Real football lovers don't care about the standard

Football Food For Thought / Gary Boswell / 05 February 2008 / 1

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Gary Boswell tells us why it is playing the game that matters, not the quality, and why the joke is on the Non-League dismissers

I watch it at all levels from Sunday park/pub sides to World Cup and La Liga. Under sevens, amputees, asians only, women, mixed men and women, prison inmates, celebrity all stars, weathermen, whatever. You want to form a football team, I'll come and watch you play. I even watch the current UK Premiership football. That's how unfussy I am!

The trick of enjoying football at all levels for me is being a genuine lover and supporter of the game. I can easily adjust to watching at whatever level it is being played at simply because football is a multifaceted team game that allows me to do so. What one game of football may lack in terms of skill is easily compensated for by other aspects of comradeship, tactics, atmosphere etc. Whatever level you watch at, there is still nothing quite like a goal being scored. Or saved for that matter. It's a great game both to play and watch and old William Webb Wotsit should be soundly patted on the back.

Of course I'm aware that I am considered a bit weird by some for preferring non-league football to its league counterpart. In actual fact, that's not entirely true as the above revelation demonstrates but I'm enough of a supporter of official non-league football to find the constant belittling of it by superior types a little tiresome. Of course, they reveal themselves for what they are and don't need me to point it out but
if Alan Hansen or Gary Lineker wheels out Wayne Hatswell's own goal for Forest Green in the FA Cup once more and uses it as an argument for why we shouldn't show more non-league football on television, I'll be boycotting Walkers crisps indefinitely!

Worst thing they ever did - allowing Lineker to develop his talents as a comedian! That's my licence fee paying him to do that!

I can see the joke of course and it was funny the first time but you have to be an Eric Morecambe or a Max Miller to make the joke still funny ten years down the line and Max Miller they ain't. It worries me that they think they are to the extent that I've started thinking maybe they are not trying to be funny at all. Maybe they really do think of themselves as superior or maybe it's me considering myself inferior because I choose to spend my Saturdays in general watching non-league football rather than the upper echelon version.

In actual fact, there are many reasons for that personal choice. Betting is one of them. I noticed how often bookmakers were pricing up non-league markets inaccurately and decided to get involved. My childhood was rooted in watching Redditch - the town in which I grew up (although we are also regulars at The Hawthorns as a family) - and such things tend to shape you as an adult. I still love going back to the Valley Stadium. I love the feel of the place despite its being far from salubrious or anywhere near as full as it used to be. It and all non-league grounds are a kind of spiritual home. They are also cheaper to get into than league grounds and all Boswells are brought up in a way for that to matter! I live now in a town that is 40 miles away from the nearest football league ground and that may not be a coincidence but a subliminal choice. You'd have to ask the psychologists to be sure.

The biggest bugbear for me when it comes to those 'leagueys' who delight in looking down their noses at 'non-leagueys' is the way they display their ignorance as to how the total football pyramid works. Players only ever get to the individual skill levels on display in the Premiership because there is a dedicated and thriving breeding ground that is the lower echelons and non-league.

Even David Beckham, who was catapulted into the upper echelons at a very young age, only went on to do what he did because the structure was in place for him at local level when he was young. And the dedication and the passion of the organisers created for him the stage on which to display what were obviously exceptional - some would say innate- talents.

And it's not true to say that non-league football is infested with mediocrity that never cuts it at a higher level. Just ignorance. Ignorance that angers Stuart Pearce and Cyrille Regis and Ron Atkinson and Martin O'Neill and Michael Kightly and Barry Hayles and, well, the list is endless. You do see quality football in non-league and yes it often moves onwards and upwards. That is its nature. That's why I personally also watch football at all levels. I love to chart a player through their progressing years. Current UK Premiership football may indeed have higher quality skill levels than ever and that may indeed have less direct link to UK non-league simply because there is a tendency to ship talent in now wholesale from overseas rather than nurture it on home soil. All to do with speed and the need for instant results. The long term repercussions of that are already being seen in the National game. We are currently a country that can't even qualify for its own regional championships.

So sneer at non-league football and wash your hands of the passion - not the passion of the fans which is obviously the same whatever level you are at - but the passion of those unpaid servants who make it happen - if you must.

We do live in a privileged age where we have the choice of what we watch and nobody forces anyone to watch anything but I'm here to tell you that all the things I admire about the human race are embodied in my weekly dose of non-league football. I stopped regularly watching league football in 1986 when they locked me in a cage for half an hour at Old Trafford when I hadn't done anything wrong (I paid five pound for the privilege and endured Gordon Strachan putting two past the Baggies!).

That was the way league football was going 22 years ago and I'd agree that those bad old days have been sanitised to the extent that I can easily get my fix of qualitative footy now via the telly box. Nothing makes me want to go regularly in the flesh though. Last time I did, they wouldn't even let me stand up!

Football is football is football is football but only if you are allowed to watch it standing up!

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Mike Robinson | 05 February 2008

Well said Boz !!

I was born in Tottenham in the 50s and lived half-way between the Spurs & Arsenal grounds. In the early 60s, as a young lad, it was easy to go to a home game every week and see some of THE greats, none of your "dollied-up", "fancy-pants", "kick-a-ball-straight-and-call-me-world-class" players then, oh no...real genius's.
But I began to go to other games in lower divisions.....Brentford, Luton, Gillingham, Leyton Orient, etc and was able to appreciate that skill is in the eye of the beholder. When you get players of equal ability together they can equally entertain you and leave you wanting more.
This then developed into my experiences into non-league, taking in the wonders of Walthamstow Avenue, Enfield Town, Clapton, Leytonstone and my beloved Barnet. I vividly remember attending the 1967 FA Amateur Cup Final at Wembley, 100,000 (Enfield Town v. Skelmersdale)....0-0 but what a game, Skelmersdale missing a last minute penaly !!
My greatest thrill was watching my boyhood hero, Jimmy Greaves, play for Barnet in the 70s.....oh the joy !!
Non-League football is the lifeblood of the game, without it, todays modern media extravaganza would not exist.

LONG MAY IT REIGN !!....RESPECT THE HERITAGE !!

Mike R