Uninspiring

Charlton 0 Aston Villa 0


Saturday evening found me slightly rushed, as I was going out to join friends at the pub, the very same pub, in fact, where we battle our way through the quiz every Thursday. No quiz tonight though; and the friends weren't my team-mates. I had arranged to meet a couple of very old chums who like rugby, and who were both hoping for a victory for Scotland. I, not liking rugby, yet having a liking for Scotland, had agreed to join in any possible celebrations as long as I didn't actually have to watch the match. Thus, instead of spending the early evening reading all the match reports, I just had a very rapid look at the BBC one, and then set off into the rain, umbrella aloft, in order to get to the pub, a twenty-minute walk, by eight o'clock.

As I reported last week, the BBC football pages prefer Charlton not to do well, so it was no surprise to me to discover that they regarded this 0-0 draw as 'uninspiring'. Most 0-0 draws are, where they are concerned, unless one of their favourite 'big' clubs is participating, when it might be described as end-to-end stuff, or something. The only surprise for me about the BBC report was that they omitted to use the rare phrasal verb, 'to grind out', as in "X and Y ground out a boring 0-0 draw", indicating, as I have mentioned before, that the result has in some way been previously agreed on by the two teams, who then just go through the motions of trying to win.

Once I reached the pub and had dried off a bit, a jolly convivial evening ensued, and I also met an Aston Villa supporter; he was in fact a guy I knew very slightly, and he knew my two friends as well, and so was part of the group. As the chat drifted away from rugby to soccer, a trend which I encouraged as obviously I couldn't join in the rugby chat, I suddenly realised that the Charlton-Villa game had been mentioned, and looked up enquiringly. John explained that he was a Villa fan and said he was disappointed at not getting a better result.

I politely enquired why, when playing away against a club with a four-point advantage in the league, one would be disappointed with a draw. John said that Villa were a big club, or some such. This allowed me to indulge in my by-now customary diatribe that people must decide what they want. If they want to win leagues just because they won one in 1894, then football must be abolished and the points awarded using a complex computational method of crowds, past victories and so on. I prefer teams to play football for points, and win leagues that way.

But it seemed, when I got home and read the reports, that neither of these two looked like teams who might win a league. For once, the BBC was right. Uninspiring it seems to have been. The Telegraph had the fairest report, I thought.