When I was growing up in Bournemouth I had a group of friends with whom I spent days on end playing Championship Manager 2 and ISS Pro Evolution.
We also played Sunday league football, you understand, but it was in front of various screens that we developed the collective habit of criticising one another for “wine tasting”, because we were hilarious.
The innocence of youth protected us from a future in which time wasting would become football’s most toxic scourge.
Never mind worldwide institutional corruption. Step off, money laundering and human rights abuse, talent farming and match-fixing, diving and dissent.
You’re yesterday’s news, because the greatest trick the Devil pulled was to convince the assistant referee that he didn’t know whence to take a throw-in inside the final ten minutes of a football match.
I don’t understand the failure to properly police the terror of wine tasting. Goalkeepers don’t forget how to catch, and kicking the ball away without the appropriate repercussions is an epidemic in its own right.
The game’s legislation covers these matters perfectly adequately, yet near enough every match is littered with them.
The post-whistle hoofs, the little nudges down the touchline when the ball goes out of play, the deliberate striking of the dreaded moving ball at set pieces - it’s all there, week in and week out, as plain as the day is grey.
When you see it up close and personal every Saturday it’s difficult to not be irritated. The officials observe it all and do nothing, knowingly submitting to the pisser-pulling to which they’re being subjected.
Let’s be clear on two points.
Firstly, this is time they’re wasting. Time! Imagine being wilfully profligate with time, the most precious resource we have as a species.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un will see to it that our supplies are finite and there are irredeemable scrotes up and down the land pouring it into the gutter in the name of sport. It’s downright reckless.
Secondly, it’s entirely acceptable for my team to waste time. I’m not an idiot; given half a chance I’ll help them.
Clear a ball in my direction with my team in front and a fence behind me, and I’ll tip it over like I’m Lev Yashin. I’ll even make it look like an accident into the bargain.
If an excited child rushes after a ball with my team in the lead I will go to any lengths to ensure she doesn’t get there, Benjamin Massing to her Claudio Caniggia.
Not so fast, little girl. There are points at stake.
And no, I can’t reach that ball. I paid to get in here, pal. Do I look like a fucking ballboy?
But that’s just my team. For everyone else it’s unseemly, a blight on the beautiful game, the behaviour of the chode and the chode alone.
This naked cheating, bared in the full glare of the referee, must be stopped. The integrity of our sport depends on it.
Sometimes.
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Chris Nee
@SphinxFtbl