What's in a handshake?

The great thing about football is that it can be enjoyed on so many levels. It’s a game that’s easily accessible in terms of spectatorship and participation. Paradoxically, it’s both simple (you need to get more goals than the other lot) and mind bogglingly complicated (have a read of a tactical review of a game on www.zonalmarking.net which will leave you convinced that Neil Warnock is a strategist extraordinaire on a par with General Patton and Gary Kaspirov).

You follow a team – maybe more than one. They might play in front of crowds of 80,000 or 80. They could be on your doorstep or you might have a 600 mile round trip for a home game. Anyone watching the ESPN coverage of Spurs v Newcastle last night would’ve seen the shaven-headed Geordie hard-nut, stripped to the waist (on the top half thank goodness) in sub-zero temperatures baring his considerable beer-induced bulk and displaying his many tattoos relating to his beloved Newcastle United. The Prime Minister supports them too.

As it’s a sport so inextricably embedded into our culture it makes it fascinating from a sociological perspective as well – look at how many academic texts were written about the hooligan sub-culture and masculinity in the 1990s. It’s often said that football is a microcosm (a pretty fucking big one if you ask me) of our wider society. The problem is that it all too often reflects its darker cultural configurations such as racism (most recently the Terry and Suarez incidents) and sexism (Paul Jewell’s comments about Sian Massey a few weeks back). This disconcerting blot on the game was again brought sharply back into focus yesterday when Luis Suarez spectacularly custard-pied Patrice Evra (metaphorically, praise be) before the Man Utd v Liverpool game. I won’t go into what happened here, because unless you have been stuck on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic for the last 36 hours you would’ve already seen the incident at least 182 times in 3-D, HD and good, old fashioned slow motion from a multitude of angles.

It’s of course not the first time the pre-match handshake has come under such intense scrutiny; originally there was Beckham/Simeone (handshake successfully completed, albeit with a dirty look from Becks), Bridge/Terry (no handshake) and A. Ferdinand/Terry (there’s a pattern here…), which saw the F.A take the most sensible approach and ditch the whole meaningless ritual to avoid exactly the kind of scene we saw at Old Trafford yesterday.

Unfortunately the FA has today categorically stated that the pre-match handshake will remain. But why? What is the point of this sportsmanship at gun-point if there is no real meaning behind it? Stuart Pearce once said that he didn’t want to shake hand with his opponents before the game and while going through the physical motions refused to make eye contact with players from the other team. Why make him do it in the first place, then? What’s wrong with giving people the freedom to shake hands with those they want to shake hands with in the tunnel before they go out on the pitch?

Of course it’s all to do with the FA’s well-meaning-but-doomed RESPECT campaign, where the shining beacons of valour and chivalry that are our professional footballers (are supposed to) set a good example for our little cherubs to emulate on the pitch and in society (and everyone lives happily ever after). I have no doubt that the handshake would be a credible gesture of sportsmanship if it wasn’t completely undermined by players spending the rest of the game cheating, repeatedly telling the ref to “fuck off” with impunity and occasionally calling each other “black cunts” (allegedly). It’s this sort of disrespect to each other and attitudes to authority that kids take with them onto the pitches and into classrooms, and unless the FA starts clamping down on this by making examples of these “role-models” then the whole handshake thing will continue to serve only idiots like Luis Suarez, who can use the all-eyes-on-me moment to make a point.

The most depressing thing that’s sprung from the whole Suarez fiasco is that Liverpool F.C’s handling of the situation has caused some of the club’s long-standing supporters to stop following the team at all. One fan, Jeff Wiltshire said “I became increasingly disgusted by the clubs reaction. I haven’t been able to watch them since”.  Nuff said really.