Matt the Shrimp
aka Harry Potter
Very amusing excerpt from a piece on the Grauniad website by Dara O'Briain. I love his analogy about the Victorians codifying fire or the wheel...
:D
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Football
Sorry, you didn't invent it
Preston football club's ground, Deepdale, is home to the National Football Museum, where I once spent a large chunk of an afternoon marvelling at the sheer brass neck of whoever had collected the memorabilia inside. The depth of exhibits is quite astonishing and 95% of them could be prefixed with the words "the actual". There are the actual balls from the 1930 and 1966 World Cup finals, the actual replacement Jules Rimet trophy (after the original was stolen) and, most impressively, the actual jersey worn by Diego Maradona in the 1986 "Hand of God" match. The thrill of seeing that jersey in a case in front of you can only be a fraction of the emotion that Maradona must have felt when he received a letter from an English football museum requesting it. He must have turned to whoever was standing beside him and gone: "No way! You're sh*tting me, right? This is a gag, isn't it?" To the best of my knowledge, there is no glass case in Hastings containing the arrow that killed Harold.
The museum should lay to rest one old chestnut, though. The English didn't invent football. They codified it, which is a different thing altogether, and a less emotive thing to shout about when you next fail to qualify for the World Cup. You didn't invent football because you didn't invent the ball, or kicking, or fields. We should only be grateful that the Victorians didn't gather together in a room and write the first rules for the use of the wheel, or fire, so that you can claim credit for them as well.
Villages have been dragging, pulling, kicking and running against each other for millennia; you just happened to be the ones with an empire when the upper class took an interest.
It was Cambridge University who initiated the first rules, in 1848; a further 15 years passed until the formation of the FA, and even then the game was sufficiently unrecognisable from the modern version that one of the delegates, from Blackheath, lost a vote to retain shin-kicking and the club promptly left to turn their schism into rugby instead.
And I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm telling you this for your own good. Almost 150 years later, whenever an English team is beaten, the line bemoaning, "This, in a sport we invented", still gets trotted out.
You've got to snap out of this. It's like you want to pour vinegar into the wound. It's a bit like having Maradona's jersey in the middle of the national football museum. Had to pile on a fresh layer of pathos, didn't you? Couldn't just enjoy a nice day out at the football museum. Had to have a little bit of disappointment in the middle of it.
:D
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Football
Sorry, you didn't invent it
Preston football club's ground, Deepdale, is home to the National Football Museum, where I once spent a large chunk of an afternoon marvelling at the sheer brass neck of whoever had collected the memorabilia inside. The depth of exhibits is quite astonishing and 95% of them could be prefixed with the words "the actual". There are the actual balls from the 1930 and 1966 World Cup finals, the actual replacement Jules Rimet trophy (after the original was stolen) and, most impressively, the actual jersey worn by Diego Maradona in the 1986 "Hand of God" match. The thrill of seeing that jersey in a case in front of you can only be a fraction of the emotion that Maradona must have felt when he received a letter from an English football museum requesting it. He must have turned to whoever was standing beside him and gone: "No way! You're sh*tting me, right? This is a gag, isn't it?" To the best of my knowledge, there is no glass case in Hastings containing the arrow that killed Harold.
The museum should lay to rest one old chestnut, though. The English didn't invent football. They codified it, which is a different thing altogether, and a less emotive thing to shout about when you next fail to qualify for the World Cup. You didn't invent football because you didn't invent the ball, or kicking, or fields. We should only be grateful that the Victorians didn't gather together in a room and write the first rules for the use of the wheel, or fire, so that you can claim credit for them as well.
Villages have been dragging, pulling, kicking and running against each other for millennia; you just happened to be the ones with an empire when the upper class took an interest.
It was Cambridge University who initiated the first rules, in 1848; a further 15 years passed until the formation of the FA, and even then the game was sufficiently unrecognisable from the modern version that one of the delegates, from Blackheath, lost a vote to retain shin-kicking and the club promptly left to turn their schism into rugby instead.
And I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm telling you this for your own good. Almost 150 years later, whenever an English team is beaten, the line bemoaning, "This, in a sport we invented", still gets trotted out.
You've got to snap out of this. It's like you want to pour vinegar into the wound. It's a bit like having Maradona's jersey in the middle of the national football museum. Had to pile on a fresh layer of pathos, didn't you? Couldn't just enjoy a nice day out at the football museum. Had to have a little bit of disappointment in the middle of it.
