A day out at a footie game now is more a family day out rather than the grim scenes shown in that video. There are still idiots about and I'm sure there are still some problems here and there, but those knuckleheads are into violence, not football. They are certainly not the norm and I have not once seen any in the 20 years or so I've been going to watch football.

While it is unfortunately linked to the game of football it is done so mainly by

people stuck with the image of a bygone era /
those who simply hate the game /
those who are somehow 'jealous' of the popularity of the game

*(delete as necessary),

......it actually has nothing to do with the actual game of football.

2pints summed it up well.

I think I said it yesterday, but I'm not trying to convert you/anyone to my religion. So there is no need to get all touchy about it.

That Pom was a Scottish great, legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly.

JA, why is the worship of football any less serious than the worship of "God"?
At least with a football team, they are there in front of you, a physical entity and not some conjured up story to control the lives and minds of the masses.

Football is THE greatest sport, I love playing football and although I'm nowhere near good enough for the pro league, are you seriously telling me that if somebody came to you and said they were gonna give you oodles of cash to do something that you love, you would turn it down for the "purity of the sport"??

Now who's having who on??

scouser has had that Shankly quote as his sig for a long time now.

so he has!!

Mantas, you are correct in saying that hooliganism has followed football around and has been a monkey on our back. The reasons of which I'm unsure, because as you say other more physical sports such as rugby does not produce such violence. The only answer I could give would be that Rugby is the posh man's sport, a public school game played (at first) by the upper classes. Football was always a working man's game and at the end of a long week of working, stresses often were expressed after a good few bevvies in the pub and a game of footy. Also the precursor to football was a very violent affair, with whole towns and villages taking part, trying to wrestle, kick, punch the ball from one town to another. As a result tempers frayed and people got hurt. One of the reasons behind standardising the rules was to stop the players from getting injured, so the violence stopped in the game, but the fans were just as excitable.
Its not an excuse, just an observation.

Tubby,

I couldn't argue with this bit ...


Worship of anything is a problem for me, whether that be a physical entity or an imagined one.

cool

was just making sure

For me, there were two Olympic highlights.

The first was Usain Bolt's jawdropper in the 100m.

The second was listening to all the athletics bods moaning about him not running through the line. Athletics has to be one of the most boring sports ever broadcast on tv. Mr. Bolt comes along and actually gives us an all too needed "wow!" moment, and all athletics people can do is slag him off, probably out of a combination of jealousy and having their head up their ass about athletics and what it means to the average person. Thousands of athletes has run through the line in Olympics. Almost all of them have been completely forgotten. Noone who saw that race will forget Usain Bolt.

That was incredible wasn't it (both the run and the moaning).

My Olympic highlight was the super heavyweight weightlifter Matthias Steiner of Germany, on his last lift, whacked a massive 10kg extra on the bar ( he was pretty much at his max on his previous lift) and the last lift was a herculean effort, not too far off the world record and he nailed it and the gold medal and promptly "lost it" in euphoric, hysterical jubilation/crying - his wife had died the previous year and he had moved to Germany from Austria after a fallout with the Austria Weightlifting Assoc. He had just passed the residency requirements to lift for Germany. He had had a tough few years and let it all out after that last lift.
The Russian who had been a almost certain shoo-in for gold before that last miracle lift, just shrugged his shoulders and shook his head that said it all.

shame you cant see a clip of it on youtube et al: The IOC are copyright Nazi's. They had a team scouring major video sites taking down
Olympic clips within hours of them being upped - 1000's a day.

Yes, how dare they try to protect their copyrights from people who wanted to ignore them.

Perhaps I was too harsh with nazi, dick is a better word: How dare they be such dicks about people viewing the Olympics in the first place.

The Olympics are generally available on free to air TV all over the world and streamed on the net in certain countries with many clips available for free viewing on the host broadcasters website.
Some countries had 100's of hours of broadcasts.

BUT each country has to exclusively broadcast and allow access only to users within that country with blackouts on the internet and radio.
For example TVNZ in NZ had a decent website with a huge selection of clips available freely to NZ users only.
A kiwi living overseas was unable to view them, these are the people who want to view these clips the most, ex-pats with no other way to view the progress of their own country.
Black and white - cant view them, no legal option to even pay to view them.
Luckily I myself am tech savvy enough to use a proxy server to by pass the area restrictions and watch stuff in other countries.

An [insert any other nationality here] living in Japan could only see what was broadcast on JTV or streamed or hosted on a Japanese website. That's it no other options. Judo, football, softball baseball, swimming, gymnastics, ping pong, badminton - that's it.
So if you wanted to see how your countrymen on? Go suck eggs - we have the technology to do it, but you are in the wrong place.
FWIW NHK had a pitiful website offering of clips but wall to wall TV coverage. If this where the UK and BBC I could have linked a nice free vid the BBC had on their website of the weightlifter.


It's not a pirated movie people are trying to watch, its a something that was freely available on TV or the net (if your country was good enough to show it!)

