Avoiding the Scores

There’s a famous episode of top 1970s comedy Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? that sees our heroes, Bob and Terry, try to avoid the score of an England international football match so to fully enjoy the televised highlights later that night. Acquaintance Brian Glover knows the outcome and tries to spoil their fun by revealing it, leading up to an amusing conclusion.

That was a long, long time ago. Try doing the same thing now, and you have to contend with a lot more than a slaphead from Yorkshire. For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to get through my Saturdays without finding out the football scores to ensure I watch Match of the Day with a heightened sense of drama. This is, of course, because my own beloved team have been playing on Sundays for the most part.

For those not in the loop of English TV, Match of the Day is a show that’s been going since the mid 60s. In it, we’re shown all the goals of the day’s football with analysis of the key points. Now, the analysis tends to be on the substandard fare of us watching a guy on £100,000 a week miss an open goal and the pundit saying “he should be scoring from there”. Enough to make you want to gnaw your own ears off, pretty much.

It’s on around 10.30pm anyways, which means if you want to watch all the action with no knowledge of what’s happened, you have most of the day to avoid any news sources. A trip to the shops becomes a gauntlet: I just managed to switch off the radio when the words “sport, now, and in football there was…” came over the airwaves. Walking round the aisles, you attempt to devolve into some zombie status, lest you hear people talking about the results.

Bob and Terry never had to worry about mobile phones either. Any message could be from a friend expressing joy/disbelief of our rivals’ results. It gets to the point where you get a message and you have to ask a stranger “is this a text message from Chris?”, to which they look at you as if you’ve escaped from a local mental health unit and reply “no, it’s from ‘Mam’…”

To be extra safe this Saturday just gone, I banned my own better half from looking on Facebook all evening. Why? Because her older sister is a Bolton fan and would no doubt post some message expressing her feelings on the game and on reading this, I would doubtless be able to divine the result from her facial expressions using my Super Derren Brown Skillz*.

In the end, I was able to settle down that night with a sense of anticipation of what was to come. Plenty of goals I didn’t know were coming, Liverpool getting spanked, Chelsea only drawing with the mighty Norwich and the sight of Fernando “Fifty Million Quid” Torres once again playing like, well, me. On a bad day. With a nuclear-level hangover. It was all even worth sitting through Gary Lineker’s smug face for.

*Which I don’t really have. Sadly.