It may be the last taboo of the modern world. Many people — mostly men — are thinking the unthinkable and even doing the undoable. They are asking themselves, for the first time in their lives, if they can justify their subscription to Sky Sports.
And I ask myself the same question.
These are not just financial issues, they are also moral and intellectual challenges.
In this column we’ve long observed that in olden days a “good family man” was defined in his most antediluvian state as someone who didn’t go looking for a pub on Good Friday, whereas today he is the man who has a subscription to Sky Sports for top Premier League action, but not to BT Sport or Amazon.
On your Dodgy Box, I am told, you can have 57 games
But now he is visited by increasingly dark visions in which this last outpost of truth may no longer be sustainable. Up to three times a year these visions rise up to torment him — at the start and end of the season, and perhaps at Christmas — visions of what might be a Pandora’s Box.
Or, to use its more common name, a Dodgy Box.
A nationwide crackdown on the Dodgy Box was declared last week, and indeed most of us know someone who has one, maddened to the point of irretrievable breakdown by the sort of game Sky showed last Saturday night, Southampton v Leicester.
Yes, Liverpool beating Manchester United 7-0 was a boon — a reminder that Rupert Murdoch did one good thing in his life by destroying the traditional Sunday and turning it into Super Sunday — but too often even those with all the subscriptions are finding themselves strangely unsatisfied. Even for them it can get like that Bruce Springsteen song, 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On).
On your Dodgy Box, I am told, you can have 57 games, and nothing withheld for their own dark purposes by the forces of corporate cynicism.
But of course this is not just a quality-of-football issue. I did watch Southampton v Leicester, because you should never not watch a football match. Yet there is a more profound corruption here, the abandonment of the sense that football was a kind of safe space in which some forms of truth and even justice were always accessible.
It was probably Eamon Dunphy who popularised most forcibly this idea that the game of “life” may be rigged, but that sport is better than that. It rewards talent rather than privilege, it is one arena where sometimes you do get what you deserve.
But now we must face the reality that the Big Lies which otherwise dominate our days are also being stitched indelibly into football’s rich tapestry.
In its most obvious form, it enables places such as Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to cheat against the grand old clubs, placing a permanent asterisk against the names of Manchester City*, Newcastle United* and potentially Manchester United*.
There were “legally binding assurances” that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not the true buyer of Newcastle United*, until the kingdom itself recently revealed in a legal action involving its LIV Golf racket, that it is indeed the provider of these massive funds.
The truth is no longer something that can cancel out a lie
Then again, everyone sort-of knew that, it just took a court case on another continent to put it in writing — leaving the Premier League with its “legally binding assurances” which were manifestly false, and which must now be unravelled?
Well… not really.
Last week in this column we were looking at two Big Lies of our time which had been debunked by the liars themselves.
Our old friend Rupert Murdoch had admitted Fox News presenters didn’t believe Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen; and Rishi Sunak blurted out the truth about Brexit, rhapsodising the good fortune of Northern Ireland with its access to the UK and the EU Single Market.
But nothing happened, as such. The truth is no longer something that can cancel out a lie, it is just another narrative. Indeed it is becoming an alien phenomenon, something that can disturb the equilibrium of our lives, something that we can actually come to resent.
So when Gary Lineker tweets something that is patently true about the language of the Tory government on refugees being “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the Thirties”, he is cancelled by the BBC — a corporation now disfigured by years of Tory abuse and corruption.
Our cultures are so saturated with crookedness, that even a Gary Lineker moment of enlightenment can be greeted with the enthusiasm of an alcoholic being told he might have a bit of a drink problem. They know... but they don’t want to know.
Now even the football itself has been commandeered by some of these authoritarian forces, hooked up to this global grid of incessant mendacity.
When they come for your Dodgy Box, you will not even have the consolation of a proper Match of the Day any more — by cancelling Lineker, they've taken the good out of this too.
How Dodgy is that?
I’d back Mystic Meg over any Cheltenham tipster
The fates decreed Mystic Meg, the famed clairvoyant, would die in the week before the Cheltenham Festival.
Yes, the “shrewdies” studying the racing form would regard themselves as being on a higher plane than someone who did her best work with a crystal ball. But really the fortune teller and the tipster are engaged in the same ancient endeavour — the main difference is that Mystic Meg in her projections would stick to manageable propositions, such as life and death, or love and marriage.
The “shrewdies” by contrast, are pretending they can sensibly predict the outcome of races which could be three miles in length, featuring many large fences to be negotiated by horses — yes, horses — who have on their backs members of an even more unreliable species.
Moreover, unlike Mystic Meg, many of the punters acting on the advice of the tipsters will be further complicating their task by being very, very drunk.
But this is the part of Cheltenham I enjoy the most — these solemn gatherings of the finest minds in the game, imparting their ante-post wisdom about every race on radio or TV or in hotel ballrooms.
How authoritative they sound, how astute. It is their very smartness which makes it all the more poignant, which fills the heart with almost unbearable pity for the sufferings of mankind.
If they were fools, it would not matter. But they are not fools — it’s just that they think they are in control of something that is controlling them, rendering them as powerless as little boys longing for Christmas.
It reminds me of a chap who explained to me in tremendous detail how an online casino was rigging its roulette games. He had the cleverness to unpick these technologies, yet a child could have told him that his mistake was going there in the first place.
At a pre-Cheltenham event a few years ago, a tipster advised that everyone should back Monet’s Garden. And then they should go home and sit down for a while. And then they should get up and go out and back Monet’s Garden again.
Monet’s Garden finished second.
Mystic Meg, no slave to such irrational exuberance, would probably have told them to have an “interest” each way.
Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin. Photo: Jonathan Hession
Gleeson outshone them all, so where’s his nod?
Brendan Gleeson is not the favourite to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and has been mysteriously overlooked throughout the awards season.
It’s been all about the Farreller and Barry Keoghan and Martin McDonagh and An Cailín Ciúin, while the Big Fella sits there, magnanimously accepting that these trophies are not for him.
Yet when I saw The Banshees of Inisherin, I assumed it would be the other way round, that Gleeson would dominate.
It’s like the way Mo Salah hardly ever gets a penalty, the referees apparently deciding that he’s just too good to be giving him free shots as well.
