I’m sleeping badly. Wake up with that NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO… thought in my head, which is aching. I’m listless, a bit shaky, disorientated, flustered, nervous, irritable. The world is a little off-axis. And there’s no cure.

Well, not until Saturday.

It always happens when there’s no ‘proper’ football. No Premiership football. Just poxy internationals. They’re not the same. They’re emphatically different. Even when I can bathe in the reflected glory of Andros Townsend’s new role as ‘national hero’, its just not right. Its lacking.

Oh, you say, that’s really childish and superficial and immature, to be so obsessed with a stupid game whilst the world is in crisis.

Well you can just fuck off. It may be a stupid game but its my stupid game and it needs to be played so I can enjoy or endure, so I can reach the highs of victory, the lows of defeat, the energy, the passion, the rivalry, the glory, and all the sweets I get to eat during games.

Internationals don’t do it for me. They used to. Then they let John Terry play for England when really he should have been the captain of Scumland, and it all went away.

I can get snippets of pleasure. A great goal, a fab performance by a Spurs player (for any country) or a nasty, horrid comment by Wojciech Szczesny, the Arsenal goalie who, when he represents (the absolute worst of) Poland and makes horrible anti-English comments, I’m actually allowed, on a national scale, to hate publicly.

Last weekend was hell.

I watched some amazing rugby, but it left me hollow. I turned on the NFL, in sheer desperation of needing to watch team sports involving balls, even weird shaped ones, I played tennis (right shaped balls, wrong size, insufficient player numbers). I even listened at one point to the Formula 1 on the radio. But its really not a great radio event. Sounds like this: VRRROOOOOOOMMMM… NEEEEYYYAAAAAAAAAHHHHH… really exciting. “AND VETTEL’S GONE ROUND THAT BEND… AND SO HAS HAMILTON…” They have to shout over all the vrooms.

So I read my book instead. Not so easy when you’re driving to the shops, I grant you, but on straight roads…

And the new Stephen King book eased my pain a little. Took me to another place temporarily. Ok, its a place with ghosts and ghouls and torture and horror, which in fact reminds me of Polish goalkeepers. And I think Spurs fans relate well to horror, because that’s generally what we get down The Lane. Horror. Well, we did last time we played there.

Much like Arsenal fans do well with terrorists and other types of evil people. Like Litvinenko’s murderer, who’d visited the Emirates and left traces of his radioactive isotopes for the other fans to enjoy. Osama bin Laden was a Gooner.

Whereas Chelsea fans eat babies. Commonly known fact.

So now we just have a few more days to wait. Just a few.

England play tonight and I wish I could get excited but it just won’t come. I’m internationally impotent. So I shall, instead of watching the game, go to Tai Chi and hit some people really hard with big sticks.

One takes pleasure where one can.

 

Happy tuesday

 

A xxxx