World Cup: A few preliminary points of irritation...

World Cup! Football excitement. A few preliminary points of irritation...

1. Soccercentric advertising. Beverage companies in particular really like the 'crowd holding up bits of card to form a picture' image - Bud[weiser made by Anheuser-Busch] and Coke in particular in particular. The idea of mass-participation is obviously going to give an corporate enterprise a stiffy, so couple that with actual mass participation imagery... and you have a recipe for CGI-drenched fakery, on every level. NO ONE WHO LIKES BEER LIKES BUD, IT'S PISS. And I like a soft drink, but I don't regard it as a communal rite. Supporters: there for the football, and a bit thirsty. There's nothing else to buy, and you're not allowed to take your own bottles into the stadium. So don't crow about this triumph of informed and enthusiastic consumerism, because it isn't one, it's a triumph of strategic sponsorship arrangement and the illusion of choice.

Further to this: adverts like the Honda 'Impossible Dream' one, which I watched with jaw hanging last night. Ok, I'm English-speaking, English-born British, living in London - I want to see England do well. There was, however, something particularly irritating about Honda's long-winded absurdist take on this - a moustachioed Anglo-type [possible elder brother of the 118 twins] races in various modes of conveyance, all in Eng-er-land team colours, while singing 'The Impossible Dream' - crashing over a waterfall to emerge in an England-coloured hot air balloon, rising through the mist.

Honda. That bastion of aspirant Anglitude. Well, if there's going to be a cynicism pissing contest, they started it. 'Hot air', 'impossibility'... the tropes of the advert represent absolute insincerity, ambiguously phrased mockery of everything, a waste of money. EVERYONE is doing it, I single Honda out for ire due to the elaborate and entirely misplaced triumphalism of their adverts. Hate something, change something, hate something change something FOOT THROUGH THE TELLYYYY!!! [Extended breaking glass FX followed by blissful silence] No, I can still hear the sounds of gridlock and a slowly asphyxiating planet... oh, this is the real world, isn't it? No flying cartoon engines here. Still, they support England! ENG-ER-LAND! That's better.

2. Commentators losing the plot.
Wayne Rooney as football's eternal youth, a young scruff in from the park perenially clamouring for a kick about. Last night it seemed like the pundits were queuing up to have a tug onto the acne-pitted digestive biscuit that is 'Wayne Rooney' - the talismanic figurehead, the carrier of a nation's dreams, the fotballer's footballer... the sulky-faced cunt.

HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH! AND he's not a tousle-haired, cap-askew, ruddy-cheeked schoolboy, you slavering perverts. He's 20 years old and a multi-millionaire.

If - IF - England are lucky, they have a potential ambassador for Viagra in thirty years' time. Thank fuck Theo Walcott's not played yet, or we wouldn't be able to see the pitch for all the tissues discarded from the commentary box.



I'm honestly not that annoyed. The multiple refractions and representations of Popworld [which Soccerland is one mighty nation of] seem so numerous, and yet they all fit into one shrinking white dot in the middle of my screen with such ease!