DON'T you just love this Respect campaign which has of late been exercising the minds of our southern neighbours - yet another example of the English nation's liking for the occasional outbreak of moral indignation.
If the English had ever "got" Burns, rather than being in thrall to Shakespeare, they wouldn't have this problem with moral indignation - a couple of read-throughs of Holy Willie's Prayer and they would, like us, be able to tell the moralists, the unca guid and thought police to: "awa and bile yer heid".
"Where's he going today?" You might ask. I refer of course to Master Wayne Rooney's latest escapade, unleashing the F word in the direction of a convenient TV camera following his hat trick goal at Upton Park on Saturday. Shocking behaviour, what; the end of civilisation as we know it and all that. Aye Right, as we say in the West of Scotland.
Master Rooney has always struck me as one of those sportsmen who wears his IQ on his back, although in his case, giving him the number 10 shirt just might be over-rating his intelligence. But, he is typical of what football has become.
The game's masters, be they directors or managers, distrust intelligence in players, other than that almost impossible to quantify intangible: "game intelligence". To put it crudely, they prefer "thick" players.
In this country, football is a game and even when it becomes a career, the guys running it want the players to still think they are schoolboys, who only have to turn up and kick the ball around.
The way Premiership stars continually get caught doing stupid things underlines their lack of awareness and how, like errant schoolboys, they continually seek to push back the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and take things to the limit.
Their bosses like this, it gives them a reason to continue to treat them badly. Sure, they pay them well, but in spite of the money pouring into the players' bank accounts, they continue to be very much the serfs in football's class hierarchy.
That small number of players who can demonstrate that their brains are inside their heads rather than in their feet are not trusted at all by the guys running the clubs. They get a hard time and, to quote from Gordon Smith's autobiography: 'And Smith Did Score' (reporting an exchange he had with John Greig during his spell at Rangers): "The clever ones don't last long".
So you have a situation whereby players who are from the bottom end of the intelligence spectrum go out on a Saturday, told since their school years they are wonderful, brilliant, world-beaters; asked to do nothing more difficult than ensure that one of the ten of them wearing identical shirts places the ball in that nice big net, held up by the 8 foot by 24 foot metal frame at one end of the park: when they cannot do it, or, as in Master Rooney's case when they do do it, have a wee swearie.
In charge of this rabble of 22 young men, there will be one slightly older man, more often than not from one of the professions: a teacher, or a lawyer, an accountant, perhaps even a policeman - someone who is there because he loves the game, wasn't good enough to play it professionally, but wants to put something back into football.
He is there, not because various people have thought he could play; but because he has gone on courses, studied the Laws of the Game he is being paid to enforce; been examined on his knowledge of these Laws. He then has to buy the badge and the kit and start climbing the ladder.
At every stage, his performances are overseen and rated by his peers, by guys who have been through what he is going through. At the bottome end, on the public parks of Britain, he discovers that, every step of the way, he will be ritually abused by players, team officials and spectators. If he is unlucky, he will be physically assaulted, but he soldiers on, until, years later, he emerges into the promised land of the top flight - where not only does the verbal abuse continue, but he is subjected to character assassination from millionaire managers, live on TV.
He gets all sorts of abuse, anonymous letters delivered to his home, threatening all sorts of violence, his every decision is analysed from every angle on TV and in print and if, after umpteen slow-motion replays, it is shown that the snap decision he had to make in real time, almost in the blink of an eye, was wrong - well he's a fool.
Then, if a big-enough stink is created, he is forced to resign from a paying hobby he loves. Yes, at the top end, referees are well-paid, but, for the abuse and aggro they have to take, they are grossly under-paid in comparison to the over-grown schoolboys they are asked to police.
They don't ask much - just a bit of respect for the essential job they are doing. That their decisions, even the wrong ones, and there are wrong ones, since nobody is perfect, are accepted.
This doesn't happen in football today, because, I think, the spoiled brats of players and the retired spoiled brats who have become managers seem to believe they are entitled to everything, even every decision.
And all the time, behind the barriers, are the myopic and occasionally moronic spectators, the followers of the clubs who seem to believe their side has a right to every decision and to win every game.
Respect ought to be given to referees for taking the job, without them, football couldn't function. It shouldn't need an organised campaign, it ought to be an essential ingredient of the game. And respect will not work through a campaign which merely has lip service from the self-important, self-made businessmen who now run the game and, since they are largely self-made, worship their creators - because I for one, don't think the guys running football believe in the respect campaign.
Which means, we will have to get used to a few more outbursts from millionaire half-wits such as Master Rooney. Not that his Saturday outburst had anything to do with the Respect campaign.
But, if the moralisers and Holy Willies would save their disgust for the guys whose bad behaviour forced the need for a Respect campaign - the managers and administrators whose lack of respect for everyone else sets the tone in football - rather than having a go at a not very intelligent if gifted footballer who "lost it" on TV - then maybe Master Rooney and his successors would learn how to behave in public - and Respect might be a fundamental of the game.
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