The Importance of Sport (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

This was my debut sports story on Medium. Not great, I had yet to find my voice, but serviceable. It treats with quite a profound subject: whether you can ever truly be a fan of a sport you didn't grow up with.

After a few more of like ilk I applied to join one of Medium's specialist labels, a sport one (it increases your exposure) and was turned down with a fairly brutal 'not what we're looking for'. A bit later they asked whether I would like to join their sports label. When I pointed out they had already turned me down, I got back a profound silence.
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A British Guide to American Football April 29, 2023

Forget all about American football being rugby league with forward passing but still essentially two sets of enormous thugs tearing lumps out of one another. It’s two sets of enormous polymaths tearing lumps out of one another and forward passing, because American football is the most complex sport on earth.

I’ve been watching it religiously for several decades and I still don’t know what a Tampa Cover Two is. Americans are born with this knowledge so it is never vouchsafed to foreigners. Actually, come to think of it, I might as well find out what a Tampa Cover Two is

[Mick Harper]

The game itself is not tremendously important, there being too few of them. Seventeen and out for most of them. Strewth, in British football that would hardly be time to drop the expensive imports bought in the summer window that ‘can’t get used to the physicality of the Premiership’.

Not that there are foreign imports in American football. [Though I grew quite attached to the ‘Nigerian nightmare’ a few years ago. Big bastard but affable with it.]

There’s no international anything, club or country. American football is entire unto itself. No relegation or promotion either. What you see is what you get forever. It’s not, as far as I know, enshrined in the Constitution like gun sports, but not far off.

N.B. Don’t go to games put on periodically in Mexico City, London and Germany except ironically.

The longueurs between action within every game can be unendurable. I’m not referring to the ad-breaks, they come extra, but to the ‘huddles’ as each team listens through their headphones about what they are to do next. Free onfield expression is not encouraged in any American sport. The manager is so deified they call him Coach Harbaugh, like Pope Francis or Prince Andrew.

* The players chat among themselves in the huddle
* Making sure everyone knows what is expected of them for, say, Omaha Red Thirteen
* Then someone says ‘hut’
* Then everyone goes off to line up as per Omaha Red Thirteen
* Then some of them move around, as per Omaha Red Thirteen
* But others may not move as much as an eyebrow for fear of penalisation
* Then someone says ‘hut’
* Then everyone hurls themselves in any number of pre-determined directions
* Many of them pre-determined misdirections
* Then after a few seconds of action it’s back to the huddle.

This is the giddy limit for half of them who troop off disconsolately and replicants, sufficiently recovered from their own five seconds of action, make their way to their respective huddles and begin the cycle all over again.

Unless there’s a change-of-possession which requires more radical changes — each team has three teams depending

1. whether they’ve got the ball
2. whether the other team’s got the ball
3. whether the kicker’s got the ball.

A game technically lasts sixty minutes but what with the huddling, the substituting, the changes of end (three times), a half-time break, two minute warnings, challenges, their version of VAR, carts coming on to cart injured players off, several hours of real time have to elapse before everything is done and dusted. Unless there’s extra time because a tie is like ‘kissing your sister’. I wouldn’t know but I wouldn’t knock it.

The games being so few means the season is short. What we call ‘the close season’ (June and July) lasts from February to August for Americans, but that does not mean their football is anything but a year-round sport.

Green Bay Packers playing the New York Jets is of less moment than whether the Packers will get an extra third round draft pick from the Jets if Aaron Rodgers plays a second season for the Jets. I have to waste two hours of my precious day, February through August, listening to a couple of twerps discussing this and allied bureaucratic niceties. I hope they’re proud of themselves.

Why do I do it? Well, on top of contractual discussions of Byzantine complexity there are always fascinating accounts of off-field misdemeanours the players (and/or the owners) have been getting up to, and what ‘345 Park Avenue’ intends to do about it.

As a rough guide: propositioning twenty-five masseuses to give you ‘extras’ equals an eight-game suspension and twenty-five million dollars to the masseuses. But not, it seems, any extras. Nice work if you can get it.

