Slow-Motion Football – Good Fun At Denaby

May 1926

Mexborough and Swinton Times, May 21, 1926

Slow-Motion Football
Good Fun At Denaby
A Referee’s Lapse

Thirteen men, including a referee and a linesman, were ordered off the field during a football match on the Denaby United ground on Wednesday. This disgraceful conduct has not been reported to the Football Association, and I understand that efforts are being made to hush the matter up. Having from time to time written a good deal about the purity of the game, I am not sure I can approve of the hushing up, but – well, we shall see. Perhaps as the official in charge of the game was among the delinquents no one in authority feels it incumbent upon him to make the report. He sent off the other twelve, and in the end they retaliated and sent him off.

The trouble arose through the introduction of a new law of the game, which has not the authority of the International Board of Control. It lays down that no player or official in the game must at any time break out of a walk while on the field! The organisers of the game called it ‘A Walking Football Match.’

It is remarkable how difficult it is not to run when you are forbidden to. Irreverent persons have been known to invent jokes about the majestic gait of policemen, and, with heavy sarcasm, pretend to try to convince their victims that they once saw a ‘copper’ run. Such jokes are in the worst of taste, of course, but, joking apart. I defy the most stolid and self-controlled team of policemen to have remained on the field in-fact at the end of the 60 minutes’ play on Wednesday (Perhaps the organisers of the revels at Denaby would like to try the experiment).

One usually looks for the greatest speed in a football team out on the wings. On Wednesday it was not so. The fastest players were two tall gentlemen with extremely long legs, and a stoutly built one who, I was told, easily won a walking race the day before. I quite believe it. He was always somewhere near the ball, and he would touch it neatly past an opponent, nip numbly round, and scurry away up field, leaving the others trudging along well behind – and all without incurring the referee’s displeasure. But once one of the tall gentlemen overdid it. His long legs had carried him well through, and in a long half-minute of suspense we held our breath to see whether he or the much shorter gentleman who was defending the goal would get to the stationary ball first. Well, the short one had a good start, and six yards from home it looked a sure thing on him, and – well I ask you, what would you do? The tall gentleman tried to walk faster – and the referee blew his whistle. The referee seemed to be quite enjoying that whistle. He blew it no fewer than eleven times in the first half for the sole purpose of ordering men off the field – and seemed to take an actual delight in it, the spiteful creature! But we all got the laugh of him in the end. He made the biggest hit of the entertainment about halfway through the second half, when he caught A. M. Carlin, one of his linesmen, running for a ball which had gone into touch; but it absolutely brought the house down when, a little later, Referee Farr got lost in an exciting scrimmage near goal, and, on a charge of unlawfully running on the public field and, pleading guilty, was at once committed for the rest of the game. The second linesman, by the way, took no risks; he took a seat in the middle of his touch-line, and, so far as I remember, refused to be tempted out of it. It is difficult sometimes to trust even one’s own legs.

However the players and officials – I must say this for them – were all thorough sportsmen, and took their dismissals very nicely. So did the crowd! There was a good many hundreds of it, and it soon shouted encouragement when the sendings-off flagged for a bit. Apparently the object of the game is for the crowd to take sides with strong partianship, and by the basest methods they can devise to do all in their power to ‘slow-time’ their enemy’s team to break into quick time; in the hope that in the end there will be only their own team left on the ground to score as many goals as they liked.

But there are one or two points I very much desire to be cleared up. One is, should a handicap be put on a player for every inch of leg-length over the average of his opponents? If not, will transfer fees – in the event of this new law being enforced by the F.A. – in future be fixed according to the length of the players’ pedal limbs? Another knotty point for the legislators is this: Is a goalkeeper ‘running,’ within the meaning of the Act, if he hurls his body across the goal to save a ball, both feet being off the ground at the time? Another is –

Oh! about the game! I’m sorry, but I have had no training at the reporting of this class of football yet, and him able to supply very little detailed description. As a matter-of-fact, I was having mental bets with myself that a certain little gentleman who played on the right wing for the team in black and amber jerseys would not be persuaded to run. I lost!

I’ve even forgotten the result. I believe the Institute beat the Welfare by two goals to none. But I advise the Sports Editor not to publish that as authentic without confirmation. You see I was hardly qualified to report on the game. My eyes were running!