Be Excellent To Each Other

I'll make an exception for England in the quarter finals or better in the World Cup, and the semis in the Euro.

Mrs Hearthly is quite partial to some football as well.

That's awesome man.

We need another goal.

Heh. At this stage, even I'm watching it!

Ed. The old arsehole's going... Squeaky bum time.

Oh England. Tsk.

Well if we lose at least I will always have this...

David hasslehoff looking constipated?

Oh, oh England.

So many missed chances

I think we did well. Very proud of the lads. Kept trying til the last.

*explodes with utter joy*

Normal service is resumed. As you were.

See you all in four years (though we’ll probably all be dead from Brexit by then).

A room full of tat?

Hope Croatia smash the French.

Bit harsh...

That was a frustrating second half and extra time. Disappointing result, but well done to getting that far.

It's coming home.

Possibly.

In four years time.

I’m sort of glad: the Brexiters would have been fucking unbearable.

Performative, exaggerated dislike of popular things isn’t cool or interesting. It just makes you look like an edgelord desperate to get a rise out of passers-by, like people who pretentiously announce that, well, they don’t have a TV, actually.

I did like the dark kit they wore tonight.

I'd generally agree with this, but while I don't agree with AS' post I kind of understand where it comes from; in terms of football specifically.

It's ubiquity makes it a unique case--unlike Love Island or whatever--and the toxic masculinity that often goes hand in hand with the culture of it is, again, especially hateful. I'm more mellow about the whole thing than I used to be but even in the last week I've suffered a load of weird looks and negative reactions (to various degrees) when responding to World Cup related questions with, "I don't know what you're talking about and don't follow the sport." And that's genuinely selling the nonsense I've seen over the years very, very short indeed.

I've learned not to be such an 'edgelord' in my day to day behaviour, but to characterise football as just 'a popular thing' like it was Game of Thrones or Fortnite is to massively miss the point of how endemic it is.

Being a dick about football is pointless, but pretending you don't realise where that dickishness comes from is genuinely unbelievable when it comes from someone as smart as you.

Side bar: I'm drunk as shit right now so it's much more than possible that my opinions expressed above are either inappropriate or obvious horseshit (or, more likely, both at the same time). It's certainly a 100% certainty that I'm being a needless dick to Gaywood at the very least. My own experience of 'football culture' though is one of exclusion and emotional damage (not to me necessarily, but as an overall impact of men I know of various ages) so I'm always going to sympathise with anyone who hates the entire edifice and be less sympathetic of the "it's only a game" crowd.

I already did that one!

https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... 48#p994648

I’ve got you on ignore.

I mean, who said that?

Also it's magnified by 1000x when its a world cup.

Yeah I can kinda understand how annoying it is. I've never been a huge fan of tennis, so I do have a bit of a groan when it's on every year. I used to be a total football hater myself. I guess football would be even more annoying, given people don't go down the pub singing "It's coming home" or getting stupid drunk and being assholes over tennis.

I went into this world cup with no expectations. I was more than pleasantly surprised, and really enjoyed it. I think France would have taken us apart any way, so no major loss there. Plus Croatia beat us fair and square, so deserve to be there more than us any way.

Pretty much this.

I enjoyed my time at primary school up until the world Cup in 1988. After which basically if you were a boy and didn't like football, welcome to shun City.
It's not hyperbole to say this has had something of a lifelong effect, so yeah, I'm rather more happy when football is not being shoved in my face constantly.

I thought that from the second half, England dropped their heads and Walker should have come off then (before Croatia equalised), he had a terrible time of it. After soaking up a lot of pressure,they looked tired.

All in all, a decent campaign, though, with a lot of promise.

Not in the slightest. I totally agree that there's an uncomfortable overlap between football fans and toxic male culture -- much more so than other sports, even (the famous quip about how you can police a rugby match with a little old lady and her poodle springs to mind.)

But that's why I specifically said "performative dislike." There's valid reasons to have mixed feelings about football fan culture; but I don't think there's valid reasons to make a big song and dance about it on Beex minutes after England are knocked out of the World Cup. At worst, we're talking about a small but noisy minority of fans who cause trouble. I'm not comfortable suggesting the majority of the people who had an emotional stake in the game last night fall into that category -- how could it? Half the country watched it! Furthermore, I'm very comfortable saying that absolutely no-one here is in that category. And hence posting this:

in this thread, minutes after the game ended, is just bloody rude.

Furthermore, there's a countercurrent of intellectual elitism that can creep in here that I don't much care for, which is why I drew the analogy to people who don't own a TV and sneer at those who do. Ignorance or dislike of popular culture doesn't make you smarter, but that is an assumption some make. And boasting of your ignorance or dislike isn't laudable. This is a bugbear of mine so I get a bit jumpy around it. I don't care for football or watch Love Island but that doesn't make me any better than Grim..., who does both those things. (I am better than Grim..., but for differnt reasons, like how I have never set fire to six square feet of pigskin and called it "barbecue.")

Totally agree, I was definitely over-egging your reaction while in my cups last night and springboarding into my own rant from there. Drunk me made generally good points I think but they could've just stood alone and didn't need to be 'aimed' at you so apologies for that guy.



I agree with this also. Although, I think there's a very slight case to be made that if someone only watches reality TV and such nonsense to the complete exclusion of anything else then they're probably an idiot. Certainly, I suspect the Venn diagram of the two groups would have a massive cross over.

Pffft you've nothing to apologise for, it was a fine post!

If France win I get an extra half day off.

It was so hot!

Bouf!

I will never forget you trying to put out a grease fire by rubbing pig fat on it.

And then scraping at it with tongs.

Which, given that they were your tongs, you were remarkably chill about

"You break it, you bought it."

Back to football, next tournament they should pick Jack Grealish, and then England will win it.

Also, the next tournament (Euro 2020) has the semi-finals and final at Wembley, so home advantage if we get there!

(Obviously now we have restored hope in the team, it’ll be a disappointing group stage exit again)

So who cried last night and who just immediately sank an entire bottle of whiskey when the final whistle blew and gave a bloody beating to a homeless man on the way home until your tears mixed with the blood on your hands before mounting the mailable corpse and wailing “Why Gareth, WHY” into the vacant eye sockets?

I finished off my small bottle of french lager, oh and the first batch of my homemade guacamole and tortilla chips (nice!), then completed Yakuza 0.

Like every blue blooded true English gentleman did.

I drank far too much Bulgarian rosé wine.

I went a Lucky Chops gig afterwards, which was an excellent antidote.

I downloaded some more Iso's for my Saturn.

I drank some Budweiser and watched an old episode of GBBO on Netflix.

I had a casein shake and went to bed. I wasn't really watching the match though as I was dicking about on instagram, so I'm not sure it counts.

Oh... Was I supposed to be watching the football?

Citizenship revoked.