Nine months and counting

It seems like only yesterday that Holland were kicking lumps out of Spain to a soundtrack of a swarm of bees in South Africa, but the summer break is almost over already and the new football season is about to begin.

Yesterday’s community shield - the traditional curtain raiser to the season - had football fans across the country flocking to their local just to catch a glimpse of semi-competitive football, after a month of getting by on the scraps that are pre-season friendlies. An evergreen performance from Paul Scholes, yet more dreadful positional play from John Terry and a promising debut from Javier Hernandez were the headlines from a game surprisingly high in tempo.

It was also an occasion for ITV to cement their position as the nation’s worst football broadcaster, with their highlights programme offering some laughable observations from their commentary team of Peter Drury and Chris Coleman. “Van der Sar dashes from his line like a child chasing sweets” was one almost sinister quip from Drury, whilst Coleman baffled viewers in describing Dimitar Berbatov as “as calm as cucumber”. Earlier, Coleman had remarked how Javier Hernandez “had probably broken his own nose” in the process of scoring United’s bizarre second goal, before adding “but he won’t care about that one bit” - something I find particularly hard to believe as no matter how good a goal I’d just scored, I would probably be a little concerned if I’d broken part of my face in the process.

Aside from sub-standard commentary and comedy goals, the game had that little bit of edge missing from all the football any of us have seen over the past four or five weeks. The summer break may be seen as a respite for many fans, whilst for others it is pure torture. Some of us have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid any contact with the game - holidaying in far off lands where football is yet to snare the locals into its trap, or even turning our attention to other (admittedly lesser) sports such as cricket, tennis, beach ping pong or scatch.

But for the rest of us, the only option was to seek out a football fix from wherever we could - stalking the TV guide for any hint of a football related programme, and believing every transfer rumour as if it was a fact uttered from the lips of Jesus Christ himself. Actually, the latter is probably not true for Spurs fans, who must now be well accustomed to Harry Redknapp’s transfer negotiation technique that nearly almost follows a formula of 1) confess to liking a player but categorically rule out the possibility of signing him based on the size of his transfer fee; 2) reiterate like for said player and speculate on what Spurs could achieve with a player of his talent, whilst categorically ruling out the possibility of signing him based on the size of his transfer fee; 3) make an attempt to end all speculation by declaring that there is no way said player will sign for Spurs based on the size of his transfer fee; 4) make a derisory bid for said player. This works surprisingly often and always to the merriment of Richard Keys and his chums in the Sky studio.

Anyway, I digress. Whilst my own hunt for football over the summer has seen me attend the Emirates Cup, tune in to Eurosport to watch the under-19 European Championship and pay good money to watch bad football played by West Ham and Deportivo La Coruna, others will I’m sure have gone to more extreme lengths. Many English clubs now travel to US or the Far East for their pre-season programmes for example, with small groups of their fans following them all the way. And things got so bad for my Dad that he even watched the Women’s under-20 World Cup on TV whilst on holiday (look, I'm sure there was just some very good technique on show ok?).

But we can all rest easy now, the wait is all but over. And best of all, we all start the season with a clean slate. Last season’s horrors are long forgotten, and everyone thinks that maybe, just maybe this is their team’s year. The fact that deep down, we all know that it’s almost certain to be Chelsea or United’s year and no-one else’s is immaterial. For one weekend only, every team in the league is level and anyone can be top of the pile with a good result. The best of luck to one and all, and let’s make the most of it while it’s here - there’s only nine months to go for God’s sake!