This football opinion column is about nothing - and that’s absolutely fine

As I sit here on a rare, pleasant afternoon in Gateshead, life is pretty good. The back door is open and as I look up from my laptop screen and into the garden beyond I can see my Siberian Husky - in a stubborn middle finger to the specifications of the Almighty - sunbathing on the patio. A little way from her beam-dappled paws are a pair of honeybees, busily investigating the soft scent of a patch of lavender sprouting from a nearby border, and somewhere down the street, a lawnmower hums with the kind of warm drone that only deafens when it vanishes. It is mild, it is kindly, and I have just had a quesadilla for my dinner. I am content.

And what is more, I have nothing to say; nothing angry, or revelatory, or opinionated. Nothing. And y’know what? I think that’s okay. In this modern age of instant information and outrage, of social media and virtual omniscience, it can often feel as if we have a duty to take a stance on everything, everywhere, all at once. In football, that is perhaps even more true. Every questionable VAR call, every goalkeeping horror show, every minute, debatable aspect of the game is squeezed and wrung out like a grubby dish cloth in an infinite, self-perpetuating sequence of faux emotion - from vein-bulging tantrums to anabolic joy - and it’s all a bit daft, really.

Everybody considers themselves an expert, and everybody delights in ramming their apparent expertise through your eye sockets and down your ear canals. Discourse surrounding football no longer seems to take into account pesky things like nuance or a consideration for the nature of subjectivity, but instead eulogises whoever can shout the loudest or deliver the most controversial take. It’s all quite tiresome.

Of course, I could have spent this column talking about last night’s Milanese Champions League derby, or dissecting in painstaking detail why BT Sport’s punditry panel continues to bluster and bore so drearily while the likes of CBS thrive and thrill, but honestly, I’m not compelled to - and that’s fine. You don’t have to have an opinion on everything, and you don’t have to force yourself into inorganically synthesising one in those instances when you are found apathetically wanting.

I’m not saying that I’ll never take a stance again, or that everybody should shut up forevermore; after all, football is there to be embraced and pored over to a fanatical extent, and I’d be out of my job by the end of the week if I suddenly started preaching a sort of blanket pacificism to any and all heated debates. But sometimes, when all is said and done, it is nice to be quiet.

Perhaps if we all just took a step back every now and again instead of charging into confrontation like blindfolded lemmings, things would just be a little bit... better. You can’t die on a hill if you’re sat at the bottom of it enjoying a picnic. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to proof this article, submit it to my editor, and then go and read in the garden with my dog at my feet.