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...

Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022.