When the games do begin — I’m back with football now — it’s only ones featuring the New England Patriots that are of any interest. The other fifteen being played coevally can be dispatched to highlight round-ups. Not necessarily the same day — in theory it could be any day except Friday when the under-18’s play and Saturday when the 18–21’s play.

This is, I learned courtesy of the twerps, courtesy of a Supreme Court ruling, a quid pro quo for allowing a billionaire’s cartel to operate in the land of the free. Though of course most people in America are billionaires.

To sum up, the critical difference between their football and ours is down to where you live. Not geographically, but deep down. In your bones.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

You always have to play to two audiences on Medium, your own and America's. Always a problem with sports stories since we play different sports.This was a companion piece to the previous one.
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Ten things that have changed in football during my lifetime May 1, 2023

Just to give you my qualifications for bringing these matters to your attention, I had a trial for Lewisham primary schools as a goalkeeper in the late 1950’s. But I was sent to a rugby-playing secondary school and never realised my promise. So I will start with them. Goalkeepers that is. I don’t suppose you’re that interested in south London grammar schools or my lack of achievement in life.

(1) They never ‘come for the ball’ now. In my day, the keeper ‘dominated his area’. Any ball crossed into it, unless it was an outswinging corner of prodigious dimensions, would be plucked off the beetling brow of a centre forward — of prodigious dimensions — with something close to panache.

Today’s goalies in their day-glo harlequinage (we were grim in green) skulk on their goal line, piteously complaining to the referee they are being interfered with by foreign imports. So? You’ve got two boots, haven’t you? They’ve got two shins, haven’t they?

If the ref is keeping an eagle eye, you’ve got two fists, one for each of their goolies. Never forget that foreigners treasure their wedding tackle in a way no decent Englishman would. Not after tackling the wedding anyway.

(2) Centre forwards, of any dimension, seem to have departed the game. Apart from becoming ‘false number nines’ which says it all. There was a ‘deep-lying centre forward’ called Don Revie but it didn’t catch on.

When I was watching Charlton Athletic trying to get out of the second division (and where’s that gone, pray?) Johnny Summers would stand stock-still on the centre spot, i.e. not offside, and wait for the ball to be thumped over his head. Thereupon he would advance towards their centre half (that will be an unfamiliar term to many of you) who would thump it back over Johnny’s head so he could resume his lonely vigil on the centre spot. That, ladies and gentlemen, is proper football.

(3) A proper football. I have no time for people who yearn for the leather monstrosity of yesteryear, and probably vote Conservative. I’m a member of the SDP Frido generation with many of my mental faculties to prove it, but I do not approve of a different ball for every occasion. Including an orange one if it’s midwinter for goodness sake. What are we, Finland?

A Frido ball was orange but took no more cognisance of the playing conditions than we did. If you could still see your studs for mud when you got home, what’s the point in having a mother?

(4) The midfield schemer. He was slight and Scottish. You’ll all remember Blackie Grey who played for Melchester Rovers. Where is he now? Well, he likely is black for a start. And there’s half a dozen of them, all melling around, interchanging like mad, tackling back, pressing forward, spraying it around like Johnny Haynes before he was reincarnated as Glen Hoddle.

Nowadays even goalkeepers can ping a forty yarder to someone getting his boots whitened on the touchline. Who’s not a winger. Oh no. He hasn’t ‘beaten his man’ since the old queen died. One before. He will ‘cut inside’ and thread a precision ball through to the centre forward only it won’t be a centre forward, will it?

Not if it’s Harry Kane, he was probably the bloke on the touchline! And he captains England. What sort of example is that for young Roy Races trying to decide between football and a career in computers?

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Sorry, I’ll have to go for a lie down. Something else that’s changed in my lifetime.

[Grant]

And goalkeepers were supposed to stay in goal (unless intercepting a cross or corner!) and never drift twenty yards out whilst trying to play the ball with their feet.

I don't have stats but goalies seem to be conceding lots of silly goals by drifting out of the area or by trying to pretend they are as good as the outfield players.

