You don't have to like soccer in general, or anyone in the sport in particular. You don't have to have a favorite club team, or a favorite national team, or a favorite anything. You can even hate the sport if you wish, whether because you require more scoring, more violence, more cheating, or more match-fixing. Or, given that soccer is the worldwide leader in match-fixing, you can hate it because you demand less match-fixing.
But you cannot deny or resist the majesty of the picture atop this post. It is triumph unchained.
For you pedants out there, the athlete impersonating the seafood special is Anthony Driscoll-Glennon, Glennon for short; he is the man wearing the fish mask and waving the inflatable haddock at the center of the image above. It isn't important that Glennon is the left back for the fourth-tier English soccer club Grimsby Town, and it only matters contextually that Grimsby just beat Premier League side Southampton in the fourth round of the FA Cup, the nationwide competition to find out which billionaire's plaything can beat which other billionaire's plaything. Southampton is the worst team in the Premier League, granted, but also losing to Grimsby is still the equivalent of the Indianapolis Colts losing to Finlandia College. At Finlandia. Or for that matter, in Finland.
It is another massive and joyous upset for the Mariners, a small club that plays in a town, Cleethorpe, that stands defiantly against the nastiest elements the North Sea can offer. Grimsby have played at the same stadium since 1898; TripAdvisor calls the place "dilapidated" and is particularly critical of the toilets. The team’s largest independent web site is called The Fishy, its historical mascot is Harry Haddock and its practice facility is actually called Cheapside Training Ground.
This result is also a matter of considerable shame for Southampton, but never mind that. Southampton asked for it. You don't mess with the Haddock. In fact, never mind all of the rest of it. As we said, the game doesn't much matter except as pretext for posting that photo on this website. It is only out of spite toward my editor that I am not just taking the rest of this post as paid time off.
Just concentrate on Glennon. Concentrate on the eyes, and the droopy mouth, and even the plastic piscine scimitar he is waving around like Excalibur in a toy store. He is celebrating a big and unexpected victory while looking like an extra in Spongebob Squarepants because, well, why the hell not? You think anyone in the NFL or NBA, or if you want something even more professionally cynical, the SEC would do that? Of course not. It's one of the many things we don't get here. Domestic sports fixates on fishfaced miscreants like Danny Snyder, not heroes made famous by wanting to look more like a fish.
And we don't need this to start becoming a trend, either. Glennon decided to break kayfabe, and should be hailed as the first and only one to choose this particular milieu. Humanity, at this moment, doesn't need an Amazon run on haddock masks. This should be left as a crystalline standalone, and celebrated as such. Glennon in this moment is perfection itself, and it doesn't matter whether the Mariners beat Brighton in the next round of the Cup. We will always have this—the face of the world we should want, not the one we have. The face of a triumphant haddock who is also waving, also triumphantly, a second haddock. This is why we learned to walk upright all those thousands of years ago. For this.
