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As an observer of Premier League football, you couldn't be blamed for thinking that it was menstruation week at the girls' school, so emotionally over-wrought and hysterical has it been of late.
Maybe Tampax should replace Barclays as sponsors?
Somehow we lost an England manager due to something someone might have said a few months ago and the man who will replace him emerged from court having, in part, defended himself on the basis that he was virtually illiterate and, in essence, not clever enough to have done the crime. Wha?!
Normally, this would be enough wackiness to keep people busy. But there was more as a psycho-drama about a handshake quickly descended into a conspiracy, the like of which Oliver Stone could make a movie about. Somehow we ended up looking at repeated slow-motion replays of a non-handshake to determine who did or didn't want to shake whose hand. What angle was the hand at? Stop the film, rewind, look, Patrice Evra's hand is out, no it's not, Luis Suarez has put his out, no...oh for God's sake shut the feck up.
The hysteria rolled on for hours as some Liverpool fans began to construct an elaborate conspiracy to defend their man with the use of screen grabs and Photoshop and some Manchester United fans reacted as though Suarez had actually killed someone and was the devil incarnate.
Then the managers turned up and made everything worse with equally hysterical pronouncements. Start a riot? Are you sure? Haven't seen it? If you say so.
The whole debacle was closer to an explanation of the Kennedy assassination than anything to do with football. All they needed was a man opening and closing an umbrella or a grassy knoll for the whole sorry-assed conspiracy drama to be complete. It was hysterical.
But hysteria seems to be a modern virulent disease which everyone is catching. Is there any chance that we can all just stop wetting our knickers about everything and start behaving less like a small child on an aspartame bender and more like sensible adults? It seems not.
Even the subsequent avalanche of apologies doesn't seem to have alleviated the madness. Suddenly, everyone was sorry and was graciously accepting apologies. This seemed to make some more people even more angry.
Personally I'd like to apologise for wearing skin-tight patent leather trousers in the late 80s, oh and for committing what a security guard call 'rope abuse' in a Las Vegas casino. Now can I move on? And there is always that expression, 'move on'. Like 'going forward' and 'getting closure' it is one of those unpleasant, default modern expressions which seem to always be lingering on the lips of the most emotionally over-wrought.
Football has always been a cauldron of dispute and argument; it's part of what makes it such a compulsive sport. It used to be largely conducted on the factory floor and in the pub, now it's done on social media and Twitter. All fair enough. All part of the culture of football. But this new almost permanent state of hysteria has taken it to another level all together.
At times I've watched it unfold with mouth agape. Ironically, the vitriol and abuse that occurs is sometimes far worse than the incident that originally provoked it
Is there now a community of people who just love to be outraged? It seems so. It seems they get off on it and such things as radio phone-ins feed and thrive on it. The 'ring in if you're really f*cking mad about anything' culture encourages the most flipped out people to believe that they own the stage More sane, calm perspectives are of no use to broadcasters or newspapers. Over-emotional over-sensitivity coupled with indignation and insult is much juicier meat.
Last night on 606, Alan Green suffered caller after caller who wanted to berate him, not for what he'd actually said but for something they had thought he had said. In essence, he got a beating for what some had just made up or misunderstood. This is a common problem that I know many writers and contributors to various media suffer from. People are certain they know you and your view and even if you say something which contradicts that impression, they will simply be deaf to it. Their pre-conception is their whole reality.
In part this is a product of this febrile environment where some are so keen to be very outraged that they can't even stick to the facts or the actuality.
There is such instant outrage and indignation that it would appear these people have their objections ready and waiting on hand for use when the occasion demands.
We used to be a fairly phlegmatic nation, famously so. There's no way of knowing how many people perpetuate this sort of hysteria; it could be a small minority who are making all the noise but there's no doubt that the media love it. When a handshake occupies the lead on the national news, you know the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
This isn't an argument for not having morals or standards, but rather for a more reasoned and proportionate response even to serious issues. If the non-delivery of a handshake drives you into a fit of rage, you've nowhere left to go emotionally when the really big profound stuff happens.
At times in this whole Evra/Suarez issue each of them has been painted as though they are evil monsters, which I'm perfectly sure neither of them is. It's become an ugly cartoon; the whole issue a kind of furious pantomime driven on and fuelled by a kind of weird culture of competitive anti-racism as everyone seeks to declare how holy they are and thus how terrible someone else is. I'm only surprised no-one has blamed either Evra or Suarez for the death of Whitney Houston.
Remember when football used to be about football because going forward, I'd like to move on and get some closure.
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