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⚽ The joy of not knowing

On the last day of the Premier League season, I set myself a challenge with an odd reward at the end of it. 

Instead of following every minute kick of the title race and relegation battle, I turned my phone off, watched some different sports, roasted a chicken and waited for Match of the Day instead. I’ve done this a couple of times this season, especially in the second half as I didn’t have to feel so hyper-connected to the Premier League as it was happening. 

It is a league that is everywhere, and even if you don’t like football, or even sport, it’s pretty impossible to ignore. There are disadvantages to that, but by far the biggest plus is that you can follow the league, its teams, players and stories at a pace that you’re comfortable with, rather than gratefully and greedily hoovering up every piece of content you can find, you can consume it the way you want to.

In my old job, I worked at a social platform, meaning you’re permanently plugged into that walled ecosystem as a job. Again, there are downsides to that, but being given the keys to experiment meant that it became a lot easier to learn the tricks and reliable sources that acts as a complement to watching football, rather than wading through the depths of some of that particular platform. 

As I did more on there, I found it easier to cover sport with a radio, rather than through TV. Radio commentary is amazing, and the people who describe what’s happening on the field are incredible at their job. It’s keeping 253 plates spinning at once. 

One example might be an attack in your game, but you suddenly get an alert that says a goal has happened elsewhere, and you should cut away to the other game, working out the permutations of what’s happened, keeping tabs on the attack, making sure your co-commentator has got something interesting to say and ensuring your voice still matches the emotion in the game. 

Doing that for a game must wipe people out. Doing it for a season can’t be anything less than exhausting. And doing it on the BBC even more so, because you don’t get the robotic respite of reading another ad for builders or betting shops, turning what should be a valuable service into a billboard.

Combining Twitter with BBC radio is the best way to follow a matchday. As soon as the commentator announces the name of the scorer, it’s normally possible to find that goal, before the lawyers get their big whack-a-goal hammers out. Most midweek football writing isn’t worth dealing with - especially those articles written for clicks, but often those same writers are excellent at setting the scene on social and giving you a real picture of what’s there. 

But I digress. On the final day of the Premier League season, I waited, and watched Match of the Day without knowing the results. It reminded me of being a lot younger, in the pre-internet days where your options were Ceefax, radio or a late-edition local newspaper ahead of the highlights show.

This approach was justified too, with the way Match of the Day presented the programme. The format feels a bit tired, with one ex-pro being joined by two ex-pros to recite slogans until the next highlights package, but you realise you’re not really the show’s target audience. Instead, they put games into vague groups, combining highlights packages to tie up the stories. It was a great way to do it, although I would like them to go further and just present all 10 games on final day from start to finish, like a sort of NFL Redzone done after the event, jumping back to the studio for analysis when nothing of note was happening, and when it was, putting social media posts as added depth to the events on the pitch. 

This says more about me than anything else, but I cannot remember the last time I turned my phone off and ignored the sports event everyone else was talking about. It was a small act that for me and at least one of my friends is going to become an annual tradition, where we choose to actively disengage from the pressure cooker and watching what happened while it’s being cleared up long after the event. 

There is a joy in not knowing. 

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