Another night in, alone, with a share bag of Doritos, your pathetic Fifa Ultimate Team and Triple Frontier on Netflix, is it?
7AM: You wake up. Alone. Your head is a bit fuzzy. What did you do last night? Go out for a quiet drink with friends somewhere? No, can’t have been. Ah, that was it: you sat in your room with a share bag of Doritos and played Fifa Ultimate Team, alone, the game mode you have literally spent money on to become even semi-competent at. Well done. Well done for that. After losing your customary 5-0 blowout to an actual good player, during which you rage-quit with 88 minutes left on the clock, for some reason, you watched Triple Frontier again on Netflix. None of that Fleabag or Killing Eve shite. No. You are a secure individual, you like watching a proper cast, proper actors: five extremely hetero burly men all wan- *cough* bantering each other off and pretending to shoot things with pretend guns.
8AM: You’re on the bus on the way to work scrolling through the various football transfer gossip columns and prepping some great work chat for your colleagues. You have to do this. You have to literally revise football to try and impress people. Pablo Fornals to West Ham. AKA The Hammers. Better check his Wikipedia page. Hmm, not many goals for an attacking midfielder. That’s your angle. La Liga Steve will love it. He will absolutely love it.
Afterwards, you hit play on that playlist Spotify has suggested for you, because you’re a cretinous ghoul that needs an algorithm to tell you what to like, and scroll through Facebook. Uh oh. There it is. Someone has shared a match report from the France-Norway game and questioned the penalty decision. Your cheeks puff out like a nuts-laden squirrel. Your skin, previously blotchy, now turns scarlet all over. A single bead of sweat trickles down your furrowed brow. No, mustn’t… give in… to the urges…
It’s no use. You comment: “no1 cares lol”.
It gets two likes.
One of the likes is your own.
9AM: Vindicated, you stroll into work with all the cocksure arrogance a man wearing the same navy M&S suit as every other man in your office can muster. Whilst you’re making coffee (four sugars, you don’t actually like coffee but you think it gives you a certain gravitas, even if it is served in a jumbo Sports Direct mug) you hit the three WhatsApp groups you’re a part of, sharing a video clip of the Wendie Renard own goal (which you read about in the article that you commented “no1 cares lol” on and then went out of your way to find on the internet) and three laughing crying emojis. It will be several hours before you get a reply.
In the meantime, you take your coffee to your desk, set your desk fan to number three and rotate, starting it off in the vague direction of your armpits, which are, yeah, moist, and begin firing off some emails in which you say things like “by end of play” and “this arvo” and “cool beans”.
10AM: As that is almost literally your entire job, you have essentially finished work for the day and begin drafting what you think will be a rather spicy LinkedIn post on why you’re boycotting the Women’s World Cup. Sandra, your colleague, who you secretly have a thing for, leans over and asks what you’re doing. Slightly startled, you stammer back at her something about not watching the Women’s World Cup.
“Oh yeah, me neither. I think it’s shit”
Oh my god. This is it. It’s happening. It’s actually happening.
“THANK YOU.” You say, dramatically, with an exaggerated lean back into your chair and flap of the arms. Confident now, you add “The men’s game is just lightyears ahead of it, you know? It’s either the best or nothing for me. That’s just how I operate.” For some reason, you suddenly think about the fact that you didn’t actually eat Doritos last night and instead had Tesco Lightly Salted Tortilla Chips because the former weren’t on offer and you refuse to pay the extra quid. Out of principle. Out of some kind of crisps principle.
“Oh, no. I mean all football. It’s all shit haha. I can’t stand it.”
“What? WHAT? Even the men’s game?”
“Well yeah, especially the men’s game. That’s the one that’s always on TV…”
“Have you even watched it? Have you even given it a chance?”
“Lol yeah. Of course I have.”
“No, but I mean really watched it. Like properly watched it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“*sighing* You just wouldn’t understand.”
“Didn’t you once tell me that you couldn’t get into City of God because it was in Portuguese and had subtitles?”
You have no response. Sandra turns back to her screen, puts her headphones on, and that is your last significant interaction of the day. On her lunch break she will send an email to her boss requesting a desk at the other end of the office. The request will be granted.
11AM: You know you have run out of swipes on Tinder but you get a notification suggesting you may have a couple of matches and not to leave them waiting. You don’t feel good about it, but you pay the £13.95 monthly fee to unlock a premium account and see who they are. You are disappointed and consider sending a terse complaint to the company with the subject heading: “Unacceptable standard of matches.” Your opening picture on the app is you dressed as a Peaky Blinders extra at the horses with a large stain down your shirt. Your bio says your job is simply: beer tester. You are 5 foot 10 at a push but list yourself as 6 foot. Your second picture is one you specifically requested of you with your mate’s dog. “Quick, take the photo, while he’s being friendly with me,” you remember saying. Your third and final photo is a gym selfie. The flash covers most of your face. You reluctantly decide not to send the email.
