In His Defense, the Game Sucked

I think we should all cut some serious slack to a certain fan in the stands during the Arsenal v. Leicester City match for taking the challenge of being entertained into his own hands.LONDON – By the time the ball glanced off Leicester defenseman Robert Huth’s barrel chest and into his own team’s goal, I’d been asleep for at least 15 minutes.

Let’s be clear here: I usually don’t find football (for my fellow Americans, I mean the game we call “soccer”) at all boring. Across the full length of the Premier League season, I get up insanely early every Saturday morning for the express purpose of watching the ‘beautiful game’ as played by some of the very best in the business.

As with any sport, though, any given football match has the potential to be duller than a butter knife — and the recent fixture pitting Arsenal against defending champions Leicester City was one of those games.

Accordingly, I think we should all cut some serious slack to a certain fan in the stands at the Emirates that day for taking the challenge of being entertained into his own hands.

After all, unless the porn he was watching was truly terrible, it had to be more diverting than this edition of Arsenal v. Leicester.

It’s not as though the guy were actively yanking his crank there in the stands. That sort of thing wouldn’t be acceptable even at an EFL 2 match between Leyton Orient and Cheltenham Town, much less whilst taking in the big show of an Arsenal game. Besides, I’m sure he was merely “checking out a link” emailed to him by a “friend,” right? (That’s certainly the excuse I would go with.)

All I’m saying is context matters, folks.

While I would be positively irate if I were to see a fan in front of me watching porn during a Warriors vs. Cavaliers NBA finals game, I probably wouldn’t even be awake to get offended by the same activity at a regular season match-up between the New Jersey Nets and the Sacramento … um … whatever it is they call the NBA team in Sacramento, assuming they still have one.

By the same token, if this porn-distracted football fan had been doing this in the middle of, say, last year’s 5-4 Liverpool victory over Norwich City, I’d say he needs to be carted off by the police to be roundly beaten with sticks and given plenty of time to reflect on the inappropriateness and irrationality of his actions.

Taking in a few moments of uplifting porn while half-listening to the rest of the crowd for cues that might indicate something actually happened on the pitch, during what was shaping up to be a truly uninspiring nil-nil draw? Well, to me, this just makes good sense.

Oh sure, a few uptight folks will argue it’s never appropriate to watch porn in public, especially in a stadium full of families with kids, but I’m betting those same people have never been confronted with the choice of watching porn or staring at a very distressed Arsene Wenger.

Speaking of Wenger, now that his team is out of the title race, about the only interest left for Arsenal fans (those without smartphones on which to watch porn, anyway) is the annual question: Is this the year Wenger finally retires, or is he some sort of managerial vampire, destined to forever roam the Arsenal touchlines in search of the blood of young footballers to power his undead corpse?

But I digress.

Honestly, judging by their body language on the field, I’m betting some of the players themselves would rather have been watching porn than having their ankles kicked black and blue by the opposing team, especially any Gunners who might prefer Wenger not come back to coach again next season.

In fact, this gives me an idea: Instead of flying over the stadium in planes with anti-Wenger messages trailing behind them, fans who favor the aging Frenchman’s removal should instead consider funding the screening of in-match porn movies on the big screens at the Emirates, in the hopes Alexis Sanchez becomes so engrossed in the smut he forgets to keep scoring all those manager-career-extending goals.

Hey, remember this is the Premier League we’re talking about. Stranger things have happened.

 

About the Author

Ben Suroeste

Gene Zorkin has been covering legal and political issues for various adult publications (and under a variety of pen names) since 2002.

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