Tom Waits

Aahhh, football. Loved by tedious jocular twats, vacuous TV pundits, dignified, salt-of-the-earth working class men who have endured a thankless life of meaningless toil, fat tattooed couch potatoes who have never done anything ever, smug, authenticity-seeking Guardian readers, noisily irksome ladettes, stupid unreconstructed hooligans and prawn sandwich-eating business opportunists. Played by spoilt, obscenely overpaid thick cunts. The beautiful game.

I say this as someone who actually likes football, within limits. I’m fairly keen to emphasise these limits, since I’m eager to avoid falling into any of the above categories and would much rather be called a dilettante. My interest in football does not extend much beyond watching a few internationals on TV or looking at the English league tables once a month or so on the internet. The nearest I get to being a “proper” fan is going to watch Sigma Olomouc a few times a season, which I do because I’ve got nothing better to do and because it still only costs 2-3 quid a ticket, whereas both out of meanness and out of principle I wouldn’t dream of paying inflated English prices to watch Coventry City, let alone the extortionate fees of a Premier League club. Still, I grew up with football, for a while it was a childhood obsession of mine, and recently, as I go into middle-aged regression, I’ve even started playing it again.

When the World Cup or even the European Championship arrives, football also provides a marvellous occasion for us to roll out the stereotypes. Not only the fan stereotypes I’ve so shamelessly resorted to above, but also national, even racist stereotypes. And how true to life they are! It’s become an irritating cliché to talk about the ruthless Teutonic efficiency and discipline of the German team, but there certainly used to be some truth in it, even if perhaps not any more. Yesterday the Italians confirmed our prejudices in exquisite style, their preening mamma’s boys rolling around on the pitch sobbing after losing to Slovakia. Though shit at football, the French have excelled in their national sports i.e. sulky arrogance and going on strike, whilst at least in the first two matches England excelled in theirs, i.e. being shit at football, as well as overrated, and we are now gifted with the irresistible opportunity to combine this talent with our other great penchant for living in the past, harking back to the fucking war and sniggering or carping about the Germans.

These minor issues aside though, you can see where all this is heading. The Swiss. Those fucking cunts. The most boring nation ever to have existed, with a football team to match. A soulless human barricade with all the charisma of ... well the Swiss, I can’t think of anything more boring. It’s possible they could be eliminated today, but in the more likely event that they are not the consequences could be truly dire. The Spanish, for all their supposed flair, were unable to stop them. The further they are allowed to go the more unbearable they will become, the greater their monumental indifference and monstrously disproportionate self-belief will be. Footballing nations of the world unite and take note – against this team, anything goes.