12PM: You bump into La Liga Steve at the photocopier. He doesn’t look up from the machine.
“Steve! *single hard tap on his back because you are mates and this is how everyone will know you are mates if they happen to be glancing across at this exact moment* Did you see that about Fornals moving to the ‘ammers?”
“Yes, mate. Good player. Doesn’t show up in the stats mind but he’s got all the technical quality to really do well in the Premier League. And he is surprisingly strong in the tackle so could feasibly play alongside Mark Noble and Declan Rice in central midfield rather than as a pure number 10.”
“… yeah. Was just about to say that, actually.”
…
…
He’s collecting his sheets now and you have one shot to keep the conversation rolling. You dig deep.
“You been watching the golf, Ste?”
“Nah mate. Nobody cares about golf do they? It’s fucking boring”
He walks off. You don’t even have anything to photocopy. Fuck sake. You make four copies of a random page out of the manual for the photocopier and take them back to your seat, sit down and dramatically tap them on the desk to align the paper. You mouth “important contracts” at the colleague who is staring at you from across the room.
1PM: You are microwaving your chicken and broccoli and rice, the same meal you have every day at work, waiting for someone else to come and wait for the microwave so you can chat to them about why you choose to eat chicken and broccoli and rice every day – (gains) – and the difference between macro and micronutrients. You use the economic version of the prefix as an analogy to help your colleagues understand, as it is quite complicated. You did a Business Studies degree. You got a 2:2.
As nobody comes over, for some reason, you’re left to once again scroll through your phone. You react to some very, very exciting transfer news: United ITK Fellainiesque69 is reporting that De Ligt is a ‘done deal’ so you dive in with the Chris Pratt shocked GIF, the fourth message of its kind in the thread already, which is saved to your favourites folder for easy access along with the Brent ‘Ooh, you’re hard’ meme and, of course, the SpongeBob ‘Nobody cares’.
You briefly wonder if it is worth your time commenting on posts so often with the same formulaic responses – giddy excitement at anything fundamentally banal, ‘who cares lol’ at just about everything else – before realising that, yes, of course it is, otherwise how else would these people know that nobody cares about what they are doing? They’d probably just think everybody else was fine with them wasting their own time by following the Women’s World Cup otherwise. Weirdos.
You discreetly pour a chocolate Yazoo into a protein shaker and take it back to drink at your desk.
2PM: Suddenly re-energised, you log on to Facebook and like a few gym bro memes. Your cover photo is, of course, a car. One of your friends (not an actual friend of course, just someone from school you still have on here, for some reason, despite all their soppy, lefty, liberal snowflake posts about being offended all the time) has shared an article from JOE.co.uk, a page you unfollowed because they wrote a different article about a YouGov poll that was just clear bullshit, even though it was based on an actual poll that happened, so you unfollowed and commented on the post, so they made sure they knew you were unfollowing, via the comment saying you were unfollowing, which was: “had enough of these bullshit posts by Joe. used to be a good football banter page now and now he just talks utter remoaner nonsense. UNFOLLOWED.”
Anyway, the article is about the HABs (Husbands and Boyfriends) of the Women’s World Cup. You see it and you are stunned. You make an exaggerated gagging sound to the rest of the office and put your hand over your mouth and lean over the waste paper bin as though you are going to be sick. Because you are doing this you can’t tell if anyone is watching. (They aren’t). You assume they are. (They aren’t).
You get back up to your computer and comment: “What the fuck is this shit lol?”.
You go back and check the same comment after several hours. No likes or interactions. Fucking lefty snowflake thought police the lot of them. You comment again, just to make your feelings known and indicate that you aren’t, in fact, bothered by any of it. At all. You comment a third time later that evening.
3PM: You finally get a reply to your hilarious Wendie Renard message on WhatsApp. It reads: “Yeah, bad mistake from Renard that. It’s weird because she’s usually so dominant and rarely puts a foot wrong.” Someone instantly replies to that message asking if the other person had watched the game – they had – and they start a brief conversation about how unlucky the Norwegians were to lose, despite the fortuitous goal.
After a few messages, you can feel the slow, dull rage building in you once again and interject with a comment calling the goalkeeping at the tournament a disgrace. Suddenly the replies stop, which is weird, as they were all just talking moments before? Must be an important client call, or something, you reason. Happening at the same time. For both of them. Even though they work in separate offices. And in very different sectors that would have no reason to collaborate with each other. Time for a dump.
