Extract

‘Football,’ they say, ‘is a funny old game,’ but I’ve never been entirely clear why. 

There’s something a bit odd about it all, to be sure. Fully grown adults chasing a ball around a park, wearing short shorts and extremely long socks. Otherwise rational people paying money to sit on cold, plastic seats, clap, yell and eat colder meat pies 

And that’s just for starters. If an alien race arrived on Earth, and made their way to the ‘G, they’d be mystified by all manner of things which you and I now just meet with a shrug. The $24,000,000 hot chips. The brown and gold stripes. The blokes with names like Dayne, Blaine and Sharrod. The continuing media careers of Billy Brownless and Shane Crawford. Not to mention the the fact that Doug Hawkins ever had one at all. 

These are things that no rational person should accept. A category into which you can also put that old prat, Sam Newman. 

But that said, there’s something a bit odd about all sorts of things which we humans somehow take for granted. If said aliens ever spent time at a Liberal Party function, you can be pretty sure he’d fly straight into a panic, hop back on his spaceship, and head straight for Mars. 

But we’re never told that politics is a ‘funny old game,’ not even by people who have heard Scott Morrison talk, and been made aware that he’s our nation’s prime minister. 

Perhaps, then, we say that football is ‘a funny old game’ because it is so full of such funny people? Of quick-witted wordsmiths who put Oscar Wilde to shame with their quips, sallies and timely bon mots. Of japesters and pranksters and twinkly-eyed wags; of gag merchants who deserve their own sitcom. 

On first thoughts, that doesn’t sound right1. And on second thoughts, it sounds wrong as well. Whenever phrases like ‘rib tickling’ and ‘funny bone’ are applied to a footballer, it’s usually because they have been charged with sexual assault. 

But I think you owe it to posterity to at least explore the theory – or rather, you owe it to your local bookshop. This thing here is $19.95. It may not contain wit or, indeed, that much wisdom. But that’s football. It’s a funny, old game.