Can't be bothered anymore

[Royal Lady]

Granny. And you knew that already.

[(.)Boobies(.)]

In my opinion, none of it is a surprise really, is it? As Foch says, we have the look of a club that is everything that is wrong about modern football today. As soon as Justice Taylor decided to go all-seat, as soon as the old 'big five' got their wishes granted with the formation of the Premiership, as soon as Murdoch and his rapacious pay-tv execs saw a market open up for them, any pretence that a once solid and quite beautiful (I don't care that is was sometime violent or dirty or unpleasant - it was simply FUN) sport would survive as anything less than a Disney-fied and over-exaggerated pantomime of what it once was, was gone.

Going to games now is similar to going to a school fete, or some 'on ice' spectacular with fat provincials in cheap suits or 'slacks' on the mike 'exhorting' crowds with that kind of accent you only ever hear on local radio. It's as cringe-making as attending corporate 'gee-ups' or 'kick-offs' or 'team-building' events with a company. That same, utterly flared, over-hyped and pumped pile of passionless shite you used to go to football to avoid.

Because football - as a fan at least - was about passion, local feeling, identity, and fire in your belly.

I watched a game at my local park the other day. Sunday morning stuff. The football was shite, yes. (But have a look at what is served up for your big tickets these days (Birmingham v Stoke anyone? - empty seats everywhere in a so-called 'traditional' football city in what was supposed to be a local derby) but it was the essence of what some of us once loved. Grass, sky, boots, goals, and everything kept simple. Bit of swearing, the occasional fisticuffs, some searing, off-the-cuff humour.

Not the anodyne, anaesthetised, utterly truly plastic shit the experience is today. I've been going nearly thirty years now. And wouldn't give you a tuppenny toss for what football has become these days for the average fan. It could have all been done better. But of course it wouldn't be. Moneymen and business types don't hover too much over issues such as tradition or the word 'fan'. Spivs and marketeers are spivs and marketeers in whatever trade they're in.

It's become an onanist's sport. A pile of shit. Where maniacs with microphones and PA systems that could disturb the peace on the moon, mental defectives in day-glo orange think they understand crowd dynamics or even human beings, players wear hair bands and male grooming products and writhe around like new-born foals who've trod on a piece of glass, and goal 'celebrations' for the retarded.

As far as I'm concerned, it needs to be folded up and fired straight out of General B's spunk cannon into outer space.

You can poke it.

*cue 'dinosaur' jibes and the hamper-bringer brigade's opprobrium*

This is where we plus one you.

[Norfolk Royal]

:roll: Granny. And you knew that already.

Is it a bit like when baybee David was born on The Royle (Lady) Family?

[General B]

Everything that is wrong about our fans and football in general can be summed up by the 89 page thread on the Smith transfer, which must be breaking some sort of record for the amount of quacking scopers ever assembled in one place.

If anyone wants to hire the spunk cannon, please pm me. It does need a bit of a clean though after the Earley St Peter's church hall debacle.

[weybridgewanderer]

after 25 years of supporting Reading i really can't be bothered anymore.

I can take the lulls in form, shit football, poor performances, bad managerial decisions. Im finding increasingly difficult to take plastic (or should i say spastic) fans with no sense of perspective, URZ no.13 shirts, totally mislead hype over average transfers caused by skysports and newspapers, clappers, rumblestix, and shit beer. We at the moment sum up everything bad that has happened to football over the last however many years.

Bring back Elm Park, the royals rendezvous, Courage Best, The Evening Paaist, and the Cardkey Network Southeast membership card scheme.

I would honestly prefer at the moment to spend my time posting mindless drivel about Burghfield Sailing Club, Christina Kim, The Scorpions, and General B's spunk cannon against Birmingham last season than sit in our mechano spakker bowl.

Yet none of this was bothering you when we were winning?

You sure it s the match day experience that is pissing you off?

[Gunny Fishcake]

http://www.samaritans.org/

[Focher]

LOL at people saying they can't be bothered any more. You should have been around when we were in the old fourth division and getting relegated from the old third. Then you'd know the meaning of misery.

At least in those days Robin Friday was playing. And Minty. And Les.

are you thick like Jacksons Corner?

This is not a thread about how bad the football is, or what division we are in, its about how shit modern day football is. If i was old enough to watch Reading then i can assure you i would have thoroughly enjoyed that misery, because that WAS what supporting Reading was all about, not some retard with a clapper posting 4500 about Tommy Smith.

[AbovetheI]

after 25 years of supporting Reading i really can't be bothered anymore.

I can take the lulls in form, shit football, poor performances, bad managerial decisions. Im finding increasingly difficult to take plastic (or should i say spastic) fans with no sense of perspective, URZ no.13 shirts, totally mislead hype over average transfers caused by skysports and newspapers, clappers, rumblestix, and shit beer. We at the moment sum up everything bad that has happened to football over the last however many years.

Bring back Elm Park, the royals rendezvous, Courage Best, The Evening Paaist, and the Cardkey Network Southeast membership card scheme.

