2007 - Dawn of the Dumb by Charlie Brooker

Author:Charlie Brooker
Format: epub

Plucky little England

[16 June 2006]

Thanks to the magic of newsprint lead times, I’m writing this yesterday, before Great Britain’s soccer match against Trinidad and Tobago in the World Trophy competition, so I’d like to take this opportunity to retrospectively wish them all the best. Good luck Britain! Here’s hoping for straight sets!

Ha ha. I’m hilarious. Enough of the lame sarcasm. Yes, I’m a member of the apparent minority that dislikes football most of the time and grows to actively despise it during the World Cup. But this year, I’ve decided not to moan about it.

It’s quite simple. I’ve finally realised that loudly and repeatedly complaining that the World Cup is a whopping great pain in the arse ultimately achieves nothing. Us haters can’t win. We’re either accused of adopting a contrary position for the sake of it, or told to just ignore it (which we can’t, because it’s bloody everywhere). Sometimes fans yawn and say they’re bored by us killjoys moaning about it, even though they can’t possibly be as bored as we are, bored with every flag and cheer and news report and rebranded chocolate bar: the kind of boredom that gnaws at your bones till you don’t want to live any more. They just don’t understand.

And sometimes people look genuinely upset, and implore you to stop having a go at the World Cup on humanitarian grounds. ‘Leave it alone, it’s just a bit of fun…it’s done nothing to you,’ they whine through their disgusting football-loving faces, as though the World Cup were a defenceless nine-year-old girl you’re attacking with a hammer, instead of an overhyped money-spinning festival of tedium in which the world’s thickest millionaires kick a rubbish ball round a poxy field to the wonderment of an audience of foghorning cretins. In my pathetic opinion.

Anyway, like I say, I’ve decided this time round I won’t gripe about it in the slightest. If it gives pleasure to millions, who are we to quibble? The fans are right: we’re killjoys. Besides, I’ve just read about an exciting development in World Cup technology that just might entice me to start taking an interest. I’ve just read about the Robot World Cup.

RoboCup is now in its tenth year. It’s a tournament (held in Germany) in which boffins from around the world organise football matches between teams of specially designed robots. Each year, as both the mechanical designs and the artificial intelligence powering them improve, the players grow more lifelike and proficient. It even has two robotic commentators, called Sango and Ami, who narrate the proceedings in synthesised voices and pump their arms in the air when somebody scores. By 2010 the players should be turning up with an entourage of absurdly spindly robotic wives in tow. By 2014, the first act of robotic football hooliganism. And so on.

But the really exciting bit is this: the organisers reckon by the year 2050, the robots will be good enough to compete in—and win—the ‘real’ World Cup. Now that I want to see: plucky little England taking on the might of an emotionless army of steel.

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