in the days since Ricey pulled the plug, that John Terry held a pivotal role in his final decision, you’d like to thing that Ricey is just making it that little bit easier for us all, by aligning himself to the most English man that ever lived.
That Ricey is just showing us how it could never really have worked out.
Hopefully phase two will involve professing lifelong admiration for the politics of Jacob Rees-Mogg.
There has been a lot of forgiveness about for Ricey, all the same. Despite his badge-kissing and subsequent teasing. Mainly, it has to be said, from people who haven’t played for Ireland.
Perhaps they haven’t yet got round to picturing him lifting the World Cup for the Three Lions as an unused substitute, clad, naturally, in full kit including shinpads.
Heroes & villains
Provided the perfect summary of Manchester United’s Champions League reality check by introducing Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, through the intercession of Seamus Brennan’s famous quote, to “senior hurling”.
GAA HQ has long abandoned its objection to ‘foreign games’ but there is further evidence of its ecumenism this weekend by staging a mammoth Fortnite competition — the game of the Premier League stars. Better still, the winner gets a chance to represent Ireland at Stamford Bridge.
Seems to have convinced himself, at least, that his decision to pay his caddie just $5,000 of his $1.3m winnings from the Mayakoba Golf Classic was the right call: “I kind of feel like unfortunately some other people have got it in his head that he’s deserving something different.”
The West Indian fast bowler dabbled in a little light homophobia against England, which has naturally been described, in some quarters, as “just banter”.
