As Paul Hayward suitably points out in some damp and moss-ridden corner of our non-functioning mainstream media, Sir John Hall, the former Newcastle United oligarch opined: "We're like the Basques. We are fighting for a nation, the Geordie nation. Football is tribalism and we're Mohicans."
Tribalism.
Warfare.
Football.
Football distorted by Power.
Football distorted by Betting Markets.
Football distorted by a rum combination of Power and Betting Markets.
A Total Simulacrum.
A Fake Product.
A Ritualistic Self-Destruction of the Game.
I bought into these Phases of the Image when the progression was rooted in Football - a communitarian, social, regional and international competitive sport that, to a considerable height in the global hierarchy, was a legitimate representation of a meritocratic Tribalism.
The media Reality of 1960s' Internazionale and the like were icons of news precisely because of their scarcity.
Perhaps that is as good a reason as any to explain the complete absence of any assessment of the viral link between the bookmaking sector and match outcomes in today's firewalled media (FK Pobeda apart, of course) - because corruption is endemic, any exposure would completely shatter the Product that used to be Tribalism.
The Reality is completely obliterated.
Take the Tribalism/Football linkage...
Historically, most of the top teams in Britain are divided into one of two camps - Protestant or Catholic.
Simple.
This isn't particularly odd - Football came into existence as a result of the Famine, and the upheavals caused by the late 19th and early 20th century versions of Warfare.
If a new sport were to be established today, we would have an even broader base of communities competing - check out the old Australian leagues where the clubs represented Croat, Italian, Yugoslavian etc groups.
The competitive environment that made Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool the primary hotbeds of Football talent was any one of a whole selection of Black and Tan versus Fenian Ram type encounters - check how many of our top teams had a church involved in their creation somewhere.
In our Scudamore Simulacrum, this cannot be spoken - the rivalries are not Tribal.
Only in Glasgow are the Troubles still mentioned by our media.
The Fake is Fake.
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The fact that the prawn sandwich has taken over from the cloth cap as the audience of choice for this phantasmagoric re-enactment certainly helps in the selling of this charade.
Insiders in the game - owners, managers, agents, players, referees, administrators, officials, journalists, other media and assorted members of the underworld - are forming ever tighter groupings to facilitate the final stage in the progression, where Football becomes a more liquid version of greyhound racing - another simulacrum, of course.
In the light of the numbing irrelevance of this entity, how could one take BSkyB/ScudamoreWorld Survival Sunday seriously?
The most Real parts of an afternoon of tyrannies of fun were Sir Ferguson's broad grin after the Newcastle result came through, and the collapse of the BSkyB computer meaning that, for much of the First Half, the viewer was unable to determine whether Survival was happening or not.
Lost hours of life...
From the safe perspective of Murky Market Monday ##############################
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##################### one would have to quote Jean Baudrillard: "History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth."
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© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