I would honestly prefer at the moment to spend my time posting mindless drivel about Burghfield Sailing Club, Christina Kim, The Scorpions, and General B's spunk cannon against Birmingham last season than sit in our mechano spakker bowl.

Good post. Sadly, your comment on spastic fans has been proved to you by some of the team board idiots who think they know better.

[frimmers]

i used to get widely berated for suggesting that the money and media that court the premiership actually distanced real fans from the beautiful game...i love my 'spurs but will never revisit the lane...in years gone by a cheap day return,a pint or two before the match..a few beers on the way back,then meeting with "rival" fans when back in london was a saturday(and wednesday night) treat....there was banter and ribbing and never violence(of course there was hooliganism,but that was reserved for retards)..point is,give me aldershot town these days...a frankly rubbish stadium with three sides filled with bitter old men (and women) of all ages moaning and groaning at a level that could represent england in any competition..small beer perhaps,but oh so real when compared with the fantasy that now seems accepted as the working mans escape from drudgery.

[Norfolk Royal]

LOL at people saying they can't be bothered any more. You should have been around when we were in the old fourth division and getting relegated from the old third. Then you'd know the meaning of misery.

At least in those days Robin Friday was playing. And Minty. And Les.

are you thick like Jacksons Corner?

This is not a thread about how bad the football is, or what division we are in, its about how shit modern day football is.

So you agree with me then?

[Focher]

LOL at people saying they can't be bothered any more. You should have been around when we were in the old fourth division and getting relegated from the old third. Then you'd know the meaning of misery.

At least in those days Robin Friday was playing. And Minty. And Les.

are you thick like Jacksons Corner?

This is not a thread about how bad the football is, or what division we are in, its about how shit modern day football is.

So you agree with me then?

no

[Royal Rother]

i used to get widely berated for suggesting that the money and media that court the premiership actually distanced real fans from the beautiful game...i love my 'spurs but will never revisit the lane...in years gone by a cheap day return,a pint or two before the match..a few beers on the way back,then meeting with "rival" fans when back in london was a saturday(and wednesday night) treat....there was banter and ribbing and never violence(of course there was hooliganism,but that was reserved for retards)..point is,give me aldershot town these days...a frankly rubbish stadium with three sides filled with bitter old men (and women) of all ages moaning and groaning at a level that could represent england in any competition..small beer perhaps,but oh so real when compared with the fantasy that now seems accepted as the working mans escape from drudgery.

I pretty much agree with all that, except I do still visit the Madejski Stadium when I can. The delights of Windsor & Eton at Stag Meadow have captured me in the last year and in normal circumstances, given the choice of a trip up the road there, where I can have a pint and a cigar wandering around the ground, or the hassle and expense of a journey up the M4 I would choose the former.

I badly want, and fully expect, Rodgers to be a huge success at RFC and find it very hard to comprehend the attitude some of our fans are displaying towards him, but I also fully expect, with another season under my belt at W&E, that it will continue to matter less and less to me.

I can work up a bit of passion for the Team on these boards, but more particularly against the attitudes shown by many and the level of ignorance about, and lack of appreciation for, the way in which the club is run, but the football itself just doesn't matter all that much to me now. If the young players can come through and highlight the wisdom and vision of the way in which the club has been run, bucking the trend of all the bigger-spending clubs around us, then that will give me huge pleasure, because it'll be a massive feather in the cap for the club.

I haven't watched MOTD since we were relegated, don't often tune into live PL games, find England internationals very tedious (definitley better under Capello though) and generally have far less interest in big-time football than I used to. I don't particularly put it down to money, just over-exposure really. I still love RFC and still get a buzz out of how far we have come in the last decade or so but watching W&E is far far closer to the good old days at Elm Park, and nostalgia is a very powerful factor in developing codgerness.

[Ian Herring]

after 25 years of supporting Reading i really can't be bothered anymore.

I can take the lulls in form, shit football, poor performances, bad managerial decisions. Im finding increasingly difficult to take plastic (or should i say spastic) fans with no sense of perspective, URZ no.13 shirts, totally mislead hype over average transfers caused by skysports and newspapers, clappers, rumblestix, and shit beer. We at the moment sum up everything bad that has happened to football over the last however many years.

Bring back Elm Park, the royals rendezvous, Courage Best, The Evening Paaist, and the Cardkey Network Southeast membership card scheme.

I would honestly prefer at the moment to spend my time posting mindless drivel about Burghfield Sailing Club, Christina Kim, The Scorpions, and General B's spunk cannon against Birmingham last season than sit in our mechano spakker bowl.

Yet none of this was bothering you when we were winning?

You sure it s the match day experience that is pissing you off?

