Whining is real winner in the 2010 World CUp

Date Published: {J}

So it’s another tournament of the world’s greatest sporting event – the Compensation Culture Cup – where teams from all over the world gather together to see who is best at falling over in a box and making a big weepy moany fuss. You or I might walk down a street, spot a broken paving slab, accidentally fall over it a few times and then feign back pain for several years. But this – this is the big league.

These boys only have to roll around clutching their ankles for a few minutes and they get paid millions, even get to bring home a big gold trophy.

What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that the game of soccer is broken. As a friend pointed out, about the third or fourth most important skill for a player is the ability to act – in fact probably more cups have turned on brilliant exhibitions of writhing on the ground than have on spectacular goals. That makes about as much sense as replacing the rugby scrum with a saxophone solo or giving an extra point to the tennis player who composes the best sonnet.

Soccer has become a game of skill, speed and cheating, and it’s only the more embarrassing because the technique is to behave in the most delicate and unmanly way as possible. What could be less masculine than rolling round on the ground and pretending that you’re hurting really, really badly? Small children do that when they want hugs.

The time I was working with children in South Africa, we had a playground game that seemed to combine the rules of soccer, basketball, squash and possibly dodgeball as well. Well I say I "played", I actually had little idea what I was meant to be doing. It was complicated, and it was fast. And I’m crap at all sports.

So I slipped, and sprained my ankle pretty badly. I limped off the field to find a place I could sit down and work my boot off. My girlfriend started to come after me, but one of the boys spoke up. This was a great kid. He was about three feet tall and maybe not even ten years old, but he was so streetwise and worldly that even bigger kids paid attention to him. He was pretty much boss of the playground. "No," he said to her, "He is a man. When he is hurt he wants to be alone."

No wonder these guys stuffed France.

Is there a crisis in modern masculinity? Some think so, and put the blame on the changing status of women. Are men made insecure when women take on roles that were once exclusively theirs? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think we need to look instead to the most common role model for young males in modern society – the soccer player. Here are men – strong, fit, excellent specimens of men – being paid vast sums of money to get out on that pitch and behave like a bunch of whining ****ing preschoolers. These men want to be compensated for crying.

What’s a boy supposed to do?