Football Zombies

What too much TV will do to you.

Watching football on television is really a terrible waste of time. Let's just think about it for a second. On a given weekend, one could sit down at nine o'clock Saturday morning and start watching Soccer AM. From there, there is usually a game on around midday. After that you can either switch over to Soccer Saturday or watch another live game on Setanta. In between you can also watch Football Focus or some other obscure game from the SPL. On Saturday evenings, the football addict is spoilt for choice. There will probably be a Premier League game at half past five, followed by Spanish football and football first on Sky where you can watch a game in full which was played four hours earlier and you already know the result. Having seen those games, you can then watch the highlights on The Premiership or my own personal favourite Match of the Day.

When MotD is over and you've drained the last of the bottle's of Heineken from the slab you bought Friday evening after work in anticipation of a great weekend, you fall asleep on the armchair for a few hours before waking up shivering at about four in the morning but it was all worth it. A good day.

The footy addict will arise lateishly on a Sunday. I myself try to time it so I can watch The Championship on ITV especially if an established Irish international or two has been among the goals in the football League. For others the day will begin with Goals on Sunday, a really great show except for the fact that there is no order to the way they show the goals from the previous day so if I've missed the Championship due to an alcohol induced sleep-in I might switch on Goals on Sunday hoping to catch Graham Kavanagh bang in a consolation goal for Carlisle away at Yeovil but I won't know if it's been shown or not. It's a very random show although if you have the time (which let's face it, most football addicts do), the guests are excellent and the conversation very insightful.

There are others who will get up to watch the Sunday Supplement but those guys are so far beyond redemption that the kindest thing we can do is say nothing for their transition from functional human being to footballing zombie is complete and irreversible.

That covers Sunday morning alright. Dis-co. Sunday afternoon is easy. Two games back to back usually accompanied with the moniker Super Sunday so you are really made to feel that you are witnessing something truly unique and your time is being well spent. Occasionally there is only one game on or even worse, it could be that one of the games isn't shown live. We've all been there I'm sure, two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon and no live football to be seen. Sitting there in the glare of the television with a whole block of time to be accounted for, the sheer emptiness and futility of your life dawns on you as you search frantically through your 168 channels looking for some football somewhere. Salvation can usually be found with Italian football on Channel 5 or the Ere Divise on Setanta. It's not ideal but any port in a storm, eh.

The horror of the summer months or a weekend without football is too terrifying to recount in this piece. There will be ample opportunity to relay the traumas of these barren periods in the weeks ahead. After Super Sunday it's back to the hussle and bustle of La Liga before finishing the weekend on a high with MotD 2 and going to bed happy that another weekend has been well spent. For me, it's actually a superior show than the original but that's for another day.

The football doesn't end there. There's Monday night football, Champions League Tuesday and Wednesday nights, UEFA Cup Thursday, League of Ireland Friday if you're really desperate and before you know it, it's Saturday morning and Soccer AM is about to kick off yet another great weekend of football.

I'm not listing out the soccer on telly here, I'm trying to say that there are people and I certainly know a few of them who watch all of the above programmes week in, week out. Just imagine all the hours of life they are missing out on with such an unhealthy interest in the beautiful game. It's like that film 'Click' where the guy just fast forwards his way through life.

Watching football all the time has a similar effect. You get to avoid all the real issues because you never have to address them. You can always watch the football. It suspends the loneliness and passes the time. There is a sadness attached to it too because it isolates the football fan. These are guys who will stay in of a Saturday night to watch football, will cancel a 5-a-side during the week because they want to watch some meaningless battle of the mercenaries.

The football isn't to blame though, it's just the medium through which the football zombie channels his frustrations. If it wasn't football, it would be something else. I wonder what it was because live sport exploded on to our screens in the early nineties. Booze, surely? Booze is still there and it too provides a very fine escape route from the stress of actually living but in a way the football is worse because you can spend every waking minute of your free time watching it without it ever really having an effect on your life. You can't destroy relationships you don't have (Championship Manager usually takes care of that anyway) and your performance at work shouldn't suffer unduly.

What the football does is fill a void. It worries me because I see the football zombies and it irks me that they shirk the responsibility of living in favour of blanket football coverage. I'm sure some would say it's heaven on earth (the same lads have told me it is heaven on earth) but to me it's a severely selfish act in which the victims are the zombie and the friends and family he never sees. His world and all who inhabit it are the poorer for his apathy.

Nick Hornby thought he was obsessed because he followed Arsenal at home mostly and occasionally away but what I'm talking about is a far greater obsession. Following Arsenal will take up at most one night during the week and one day of the weekend. Constantly watching football on the television takes up an entire life.

I'm not knocking these guys personally. They really know their stuff and are great for coming up ideas for this site. They know all the up and coming prospects from Spain, though their knowledge of the lower leagues in England could be better but I just wish they'd turn off the TV once in a while and get laughed at by a chick in a nightclub, have casual sex, crash the afters of wedding, go surfing without a wet suit, get arrested, talk to strangers, buy a guitar and never play it, sign up for a French course, spend a weekend in the Gaeltacht, get a dog even though you have nowhere to put him.

That's life. It's not always fun and rarely perfect but by living it you make other people's easier and more entertaining. You don't watch football because you're a loser, it's what makes you the loser.

Anyway, if you are going to have an addiction at least make it a decent life threatening one like Heroin or something.