The IOC have missed the Olympic spirit, it often at the Olympics that people want to see how their home country is doing, yet the IOC has effectively alienated them and given zero option (other than relatives recording and sending over) of seeing footage of the home country. If I want to watch a rugby test - I subscribe to JSports, if I want to watch premier League soccer ditto, NFL: Gaora, AFL in Australia - Pacsat. I want to watch my country performing at the Olympics....I don't mind paying to see stuff I want to see, here there was no option.

If someone upped an Olympic clip on youtube - I say bravo, the IOC are being dicks (corrupt - I'll take a nice backhander anyday dicks) so good on a little internet rebellion against their dumb policies and thank god for torrents.

>"people think that football is a matter of life or death in this country, when in actual fact it's much more serious than that"<

>"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. It is much, much more serious than that"<

Pretty close eh TB? And not too bad considering the quote was told to me by my London flat mate in 1989. . Sorry about the blasphemous comment about it coming from a Pomm.
BTW your analogy was spot on

2pints......Denial man, it's just de river in Egypt.

Not really following you there Mantas, a bit more explanation is required!

I'm just standing y my comment about hooligans linked to football but didn't feel I fitted into any of you three catogories.

While it is unfortunately linked to the game of football it is done so mainly by

people stuck with the image of a bygone era /
Nope. Some incidents are very recent.

those who simply hate the game /
Nope. My boy plays every Saturday. I love it.

those who are somehow 'jealous' of the popularity of the game
Nope. I don't really understand it's popularity but jealous pffft. I don't really care how popular my sport of choice is or isn't. And I'm certainly not comparing it to football.

*(delete as necessary),

......it actually has nothing to do with the actual game of football.
Technically your right. Holigans don't actually play the game. To suggest there is no link......, come on. There is no other sporting code I know of that atracts these type of thugs.

Let me answer on behalf of 2pints:

people stuck with the image of a bygone era /
Nope. Some incidents are very recent.

>>>> Yep. The current game may see the odd outbreak by knuckleheads, but they are now very much rarer than in the videos shown above. As 2pints said, going to a game now is a very different experience than it was just 15-20 years ago. For one thing, thugs simply can't afford it now. There are also sometimes fights at cricket and rugby games, but we don't hear about those quite as much do we? If someone calls someone else a pansy-boy at a footie match now, it gets reported and sensationalised as hooligan anarchy.

those who simply hate the game /
Nope. My boy plays every Saturday. I love it.

>>>> Did 2pints,mate say that you hated the game?
Lots of people do and will scrape at anything to have a rag at footie.

those who are somehow 'jealous' of the popularity of the game
Nope. I don't really understand it's popularity but jealous pffft. I don't really care how popular my sport of choice is or isn't. And I'm certainly not comparing it to football.

>>>> Did 2pints,mate say that you were jealous?
It's a fact that lots of people feel that footie is unjustly popular, and there is a lot of resentment towards it for that reason. (I personally know some ex-rugby players and fans who really are jealous of the attention the game gets and the money involved). Believe it or not, it's there.

*(delete as necessary),

......it actually has nothing to do with the actual game of football.
Technically your right. Holigans don't actually play the game. To suggest there is no link......, come on. There is no other sporting code I know of that atracts these type of thugs.
>>>> There actually is little link with football these days. No other sport in the world is anywhere near as popular as football. No other sport has anywhere near as much passion in it/among its supporters as football. Perhaps those small points have something to do with it, there are knuckleheads in every aspect of life.

Anyway, I really do not care if anyone else on here likes football or not as it really doesn't affect me.
Just shedding some light, you know?

I'm sure the football haters will resent this conversation in the Olympic Highlights thread. As such, I will retire at this point.

You do make a good point pie-eater about passion in sport.

Regardless of the sport being engaged in OR the level at which it is played at - passion can sometimes beget violence/aggression/confrontation.

We recently saw a nasty case of an all in brawl between a large group of team supporters in a childrens game of Aussie Rules football at local club level. It was a final game, emotions were high, parents were pumped for thier kids game and when a couple of things went differently to thier liking it became anarchy - got quite wide press locally.

In our own case one of our coaches for primary school aged kids was asked not to run with the team for the final couple of weeks of Rugby Union due to too many complaints about the aggressive one eyed argumentative behaviour. However this bloke LOVES these kids, loves the sport an is there at the field rain hail or shine training this unrooly group of boys without pay or compensation - just for the love of it. He was there last year, and the year before and the year before that ...and he will be there next year too. PASSION.

But there is a price to passion...
I don't have any answers, but this kind of 'ugly sportsmanship' happens in most sports.

>>>> Did 2pints,mate say that you hated the game?

>>>> Did 2pints,mate say that you were jealous?

No he didn't. He said that if I were to suggest that there was a link between football and hooligans, I had to be in one of his three catogories, which I wasn't.

Anyway, enough from me too.

No, I did not.

Here is what I actually said:



Please refer to words 'mainly by'.

I like football. I don't love it. I like watching the olympics, I don't love it.

I love beer.