Collins' Beans: You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone…if only it went away though

When something is in your face 24/7, rolling across your sub-conscious like a bright yellow BREAKING NEWS! ticker you start to lose that feeling of anticipation: it becomes difficult for your heart to pine for something when it never leaves your sight.

Can you ever truly miss something if it never goes away? Perhaps it’s like the tree in the forest conundrum: whether there’s a sound if a tree hits the ground and yet no-one’s there to hear it fall. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and while that doesn’t seem to account for the fact that long distance relationships don’t typically tend to be the favoured model for a life time of companionship, there is definitely some truth to the fact that if you miss something so much, to the point where you want it back so bad, then it needs to go away. And stay away. At least until the cricket season is over.

In many ways it feels churlish to be complaining. After all, the world of football is where I call home. Eat football, sleep football and I guess drink coca cola, but this is a sport that can at times consume me. I don’t say that like it’s a bad thing: I love it. Playing, watching, writing, reading, this was a hobby that became a passion. Did it become my life? I’d like to hope it might not ever go quite that far - no weddings or christenings missed for a Johnstone’s Paint Trophy Match just yet -but there’s no question it forges who I am today. I make no apologies for that - I love football and yet… and yet… when it comes to the summer, I just wish it would go away.

For a bit that is.

Just give us the summer to recharge those batteries. Give us time to think of things like the British Lions and the Ashes, Wimbledon and the Tour De France, and also perhaps some things that don’t involve sport. It’s pre-season, that Sky Sports Sitzkrieg, when a phony war between the end of May and the beginning of August breaks out, where football scrabbles to capture your attention at a time when all you want is a period of purdah for your drained emotional tanks to be topped back up. It’s a time when you want to dream and forget reality, but dreams cease to be fun when you constantly get woken up.

You want to be left alone to fantasise. To be lost in the light, fluffy, imaginary bliss of a surprise move for a Spanish World Cup winner rather than be jolted back to reality with the news that a move for a Macclesfield fullback was in fact the dreary reality.

Football was never designed to go all year round. Just like birds flying South, leaves falling form the trees and Morris Dancers, it was meant to be seasonal. Just as the intermission at the theatre allows an excited dash for a tub of overpriced half melted ice cream, so the break in the middle gives football its appeal: last season’s disappointments are in the can, it’s time to look forward and reach for the stars. The opening game is like the first day of school: new kit, new players and new hope, all glistening brightly in the late summer sunshine. You need that detachment to build the excitement.

21^st Century consumer culture suggests you can never have too much of a good thing: over indulgence doesn’t exist. Football these days couldn’t agree more. Pre-season friendlies in Japan against Urawa Red Diamonds, trips to America to play at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park: the games never stop. The build up to that magical day in August gets ever more squeezed.

The Rovers Return and the Queen Vic: people can’t get enough of their daily dose of living their lives vicariously through Deirdre and Ken or the Mitchell Brothers, but Coronation Street went from two, to four, to five nights a week: Eastenders brought in an omnibus. Has people’s appetite for Betty’s hot pot lessened? Probably not, but with so many hours to fill, has the creativity and originality slowly started to seep away? Does it make you want something more if you never have to do without it, or less?

Pizza, steak, chocolate: can you have too much of a good thing? To me they cease to be special anymore if you have them every day. It’s a bold claim, but to me, football is better than all those things anyway, and yet, just like a geography teacher it needs to remember to have a summer holiday. The first day of the new football season is one of the highlights of the whole calendar, the hopes, dreams, fears and everything in between all to be looked forward to. The game needs to remember that: remember it’s that eager sense of anticipation and expectation – the inner child on Christmas Day - that keeps us coming back for more.

So, in the politest way possible, and from one that loves it dearly: this is to football in the summer – please go away... remember to come back soon.