A proper balls-up in the snow – James Calvert
Watching the snowy football last Sunday was like a nostalgic and enjoyable trip down memory lane. Although all major grounds in England now have undersoil heating, in the games I watched the heating couldn’t keep up and the green grass was slowly replaced by a blanket of white. While that may not have been ideal for puritans looking for perfect football, it made things feel a bit more real and raw, harking back to the days when players had to turn out on imperfect pitches week after week. You know, games played on patchy grass where players would often come off at the end looking like they had been dragged backward through a muddy puddle (in most cases because they had been dragged backward through a muddy puddle). There was one problem with last Sunday’s matches though – on television it often looked like we were watching 22 grown men running round the pitch chasing an invisible ball. I am guessing the players could see what was happening, and maybe if you were actually in the ground the proceedings were reasonably visible. But on TV it was an almost comical spectacle as grown men chased each other for no apparent reason. Which begs the question, what happened to brightly...