Small football pleasures: Double-digit scorelines

Small football pleasures: Double-digit scorelines

Last week a colleague of mine phoned to say she’d be late for work as her youngest child had tripped and fallen on his face, and she wanted to take him to the doctor just to get checked out. She told me: “I obviously feel bad for him because he’s in pain and it’s sad, but also, it was really really funny. I couldn’t stop laughing even when I was crying.”

If there’s one thing this teaches us and 27 years of You’ve Been Framed can confirm, it’s that mild failure is bloody funny. There’s a limit, though: while there is no greater spectator sport than a close friend getting thwacked in the face by a screen door, their getting run over by a car is only funny in very extenuating circumstances, or so my probation officer tells me.

As a result, I took very little satisfaction from Arsenal’s humiliating Champions League exit. Plenty of interest, yes, and lots of conclusions to draw, but this wasn’t so much Arsenal stepping on a series as rakes as it was an industrial accident. After Bayern’s second goal of the night the amused smirks became vicarious embarrassment, and you just feel kind of bad for everyone concerned: the players, the manager, the club and most especially the fans. But I’ll give Arsenal this: at least they had to good sense to obligingly realise there’s something deeply satisfying about the number 10’s appearance in the aggregate scoreline.

Double figures in football are special. It doesn’t matter what the game is. Whether you see a 12-0 flash up on a round-up of World Cup qualification results or you’re Daniel Storey and come across a 14-2 as part of your routine weekend studies of Micronesian Fisherman’s League results from 1983-84 makes no odds to your reaction. You flare your lips, suck in between your teeth, shake your head slighty, and say “bloody hell, look at Tarawa Rovers. You wouldn’t fancy being a Bairiki Wanderers fan that day, would you?”.

At first glance, double-figure games provide the same pleasure as when the match timer hits 100 minutes following a lengthy stoppage, or when a clock shows 12:34 or 11:11. It’s the perfect blend of pattern and novelty, like exquisite pointillist painting, a beautifully crafted one-touch goal, or the Rotherham United game I was at recently that had an attendance of exactly 10,000. Bliss.

But you also know there’s a story behind a double-digit scoreline. Maybe the competition is massively imbalanced. Maybe one side just had a red-hot day while the other side turned up hungover. Maybe the manager’s exciting new first-choice goalkeeper turned out to be three children in a trench coat, or a shaved bear, or Simon Mignolet.

You can debate possession statistics, you can make excuses for a narrow defeat, you can even choose to see a 4-0 defeat as a learning experience and an opportunity to sell your deadwood and bring in fresh blood, like a vampire lumberjack.

Whatever the circumstances, though, there’s no arguing with a double-figure shellacking. The embarrassment may be so thick you can carve your name in it, but there should be no doubt, no shades of grey, no blaming the ref, and no ambiguity as to what’s happened. There shouldn’t – that doesn’t mean some people won’t try anyway. But even the most casual and uninformed observer can see through their flimsy protestations in the wake of a ten-goal defeat.

Certainty is a precious and rare commodity in life, so thank God we have football to provide it every now and then.

Steven Chicken