There are many conceits in English football, but the most important one is that you have to be hard. It’s important because unlike many of our footballing traditions, this one has some foundation in reality. England is cold a lot. If you’re going run around on a frozen field for 90 minutes on a Sunday morning chasing a man who may or may not have spent the previous night in the local police station, you can’t cry when he kicks you. That’s human survival.
Marc Albrighton has just scored Leicester City’s second goal of the night and, assuming they don’t go all Arsenal on us, will proceed directly to the quarter finals of the Champions League. Their performance has been everything part 2 of the Ranieri era was not; purposeful, competitive, pressing, intense. They’re irresistible.
How ironic then, that they should be the club representing football’s summiting of Peak Entertainment and beginning the long miserable march downward into unknown (if inevitably uncomfortable) territory.
Image: ANDREW YATES/AFP/Getty Images.
If I went up to a mechanic and started telling them how to do their job based on my knowledge of cars (they’re oily and you shouldn’t put water in the petrol tank), he or she would be perfectly within their rights to chuck me and my car out onto the street.
So when did it become OK to do the same over an incident, just because it appears in the media?
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Kelly Welles 