Recently our local paper published a list of players who were going to miss finals football because of injury.These were not people who had fallen down a hole, or been in a road accident or been beaten by their wife with a golf club. These people had been injured by opponents in what is ostensibly a game.
I ask whether any activity where players set out to damage their opponents can lay claim to be called sport, and whether such an activity should be allowed to draw on the country's medical resources to mend that damage.
The injury lists could probably have been taken from any of the past 20 weeks, the result of highly trained young men attacking each other in front of thousands of people. I am not talking about fighting, affectionately known as biffo. I am talking about the game itself, in which the chances of winning are greatly increased by causing as much pain as possible to your opponents.
Police look on benignly; clergymen bless them; a politician may turn up to watch. There is no emperor in the stands to give a thumbs up or down for performance; instead there are fans (short for fanatics) who applaud thuggery and suggest that any participant who is less than enthusiastic in battering an opponent is unworthy to be part of the spectacle.
They may not put it like that — it is usually couched in terms suggesting uncertain parentage, indeterminate gender and unconventional sexual practices.
Read your local paper any weekend for the litany of concussions, broken bones, corked thighs, sprained ankles and damaged vertebrae — bodies that have been absorbing punishment that if it were meted out in any other context would attract a prison sentence. Monday after Monday we read it: players out for weeks, players on crutches, eye gouges, broken cheekbones, dislocated joints.
And the adults who are in charge of these muddied oafs protect the offending player ('it's a man's game') and hire a Queen's Counsel accustomed to defending murderers to plead their case in front of the judiciary, so that they can be back the next weekend to continue the havoc.
I pick on the rugby codes in particular. Aussie Rules does require a number of skills — you have to be able to catch and run and kick, and the playing field is sufficiently large that all these skills are needed.
Even though they glory in the