A PRIZE WORTH WINNING?

The football club I have supported since 1946, Southampton, are sitting pretty at the moment.   No money worries, a good squad of players, a bright manager, a lovely stadium, an ambitious chairman, good support and at Christmas standing top of the Championship.   Tradition has it that the team that finds itself top of the league at Christmas invariably gets promoted at the end of the season.   If that happens, Southampton will return to the top flight of English football where they were for 27 seasons before falling on the hard times from which they have only now recovered.   All sounds good doesn`t it?

And yet.   And yet I`ve been observing the Barclays Premier League - the self-styled `best league in the world` - and I`m not at all sure that`s a club I`m looking forward to joining.   The antics both on and off the field of play seem to belong to a wholly different culture to the one I`ve been used to during Southampton`s `wilderness years` in the Championship and League One.   

I may not have been treated to the most technically gifted football but instead I`ve witnessed honest endeavour.  I`ve watched a team which includes talent emerging from the club`s own Academy with only a smattering of overseas players to boost the ranks - at the moment, we have a Frenchman in midfield who has been with us for years and an enigmatic Brazilian who may not be.   The rest are, by and large, competent, committed professionals doing their best to achieve the glittering prize of promotion that most people crave.

Trouble is, joining the Barclays Premier League is like joining a pantomime.   A lavish production, a product to be sold worldwide where the audience become more customers than supporters.   Where clubs become the whimsical playthings of the rich and richer, where players become millionaires and adopt attitudes that demand entitlement and privilege rather than the well earned admiration of home town fans.   And where a selection of managers adopt personae ranging from the absurd to the insufferable.

There are exceptions to this prejudicial rant, of course, but they`re few and far between.   I could cite the essential decency of, say, Roberto Martinez at Wigan, the genuine advancement and acceptability of recently promoted Norwich City and Swansea and the rather niceness of West Bromwich Albion and their urbane manager Roy Hodgson.


But for every Martinez there`s a Ferguson, for every Swansea there`s a Manchester City, for every Hodgson there`s a Pulis, for whom football is a war to be prosecuted by size, brawn and unremitting aggression.   There are haves and have nots, heroes and villains, the good, the bad and most certainly the ugly.


I might stand accused of a lack of ambition for my club, but I see little reward in struggling to survive in a league that has taken the beautiful game to avaricious extremes, where the pressure to survive can be debilitating for managers, players and fans alike - Blackburn Rovers anyone?   And so, whilst my club may be on course to rejoin the circus at the end of the season, something within me wonders if it is a prize worth winning.   That`s not being defeatist or fearful so much as simply exercising a choice.