Football Crazy

The beautiful game. And for the bar-owners of Alcúdia, Pollensa and hereabouts, the beautiful game is a thing of beauty. The miserable weather helped, but yesterday the tills were scorching even if the weather was most certainly not; another ring and the chatter of till-roll listing John Smiths and Saint Micks by the score. And the score may not even have mattered as watching some footy was at least something to do. Save for a play-off or Cup final here, a Champions League final there, the beautiful game is poised to be less a thing of beauty by the end of the month. The Euro championships, embarrassingly minus any British Isles representation, will be more a thing of "belleza" and "Schönheit" for the Spanish and the Germans than it will be for the Brit and Irish contingents and for their bars. But the Spanish bars will be a chorus of "España", España". One had only to witness the masses clustered in front of screens for the Barcelona-United games to realise that the urge to commune in public in support of one's team is far from limited to the English football fan.

For the Brit bars, the absence of the home nation teams is a double-edged sword; it means less interest in the Euro championships and therefore fewer Euros passing across the counter, but it - so the theory goes at any rate - also means that fewer tourists will be tempted to put off or delay their holidays. I've never necessarily subscribed to that theory, but be that as it may. The Brit bars may not rely on football to get punters through the door but it definitely does not harm business - assuming there is a team to support.

Something of a curiosity, especially in Alcúdia given its strong associations with Germany, is the lack of German bars. Off the top of my head, I can think of not one that actually goes out of its way to advertise itself as such. It is strange that the British, among the foreign bar market, have that market more or less cornered. For lack of German, read also paucity of Swedish, Dutch and even French.

Yet there will be plenty of supporters of the beautiful game here during the Euro championships - Germans, Dutch, Swedes, French, Italians - everyone except the British or Irish. So, here's a thought. Those Brit bars. Haul down the Union Jack for a couple of weeks or hoist up a German flag next to it, get some crates of Erdinger in and some Wurst and Sauerkraut. Or for the French, lay on some cases of Bordeaux and paté. For the Swedes? Frankly, I haven't got a clue but any alcohol at Mallorcan rates is an incentive to a Swede.

But once the football has truly ended and there is the hiatus until the kick-off of the 2008-9 season, what can fill the bar TV gap? The answer is very little, except for the obsession with soaps. Despite the notion that 20-20 could become the world's premier team sport (fat chance), cricket, especially test cricket, does not fill the bars. It takes too long. And that about sums it up. The tourist will gladly set aside 90 minutes from the beach or other holiday attractions for some football, but a few hours for some cricket or tedious heats of the 5000 metres at the Olympics or a three-hour slog on Centre Court or God knows how long around the Open golf course? No. Football. And for the bar it is the one sport that matters, not just because of the money it brings but also because it is the most social of all the sports, which is why so many choose to watch in a bar. Most social and the one most likely to generate the most animosity as well. Forget all that stuff about the Germans.


QUIZ
Yesterday's chain - Whitney Houston to Bobby Brown to "Bobby Brown" by Frank Zappa and therefore The Mothers. And Frank Zappa was responsible for "Hot Rats". So what's the connection with that and The Damned? Easy. Today's title - who popularized this?

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