Opening ceremonies, why do they insist on doing this to us? [View all]

It has never been satisfactorily established why major international football tournaments require opening ceremonies. There's a logic behind the organisers of the Olympic Games pre-empting their event with the sort of lavish song-and-dance productions that would put the combined efforts of Rodgers, Hammerstein, Lerner, Loewe, Bernstein, Berlin and the carpenter who used to build the sweeping staircases for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to shame: that flame won't light itself. But there are no such pyromanic administrative requirements in the world of soccer. So why do they insist on doing this to us? What is it that we've done?

The poor bugger whose job it is to churn out press releases for Uefa has, ahead of their existential breakdown upon contemplation of the direction their life is taking, made a brave stab at some sort of explanation. The "concept for the UEFA EURO 2012 opening ceremony" – your corporate prattle detector is already strobing wildly, isn't it – has been designed to "combine heritage and innovation, to bring sport and culture together, and mark the start of a historical event".

But nobody – least of all poor Press Release Man, currently sitting on the floor in the corner of his office, hugging his own knees and crying quite a lot – believes any of that really means anything in particular. Accordingly, the audience at Warsaw's Stadion Narodowy, who just wanted to finish their bottles of Bisongrass vodka in peace and quiet before the game, were forced to look on in impotent glassy-eyed frustration as thousands of children and badly choreographed dancers cavorted around on a large turquoise tarpaulin to homogenised Euromusak that could have been written and recorded anywhere from Gdansk to Gants Hill.

Unlike a best man's speech at a wedding, which all concerned desperately hope will go swimmingly in order to avoid acute embarrassment, the audience at an opening ceremony is praying for the performance to degenerate into a thundering shambles. It's the only hope of extracting any sort of entertainment from such a deep, dark mine of bland, focus-grouped mediocrity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/jun/08/euro-2012-opening-ceremony