Sometimes you only want to hear one commentator on a certain subject, and which of us can truly rest till we have heard Roy Keane on Manchester City’s Tunnel Club? It makes the prawn sandwich brigade look like a bunch of scavengers going through bins in search of leftover crusts of E-coli pie.
If you missed Sky’s pant-wetting coverage of this on Monday night, City have unveiled a huge advance in the economic stratification of football fans. The Tunnel Club is a new facility at the Etihad which offers unprecedented access to the club’s innards. For up to a highly competitive £15,000 per season, fans can watch headphoned players ignore them on their way into the dressing room, then gain entry to a restaurant bar area constructed around the tunnel. Here, they are served a five-course fine-dining meal – or “experience”, in the modern parlance – before receiving a tactical briefing from an actual member of Pep Guardiola’s coaching staff (two of them were reported to have been deputised before the City-Everton game on Monday night).
Members can then behold the players waiting in the tunnel and making their way on to the pitch through one-way glass – a bit like DCIs watching their suspects before an interview. Actually, having looked at the footage, perhaps there’s more of an aquarium feel to it all, allowing spellbound gawpers to watch as John Stones swims majestically by. Next, the Tunnel Club members can enjoy a short walk out to their own cushioned seats behind the dugout, where even the concrete floor is cushioned with artificial turf, presumably of the shagpile variety. Among many other arguably capital offences, City describe the Tunnel Club as “a premium networking space, perfect for you and your clients with a concierge and an account manager catering for your every need”.
Some City fans, would you believe, found themselves slightly less enamoured of the place as they watched the Sky coverage. A quick trawl through social media found various dissenting voices – for instance, the fan who spotted a chap in blazer and yellow trousers and pronounced it “everything wrong with football and our club”.
On the one hand, you have to marvel at the Premier League’s endlessly restless search for the definitive piece of twattery. You think it’s settled – Ashley Cole shoots a work experience person, or Mark Clattenburg calls a press conference in Jeddah to announce he has signed to “educate” Saudi referees – but it never is, as the twattery continues to unfurl itself like an eternal lotus blossom.
On the other hand … City do seem to have missed a trick or two in failing to maximise their well-deserved reputation for theatrics. After all, the fact that the Tunnel Clubbers were on their cushioned seats during the game means they missed the big tunnel action of Monday night – a prime view of Kyle Walker and Morgan Schneiderlin returning for their early baths.
This feels suboptimal. Perhaps in future, sent-off players could be held at the mouth of the tunnel until Tunnel Club members had been shepherded back down to the viewing area – waiting staff could follow with their drinks on trays – and only then be released to stage a histrionic tableau for the benefit of the club’s richest rubberneckers.
Football still has a long way to go on homophobia and sexism
Alas, the homophobic chants that led to some Leicester fans being chucked out of the King Power and reported to the police seem likely to follow Brighton around the Premier League this season. While groups of fans making racist chants is now largely thought to be something that other countries do – along with irony – the position on their homophobic equivalent feels less fully evolved.
I’m glad it’s being taken seriously in a sport where gay players are still too afraid to come out, but I must confess myself slightly amused by the contortions of people’s internal logic as far as the various -isms go. Everyone has their red lines, which often make sense only to them. As any female sportswriter or broadcaster will tell you, social media mean one is often lavished with invitations to fuck off back to the kitchen and observations that no woman should be talking about sport and whatnot. Every now and then I respond to one of them for a giggle, usually by congratulating the sender on their thoughtful sexism, and saying that I assume they do thoughtful racism too.
The response is almost always the same: the chap in question will draw himself up to his full internet height, and wonder what on earth you’re talking about. OF COURSE he isn’t racist. Eh? Why would you think that? Occasionally something faintly contradictory about “black cock” might follow, though that approach to kicking it out does tend to be limited to those in the lower half of the Mastermind league table.
But it does seem clear that some who in decades gone by might have indulged in racist chanting – and now wouldn’t dream of it – have yet to get “up to speed” on the impact of their other -isms. Of course, it’s not a football problem: football reflects society, rather than the other way round. Bigots don’t leave their bigotry in the ground at 5pm on a Saturday – they walk among us for the rest of the week. Still, perhaps the advent of Brighton to the Premier League will eventually help some of them to the realisation that a lack of bananas on the pitch doesn’t actually mean their work is done.