Football seems to have forgotten about fun: the World Sevens has brought it back | Tom Garry

A s much as it is tempting to romanticise about Bill Shankly’s most famous quote, he was wrong. Football is not more serious than life and death, and over the years far too many of us seem to have taken the former Liverpool manager’s words a little too literally and stopped being able to enjoy football for its primary purpose: fun. Whether it is clubs writing letters of complaint because a referee – a fallible human like all 8 billion of us – has made a mistake or the rage on social media that a pundit’s opinion might be skewed towards – shock – their former club, isn’t it time we chilled out a bit? For three sun-kissed afternoons by the Thames, an end-of-season seven-a-side women’s football tournament provided the perfect antidote to the depressingly serious elements of the modern game. Forget VAR, PSR and arguing about the significance of xG, this was goals, laughs, goals, then more goals. The third edition of World Sevens Football, which involved eight English teams and was won by Chelsea after an 11-goal thriller in the final, served up what the players had craved: fun. On the pitch, flair players such as Manchester United’s Melvine Malard and Jess Park thrived in the format, showing off their stepovers and lethal finishing, and the Chelsea forward Aggie-Beever-Jones, the top scorer with eight goals, toyed with defenders. The officials perform their own walkout before the final. …