With the correct amount of decorum Hayden Shaw enters the fray of the class wars.
Football these days is all about whether you’re classy or you’re not. That used to mean did you have a first touch like Berbatov or Carlton Palmer, but now, with an ever wider media focus and 24 hour coverage of everything the term has widened a tad.
Nowadays classy covers anything from charitable work that you don’t brag too much about all the way through to just behaving like a half decent human being. Of course if you’re a club it can range from guards of honour to laying on decent away travel or bringing out bacon sandwiches for the 10 people stood queuing outside the ticket office overnight.
Whatever classy means to you, or whatever examples you’ve seen recently, one thing is fairly clear, here in Britain we’ve gone classy mad. We’re obsessed with it – we’ve got a whiff of classy in our nostrils and like any good/rabid hunting dog we’re not going to stop until we track it down.
The problem with class is it can be a bit confusing. It used to be that form was temporary but class was permanent, but then how do you explain the headline caterpillar that was Wayne Rooney’s kitchen boxing tournament becoming the classy celebration butterfly of the year after his goal against Tottenham? Does one outweigh the other?
Remember that dirty cheating foreign bastard who was rolling around time wasting? Not classy in the slightest. The problem of course being when we all discovered that he’d broken his ankle and had to be stretchered off. At that point the classy thing to do was to stop loudly informing him he’s a disgrace to the game and applaud him off the pitch, home and away fans united by that shared bond of being classy.
Pitch invasions, they’re another funny one. Pure class when you support non-league minnows on their way to Wembley. Of course if you support a top flight team who have just been gash all season then you should probably stay seated because if there’s one thing worse than not being classy then it’s a return to the dark old days of football’s shameful past.
Here I am acting like fans have got it tough, imagine being a player – you’ve just scored a screamer against your former club, what do you do? After all you don’t score *that* often, you did move six years ago and they have called you a money grabbing Judas cunt ever since, but it wouldn’t really be classy to run the length of the pitch and power slide in front of the away fans thumping the badge on your chest, so best not do that. Far better to stick with the #muted celebration and let the classy accolades come rolling in.
Why do people care? Do they even care? Maybe there’s only really five people talking about it and everyone else is talking about them talking about it. Either way, classy is going the way of Drake and Nandos and that can never, ever be a good thing.
