I don’t believe it! The not so serious side of the industry
©BBC
No sex please - we’re football fans!
ONE in ten male football fans would rather watch their team play than have sex, according to a survey. The findings show Wolves supporters to be the worst culprits, while followers of the top south coast teams are the most romantic. Researchers discovered football fans watch an average 76 hours of their favourite sport each month - either from the stands or the armchair. And one in four admitted they got a hard time off their partner as a result. The survey for Teletext showed 40%
The Top Ten!
percent of Wolves fans preferred football to sex - and also spent the most amount of time watching games - 1,263 hours a season. By contrast, just 2% of
Southampton supporters said they would rather score on the pitch - with only eight percent incurring the wrath of their wives and girlfriends. Portsmouth fans also came out of it well - spending just 142 hours a season watching the beautiful game, with only four per cent preferring it to sex.
1 Wolves - 40% 2 Bolton - 18% 3 Man City - 16% 4 Arsenal - 13% 5 Aston Villa - 12% = Leicester - 12% = Liverpool - 12% 8 Chelsea - 11% 9 Birmingham - 10% = Charlton - 10% = Newcastle - 10%
Greenkeeper on the ‘cutting edge’
But you can bet the air turns blue in North London when Arsenal are playing at home. Gunners fans got in the most trouble with their partners over football (38%), while 86% of, you guessed it, Wolves fans said they suffered from depression if they were unable to watch their team. Former Wolves star Kenny Hibbitt admitted the figures made uncomfortable reading, but predicted fans of the West Midlands club would have become less interested in football by the end of the season.
At the other end of the scale, Southampton supporter John May insisted he was not surprised by the findings. “It just goes to show that on the south coast we are sex gods!” he boasted. We were unable to get a quote from our own resident ex-
Wolves player, John Richards, or indeed from the self proclaimed office stud and Wolves fan, Dan Hughes ... but it explains a lot!!!
Taylor’ed shirt ....
LOOKS like the dyslexic shirt manufacturers have been at it again! Following on from Blackburn’s David ‘Betnley’ comes West Indian fast bowler Jerome Taylor who took to the pitch in the recent ODI series against Sri Lanka sporting this error.
You could have understood it if it had been the shirt of Warnakulasuriya Patabendige Ushantha Joseph Chaminda Vaas or even Denagamage Proboth Mahela de Silva Jayawardene, but Talyor!!!
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A CHANNEL 4 programme has angered Greenkeeper Gordon Estlick. The Cutting Edge documentary series screened Strictly Baby Fight Club, at the end of April. It showed children as young as four and five in Thai boxing bouts, with their parents egging them on. One nine- year-old was shown in five two-minute rounds in front of 1,000 paying adults in a 23-ft metal cage. Gordon, a Greenkeeper at Lobden Golf Club in Lancashire, is a former world champion bronze medalist, said the programme gave the wrong impression of the sport and described it as ‘sensationalist’. He said: “The programme made it look like full contact fighting. No club I know of would sanction that. They made it look like a blood sport, when, in fact, it’s no different to other martial arts such as Karate and Taekwondo. In Thai boxing, there can be no head contact
until they are 18 - unlike boxing, where the age is 11. The children wear a body shield, shin guards, head guards and 12oz gloves and I’ve never known anyone to be injured - unlike some other sports.”
The martial art is a passion with Gordon. Now 40, he fought for 15 years and was British heavyweight Thai boxing champion. He is a member of the Sparton club in Middleton, near Rochdale who regularly attract forty enthusiasts aged from just three to 40 plus. Gordon said: “We teach them discipline and self control, not aggression, and how to defend themselves. In the ring you have to control your emotions, because if you don’t, you’ve lost. The club is very popular with the kids and they are very well behaved. We start with exercises and stretches, then they have a bit of a spar with the adults and practice their moves.”
Announcer’s polite requests go unheeded ...
A COUPLE of issues ago we reported on the frantic efforts of the stadium announcer at Colchester United who was trying to stop supporters smoking in the stands by threatening burial by the ‘forking’ groundsman in the pitch at half time. Well, it seems that threat didn’t have the desired affect. So, as relegation loomed and smoke wafted across the playing surface, desperate measures were called for. Here are a couple of end of season classics that will have, perhaps, helped to lift the gloom at Layer Road just a
little bit. “There is a no-smoking policy in all parts of the Layer Road ground. Anyone who is caught smoking will be taken away, strapped to an electric chair and electrocuted until they are dead. Thank you.” “There is a no-smoking policy at Layer Road. Anyone caught smoking will be taken to a darkened room, where they will be imprisoned for 27 hours and forced to listen to Will Young records for all of that time. Thank you.” Priceless but, no doubt, unsuccessful!
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