Hectic holiday season is worth the trouble for English football

Fabio Capello has said England have no chance in the World Cup because the lack of a winter break leaves their players exhausted. Jose Mourinho rolls his eyes, speaks of his love of the intensity of the Christmas programme and then blames it for the injuries suffered by Frank Lampard and Branislav Ivanovic.

Raymond Verheijen, the outspoken Dutch coach, has repeatedly talked of how damaging it can be to play games two rather than three days apart. Players and coaches moan about time away from their families at Christmas.

It seems as if those inside the English game increasingly are in favour of falling in line with the rest of Europe and taking a couple of weeks off over Christmas.

It must be resisted.

For all the benefits of the Premier League in terms of the quality of football produced, the enhanced television coverage of games and the greater comfort and safety in stadiums, there has been one group who can legitimately wonder if they are better off now than they were in the 1980s.

That is what might loosely be known as “the traditional fan”, the people who would go to matches in all weather and stand on a lump of crumbling concrete to watch their team.

They find themselves struggling against exorbitant ticket prices and increasingly hamstrung by a fixture list that means only around half of league games kick off at the traditional 3pm UK time on a Saturday.

Varied kick-off times may suit fans watching on television, particularly internationally, but they do not help game-goers.

The 3pm kick off allowed home fans to have lunch at home, pop out to meet friends, watch the game, head out afterward and still be home in time for dinner: it fitted the rhythm of the working week.

For many, the festive fixtures are part of the rhythm of the Christmas holidays, part of what makes English football special. It is a fixed point, a time to be with family or friends doing something rather than gawping at the television.

Speaking personally, the vast majority of the people I’m still in touch with from school, I know because I see them before or after the Boxing Day game.

People can argue about what the spirit of Christmas is, but the spirit of New Year is summed up by Auld Lang Syne, the Robert Burns poem traditionally sung just after midnight, which encourages us to “take a cup of kindness” lest “auld acquaintance be forgot”.

In bringing old friends together, football is fundamental to the spirit of the holidays.

And that can be felt in the atmosphere at Christmas games. Not only are crowds larger, they are usually somehow both more raucous and more mellow, characterised by a noisy mischievousness.

Those games are a reminder of the ideal of football as a laugh rather than the serious entertainment-business it has become; they are games in which the fan, for once, comes first (travel disruption notwithstanding). Four fixtures in a week and a half may be chaotic and exhausting, but they are also fun. Football loses that at its peril.

sports@thenational.ae