Hypnotism and football

I once read a book called "Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance" - I can't remember a single thing about it unless there is one small detail I recall about having a left and right side of your brain that helps in some way in life. Anyway, the reason for reading this small work of art was to improve my target pistol shooting in some measure that would take me from club and county level to perhaps County and Country level followed by Country and International level. Well, it didn't work for me. However, in recent years I have been studying "Football Premier League Managers" to see if they could be utilised in some form of self help group as Hypnotherapy practitioners. Now why would they be useful in that respect I hear you screaming (I am slightly deaf remember so scream louder if you can). I am not sure if I am being fair now when I state that almost all the Premier League Managers that come on TV to talk about their latest success or failure all do so in the same monotonous drone whether the news they are passing on is brilliantly good or devastatingly bad. I have had to conclude from this that they are actually attempting to hypnotise their entire fan base so that the hapless manager can keep his job and the that the rest of us have been tricked into thinking we like football!

Now to my untrained non-football supporting or even interested ear is that Alex Ferguson (I don't bother with the "Sir" bit), Avram Grant, Arsen Venger, Rafael Benítez and at least 20 more all speak in the same dull monotone and are only barely identifiable by their own particular national (aka foreign) dialect.

The fact is that once they have cleared the TV screen I look at the nearest clock and bingo, I realise that I have been out of it for 2 hours and for some reason, until I bang my head on the wall, have have a passion for the "beautiful game" (whatever that means?).

I expect all you avid "footie" (another word I have gained through hypnosis) fans will be foaming at the mouth and gnashing your teeth at my heretic thoughts and comments on your passion (when did football take over from sex?). Please, save your breath on anonymous phone calls, horses heads, letter bombs, letters packed with anthrax and the like as I am too old to be bothered with any offence caused.

I do believe that when these hypnotic managers come on TV they all have some key word or phrase that they utter, usually on a Sunday morning on News 24 or some other meandering Weekend news programme. The moment they utter this particular trigger and having received some subliminal instruction from them , I imagine myself and thousands of others leaping out of bed naked, darting down the stairs to peel and eat a raw onion and then rushing out into the street to perform a David Brent style dance before returning to bed. Later coming out of the hypnotic state that "Sir" Alex put me in and worse still being none the wiser and I wonder why I am getting odd looks from the neighbours!

Perhaps I will give the Sunday news a miss from now on, anyone for a game of footie?