[Mick Harper]

I do have the stats* and I can assure you that converting the goalie into an outfield player, albeit of modest abilities, is the alpha and omega of the modern game. He is the 'extra man'. The goals conceded are largely caused by balls-ups by actual outfield players.

* N/A at this time for technical reasons.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wiley is here to help you out.

1871, the laws were amended to introduce the goalkeeper and specify that the keeper was allowed to handle the ball "for the protection of his goal".

It was a good rule, the goal keeper has a special privellege not given to others. He could handle the ball.

However, like all special privleges, it was devised to come at a price.

1) He was not allowed to wear the colours of his other teammates.

2) He had to make out he was bat shit crazy.

3) He had to stand around getting bored for most of the game. The rest of the time was collecting back passes from defenders, of which there were many.

4) He was expected to half freeze to death without moaning about it.

5) No self-respecting keeper woould wear gloves as it was only really a good save if your hands stung for at least three days after the completion of the game.

6) Playing on after a concussion, a broken neck, or with one eye, was obligatory

7) Away fans were encouraged to barrack the opposition goalkeeper, as foreign players had not been invented.

8) Punching the ball was not allowed, you had to catch it.

9) You were allowed to swing from the crosssbar if the oppostion had shot just over. But only one swing a game was allowed.

10) If the opponents had been given a free kick, you were expected to gesticulate wildly, waiving your arms, bit like a policeman after a road traffic acident, this was to organise your defensive wall. Only then could you collect the ball from the back of the net.

[Pete Jones]

I'm pretty sure I've learned more about European feetball in the last few moments than I learned in a lifetime of ignoring the 3rd grade game we all declined to play on our way to the basketball courts

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Cricket is already too comic for me to wade in with more so here is my one and only Medium cricket story
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Testing Our Patience July 3, 2023
Britain is in an uproar because of Australian knavery. They may
be asked to leave the Commonwealth. What’s it all about?

A cricket series between England and Australia is how Britain measures itself on the world stage. Or as they say, ‘Who holds the Ashes?’ So called because a wooden bail was ceremonially burnt the first time Britain lost to a convict colony since 1783. The urn holding the ashes is presented to whoever wins a series of five five-day cricket matches ('Tests') between England and Australia.

This year, when the sporting caravanserai reached Lord’s, ‘the home of cricket’ (and the urn), for the Second Test England were one-down. Nobody comes back from two down so, as the last day dawned and with Australia miles ahead gentlefolk in England now abed prepared themselves to observe the last rites of another inglorious summer.

Lo! a minor miracle occurred and England looked as if they might actually win. True, their last two recognised batsmen were ‘at the crease’ but they were playing well, and set fair. Then at the end of an ‘over’ — a bowler bowls six times and there’s a break while everyone saunters around — one of the batsmen sauntered down the pitch to do a bit of stretching, patting the grass with his bat, geeing-up his partner and generally relaxing from the six torrid battles he had just survived.

[Mick Harper]

This turned out to be nearer the mark than could be predicted at the time.
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A Footballer’s Story September 25, 2023
England’s Premier League scours the earth for talent.
What the talent makes of it is another story entirely.

[Mick Harper]

The Lies the Guardian Tells

[Mick Harper]

Is this a sports story? Just about.
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Let’s talk darts! No, let’s not. December 18, 2023
Because it’s played by men with beer bellies and
watched by women with peroxided hair

But why not the other way round? It’s the one sport where gender lends no advantage. Untrue! According to the latest research, women have an aversion to scaled down weapons of war, a poor grasp of spatial geometry vide parking a car, and cannot subtract from 301.

Be that as it may, it is incumbent on those of us here at Medium, responsible for the smooth running of the world, to take cognisance of this report from our house journal, the Guardian

[Mick Harper]

The politics of sports are often more entertaining than the sports themselves.
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What are women for? December 23, 2023
To make money out of, of course

You’ve probably never heard of the R & A, but it stands for Royal & Ancient and is the governing body of British golf. You’re probably too young to remember but the R & A was among the last institutions in Britain to allow women in, at their HQ, St Andrews in Scotland — where golf was invented and later given to the world.