F365 Features

You know what it's like, you've been working for a few hours every week since August and so by the end of the year you're feeling quite tired. Okay, you're very rich and you don't actually even need to work, but you feel like it's all got a bit much and you would rather have a few weeks off lying in the sun somewhere. Now imagine that your employers were prepared to pay you for this time off - and in fact actively encouraged it. Who wouldn't want that sweet deal? Footballers certainly would.

But never mind what they think, what about us? The idea of the winter break seems to fall into two types: no football over Christmas; and no football in January.

The Christmas break would allow players and managers a chance to recharge their batteries and recover from minor injuries. (Not you Kieron, obviously.) This would be a bad thing. The intense programme of fixtures acts as a levelling effect: tired players means more mistakes, which means more unpredictable results and upsets. A less gruelling Christmas programme would reduce one of the few democratising elements of the League and this is why the big clubs, especially, want a break. They've paid millions for players who are often little more than boys, and look as though they could quite easily be girls; fragile, willow-the-wisps for whom a bit of cold weather, and the odd kick in the crotch, is simply unbearable. So they want their assets protected from over-use.

They would have us believe that it is almost an infringement of the players' human rights to have to run around for a bit more than normal for a couple of weeks, as though they will die of exhaustion or simply wear out their limbs. This is a lie.

No football over Christmas would be horrific. It would encourage us to get a life, to start talking to our partners or even worse, our relatives, at least those that haven't found the festive season totally unbearable and taken the coward's way out with the gas oven or granddad's twelve-bore. It would mean we might recover some degree of emotional connectivity with the world outside instead of being furious about refereeing decisions. Christ, that is a scary thought. We might start eating vegetables and reading poetry and talking to girls about knitting. It might precipitate an entire lifestyle revolution.

It would be the equivalent of taking away our drugs and we'd have to go cold turkey. And let's face it, there's far too much of that around at this time of year as it is. It's dark, it's cold and you're skint after spending all your wages on presents for people you despise, and for pretty women who will almost certainly fail to grant you sexual congress in return. It's a miserable time of year, and - other than massive amounts of brandy and Quality Street - the only thing that gets us through these dark months is the ongoing soap opera of football. Homosexuals and women called Julie get to watch hours of shouting Cockneys on the EastEnders special, we get a full fixture programme four times in ten days or so. Stick that up your bracket, Barbara Windsor. The intense amount of football makes Christmas bearable.

A winter break would surely mean a lot of sad men wandering around looking lost, buying wood and self-tapping screws aimlessly in B & Q just to fill in the time. And yet the idea will not go away. Managers and players want time off to help players recover from injuries, and even bleat on about spending time with their families. Frankly the thought of Lucas Neill not having a nice turkey dinner is the only thing that keeps some of us getting up in the morning.

The alternative idea, possibly even worse, is for football to have a few weeks off in January. The Scottish had this and look at the bloody mess they're in. The football's terrible, and anyone who lives past the age of 43 is known as 'Auld Willie'. Scientists have proved that the nation's titanic health problems are almost entirely down to the bleak period after Hogmanay when there's no football to distract them from transfats, poor devils. Does Arsene Wenger want us to start injecting Bensons and lard into our veins right now as if we were all from Shettleston? See you pal. He is a very dangerous man.

Football folk want January off to recover from Christmas. Well, who doesn't want to leave Britain in January? If we had our choice, the whole country would be empty, we'd have handed the keys in and fecked off somewhere where you can see tanned women in bikinis and the drink comes brightly coloured and strong. And with a sparkler in it. Or a girl called Candy.

The option to spend the darkest month of the year choking on a supermodel's muff in the Seychelles is not open to most of us, and it should not be open to Ronaldo and his heavily-moisturised associates. Get back on that pitch, start running around, and stop us all thinking about the beastliness of life in winter.

If the winter break came to pass it would not be long before every Englishman worth his salt would be rocking back and forth on his sofa punching himself in the face for entertainment rather than endure life without football. The social services would become over-stretched and doctors would be prescribing Prozac like it was Smarties. All because some multi-millionaires don't like the dark and the cold. Winter break? It would kill us all.

Alan Tyers and John Nicholson