Seasons in the Sun

Summer used to be a lazy time, lounging about in beer gardens and breathing in barbecue smoke in a yellowing evening sun. Although it could just be that I’ve watched one too many cider adverts I’m pretty sure that’s how my summers have been spent for more than half a decade. Conversely football was all autumn leaves, floodlights in the gloom and keeping warm through communal referee baiting.

There was a marked difference between the two; it was football or summer as binary opposed as day and night or good and Mark Lawrenson. I use these past participles deliberately because it seems, like those arrows on the Dads Army title sequence, summer has been gradually and steadily penned in by football. The close season is almost no more, football is steadily becoming a year round game which is never out of season, like badminton or Connect Four. In fact the close season was so small this year that it did not begin until 1:00am on Monday 30th June, and it finished just thirty seven minutes later.

The excellent Euro 2008 was a key factor in this particular summer’s football (or should that be football’s summer?). However, major international tournaments aside, the media have worked hard in recent years to blur football and summer as one. You see when you’ve spent nine months of the year hyping up your football coverage it would be bad marketing to subsequently admit the fact that there actually isn’t any football to cover. So instead we get a succession of stories on non-news, wall to wall, screen to page coverage about players who have not gone anywhere.

The thing is, as you may have guessed, I really like football. But then I also like a nice Mint Feast, and as nice as the Feast is, if I was given one every day of the year I would eventually crack and inevitably be found on a roadside somewhere reciting all those poor jokes off the lolly sticks at passing traffic. I like having a break from football, I want to have a break from football so please bring back the close season. Stop squabbling over the television rights to show obscure pre-season tours and in the words of Peter Kay; “Have a Solero and shut the f*** up”.