The most brutal sport on earth: Dozens of muscle-bound men punch, kick and wrestle each other in Italy’s traditional Calcio Fiorentino version of soccer as Apple CEO Tim Cook watches from the crowd
The most brutal sport on earth: Dozens of muscle-bound men punch, kick and wrestle each other in Italy’s traditional Calcio Fiorentino version of soccer as Apple CEO Tim Cook watches from the crowd
Appears to have several referees. What do they do?
What is the stereotype? It is not that the Italians are tough and like a good fight.
You mean that Gay men like watching a bit of Rough? Quite a bit by the looks of it.
And soccer? Football please.
SMFS, the correct term is soccer, derived from Association Football.
SMFS: so wrong on many counts.
Italian rugby is forward dominated, for example. Italians were the hard men of soccer for many years. It’s a very macho culture.
They don’t do *collective* things like dying for a recently invented nation quite the way the Germans do, but that’s a different thing entirely.
It pays not to confuse individual and collective behaviour.
HC
Only the yanks call it soccer. The rest of the world calls it football.
CD
It’s still 3 reverse gears for every forward gear…
@ENLB
Posh Brits used to call it “soccer”, it’s where the term comes from. C.f. “rugger” (for rugby), “Twickers” (Twickenham), “Singers” (Singapore), the naval game of “uckers“. In fact quite a lot of naval slang does the -er or -ers thing (icers, roughers, shippers, four [or nine] O’clockers, sippers, gulpers, homeward bounders, limers, snorkers) though someone like SE would be needed to say how many of those are still in common use.
Having said that, it’s been ages since I heard a Brit use “soccer” in anything other than the ironic sense – either poking fun at the Yanks, or poking fun at people who poke fun at the Yanks and have forgotten it was originally a British affectation.
As lower middle class kids, we always called it soccer or footy.
Chester Draws – “so wrong on many counts. Italian rugby is forward dominated, for example.”
Oh come on. I love Italian rugby, I really do. I hope for them to improve almost as much as I do for Argentina. But if they are trying forward dominated rugby it is not working:
“Italians were the hard men of soccer for many years. It’s a very macho culture.”
The hard men of soccer being right up there with the hard men of musical theatre. It is macho. A culture of diving, crying and cheating.
“It pays not to confuse individual and collective behaviour.”
I never do. The Italians, and the Argentinians, were capable of extreme acts of bravery as long as they did not have to do it in a group. But that is kind of the point.
The hard men of soccer being right up there with the hard men of musical theatre. It is macho. A culture of diving, crying and cheating.
That’s modern football.
Up to the 90’s the Italians always fielded a player of the Vinnie Jones mentality (but generally rather better at football) in their national and club sides. Men who hurt people for a living if they touched one of their important players the wrong way.
That was an era when football was still a rough game — when the Bulgarians could beat Brazil by hacking Pele so much he could barely run. And the Italians were masters at it.
(TV has softened football, just as it has rugby, because all the hidden thuggery and brutality is now visible for endless repeat. People cheated like fury back in the past, but it wasn’t caught on camera.)
And while the Italian rugby team isn’t much chop, it’s because their player base is tiny and their backs are useless. Their forwards are usually fine.
Only the yanks call it soccer. The rest of the world calls it football.
That’s only because the rest of the world is full of wogs too dim to watch a college football game on Saturday afternoon. If they did, they’d call soccer, soccer… as God intended.
I love Premier League soccer, but to try to argue it’s football, especially when there’s Ohio State vs. Michigan, only invites mockery.
I call it soccer.
But that’s only to wind up the oiks. I couldn’t care less about the game.
Up to the 90’s the Italians always fielded a player of the Vinnie Jones mentality (but generally rather better at football) in their national and club sides. Men who hurt people for a living if they touched one of their important players the wrong way.
Franco Baresi. What a filthy bastard.
Anyway, I insist on calling it football as it seems to irritate the rugby crowd who insist on calling it soccer to irritate the football crowd. Actually, I call it football because about 97% of the British population call it that.
Footie is for nancies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUbn5ss8j9c
(Yeah, it’s a movie, but not a million miles from reality.)
Common use:
roughers, shippers, four o’clockers, snorkers
Dead due to Black Tot Day:
sippers, gulpers
Never heard used:
icers, homeward bounders, limers, nine o’clockers.
@SE
Cheers. Knew you’d come up trumps. Top man.
Monsieur le Pensant
I knew I could rely on you 😉
DtP, what you call football is just rugby league for nancy boys.
DtP:
Rupert Giles:
Never heard used:
icers,
Common among bootnecks, meaning cold. Opposite of redders.
Firstly, there are hard men in lots of sports and there are cheats in some – grabbing Gazza’s balls is not the action of a hard man, it is the action of a cheat.
I went from a school that played soccer to one that played rugger – both used the same language so it’s not just how posh you are.
@ Tom J – many thanks: I can visually it but can’t get the quote right.
But rugger isn’t *that* tough – Alf used to recruit one of the Varsity forwards if he was short of a decent heavyweight to fight Cambridge and they (apart from one who virtually never talked to me) reckoned they needed to be *much* fitter to box than to play rugger.
Footnote: sixty years ago we played football (of either kind) with leather balls that absorbed water when it rained and/or from the ground after it rained and their impact was significant, often painful: I can remember one of my schoolfriends being felled and concussed by a failed attempt at a conversion. Soccer is a lot softer than it was (unless you are playing against Vinnie Jones).
Apologies – John was a wing-three-quarter: he just happened to be stronger than most of the forwards as well as faster than the Centres. He was also a brilliant boxer (I couldn’t touch him)
SE, if you’ve never heard of nine o’clockers you must be a WAFU.
TimN,
The prefix Harry is often used in conjunction with icers or redders, in fact it works especially well when referring to black masking tape.
I just think it’s rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility should feel compelled to strap on forty pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby.
Wog thinking in all its glory… Quoting a fictional character from a shitty TV show written by Grade A cunt Josh Whedon. Take a look at Whedon and tell me he’s ever played anything more physically demanding and dangerous than lawn darts.
‘Mericans wear of protection in football because when they hit someone, those who get hit aren’t getting back up unless they had that protection. Put a bunch of rugby wogs on a playing field – protected or no – with the likes of Ronnie Lott, Jack Lambert or Reggie White and what you’ll end up with is a bunch of hospitalized rugby wogs.
Mr the P, I’ve looked-up these chaps or blokes of whom you speak. 2/3 appear to be of the wog variety. But putting that aside, they do indeed look very scary in their armour.