Empty calories (3 Llamas)

I appear to be back, everywhenever

Bill Shankly grew up in Glenbuck, a tiny Ayrshire mining village that produced an extraordinary number of professional footballers.

Football wasn’t simply something people played there. It was part of the culture, the conversation, the identity. Bill Shankly carried that with him all his life and eventually gave us what is probably the most famous line ever uttered about the game: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more important than that.”

Said various ways, in a number of interviews granted.

It’s a wonderful quote, though, because, delivered with that unmistakable Scottish grit and wit, it also contains a grain of truth.

Four billion people are, apparently, to one level or another, football fans.

I have seen this on my travels. Footballification means I can stand in a compound in The Gambia, watching an age-old fertility traditional dance carried out, probably a thousand years old, but in the middle of the wonderful furious foot stomping of feet, will be at least two young boys or girls of course, wearing a Barcelona t-shirt.

Football has an extraordinary ability to persuade otherwise sensible people to make utterly ridiculous decisions.

Like believing your team will lift the World Cup.

Last night England lost to Argentina in a World Cup semi-final.

Again.

England expects, I saw on the front cover of a newspaper. And they were right; I expected it, though not wishing for it.

In England, oh dear England, we have unfortunately been transfixed by the lure of one day believing we will win the football World Cup.

And I have an apology to football fans, because it could just be my fault or my family’s or actually my wife’s if I am blatantly honest.

You see, I haven’t washed my footie shirt, the same one has been with me. Jack, my eldest, has worn the same one too. This is superstition in all but name, but it’s been working for all but two of the matches.

We’ve watched it really with the same people, then last night we played with the time continuum or whatever that thing is, and invited our friend Paul and his son Sam over. We’d changed the pattern of fortune.

For years prior we’ve watched football with him and his family, and lost at all the important moments. Why now, with a final beckoning, did we invite them over?

He’s a lovely bloke an’ all, but he takes sharp intakes of breath, not letting them out, like a car mechanic about to tell you your sump has got a hole in it and your diesel injectors won’t last another fifty miles.

Then comes the exhale, which is longer than the intake. Like a roofer who’s been asked to simply replace a tile, and tells you the whole roof needs doing and is one storm away from looking like a house during the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz.

It’s his energy, surely. I’m grasping at straws here, but it’s his fault, our fault.

But then it’s football… you’ve gotta have faith. We can win it, we will win it, we bloody well should win it, because we invented it.

Hmm, partly true.

We English like to say we invented football, but let’s be honest, and we both know this, people had been kicking balls around for centuries before we became involved, usually with very few rules and, I imagine, a lot of soggy cauliflowers.

What England really did was organise the modern game, writing down a common set of rules when the Football Association was formed in 1863. We didn’t invent the basic pleasure of kicking something towards somebody else’s goal, whatever that goal would have looked like in, say, 1561.

We simply gave it regulations, officials and, eventually, the ability to ruin an otherwise perfectly calm and pleasurable Wednesday evening.

And then came VAR, the virtual assistant refereeing. Which, let’s be fair, we’d kind of been doing with slow-motion replays for a good generation prior.

VAR actually began life as a Dutch project called Refereeing 2.0, which sounds less like a football innovation and more like a software update nobody really asked for. The rest of football looked at it and thought, “Yes, that’s exactly what the game needs.” Millions of supporters have been debating that decision ever since.

“It’s stuffin’ up the game,” is usually what you’ll hear seasoned supporters say, unless VAR has ruled in their favour obviously.

Now I don’t want to be controversial but, I’m going to be, and it’s my ball so you’ll just have to play to my rules, as we used to say in the playground when we returned to school after Christmas holidays with a brand new football that somehow Mum had squeezed into the top of our stocking… on top of what Santa had left, obviously.

Argentina have acquired a new name during this World Cup: Vargentina.

A little unfair, perhaps. But nicknames like that don’t arrive entirely without luggage or baggage.

Against Algeria, Lionel Messi escaped without a card after catching a member of the opposition with a studs-up challenge which Algeria believed should have brought a red. Usually it would, but Messi remained on the pitch and scored a hat-trick.

Then there was Austria, where an Argentina goal was allowed despite complaints that Mac Allister had fouled an Austrian player earlier in the move.

Egypt had a goal disallowed after VAR travelled back through the move to find a foul around three score years earlier, while other disputed decisions went Argentina’s way during a match Egypt eventually lost 3–2. Their manager was furious, the Egyptian federation complained, and the name Vargentina began to feel less like a passing joke and more like a new entry on the tournament wall chart.

Switzerland then played Argentina in the quarter-final and lost one of their players to a second yellow after VAR intervened. The original booking had gone to Argentina’s Leandro Paredes, but following the review it was transferred to the Swiss player Embolo for simulation, which meant he was sent off. He wasn’t clever, and I suspect normally migt have had a ticking off. Switzerland played for more than an hour with ten men and eventually lost in extra time.

