More on opinions

... and why it's good to change them!

I jumped into the back of a taxi recently and, before I could work out how to fasten the seat belt, the cab driver clocked me and plunged me into a scary version of TalkSport phone-in hell.

“What’s gone wrong at Liverpool, then?”

“Do you think Arteta will bottle it again?”

“Frank won’t last at Spurs, will he?”

Not only was I wary of attempting a meaningful reply to any of his Storm Goretti of questions for fear of my answers being regurgitated to the next passenger, but I quickly realised that my honest response to most of the inquiries was, “I don’t really know.”

It’s ok to ‘not really know’. Even better, if you then make it your mission to get to know by research and learning. That’s kind of what I do for a living.

What the cab driver did for a living was to interrogate his customers… but only as a prelude to telling them what he thought about Liverpool, Arteta, and Frank. He wasn’t really interested in my opinions, he had more than enough of his own already.

When did anyone last change your mind about something? Where, in this particularly uncertain world, did we all suddenly get our dogmatic certainty from? Opinion only has any value if it is strong enough to change that of others. Powerful waves wash away lines in the sand.

My pilot through the safe streets of London would never do a U-turn if he drove to the end of the earth. Breathless political commentators are now counting the government’s U-turns as gravely as a boxing referee standing over a stricken fighter, but U-turns are sometimes among the bravest and best we ever take.

Stubbornness is a mule’s game.

I remember turning off the first episode of Slow Horses after 15 minutes (remember River’s cliched chase scene through the airport?) before being persuaded to persevere and becoming totally hooked.

I might even grow to like The Traitors or Pluribus!

When Thomas Tuchel first selected Elliot Anderson to anchor the England midfield against Andorra last September, I privately thought he was wasting his, ours and Elliot’s time. Handing a pivotal role to a young player that didn’t even occupy that position at club level seemed pointless to me. And – like the smug Remainer I am! – I wanted to be embedded on the right side of the argument when the folly was exposed.

I wrote a Substack blog on the subject in which I flimsily veiled my deeply sceptical opinion in rhetorical questions. Anderson has answered each and every one of them so far. I’m not quite a convert because he is not quite the Kante, Kroos, Busquets, Deschamps, Dunga clone that have provided the security for previous World Cup wins but I’ve become a believer that Elliot is England’s best bet. He has changed my opinion.

Every day, I try very hard not to grow old (and grumpy). An open mind is my best anti-aging balm. I’m still not sure why we need to see videos of sports commentators delivering audio commentaries but I guess there are bigger issues out there!

There are too many people of my generation that remain devoutly faithful to a doctrine that nothing good has happened on the planet since The Beatles broke up. They dig dangerously deep into their trenches until they strike a seam which is not only free of VAR and K-Pop but is fuelled by coal and oil and packaged in plastic. It’s how it was… for good or for ill.

The really frightening thing is that it is the very advances in modern mass communication that confound and confuse the fumbling fingers of older users like me that are now being used to build safe houses for everyone to escape back to the old days. 21^st century media manipulation is selling 20^th century prejudices to new audiences.

Like long-throws, toxic nationalism, industries, censorship and rhetoric are back in vogue. We are resurrecting the barriers we joyously tore down, we are recreating the conflicts we found the humanity to resolve. And we are doing it with words that spread like pandemics across contemporary media platforms… spread without question or fact checking.

Too many opinions, too little doubt.

Last night – after seeing a long-throw win a football match – ‘I read the news today… oh boy’. I spent an hour watching two totally polar accounts of the shooting in Minneapolis. I heard Tim Walz say, ‘this has to be the event that says enough’. I’m an optimist at heart but I feel like I’ve heard good men and women say the same in Ukraine, Gaza, the USA, the UK too many times in recent years.

Walz was convinced that the fact that, in 2026, we actually have grim video evidence of the truth of the tragedy would be the game-changer this time but our means of communicating with each other have ironically become so vivid that we are not sure what to trust and believe anymore. Whether through fear, apathy or cynicism we are opting to hold our positions and dig in.

The Governor of Minnesota was pleading with America to look in the mirror and ask itself if the time had come for change.

That’s where change begins. By looking into ourselves. And just maybe changing our opinion. Or at least thinking about it.

Thomas Frank would appreciate it.