Surely this is going a little overboard?
Comparing one sport with another one as a form of points-scoring exercise is a pet peeve of ours yet it remains an extremely common practise amongst sports fans.
Stephen Hunt, for example, quickly found out the troubles of comparing GAA to soccer in a Sunday Independent column last year and a column in today’s Daily Telegraph is bound to raise the heckles of a lot of football fans.
In a column about mercurial England fly-half Danny Cipriani, Max Davidson of the Telegraph felt the need to drag up some old stereotypes about football while making the claim that in terms of ethics, rugby and football “are worlds apart”.
The headline for the column – Danny Cipriani is a soft footballer at heart, but even he wouldn’t dive – signposted what was to come, but the way he compares what could only be described as the manly values of rugby compared to the apparent lack of them in football is bound to throw a few noises out of joint.
We’ve included a couple of the more controversial passages of the column below but you can read it in full here.
We fail to see why people can’t take individual sports on their own merits – rugby and football both being excellent sports – rather than having to compare them in an attempt to get the upper hand.
History, however, suggests that this isn’t the last time we’ll see this sort of petty debate.
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