Please, no. Not Eye of the ****ing Tiger

Game 24, 2020-21

"Nooooooooo!" It's still 40 minutes to kick off, but already I'm in mental agony. My changing room is next door to the away team, and they're playing motivational warm-up music. There seem to be only two criteria for such music - it has to be blasted out at an intrusively loud volume on a below-par sound system, and the choice of song has to be the most unimaginative shite with the perceived widest appeal. In today's case, Eye of the fucking Tiger. They can't hear my cri de coeur, of course, because Eye of the fucking Tiger is way too loud. I can't stress enough how much I hate this song. That dumb, macho opening riff I've heard 25,000 times too often. The whiney vocals. The asinine lyrics. And then everything else about it, which sticks in my poor, suffering head for the entire first half. 

If the International Football Association Board gave me free rein to add just one law to the game, any law, then it would be this: "Teams playing loud pre-match motivational music that annoys the ref will be issued with a collective eleven yellow cards prior to kick-off. No exceptions. Should that pre-match music consist of Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, those cards will be red, the game will be abandoned, and the opposing team awarded a 25-0 win. The ref shall be permitted to access the offending team's changing room with a heavy hammer to attack the source of the music and render it beyond further sonic re-production."

I think that's reasonable. It certainly makes a lot more sense than the comical handball law IFAB's now had to retract and pretty much restore to its original state...

After an eight-month break, back to foul play and hot tempers

Game 23, 2020-21

First game for eight months, a boys U19 friendly. The pandemic's second wave is over, while the third one (driven by the Delta variant) is not forecast to hit Germany for another two months. It's been humid and in the mid-30s all week, the worst kind of weather for outdoor sport. The back-end of June seems an odd time to be re-starting play. But these are odd times. It's still the 20-21 season, but really we're preparing for 21-22. In the meantime, I've been 'training' by watching the referees in the European Championships, who - aside from being too lenient on dissent - have been doing an excellent job.

The home team wants to play three halves (2 x 45 minutes, plus an extra 30 minutes) because they have so many players. It's okay with me, but their opponents, with a squad of 16, say they'll decide after the 90 minutes are up. That makes sense, given the weather. Kick-off is delayed because the German FA's software won't accommodate more than 11 subs. When that's finally sorted out, I start the game and soon we're back to normal - two yellow cards in the first seven minutes. The first is for a tactical foul, the second is when the away team's goalkeeper up-ends a home forward who's about to score. At half-time, the home team's assistant coach wants to know why it wasn't red. "He made an attempt to play the ball," I say. He doesn't think much of that explanation. Some rule changes can take years to seep through into the consciousness of players and coaches...