The Spectator at war: The great game

From The Spectator, 28 November 1914:

Professional football is something worse than an excuse for young men who refuse to do their duty. It is actually an incentive to them to continue their lives in the ignoble ordinary way, because the very continuance of the games suggests that everything is going on as usual. In the midst of the clamour of a popular match, when nothing seems more important than that Jones should have dashed his way through the opposing backs, or that Smith should have “saved” by a miraculous feat of agility, or that one rich and powerful club should be whispered to be intriguing to buy that wonderful player Blank from another club, powerful but not quite so rich—in the midst of these things, we say, it is almost impossible for the young man to picture to himself those scenes in the trenches only forty miles from Dover, which ought to beckon him to where all his ideal conceptions of how a great game should be played may be put into practice.