Brutes in Boots: Strength Has Replaced Skill in the English Game

After seeing the horrific injury inflicted on Eduardo Da Silva today, I couldn’t help but try to imagine a game where these sorts of injuries were impossible.

This professional has worked hard his whole life, eaten the right foods, trained harder than we can imagine for many years, and given up his teenage years chasing girls and drinking beer, to get to where he is today only to have some brute with no class possibly end his career in a split-second.

Eduardo Da Silva can never get those years back, and nor will he have much future in football unless he is very lucky, and for what? To watch the same thing happen to some other poor soul in a few months time?

Now I know what I am about to say will be ridiculed and passed off as another of these new-fangled ideas, such as most things are these days, but I believe football has problems.

This is nothing new to anyone that has followed the game in the last 100 years, but with all the furor over ticket prices and the great money debate, we have lost sight of our beautiful game.

Having played myself at a reasonably high standard, I feel I have the right to an opinion on the matter, well at least as much right as the top guys in the suits that seem so reluctant to alter everything bad about our game.

Anyway, enough about that, or we would be here all night.

My biggest concern about our modern game is the reliance on brute strength and physical size to bully other players. What happened to the technical side of the game? I would go so far as to ask "Other than technique, skill and speed, IS there another side of the game?"

Week-in, week-out, I see grown men fall to the ground like they have been shot at by Napoleon’s best gunners. Now, I think diving is possibly more despicable than the heavy-handed approach we see these days, but most of these players fall to the floor because, if they don’t go down, the referee will do nothing.

Football should, in my opinion be about skill, speed, and technique. Not about who has the tallest center-backs and the boniest elbows.

It seems to be a worldwide disease, but here in England it is at its worst. Here, we pride ourselves on having players that can shove people out of the way with their physical strength, man-handle attackers in the penalty box, and get away with it.

I know some of the older generation of football fans will be sitting there thinking that this is the way the game should be played, and perhaps they are right. But, do football fans pay money to watch John Terry or the Italian brute Matterazzi, for example, give a master-class in holding onto players’ shirts, taking out the most skillful player on the pitch, and generally barging his way through the back of any striker that dares to jump for a high ball?

No, they pay money to watch flair, dribbling, skill they cannot do themselves, there-in lies the beauty of our game.

But in returning to the disgusting assault I witnessed today at the Birmingham "game,” it struck me that the nature of these sorts of injuries occurs when a stationary knee and a stationary foot, are snapped in two by great force. Obviously, but when players are wearing studs, their foot is temporarily stuck into the ground, therefore having nothing to take the force of the challenge except pure bone. 

Would wearing Astroturf-type boots allow the victim’s leg to be simply swiped out of the picture, rather than being snapped into a thousand pieces by an unskilled center back?

Yes, I’m suggesting abolishing studs. Is there any need for them in the modern professional game? I’m sure you are thinking the same as me, “we need them for grip,” but I am thinking on a purely professional level here. 

Nowadays, the pros play on putting green grass every week, meticulously maintained, and re-seeded weekly.

Football has gotten too rough. I shudder to think how much young talent has been lost through career-ending injuries, poor coaching and the general psyche that fouling is "part of the game.” That’s crap!

It’s this attitude of Jonny Foreigner, the diver, which has influenced many a young footballer to abandon skill in favor of deception and rugged tactics. 

Does anyone know how long it has been since this country produced a world footballer of the year?  Me neither, and I wonder how long we will have to wait for another?

In short, why is there any need to foul anyone?

Lack of skill is all I can attribute it to, and I pray for the day the John Terrys and Phillipe Senderos of this world can be resigned to the dustbin of football, allowing the skill and creativity of our beautiful game to shine back through.

You may think I’m a dreamer, well, as John Lennon said, “I’m not the only one.”