And just to add a little more seasoning, Lautaro Martínez celebrated Argentina’s winner against Switzerland by climbing over the advertising boards and into the crowd despite already being on a yellow card. Many expected a second booking, which would have ruled him out of the semi-final. It never came. He stayed available, lined up against England... and scored the winner.

Of course he did. Football has a wicked sense of humour sometimes.

So yes, Vargentina may be the invention of irritated opposition supporters wearing heavily tinted spectacles. I accept that. But when Algeria, Austria, Egypt, Switzerland and now England are all standing outside the VAR room wondering why the door only seems to open one way, the nickname does begin to write itself. Surely.

Perhaps Argentina haven’t had every decision, of course, but they’ve merely had enough of them to make the rest of us start counting.

And let me be clear here, I think, Argentina on the balance of passion and play, probably deserved a win against England, although I didn’t much like their what’s called dark art tactics.

And so here I am once again, lamenting an early bath as they call it in football.

Of course as this goes out, we face France for a third place position, which I suspect even the wonderfully entertaining French team will probably find a bit of obstacle in the way of getting home to enjoy some time around a pool.

Something that really irks me and the reason for the name of this piece, is the fact I’d let my guard down. Sure sure, the one that partly believed despite some of our quite obvious luck that we might actually this year, possibly, somehow, perhaps lift that cup, but mostly because it had taken my eye off the real prize, my endeavours to get fit, if only for a night, of course.

Nutritionists talk about empty calories. They’re the calories that give you some form of energy but very little else. Sugar, alcohol, ultra-processed snacks... sh8t like that. They all fill a gap in the moment, but they don’t really feed you. They don’t leave you stronger, healthier or better nourished. They’re called empty because once the moment has passed, there’s very little left behind.

This week I’d stuck impressively well to my meal plan, I think. The scales are certainly moving in the right direction and, perhaps more importantly, so is my mindset. Then England make their way through a football tournament reaching this World Cup semi-final. Suddenly, the evening had its own logic. A few beers wouldn’t matter. It’s football. It’s an occasion. It’s a semi-final.

So there I was, watching England lose to Argentina with a bottle (or 5) in my hand and a packet of snacks that certainly hadn’t appeared anywhere on my spreadsheet.

By the final whistle I’d consumed hundreds and hundreds of calories that had done absolutely nothing for me. They hadn’t improved the football. They hadn’t softened the disappointment. They hadn’t made the evening more memorable. They certainly hadn’t helped the version of me that had been making good decisions all week.

They were, in every sense, empty calories.

And empty calories are like empty promises.

“We’re bringing this home,” said one member of the team.

No.

No you’re not.

Instead as always, I had to endure not just the loss, but that bloomin’ song.

Three lions on a shirt

Jules Rimet still gleaming

No more years of hurt

No more need for dreaming

It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, football’s coming home.

I tell you, it’s become like a fever dream, the sort you whisper or even whimper, whilst someone wipes your sweated brow and wonders if you’re going to come round from this one.

I was hoping three lions on a shirt, might become a re-released two stars on our shirt to celebrate a second world cup victory.

My mate Mali spoke to me after the match and recommended we take those three victorious looking lions off the badge on our football jerseys and replace them with three llamas.

It’s coming home. Blind faith is that.

That’s a phrase that feels like criticism, as though believing in something without any guarantee of success is a weakness. But I wonder whether the opposite is true.

Almost everything worthwhile in life begins with an act of faith.

Dare I mention… “don’t say the R word Neale, you’ll get yourself in trouble.”

Okay then, you take a new job believing it’ll work out. You ask someone to marry you without knowing what the next fifty years will hold. You have children with no certainty of who they’ll become. You plant a seed because you believe something will grow. You write the first page of a book without knowing whether anyone will ever read the last.

That’s faith, or is it hope?

Either, is rarely logical.

We’re, I suppose, investing ourselves in something today, for a tomorrow we cannot see.

Football supporters simply do it a little more noisily than everyone else.

Perhaps that’s why I keep believing, not because I know what will happen, but because I don’t. Somewhere deep down, despite all the evidence gathered over a lifetime, I still believe that this time might just be different.

And maybe that isn’t foolish after all.

Maybe it’s one of the finest things about being human.

I’m officiating at a funeral today, reading a life tribute for a woman who passed in her late eighties whose greatest pleasure was shouting at the telly and the referee whenever England played.

She did see England win the World Cup in 1966. She had that memory and, according to her family, she never stopped believing she might see it happen again.

Last night, as I watched another semi-final drift away, I wondered whether I should change a line in her tribute for Friday.

Not because football matters in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t.

But because hope does.

Hope was part of her story.

Not simply the hope of another World Cup, but the hopes that fill an ordinary life. The hope of seeing another spring arrive. Another summer in the garden. Another Christmas with the grandchildren. Another birthday cake with too many candles. Another phone call. Another laugh around the dinner table. Another chance to tell the same stories that everyone knew by heart but wanted to hear again anyway.

Perhaps that’s what hope really is.

Not three llamas on a shirt.