God love 'em. I was hugely proud to see a couple of weeks ago that MY team, not any of the high-profile tattoosome moneybags of the Premiership, were the first professional football club to sign the
I Love Sport But I Hate Homophobia government campaign, causing David Cameron to tweet his congrats. Hurrah! It's part of the government's general Kick It Out campaign to banish any form of prejudice on the terraces (or, indeed, is it has been alleged rather a lot this week in the Prem, on the pitch). It frankly seems astonishing to me that there could possibly be anyone left in the world who feels that it might be a bit of a giggle to abuse anyone for their sexual preference, or indeed ethnic background, but then I'm an artist who mixes happily with all and sundry, not someone who lives in the Dark Ages eating meat pies, collecting Daily Star clippings of Page 3 beauties and getting a bit nervous when watching Graeme Le Saux, because he can string two three-syllable words together and has nice hair. I'm looking forward to someone,
somewhere amongst our 92 professional teams of men, being as brave as
Sweden's Anton Hysen and coming out. Wycombe Wanderers at least would make sure they were the first to give them a big, non-embarrassed man-hug. Here's Matt Bloomfield doing us all proud!
Not content with being pro-gay/lesbian/trans etc, the boys are also throwing themselves into Movember, the month in which men grow moustaches to raise money for prostate cancer awareness. Tomorrow, on November 1st, 14 players will begin their 'tache growing, and can be
sponsored for the pleasure here! I've done so, and hope to hot-foot it to MK Dons at the end of the month on my day off to witness what will surely be the Extreme Hilarity of a full team of handlebarred and face-fuzzed gents (AND manager - Gary Waddock is doing it as well), as if we'd all been transported to 1973. Brilliant! And again, I challenge the self-involved Prem boys to do the same: however much money WWFC raise from their 5,000 or so supporters, imagine how much Manchester United could inspire at the promise of Rooners, Nani, Hernandez et al looking like disco kings... Gareth Ainsworth, whose brainchild this was, has already been practising, and appears to have transformed into some sort of Leone-style villain, hur hur.
And if this isn't cheerily homoerotic, I don't know what is!
All this charitable loveliness makes the falling about ON the pitch that the boys must be doing seem a little less terrible... we are now sunken treasure rusting away in 23rd place with only Yeovil for company. Wycombe's new starlet, Jordan Ibe, who scored on his debut at the Battle of the Garys (Megson vs Waddock) on Saturday, is probably too wet behind the ears to grow a beard, being 12 or whatever he is... Just like bright young thing Matt Philips before him, who now plays for Blackpool, he'll be away to Liverpool or some such before he can even fashion a wee tuft of dormouse fluff on his chin, I should wager.
Making money out of rising stars has always been part and parcel of the youth training embedded in lower league clubs, sad as we might be to lose them. But this system is being threatened by the Elite Player Performance Plan, which proposes a fixed payment system that would mean the Big Bad Clubs at the top could cream off lowly clubs' talent for next to nothing, which hardly seems fair. The Premier League shoe-armed this scheme in by saying they'd otherwise withhold funding for youth training. What absolute darstardly gluttons. £1 million might only garnish the canapés at the VIP boxes for a season in the top flight, but it can keep a club going for a bit longer down at our end. Matt Bloomfield, who when not signing anti-prejudice charters does some online journalism for the BBC,
writes about it his latest column, and there's an
online campaign here. Let's bite the heels of those racism-spouting, Gillette-smooth fuckers!
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