Apart from the fact that almost nobody goes to church and Essex has produced
more good bands in 20 years than New York and Los Angeles combined, if one
were to list the things that make Britain great, the public attitude to
David Blaine would certainly feature highly. In Bryant Park, New York, in
2002, Blaine performed a stunt in which he stood on a pillar, 105 feet high,
22 inches wide, for 35 hours, and was taken absolutely seriously, eventually
leaping off to widespread acclaim and admiration.
A year later, he sat in a Plexiglas case suspended over the south bank of the
River Thames in London for 44 days and people turned up with six-irons and
tried to hit it with golf balls. “Right, here we go, lad, chip this down the
air-hole – see if he’s really magic.” One chap flew a burger out to him on a
motorised helicopter; others chucked eggs.
Now, some may regard this as symptomatic of our distressing yob culture, but
it is more a continuance of a fine British bent for puncturing pomposity. In
the same year that the Beatles opened the Revolver album, with a song
bleating about how much they were handing to the Inland Revenue, The Kinks,
a quintessentially British band, were at No 1 with Sunny Afternoon.
“The taxman’s taken all my dough and left me in my stately home, lazin’ on a
sunny afternoon,” Ray Davies sang. “And I can’t sail my yacht, he’s taken
everything I’ve got . . .”
We used to be so good at seeing through humbug. True, this native instinct has
been blunted by eight series of Big Brother (it is day 3,094 in the
Beg Broother hoose, apparently, and the housemates are searching for
somebody who gives a f***), wall-to-wall reality television and music
manufactured by people called Simon, but it would be nice to know that a
bulls*** detector is still part of our national armoury.
So. Will somebody please tell Five, Sky Sports News and all other media
outlets that we really don’t care about Major League Soccer. We don’t care
who is top, we don’t care who is bottom and we could not give a monkeys
about whatever the hell a Superliga is.
We are interested in him. You know, old Goldenballs, or Nickelplums as he may
have to be renamed if his career maintains its present trajectory. We care
whether he is fit because he is once again part of England’s increasingly
troubled attempt to reach the 2008 European Championship finals. And that is
it: end of story. No more MLS talk, please. No more league tables at the
side of news bulletins, no more David Beckham’s Soccer USA.
Stop it all. Now. We are just encouraging them.
Remember the good old day of MLS? That was June 19, when Alexi Lalas, the Los
Angeles Galaxy president, made the most poorly judged public pronouncement
since Newsweek tipped Vietnam as a popular safari destination for
the late 1960s traveller. “Beckham is coming to play in one of the most
competitive leagues in the world,” he said. “I get so irritated when I hear
the experts in England talk as if he is going into semi-retirement. That is
ignorance of the first degree and insulting to our sport. We may be
Americans, but we’re not stupid.”
No, Alexi, the majority of Americans are not stupid, but some are and a great
many would appear to be in the employ of MLS and its associated bodies. We
misread football in America. We just thought it would be rubbish. We didn’t
realise it would be rubbish and physically endangering because that is an
unfamiliar combination, like the moment in the comedy show, Frasier,
when Niles is being taught ballroom dancing by Daphne. “This is boring, yet
difficult,” he says, bemused.
Anyone who has watched the goals conceded by the Galaxy will know that the
standard is all we expected and less; what we did not factor in was the
complete lack of understanding his paymasters would display for the
wellbeing of an athlete of Beckham’s standing. We thought they were going
inadequately to challenge him; in fact, they are more likely to kill him.
His career is panning out like a particularly spiteful episode of Za Gaman,
the Japanese game show, in which contestants might be buried up to their
necks in sand and confronted by snakes. Beckham has been played when unfit
(at least twice) and dragged across the country while carrying an injury
that reacts badly to flight to appear at a match in a purely ceremonial
role.
Now Lalas is up in arms about a fixture list that was in place when he was
boldly predicting that the Galaxy would become America’s first super club,
rivalling Manchester United and Real Madrid. “We sure as hell are not going
to put up with another season like this,” Lalas said after the Galaxy’s
latest dispiriting defeat. “The travelling, the number of games, the lack of
consistent scheduling – no other team has had to withstand that.”