4pm: Sat on the toilet and still thinking about that article that really didn’t bother you at all, you have a scroll through JOE’s page to see if he’s stopped talking complete and utter bollocks. You find an article headlined: “The gap in quality between the men’s and women’s game is quite frankly embarrassing.” Without bothering to read the piece you just comment “EXACTLY, who cares about the women they can barely kick a ball lmfao”. A comment immediately dings back asking you if you had even read the article. You quickly click on the article, skim the first three paragraphs and comment back “Ofc I did you moron, the article agrees with me”. The person reacts with a laughing emoji. They must have realised they were being an idiot.
A few minutes go by and a nagging doubt starts to overwhelm you, Maybe the article might have have been doing that thing that articles sometimes do, where they say one thing, right, but what they actually mean, what they actually mean is the exact opposite? Of the thing they are saying? As a kind of joke? It’s always something you’ve struggled to decipher. Reluctantly you open it and read the whole thing. You realise you’ve been had. There’s that anger again.
5PM: In response, you comment a few more times essentially explaining in layman’s terms to the other posters that the men’s game will always be superior to women’s game for one simple reason: physicality. The women simply wouldn’t be able compete on the same pitch as the men, you say, seriously put one of them on a men’s team and see how well they do, you also say.
Just to reinforce your point you mention the fact that you had played football to a reasonably high level (you hadn’t, unless occasional five-a-side substitute when your mate’s team was struggling for players counts, which it doesn’t) before a serious injury stopped you from taking it to the next level (which it hadn’t, unless a stitch during said substitute appearance which forces you to go in goal and concede seven and lose your team the game counts, which it doesn’t) so you know just how physical it can be.
You check the thread every few minutes on your way home for likes and replies. You get up to about 15 likes, and a few comments in support saying things like “they just don’t appreciate the physicality of it lol”, “the standard is shockinnn” and “my sunday team could beat them haha”, all exclusively from men with names like Leigh and Stefan who own bulldogs and have bicep tattoos and have never, not once, literally never, kicked a ball further than fifteen yards on a football pitch.
6PM: Buzzing, you get in, flop onto the sofa and start flicking through the TV. Ugh. There’s only the women’s football on. You shout out to your flatmate: “Ugh. There’s only women’s football on! I wish we had some Euro 2020 qualifiers or something instead. The standard is much better.” You didn’t watch any of the Euro 2020 qualifiers when they were on. The Euro 2020 qualifiers included games like Russia 9 San Marino 0. And Moldova 1 Andorra 0.
Your flatmate comes to sit down and says: “Nah put it on. I watched a game earlier. It’s good.” You pull a face at him but turn over. It’s Australia vs Brazil. You make sure to performatively grimace as you watch and make a comment after every mis-controlled touch or under-hit pass.
Your flatmate, clearly bored by the pathetic football on show, soon heads off to his room. As a result, you turn your attention to Twitter and begin a “WHY THE WOMEN’S WORLD CUP IS A MYTH [THREAD]” chain of tweets. You compile 25 of them in total instead of watching the game. You have more tweets in this chain than you do followers. Australia come back from 2-0 down to win 3-2. You miss all of it.
7PM: The twitter chain doesn’t quite spark the fervent discourse it so deserves, not even your (very clever) deconstruction of why the game between England and Scotland attracting 6.1 million viewers on BBC One – a 37.8 per cent share of the available audience – was fake news.
Saddened, you retire to your room for some proper football action. To play Fifa, online, against 12-year-olds.
1AM: 4-0 down to someone who is just quite clearly abusing an overpowered Mbappe team of the year card, god that makes your blood boil, and knowing an inevitable fifth is coming, you switch off the console. You have one last check of your phone before calling it a night. There’s one notification. It’s from Twitter. It’s a reply to your thread. It’s me. It’s me going: “Do you actually even like football, mate? Seriously. Are you a fan of football?”. And now you’re raging again. So you go on my profile. And you check for the last article I wrote. And it’s this. It’s this, about you. And you read the first bit of it but stop because I don’t really paragraph like the pieces you are used to – the ones in the Sun that write a sentence and then leave a gap and then write another sentence like they used to in children’s books about hungry caterpillars and a long walk out in the woods to find a bear – so you inevitably give up. You get to the replies and your face is red and that single bead of sweat is trickling down your forehead once again. You bash away at your phone.
In the morning I will wake up and see it. Your reply. It’s the SpongeBob meme. You’ve sent me the Spongebob meme. Great. Great. Thanks. Nice one.
