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Why We Play "Surely the whole point of sport is to act as a necessary counterpoint to the grim realities of life. Sport provides an escape from the routine absurdity of everyday existence. It gives us the chance to experience the best that life has to offer, usually without serious consequences. We win, we lose, and then we go home and get on with life. We submit to sport's arcane rules and regulations and rituals. We recognise that we will need to show courage and skill, and we train hard for the event knowing that we are undertaking an ultimately futile task. It is this futility that explains sport's universal appeal, that and the desire to satisfy a basic human urge to play. Sport loses its appeal when it is invested with fake importance. This is why English football engenders scant respect: the managers who snarl and spit at players and officials from the sidelines; the players who confuse competitiveness with sometimes vicious intent; and the supporters who cannot cope with the fact that in sport there must nearly always be a loser. They have all clearly forgotten that Bill Shankly had his tongue firmly planted in his Scottish cheek when he said that football was more important than life or death. Sport is not more important. And it won't help to bring Woolmer back, but it might help us to cope.” ******** This was Michael Atherton writing in the Sunday Telegraph two days after it had been announced that Bob Woolmer had been murdered at the 2007 Cricket World Cup, but perhaps on a much lesser level it also offers a suitable preamble to the philosophy behind the Amateur Football Combination’s Spirit of Football Campaign, and indeed, a suitable overview to the whole ethos of what "our football is about". ******** Increasingly the highest tiers of football take themselves far too seriously, and slowly slide into moral decline, The Spirit of Football Campaign is central to reminding clubs, players and spectators about the core values that the AFA has cherished for one hundred years. On a Saturday afternoon we want people to go out and have an enjoyable game of football, free from verbal abuse, without fear of “a bit of a ruck”, and go home, hopefully after a drink and a bite with the opposition looking forward to the following week’s game of football. If your idea of football is to wind up your opponents, humiliate and beat them and hopefully give them a “bit of a kicking along the way”, then simply put, the Amateur Football Combination and its clubs don’t want you. The driving force behind the campaign is our own Rob Gibbs, who throughout the season, assisted by Bob Coates and Mike Sainsbury, has driven the campaign forward. In many cases it’s simply a quiet phone call from Rob to clubs reminding them of their responsibilities and in the vast majority of cases those calls have been positively received. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that sometimes we need reminding about the basics, but if it preserves “our sort of football” it’s worth it, and with players being increasingly mobile and moving from one club to another it’s probably increasingly necessary. Most significantly, the intention is to get the campaign reaching down through all levels of competition. It isn’t just about the Senior Divisions, which all too often seems to be the focus of attention, but it’s about the whole of the league, where the vast majority play their football, and want the same sort of standards to be upheld and cherished. |
