I was watching a Real Madrid soccer game recently, and they were beating the other team by a couple of goals, and the commentator mentioned this discrepancy in the score line, but indicated of the opposing team: “…but they’re not giving up!” It seems like somebody says this during the on-air analysis of every game I ever watch on television. Maybe there’s only so much you can actually think to say about a sports game when you have to talk about them week after week; I don’t know. But it got me wondering: was there a time when things were different in sports?
Before I was born, maybe teams would give up when they were losing. If that were the case, then there would be a reason why all these commentators would feel like they had to stress the point that the other team wasn’t going to just give up: you know, for the older viewers, so they wouldn’t just switch off the game. Because maybe it used to be that when a team was losing, they would just say: “This is no fun anymore, so we’re just going home.” Or maybe if they were already at their home field, they could say: “You’re being really rude to your hosts by not letting us win, so get out of our stadium!” Then the home crowd could have thrown hot dogs and popcorn and stuff on them as they left with their tails between their legs for having offended their host team after they had invited them over and all. And maybe they wouldn’t get invited to play anyone else, after everyone found out that they just wanted to win, and they didn’t care whose feelings they ended up hurting.
If that’s the way it was, it would explain a lot, because I’ve never seen a team completely give up and leave the field before in the middle of a game, no matter how badly they were losing. But maybe they should, once in a while, just to keep things interesting. Especially in soccer, where the referee calls are so often shown to be completely wrong upon replay, which everyone at the stadium gets to see on the huge screens nowadays, maybe the team who gets screwed by the call should just say: “That’s not fair, so we’re going home.” Then, maybe they’d change that stupid rule and let soccer games be fairly refereed from then on: with video replay. But probably not, because then they couldn’t be corrupt and cheat, and that would spoil it for everyone.