Pardon me for jumping in here. No, it's not to do with being shite. Just as I loved the days when we were in the top division (I'm sick of calling it the f*ng Premiership it's the Football League Division One ffs!) the Mad Stad was still full of this odious modern-day shite. Utter, utter, childish and over-trivialised American drivel. There was a day when we as British people behaved as and were consequently treated as adults. Not the over-toddlerised juvenilia we see now. Going to 'top level' football games is no different these days to going to a frigging theme park. Even grown men these days look like bloody toddlers who've escaped their reins. Short trousers, huge trainers and diddy little 'trainer socks'. It has just simply become an 'experience' that seems to exemplify the continuing lobotomisation of the average British person. There's a bloke called Theodore Dalrymple who writes the odd book or two. He said 'The British are no longer sturdily independent as individuals'. Well, that's certainly summed up in how modern football fans and crowds seem to lap up such utter corporate faggotry and nonsense in the name of 'entertainment'. It bothers a great deal of people when we are winning, just as much as it does when we lose. The only good thing is, if we lose enough, we may end up somewhere where this offensive modern bullshit doesn't want to follow. (I hope.) Although there's not much hope of that.

[Focher]

Pardon me for jumping in here. No, it's not to do with being shite. Just as I loved the days when we were in the top division (I'm sick of calling it the f*ng Premiership it's the Football League Division One ffs!) the Mad Stad was still full of this odious modern-day shite. Utter, utter, childish and over-trivialised American drivel. There was a day when we as British people behaved as and were consequently treated as adults. Not the over-toddlerised juvenilia we see now. Going to 'top level' football games is no different these days to going to a frigging theme park. Even grown men these days look like bloody toddlers who've escaped their reins. Short trousers, huge trainers and diddy little 'trainer socks'. It has just simply become an 'experience' that seems to exemplify the continuing lobotomisation of the average British person. There's a bloke called Theodore Dalrymple who writes the odd book or two. He said 'The British are no longer sturdily independent as individuals'. Well, that's certainly summed up in how modern football fans and crowds seem to lap up such utter corporate faggotry and nonsense in the name of 'entertainment'. It bothers a great deal of people when we are winning, just as much as it does when we lose. The only good thing is, if we lose enough, we may end up somewhere where this offensive modern bullshit doesn't want to follow. (I hope.) Although there's not much hope of that.

crop rotation in the 14th century was considerably more widespread after John.

[sandman]

Wasn't it great to see West Ham and Millwall fans doing their level best to bring back the "good old days" last night.

I agree with the sentiment that football has become horribly commercial and is being taken away from the traditional values but as last night showed it's not going to change anytime soon.

[Ian Herring]

Pardon me for jumping in here. No, it's not to do with being shite. Just as I loved the days when we were in the top division (I'm sick of calling it the f*ng Premiership it's the Football League Division One ffs!) the Mad Stad was still full of this odious modern-day shite. Utter, utter, childish and over-trivialised American drivel. There was a day when we as British people behaved as and were consequently treated as adults. Not the over-toddlerised juvenilia we see now. Going to 'top level' football games is no different these days to going to a frigging theme park. Even grown men these days look like bloody toddlers who've escaped their reins. Short trousers, huge trainers and diddy little 'trainer socks'. It has just simply become an 'experience' that seems to exemplify the continuing lobotomisation of the average British person. There's a bloke called Theodore Dalrymple who writes the odd book or two. He said 'The British are no longer sturdily independent as individuals'. Well, that's certainly summed up in how modern football fans and crowds seem to lap up such utter corporate faggotry and nonsense in the name of 'entertainment'. It bothers a great deal of people when we are winning, just as much as it does when we lose. The only good thing is, if we lose enough, we may end up somewhere where this offensive modern bullshit doesn't want to follow. (I hope.) Although there's not much hope of that.

crop rotation in the 14th century was considerably more widespread after John.

So were tythe barns. I understand fully.

[Question Mark]

i used to get widely berated for suggesting that the money and media that court the premiership actually distanced real fans from the beautiful game...i love my 'spurs but will never revisit the lane...in years gone by a cheap day return,a pint or two before the match..a few beers on the way back,then meeting with "rival" fans when back in london was a saturday(and wednesday night) treat....there was banter and ribbing and never violence(of course there was hooliganism,but that was reserved for retards)..point is,give me aldershot town these days...a frankly rubbish stadium with three sides filled with bitter old men (and women) of all ages moaning and groaning at a level that could represent england in any competition..small beer perhaps,but oh so real when compared with the fantasy that now seems accepted as the working mans escape from drudgery.

I'm actually quite tempted

[cmonurz]

And....

You lock me in the cellar and feed me pins! Where shall we sleep tonight Mother? In Father's grave?

[Focher]

And....

You lock me in the cellar and feed me pins! Where shall we sleep tonight Mother? In Father's grave?

can you still use the word 'black' on this site?

[Dirk Gently]

Yep, I know an awful lot of people who have/are falling out of love with football.

The sheer cost in terms of time and money with little pay-back, the comtempt that is shown to their supporters by many clubs and the TV companies, the lack of "connection" between supporters and clubs/highly-paid, imported-in players, the lack of competition and mobility etc etc etc

It's a growing trend, with lots of statistics to support it.