What is the hype about football anyway? Twenty uniformed men running after a silly looking ball while two stand on guard before a huge net that they call goal. And those twenty lunatics try their level best to push the ball into that thing called goal, and the twelfth man ( which by the way is the footballers nickname for the spectators) goes berserk. I sure never did understand this term called football frenzy. Well, until now.
Yeah, I too have succumbed to the mysterious charms of football. And like millions of other devout football fanatics across the globe, I can establish no logical reason as to why the sport brings out the very worst in me, why it doesn’t let me concentrate on more important tasks at hand, why it forces me to stay awake till the wee hours of dawn when I should be getting at least seven hours of sleep to recharge my system for the day ahead, why it makes me sit with the newspapers sports section for at least half an hour every morning before letting me proceed to the more important world affairs and financial news and why for the first time in my seventeen year and five month existence on this planet ( not counting the foetal days) I have not watched any other TV channel other than ESPN for a period almost exceeding three days. Weird, but true.
Now the most important question is, why this absurd preoccupation with something as ridiculous as football. I agree that I am a neophiliac but that cant be the reason really. If I did need something new, I would have gone in for bungee jumping or whatever, why the age old favourite of beer buddies a.k.a. football. As countless of other lunatics like me will reason, football is a way to relieve their insurmountable stress, to calm their minds after a hectic day of work. But come on, at least in my life, this bloody sport has caused nothing but tension, with the ever increasing guilt of not putting adequate amount of studies mounting high. So I guess that explains it all. Football causes stress, stress causes the secretion of adrenaline which in turn makes you feel energised and charged by just sitting on the couch and watching a blaring idiot box till the wee hours of dawn. Someone once said, Religion is the opium for the masses. I would like to make a slight correction, football not religion, is the opium for the masses.