What are you doing on Boxing Day? Anything special?
I only ask because if you are a fan of a Premier League club other than Manchester United and Newcastle, you won’t be going to a game.
Apart than those two clubs there are no Premier League fixtures on the feast of St Stephen, so you might be at a loose end.
In one swoop, the ‘Best League in the World’ has tugged the rug from under one of the English domestic football calendar’s great events – the Boxing Day fixture.
More than a mere football match, the Boxing Day fixture was all about tradition.
It was a blessing and a curse. It was a heaven-scent opportunity to escape the domestic purgatory that Christmas Day wrought; the kids still hyped on adrenaline and either rampaging around the house putting their favourite presents to the test, or sulking in a corner like sullen trolls because the jolly, bearded bearded numpty did not magic up the expected treasure. The Boxing Day match enabled you to escape the dreaded visit from the in-laws, ‘just popping our heads around the door to pass on season’s greeting’ and still there eight hours later and showing no signs of leaving despite your subtle hints of coming downstairs, clad in a dressing gown with a lit candle in your hand.
Boxing Day football was an excuse to get away from dreadful television; the Christmas Special shows, recorded on a hot day in August, the Vienna Boys Choir from a gaff in Austria, and the knowledge that somewhere, sometime on Channel Four or BBC 2, the Great Escape and Mary Poppins would be showing.
Traditions from past Boxing Day matches
Boxing Day football crowds were always a bit different. Guys (it was mostly men back in the day) would show up decked out in new jumpers and scarves, unwrapped only 24 hours earlier and despite their hideousness, were ordered at turkey carving knife-point to wear.
Boxing Day crowds smelled differently. Suddenly the half-time air was filled with the sweet perfume of Brut, Hai Karate or Denim, slapped on the chops or dabbed behind the lugs. In the more affluent areas which harboured top-flight clubs (Fulham, Chelsea, Highbury) the whiff wafting on the air would more likely be Joop! or Paco Rabanne.
Some clubs indulged in bonhomie and seasonal generosity, and dished out a mince pie as you passed through the turnstile, although Portsmouth FC’s generosity came with a price tag as they slumped into administration and among the trail of unpaid bills to local traders was the £5,000 owed to the family bakery who supplied those Boxing Day mince pies.
So what’s it all about? This smacks of the latest exercise in willy-swinging by the Premier League to show who or what is the football boss.
They’ve done it once, with the FA Cup final, once the showpiece grand finale and climax of the domestic season, now shoehorned in among the season’s fag end so that the final day of the Premier League season is the frantic, knicker-wetting end to the season, even if there is nothing to play for.
The Premier League cares little for tradition, and perhaps it echoes the the thoughts of the new generation of Premier League club supporters.
But being a suspicious and cynical old curmudgeon, I can’t help wondering if this latest display of Premier League phallic flexing is the softening prelude to something bigger.
Reasons to be worried for football fans
Eleven Premier Clubs are currently wholly or majority owned by Americans, individuals or companies. Add in others including the Middle-Easterners playing out their power politics in the Premier League and that takes the total of current Premier League clubs not owned by UK interest to three.
With Tom Brady-backed Birmingham City and Ryan Reynolds (yes, OK, he’s Canadian) Wrexham not beyond the realms of possibility of buying their way into the top flight in the near future, the North American contingent will have a powerful voting bloc.
If there’s one thing American sporting bodies hate, it’s promotion and relegation. Current Premier League rules only require the votes of 14 clubs to make a rule hard and fast and when the American lobby reaches that number? Well, I think you can see where I am going with this.
What price the Premier League becoming a closed shop, similar to the NFL, a cosy cabal of 20 teams who play among themselves, relieved of the pressure of relegation haunting them like Marley’s ghost over Scrooge?
Then we won’t be moaning about the end of a tradition of football competition, we’re talking the collapse of the football pyramid providing clubs with dreams and aspirations of a route to the top for clubs as the drawbridge is quickly raised and the moat flooded.
That might be down the line but in the meantime, of course, the Boxing Day tradition is not lost, and it’s still out there in bucketfuls. Premier League supporters, hold your nose and plunge into the world of the EFL, or even non-league!
Put your ugly jumper on, squirt on a bit of Clinique Happy and head out to a game near you!
Or check your TV listings.
Um-diddle-iddle-diddle-um-diddle-eye, what Time is The Great Escape on?
