EPL and me

During the past few months, especially since I started working, I have concluded that there are broadly two things that these Brits talk about – the weather and football. To be honest, I never understood what’s there to talk about the weather so much because it’s always (in bold capital letters if I may say) cold!! But then I was being too cynical, because soon I realised that it is sometimes cold and raining or sometimes even cold and snowing or sometimes cold and cloudy. So basically you get my point no? It sucks! I believe that the most difficult job on earth is that of the BBC weather reporter. How much effort must be put everyday into devising innovative ways to convey people that the weather is going to bad! But weather is not my only issue in life currently.

I have a serious problem with this EPL or whatever they call it. As if Mondays weren’t depressing enough by themselves, everyone in my project team had to discuss the weekend league matches with every miniscule detail while I sat there like Tarzan stranded in New York city not knowing what everyone is blabbering on about. But even then, I didn’t take much interest because there was a guy from Barcelona in my team who used to say only the Spanish league had some value for money and all this EPL is one big sham.

But my Mr. has to watch every single EPL game too! There are 150 odd teams (or so they seem to me) playing with one another. Thankfully, by Gods grace if I may say so, they don’t telecast all the matches here. Apparently the TV rights are split between BT Sports and SKY Sports. Now we being true Indians and with the exchange rate higher than 100, we have decided not to spend another 40 pounds on BT subscription every month. However, to make up for it, he has to watch each game analysis at the end of the day. So much time is wasted that I can see two full episodes of ‘Bani Ishq da Kalma’ with advertisements and would still have more time to watch one more episode of ‘Saraswatichandra’ in that. Bah!

So I thought, enough is enough, let me take keen interest from now on. Drawing parallels from the IPL, I concluded that the easiest way to get to know the teams was by their t-shirts colours. Correct logic no? Wrong! Turned out that half the teams had red colour t-shirts and the other half had blue!! To make things worse then, I found out that the teams are given only one set of team colour t-shirts which takes a while to get washed in the laundry since shops close at 12pm every Sunday. So next week when they play ‘away’ they use some other t-shirt of some random colour. Only if they would have also outsourced this laundry thing to India! (Dear Brits, can you please stop drinking wine and start working!) Bah! Bah!

Interestingly, I noticed everyone and anyone in India who was on my facebook supported some United team. Obviously, I thought that it must be a very good team to show some loyalty but to my shock, my London friends hated them. Turns out that their ex-coach was some ‘Don’ like personality who ‘fixed’ red cards, penalties and the extra-time awarded. Now I wonder why we, being Indians, should get so annoyed at this fixing. We fix our cricket matches, then we create our own private investigating agency and then we declare ourselves not guilty no? But I wanted to be alive in London and statistics revealed that these EPL teams change their coach more than they change their t-shirts so I chose not to argue on this coach issue further.

As a last resort to get interested in the game, I focussed my attention on the players. With many million pounds spent on them, they must be of great class I thought. Some names were catchy so they caught my attention, Suarez for example. Turned out that he goes about biting peoples ears in the middle of the game! Really? I mean, you can see the same drama -like players ‘slapping’ fellow players, then fellow players crying etc. at a much lesser cost back home no? Also, I think biting ears would look less like a football game and more like a scene out of porn video which you can watch for free anyways. Why waste so many million pounds over it. And Mr. David Cameron, ban this EPL and get your country to work!