Shoot the ref

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY

There is only one sensible way to read a news- paper—the way I do. You start, as do all men

of taste and judgment, at the back, and only when you have digested the doings of the sporting heroes of our time are you in a fit condition to have a go at the hard news and the soft thoughts nearer the front end.

But this week has been different. If you happened to read the sporting chaps this week your blood will be boiling—in fact, some.,of it will be spilling; your rag will be out, and the one thing you will be sure of about yourself is

that you're a xenophobe. For .I refuse to believe

that any red-blooded Britisher isn't in a white hot rage about what those wops did to our boys out there in that cauldron of hell and horror which they call the Boca Stadium down Argen- tina way.

That well-known satirical White Russian, Mr Bernard Levin, has spotted this. In what all fair-minded people will consider to be the most reasoned column ever to appear on the subject, Comrade Levin points out the utter dastardli- ness of the filthy foreign swine our lads have

been fighting against in a faraway land of which I know nothing. Writing in the Daily Mail, Mr

Levin can scarcely contain himself. With justi- fied rage he recounts how the horrors we were playing against—not for money, mind you, but for honour and the fair name of England— simply ignored all our efforts to contain them and devoted themselves with evil singleminded- ness to scoring goals against us.

I quote his remarks about' a quite clever enemy : 'he deliberately avoided or ran round an England player, and then, finally, when he was only a few yards from the English goal, he deliberately and savagely kicked the ball into

the net.' And now I quote again; the man is

talking about the arrogant way these foreign fellows behaved; apparently when they 'took the field in the alarmingly intimate, vertiginous stadium, a catherine-wheel came whizzing and hissing from the steep terraces behind one goal

to explode in bright scarlet conflagration. At the other end a second firework burned first brilliant white, then gave off pantomime demon clouds of billowing red.' There is just one point. The first quote, as I said, was from B. Levin; the second was from B. Glanville of The Times.

As usual, whenever B. Levin is not being insane he is being far more sane than most other people. We had the total idiocy, for instance, of Peter Lorenzo writing in the Sun: 'Now I know why they call it the most terrifying experience in the world.' Which makes me think that I know why they call Mr Lorenzo the most terrifying experience in the world.

Since I am fond of Mr Lorenzo I think, for the sake of his amour pro pre, that I must make it clear that he is not alone. He is just the first one I read about, because the Sun, printed in Manchester, just like the Mail and the Express, was the only one to have the Estudiantes match on the front page on the Thursday morning, in my editions at least. Virtue is quite often not its own reward.

But it does raise the good old question aboin our sportswriting chaps. The days of the fellows who talked about the custodian and the spheroid, not to mention the period of quietude that then ensued, have gone. But look at the lads now. They are terrible. There are no prizes for identifying the sources. 'Now that we have stopped playing cricket against South Africa for political reasons, how long must it be before we stop playing football against South America for medical reasons?' And this one : '[they] were allowed to pass the ball freely from one to another, to run with it, to bang it with their heads, and even—in the case of their goal- keeper—to pick it up.' You guessed that one was Levin, of course. Not the first quote, by the way; that was the Guardian. But what about these two? Where do they come from? 'The bastards were after me even before I got on the plane': and 'but it was not until the last minutes of the game that the final, unspeakable, unforgivable, obscene, and shameful incident occurred.' Of course you recognise them. One was the Mail; the other was the Mail. But who was the sportswriter and who was the satirist? Find out for yourself.

The point is this; each week I read about the unspeakable brutality of the average Football League game. And yet when these same experts in Mayhem go abroad they become clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful. I begin to think _your average sportswriter is like your Mistress Quickly. He is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. A man knows not where to have him. But like the rest of you, including Freddie Ayer, I shall be there again on Saturday, filing through the turnstiles.