A replacement for football?

a guest contributor writes...

With the recent scandal concerning Thierry Henry and the Ireland-France playoff, we can see how important football has become to national identities. Even the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach), Brian Cowen has stepped in, demanding a rematch. This seems to have blown the whole thing out of proportion; perhaps it should be accepted that it is a fundamental rule of the game that the referee's decision overrides the fundamental rules of the game.

As someone with close to no knowledge of the game of foot-the-ball, you may find it insulting that I am attempting to comment on the recent events at the playoff match between the teams of the Republics of Ireland and France. I don’t care; I’ll do it anyway.

As I understand it, the player Thierry Henry touched the ball one, nay two times in the Irish penalty area, leading to a goal. This seems to me as wrong; surely there is a rul that forbids non-goalkeeper players from handling the ball. I looked it up in the FA 1981 Book of Rules and Stuff, and apparently there is such a thing as the “hand-ball-rule”, or something. In other areas, players are being bought and sold like commodities, and managers are being mutinied against and thrown out like bottles of sour milk.

Football as a whole seems to have been blown out of proportion. It is no longer the realm of pleasant university matches, leather balls and top-hatted spectators. The commentator with the clearly enunciated Received Pronunciation is also a thing of the past. Perhaps it is time to return to that age, and to start afresh with the core elements of the game, or perhaps it is time to find a replacement.


I feel that an ideal replacement for the noble game of footy would be the ancient South Asian team sport of Kabaddi. It has some very interesting rules which would certainly stop it from becoming part of a serious world full of serious economics and highly-paid-slave-trading. In the game there are two teams in different halves of a field, and they take it in turns to throw members of their own team into the opposite half to writhe and wrestle on the floor with members of the other team, and to "tag" them. Once this strange practise is completed, the player must return to his own half. The players must hold their breaths during all of this. Genious.

A website has provided me with a list of the skills needed to play Kabaddi like a pro. I'm sure not all football players could pull these off. They include "Taunting" (well...), "Touching with the hand" (fine, OK...), "Raid" (yeah, but...), and "Penetration" (we won't go into that). All in all, a wider portfolio of fun skills, thrills and spills which will enthrall a British and worldwide audience once they are disillusioned with the crazy world of football. So, think about it. Soon football itself could be a thing of the past, replaced by the All-UK Kabaddi League. Of course, that would mean the end of this blog. Sorry.

Now, move along. Go back to watching I'm a Celebrity, or hitting each other, or whatever it is people do these days...