To accommodate the Beckham road show, promoting the sport across the States,
the Galaxy have a disproportionate number of away games factored into the
second half of their season. They have played six of the past eight away and
from September 19 will play six of seven away, too. Yet, if you look to the
right of the screen on the Sky Sports News channel, the MLS league tables
appear in what might be termed a fact box, treated credibly, as if this was
a proper competition, not a travelling circus. On SSN, the standings in the
MLS Western Conference and Eastern Conference are displayed on a loop after
the Welsh top flight and the League of Ireland, but before cricket’s LV
County Championship, in a position that used to be the preserve of the chief
leagues of Europe: Spain, France, Italy and Germany.
This gives America a status it does not deserve. Say what you like about Total
Network Solutions of Llansantffraid-ym-Mechain (now known as The New Saints,
and thank heavens for that): they might have had a daft name, but if their
right midfield player had an ankle the size of a hippo’s backside, they
would not have played him, being a serious professional football club. No
league with grand aspirations would pick a man who was badly injured simply
because the occasion demanded it, or let him play on consecutive days on
either side of the Atlantic, merely because he wanted to, just as no league
of stature would rearrange its fixture list around one competitor.
The whole process is shockingly Mickey Mouse and must pain those American fans
with a genuine love or knowledge of the game. It is a bigger mess than any
of us could have imagined. Witness Tim Lovejoy, formerly of Soccer AM
(who must also be casting a jaundiced eye on recent career advice), exiled
from football’s mainstream and trying to breathe life into news from the MLS
in his Soccer USA programme on Five. The show promises the same
gags and attitude as Soccer AM, but in reality is saddled with
promoting not just Beckham, but Juan Pablo Ángel, Shaka Hislop, Steve Nicol
and Paul Dalglish, as well. Yet who wants the inside scoop on the fate of
this ageing band? Five must have some sense of how sad it all seems as there
is no mention of the programme on its website, which features Home and
Away quite prominently. Maybe the station could combine the two and make
a soap opera about Beckham’s first two months in the MLS. Something like
Home and Away and Away and Away . . .
Football clubs believe that there is a pot of money to be made from the
American market, but that does not mean English fans must buy into it, too.
There is gold in Japan’s yen for the game, also, but nobody wants to sit
through magazine programmes built around the fortunes of Albirex Niigata
(that is a J-League team, not the latest target for Manchester City). As our
thirst for knowledge does not stretch beyond the fitness and form of
Beckham, the moment that he is no longer part of the England team even that
will wane, just as the lack of local interest means that there is not such a
buzz around Spanish football this season, even if for openness, excitement
and technical excellence, it remains the world’s most captivating league.
Fascination with Serie A dwindled in Britain because the coaches tended
towards caution and once the English players returned home it was a dull
affair with nobody to cheer.
Lalas foolishly mocked the Barclays Premier League as an inferior product, but
he does not get it. We do not tune in for displays of technical excellence,
but because it is our league and we care. We care who wins and loses, we
select heroes and villains, we love the drama and, sometimes, the football
isn’t bad, either. Americans no doubt feel the same about the MLS, but do
not expect us to catch their fever. “If you took a helicopter and grabbed a
bunch of MLS players and took them to the perceived best league in the
world, they wouldn’t miss a beat,” Lalas sniffed, but that is not true,
either. The Americans in Britain are not at the top of the pile, they
comprise a smattering of good goalkeepers at mid-table clubs and one third
of the first team at nineteenth-placed Fulham. You wouldn’t put that
helicopter idea past them, though, so Beckham should watch out. Next game,
he might be asked to parachute in.
Overpromoted, overplayed and mystifyingly over here, the MLS represents the
worst of all worlds. It is a quarrel in a faraway land between people of
whom we know nothing and is incapable of looking after the one great player
it has. All things considered, we did get it wrong. The lousy football
wasn’t the half of it, really.
