Football vs religion

To the World Cup winner to come in 2006, ponder your praises upon up high. The hard work is over and now in preparation to lift the trophy with aching limbs but with wild smiles. Lift up your eyes, higher, higher and above the World Cup orb you so cherish. There! Can you see it? Seek out a throne made of excrement and gold, and sitting upon it with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen, serene and preposterous – he who calls himself the creator!


Camus must have read The Chants of Maldoror and almost hallucinated upon the surrealistic prose of the mad young Frenchman the exquisitely named Le Comte de Lautreaumont. The creator was a mishap, a madman, a lunatic, a divine master of nothing and a mutant of everything vile and beautiful at the same time – a cocktail of life and death, of respiration and expiration, of disease and conditional health – the creator could so easily commit suicide with his mountain of ideas!



What of Football, the suicidal back pass? The winning and losing, but what of a different type of football match? There is no football match which will ever be played to decide whether or not suicide is the most important philosophy to muse over. If one dies eventually - in Camus’ eyes, and this is where the absurd enters, starts and belatedly may finish. If we all die, what is the point of suicide anyway? One must praise Camus for one of his most insightful moments “I’m on the side of life”.

If consciousness is extinguished whether in unplanned or planned circumstances then consciousness is the agonising truth for us all – and if stripped back what is it that one exactly tries to preserve with respect to existence? What part? What memory? What was the best football match you ever saw? What goal was the best? Etc!



There were profound lessons in my youth about preservation and it was all linked to my love of football – the devout and balding Father Gaetano Nani, the Italian priest who brooded to my parents that it was not good for Giovanni to miss mass on Sunday because he was playing football at the same time – this was sinful. My Father didn’t seem too worried – at one point he was paying me to score and win! Then another time the aging and fragile Sisters at my Catholic Primary school forbade me to attend a soccer final because I had not completed a ‘second time’ my Confirmation studies at the school when I had already completed them with my local church – it was sacrilegious amongst my soccer-friends that myself and one of my best friends would miss the most important final of our lives (aged 12). We won the final, I played that game. I didn’t pray that I would play, I wanted to stun the nuns – I along with my friend picked up litter all morning, dirtied my hands, swaggered around, defiant as if I had done no wrong deed. Wasn’t I religious enough? Why twice? What sin had I committed? I was given an exemption not to do the studies – yet the ‘Mother Superior’ had not been consulted on the matter. But I was resourceful that day – religion did not win. Skill and football did. In honouring that day… I was the creator.



Johnny Nonation