Let’s have all sport returned to us...
WHAT a wonderful display of the power of a unified, collective public voice we had recently. What a pity it took a threatened sport to produce it.
As far as football is concerned, it’s about time! Nearly 40 years ago, the process began with business taking over and fans became a giant pocket to continually pick.
This was the decade when unfettered capitalism and greed became the norm.
If you ever doubted the power of marketing, consider the following examples. Remember being seduced into paying to watch football on TV when it was already there?
Stadia becoming all-seaters in the wake of preventable tragedies and corporate boxes aplenty?
Ticket prices and merchandise at extortionate rates, and obscene wages for the sporting mercenaries feeding an entourage of agents?
I have often thought of football as a metaphor or microcosm for the wider world. When is enough
enough? Can greed and power ever be sated? The same is happening with cricket. Only those with money in mind would lack the sensibilities to suggest altering the terminology.
It is suggested that simpler terms would help attract fans – an insult to our intelligence!
Let’s have cricket back on terrestrial TV, to attract fans like it always did. In fact, let’s have all sport returned to us, rich and poor. As one protest banner read: ‘Made by the poor, stolen by the rich’. Don’t stop now, football fans; do us all a favour and make sport affordable to all.
Peter Lawrence Dursley, Gloucestershire