Football FanCast columnist

The word ‘overrated' is one of the great aids of the modern day football fan. Like the grumpy music connoisseur, sighing to himself about whatever painfully average sounding band with daft haircuts NME are boring us silly with this week (until they get tired of them midway through their second single) we use it as a defence mechanism, a crafty rejoinder to the insane hype we are constantly subjected to by manipulative people with ulterior motives.

You can hardly blame us. For football watchers, Liverpool and Chelsea the other night was one long force fed nightmare, going into it devoid of sneering sarcasm and steely eyed cynicism was simply unthinkable. The entire evening became one lone procession of the ‘O word', without it "Special European Nights at Anfield" would be abject holocausts, melancholic grey skies residing in our very souls as we grimly march off to overcrowded gulags, sharp battens in the shape of Clive Tyldesley's flowery rhetoric digging painfully into our lower backs.

"Overrated, overrated, overrated", we chant to ourselves, hands over ears, fearful that enduring one more sound bite about the Kop churning out yet another unmelodic rendition of ‘You'll Never Walk Alone' may be enough to vaporise us into oblivion. "Not listening, not listening, not listening".

Waging subtle war, and countering our stance, those with vested interest in the surrounding hype around the game started making strategic use of the word underrated and rather than balance each other out, the words became the vocalisation equivalent of an unstoppable force crashing into an unmovable object.

Joe Cole, for example, is a decent player who regularly doesn't play at all decently and is sensibly rated by most as "alright, I suppose", yet as many people clamour to label him overrated as they do underrated. It's an odd phenomenon and typical of a game prone to embarrassing self aggrandising and a crippling lack of self awareness, a queer situation which has led us to our complicated relationship with Frank Lampard: originally "underrated" at West Ham, then just as quickly "overrated" at Chelsea, then rated just about right, then back to being "overrated" on the back of a couple of bad games for England and then "underrated" when people started talking about replacing him with Gareth Barry. It gets confusing, especially when these same journalists trot out ‘form is temporary...' comfort clichés when the player under scrutiny gets in a deflected free kick against Wigan.

It's for this reason that I've been making a concentrated attempt to avoid using the word when discussing football; it's reactionary and hollow (how a player is rated disclosures absolutely nothing on what's good and bad about his game) and it can make you sound a little like an old lady in your newspaper using the opening of a mosque by the civic centre as an example of political correctness gone mad.

Allan Carr never wrote the ‘Easy way to give up saying the word overrated', so I have no idea whether one last burst of using the word is advisable or not, but I fear it may be the only sensible option available to me, lest the craving eventually get so vicious that the second leg at Stamford Bridge is played to a soundtrack of Lou Reed's ‘Perfect Day' and accompanied by me taking a crawling ambulance ride through Edinburgh housing tenements; so (ahem), overrated things:

Corner Kicks

I watched Manchester United play Barcelona this week with a Man Utd supporter and the look of absolute anguish on his face when Evra sensibly knocked the ball behind for a corner triggered an amused but empathetic reaction in me because we all do it. That stinging reaction to your team conceding a corner and that sickening noise of encouragement you hear from their support is up there with your reaction to a friend arriving at the pub late from work and beginning their conversation with the words "you will not believe the email I got sent down from accounts today". It's an understandable if illogical reaction; nobody ever really does anything with a corner, they either get cleared at the near post or they go too deep or just float around non-threateningly and half heartedly, trying their hardest to get their face on camera with the optimistic over eagerness of an extra in The Woolpack.

Teams have scored from corners but then teams have scored by deflecting the ball in off the referee; if all the goals ever which resulted from corners were sat on one side of a sea-saw they would have the physicality of Frodo from Lord of the Rings and would soon be catapulted into the air by all the corners that didn't lead to goals at the other end represented by the weight of an industrial storage freezer, a couple of Boeing 747s and the entire population of China. The next time your team gets a corner, just don't bother, it isn't worth the heartbreak. Sit back down, flick languidly through your match day program, chat to those around you about how bad the second season of ‘Heroes' is, anything else simply doesn't merit the effort, life's too short.

Paul Gascoigne's legendary sense of humour

Whatever's going on with Gascoigne at the minute, we should never lose sight of the fact that even at his very peak of supposed hilarity he was a distinctly boring individual, with an eye for a joke so tactless and boorish he made Bernard Manning look like Bill Hicks. That Gascoigne thought it mirth inducement on a par with an early Woody Allen film to give Tony Cunnigham free sun tanning sessions (Cunnigham is black: geddit?!?) is one thing, why he was romanticised as some sort of Richard Pryor shaped court jester is the more worrying issue; are the sports writers in this country so devoid of imagination that they find a grown man in comedy breasts as amusing as most others find the Kipper and the Corpse episode of Fawlty Towers?

Tony Cascarino's ‘Full Time'

You could argue that it's the best football autobiography ever written but you could also argue that it's neither true nor particularly pertinent even if it were. The book strives for heart breaking revelation but gets lost somewhere between mundane detail and self pitying moping, the bit about missing a sitter for Celtic against Rangers (an extract hyped as akin to Shakespeare by most reviews) is about as insightful a glimpse into the footballer's psyche as a six month out of date GNER timetable giving that it can be basically surmised thus: "yep, I missed it; bit of a pisser really".

England in Euro 1996

Unconvincing against Scotland and Switzerland, fiendishly fortunate against Spain; the impressive performance against Holland (wherein the England team played very well against a fractured, at war and ageing Dutch side, and didn't quite grow wings and ascend into heaven as the press may have you believe) and nature of defeat to Germany seems to have crystallised this tournament in the minds of many as heroic and thrilling as opposed to the rather timid submission and inability to cash in on home advantage it could equally be remembered as.

Subbuteo

Fiddly, dull and about as effective a simulator of the big match experience as waiting for a bus on a damp Tuesday morning. Roughly ten thousand times less fun than playing football, watching football, talking about football, thinking about football, reading about football or sat alone in a darkened room with no mental stimulant to hand, the only people that claim to have ever enjoyed subbuteo are minor celebrities making a miss-guided attempt to bond with the plebs on a dreadful ‘I love the...' nostalgia show and should be fundamentally mistrusted.

Sitting in the front row

Your mate can get as excited as scoring the tickets as he likes, you will soon be cursing him under your breath as the novelty of being sat close enough to hear the players dissipates mid-way through the warm up and you face up to the prospect of watching the game through a mass of legs, hopelessly lost and unable to decipher anything that is happening inches from you. You spend the majority of the match looking at those behind you with envious eyes, drooling and hissing like Gollum before eventually giving up and watching the end of it on the televisions in the concourse.

There's more, of course there's more: there's Steven Gerrard's passing ability, there's Del Boy falling through the bar, there's the importance of the sitting midfield role, there's ninety per cent of Bob Dylan's back catalogue and there's- if I want to be all clever and post-modern-the word 'overrated' itself (and I do genuinely believe it is too often used as a crutch by people who feel they should criticise but aren't sure why). But I can let those rest, this has all been cathartic enough and I feel like I can approach viewing the next Chelsea Liverpool match as 'boring' and 'rubbish' with a clear conscience and without having to resort to trite terms designed to complicate the game and our understanding of it; something can only be 'overrated' if you value to opinion of the person rating it in the first place, after all.

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