This made me laugh:
These expensive professionals seem to be very fragile creatures; the smallest hack, which no Public School boy would think of noticing, is enough to send them to earth in a well-acted, but supremely ridiculous, agony of pain, whereupon the referee blows his hard-worked whistle and hurries to soothe the injured spot with a sympathetic paw.
As you can probably tell from the language it’s from a while ago. 1913 to be exact and it’s from The Times’s report of that year’s FA Cup final. Yes, people then were making exactly the same complaints about footballers that they do now. At least they weren’t trying to eat one another.
What is really astonishing is the size of the crowd. 120,000 (the second highest ever) at Crystal Palace, of all places. I googled and found this photo from 1905:
What a mess! But as the article I linked to points out most of the crowd had no idea what was going on. Not only that but it was clearly a dangerous place to be:
Many of the railings designed to render the crowd of standing spectators less fluid and mobile collapsed with a crash, and there must have been scores of minor casualties.
Read the whole thing as they used to say.
Perhaps the BAFTAs could have a ‘Surprise!’ listing, where a non-professional actor is given an over-acting award! A camera crew could be outside the house until the award is announced, and then ring the doorbell, and give the surprised home-owner the acting accolades. (could be a tv show in that, for all kinds of occasions….)
Wimps don’t bite!
Wimps don’t bite!
They just make up phony allegations of racist referees out of whole cloth.
Brian Moore is sound on this, as he is on scrums and so much else, when a rugby player gets a knock. He rightly points out that they deal with it calmly whereas footballers would be rolling around screaming.
Imagine soccer ‘hard men’ like Vinny Jones or Roy Keane, if they took an impact from Jamie Roberts at speed.
This is only an issue because you Brits, God bless you, still insist on watching the wrong Football.
“Yes, people then were making exactly the same complaints about footballers that they do now.”
But now, they’re in trouble with The Malicious Communications Act 1988, according to the Topic above.
So what you’re saying is that soccer players have always been candy-asses? Colour this North American shocked.
Alsedius completes the pass for a touchdown!