Square-headed Arteta, goalbot Haaland and sulky emo Mourinho – David Squires doing David Squires things
Jose Mourinho, Erling Haaland, Mikel Arteta and Roy Hodgson know David Squires cannot be stopped. And Johnny Nic loves his new book’s pin-sharp observations.
Every week one bunch of fans of one of the top teams or another seems to lose their sanity. Dragging up injustices by the same referee from the last five years, inventing ludicrous conspiracy theories and weighed down by grudges and grievances. It happens so much and so often, you could be forgiven for thinking they are more preoccupied by it and even enjoy it more than the actual football.
The vast majority of fans, of course, don’t care, and just get on with life, not haunted by what Michael Oliver is thinking or doing.
All the bitching and moaning is so humourless and takes football so seriously, a quality satirist is needed to preserve sanity. Your wealthy nation state, soft power project probably doesn’t understand why these fans don’t apply their forensic analysis to their owners’ values, politics, economic and human-rights record. But no, screw that, it was never a red card!
The politics of top-flight football is, at best, selfish and greedy and at worst, actual warmongering. It’s hard for some of us to watch any of it while forgetting a club’s owners are, at this moment, reaching for their bonesaws. And while we can’t just ignore these things, we can at least laugh at them.
And that is what is so brilliant about David Squires’ weekly comic strip. His book gathers together pieces from 2018 to 2024. As a chronicle of our football times, it is unsurpassed. From the 14-year-old sulky emo Mourinho to a moving Terry Venables epitaph, this book represents a huge amount of work which manages to be satirical, laughs at football’s absurdities, is scathing about the way the game embraces autocratic bad actors and incompetent bigots, but equally pays respect to greats of the game who have passed, rarely crossing the line marked squeamish.
Until you read this, you forget just how much water has passed under football’s bridge in just a few years. It’s all here: a spot-on, square-headed Arteta saying ‘we don’t accept mistakes we don’t benefit from’; Roy Hodgson as an eternal Brit-Pop dude, talking about Swervedriver with Ray Lewington; Haaland as an advanced robot; a Qatari World Cup official saying ‘everyone is welcome to a degree’. They’re all here among a thousand other pin-sharp observations.
David has no peer and all of his work here shows a forensic knowledge of the ongoing psycho drama and marries it to a great political and moral sense. So many horrific things happen in the name of football that often go uncommented on, but they don’t escape David’s gimlet eye.
If, like me, you sometimes think you’re going mad when those obviously ridiculous things happen and go uncommented on elsewhere or are even embraced by some fans, here’s David to voice mockery and contempt about it. As such he’s an important element of the football media landscape. Funny and righteous is a tricky position to occupy and I’m sure he must find it hard striking the exact right note on every issue but he manages to avoid being pompous and he’s an equal opportunity satirist. No-one escapes.
Without David, the Premier League, with its propensity to take itself very seriously indeed, would exist in its fetid, often immoral, self-congratulatory world, unchallenged, without ever breathing the clear, clean air of sanity.
As a Swindon Town supporter, I’m sure he’ll appreciate being called the Don Rogers of football-based cartoons.
Get ‘Chaos In The Box’ for the discounted price of £11.99 from The Guardian’s bookshop