Dave Hannigan: The World Cup is proving football has become ridiculously overcomplicated

I recently blew the dust off an anthology of writing from When Saturday Comes, the great British football fanzine launched in the 1980s. Among the articles was an evocative piece by Graham Brack entitled Great Goals Scored by Tubby Left-Backs. It brought back fond memories of the old terrace standard “He’s fat, he’s round, he bounces on the ground”. You don’t hear that kind of sizeist abuse so much any more. The past is a foreign country; players looked different there.

When footballers remove their shirts after games now, almost everyone boasts a washboard stomach and pneumatic pecs. The closest thing to excess flesh on view at this World Cup was John McGinn’s preternaturally gifted arse. Gone are the days when a match could be run by a short squat midfielder carrying excess timber that somehow didn’t affect his balance or the twinkle toes on his dancing feet. The kind of portly general who might have dipped into his box of 20 Woodbines for a restorative half-time drag.

Entire generations have come of age never knowing that some footballers’ jerseys once boasted unseemly bulges around the middle. Man boobs could sometimes even be glimpsed. Today, players vary only in height, each one otherwise boasting the identikit, lean, supreme physique of strict diet and conditioning. Of course, they must be super fit because games will soon last two hours. Remember when the first half used to yield one extra minute and the second maybe three. Nobody complained or wanted that to change. Except, you know, the blazers who ruin everything. Obviously the same lads who made movies run way too long.

The deeper you venture into middle age, the crankier you get and the more you realise that in sport, as with so much of life, everything was better before. Music, television, film, you. It just was. Yes, I know, this is the Golden-Age fallacy of every curmudgeon, waving a Luddite fist at modern technology, shouting at number-crunching algorithmists to get off my lawn. Sentimental ageing fools we may be, but that football has become ridiculously over-complicated and unnecessarily mysterious cannot be denied.

I no longer know what constitutes a handball or what deserves a yellow or a red card. I have no idea about fouls, in general, and penalties, in particular. Once upon a time I taught young kids the intricacies of the offside rule. I wouldn’t dare to even try any more. Not when every major decision turns into football’s version of the Zapruder film, replete with some improvised riff on the magic bullet theory offered by a former ref making handy coin on the commentary team.

We didn’t used to need superannuated refs to analyse slo-mo footage and explain graphics to viewers. Decisions were made. Some wrong, mostly right. We fumed. We moved on. Occasional injustice became part of the game’s lore, grievances to be nursed and almost cherished. Thieving us of all that, VAR deprives fans of the instant gratification that is the unbridled joy of a goal. It’s a sporting version of crypto, something we are assured is necessary by those who can’t explain the reasons why.

I know modern players are fitter, faster and more skilful than ever but why do so many of us pine for the days when the centre back didn’t have the ball at his feet more often than anybody else on the pitch? A time when boots were mostly black and mud-caked. When kits weren’t so busy and garish. When shin guards were full-sized and there was no such thing as cutaway socks. When wingers took on full backs most of the time instead of turning to endlessly recycle the ball back down their own wing. When the pantomime nonsense of the free-kick draught excluder was not a thing.

I preferred when goalkeepers of yore used to catch the ball. Not just from crosses. They often dove full length with two hands extended, stopped the shot and held on to it. Parrying it away was reserved for spectacular efforts heading to the top corner or thunderbolts unleashed by Jan Molby. To be fair to today’s custodians, this has become nigh-on impossible at corners, a part of the game involving a ruck so utterly lawless we are surely approaching the day some set-piece coach (the very job description captures the moral decay of an era) has his charges attempt a rugby-style lineout lift. Hirsute Austin MacPhee of Aston Villa and Portugal is probably plotting this as we speak.

Our televisions have never been bigger, the picture never clearer and the surround sound next level. Yet, the sport just seemed much more of a spectacle back when glamorous words such as centrocampista flashed up on screen to inform us what position somebody played and commentators, their voices crackling as if talking down a tinny phone line from a faraway planet, didn’t try to force-feed us their personalities.

Back then, they used to, you know, just commentate, taking very seriously the job of describing only the action, often feeling no compunction to speak at all for several seconds. Perhaps they were fumbling for change to appease an angry operator. In any case, silence bred tension, so when Jimmy Magee unfurled, “The man they call the monster” or George Hamilton uttered, “The nation holds its breath”, it was peak drama. Those lads created memories powerful enough to convince us, all these decades later, that everything was definitely, seriously, better before.

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