“Purist” is a word that gets bandied about a lot in football these days, like “bankruptcy” or “racist.” It’s usually used as a pejorative, as in, “Leave it to the football purists to try and transform a man’s game into a chess match.”
Perhaps it’s time though we start using the word with a measure of pride. I’m thinking specifically here of the general disgust among Cardiff City fans over the fact music was played over loudspeakers when Joe Mason scored the opener at home against Blackpool in the Championship.
As one blogger wrote:
Goals do not require a theme tune, fans do not need a reminder of when and how to celebrate. Supporting your team in the flesh is an instinctive and emotive experience, the ebb and flow of the game dictates your mood and reaction. It’s not the NBA, we don’t need music to sustain our interest or prompt involvement.
Needless anti-American basketball-bashing aside, let me add a “Damn right!” Goals are beautiful, perfect. Like pizza, even when they’re bad they’re still pretty effing good. Danny Welbeck scored one when he was 18 for United and said, “When the ball went in, that feeling … if that feeling was a drug I would be dead.”
While it’s watered down slightly for attendant fans, that’s generally the idea. Look at that Higuita strike above. Could you imagine if the stadium played some Kool and the Gang to ‘augment’ a packed stadium going absolutely shit-house mental over a goal-keeper scoring a monster of a free kick? No one would hear it anyway, of course. But if they did, it would defile the moment, undercut the sublime that’s so fleeting in a game characterized by few chances and even fewer goals.
Cardiff, thank god, won their battle with the sound system:
There’ll be no goal music any more, all gone. CCMB feedback a big help >> RT @H_paz: any news on if the horrible goal music will carry on?
— Barrie McAuliffe (@MAcMcAuliffe) February 10, 2012
Now, how to convince TFC to end their little confetti goal shower at BMO…
I’m for limited use of goal music, I think some smaller clubs have used music effectively as something more for the fans to make matches even more fun for kids at the games. Seeiing Grant Holt score for Norwich followed by a cascade of Samba De Janeiro is something few could dislike. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wKEO7LMYtI
Part of the key is choosing something that can include, not alienate the fans cheering. I’ve been to hockey games where the music is just flavor of the month and in no way going to be iconic, and just drowns out the cheering, but if anyone has been to the Madhouse in Chicago and sung along drunkenly to Chelsea Dagger, knows how effective and fun a good goal song can be. Whatever the hell Cardiff chose was more firmly in the former category.
This might be an apocryphal story… I remember reading somewhere once.. might be a work of fiction… but anyway:
It was about an old NASL game and at the stadium and they had a baseball game organ, which was being played as the match was going on.
It was the same sort of thing thing you get at a baseball game, with the organ striking up at certain times: Such as when the home team had a corner or a free kick, you could hear: (organ) *fanfare sound* (crowd response) “CHARGE !”
and even when the home team was attacking/getting near the opposition 18 yard box:
“Do do do do… do do do do… Do do do do….”
I can’t find the appropriate sound bytes to illustrate but you know what I mean.
Again I don’t know if there was any truth in this one, but I would have actually liked to have been there. Just to experience the bizarreness of it all.
This is not a dream: there’s a clip of this that I can’t find on YouTube that’s featured on the History of Football documentary.
They do it all the time in South America…
And I hate it in that context too. On the plus side, it may be one of those cultural thangs that, as well as providing an outlet for the snide commentary of English sports journalists, keeps football from descending into the endless horror of tactical, racial and organizational homogeneity that seems to be approaching.