BLAME IT ON BRUDDERSFIELD

On a day when Hepworth United Under 11s forged a 4-3 victory against Cumberworth B in Division 6 of the Huddersfield and District league (reputedly the largest league in the country), our celebration of this great game is chastened by the news that Feyenoord football hooligans have cause permanent damage to Rome 500 year old Barcaccia Fountain at the base of the "Spanish Steps" in Italy's capital city during violence before their match against Roma during the week.
With the Chelsea supporters' racism in Paris and news that the Italian football club Parma is too poor to stage their Serie A game with Udinese, since their new owner has failed to make payments on debt due in February, it makes me wonder where all this is going? Worse than this, a referee was killed in an amateur game by one punch from an "upset" player during a match in Detriot.
Football is a wonderful game, as our kids experienced this morning on a cold and muddy pitch in the Pennines, but sometimes we must look back at the upheaval in football in the 1890s, when the game changed from being an amateur and gentlemanly sort of affair, into a global engulfing financial giant as professionalism took over.
J.P.Priestly in The Good Companions (1929) wrote about an imaginary Yorkshire textile town Bruddersfield, based on Bradford. He recognised the transformative power of football in the industrial community, where locals escaped from the industrial drudgery of the week's work and the dull life at home, to celebrate with their mates and half the town on a Saturday, at the match, "swapping judgements and thumping each other on the shoulder". It soon evolved into "bad language, free fights and disgraceful scenes" even then.
Thank goodness the "respect barriers" sometimes erected around our junior pitches protect the youngsters from their parents!