As ‘the pressure of the haircut’ enters the game’s lexicon, the extent to which football revolves around winning and losing games appears to be fading
“I
don’t care about his haircut at all,” Matheus Cunha said this week. “I don’t really look at other people if they need to go to the hairdresser or not,” Bruno Fernandes said at the weekend. Michael Carrick, for his part, said he was aware of the haircut issue. But the Manchester United coach insisted it would not factor into his team’s preparations for their game against West Ham on Tuesday night.
And so, here we are. Many games of football end up being remembered for reasons far outstripping their original significance: the 1914 Christmas Truce, the 1962 Battle of Santiago, the 2020 pandemic curtain‑raiser between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. To these we can add the Haircut Game: a mildly arresting 1-1 Premier League draw at the London Stadium that posterity will nevertheless recall as the game when a man did not get his hair cut at the end.
The haircut overshadowed the buildup, the live commentary and much of the post-match analysis on TNT Sport, as well as a ground radius of about a metre around the haircut itself. On the video streaming platform Kick, a quarter of a million viewers watched a live feed of the unshorn Frank Ilett – now known as The United Strand – watching his beloved United going for a fifth consecutive win that would free him from his pilar purgatory.
