As soon as strong feelings of rivalry arouse, the notion of playing the game, according to the rules, always vanishes.

People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they forget that victory

gain through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless.

Even when the spectators don't intervene physically, they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and rattling opposing players with booze and insults.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred,

jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure and witnessing violence.

In other words, it is war minus the shooting. Welcome to It Was What It Was, the Football History

podcast. I'm Jonathan Wilson. I'm with Rob Draper.

And that was, I think, an excellent impression of George Orwell. And that's from his famous piece in Tribune on the 14th of December, 1945. So it's the 80th anniversary this week of that famous piece. And that line, war minus the shooting, you see

quoted regularly, often slightly out of context. But really, I think that line, that passage

exemplifies Orwell's attitude to sport. Orwell, I guess we should explain to people. Very famous

left-wing English writer.

He fought in the Spanish Civil War.

He wrote 1984, he wrote Animal Farm, a leftist who became very opposed to communism

as it was practiced in the Soviet Union.

What he saw in the Spanish Civil War really affected him.

And he's now, I think, probably the most quoted English left-wing figure of the 20th century.

What prompts that essay is a tour earlier that year by Donama Moscow of Britain.

And that's a tour that really took on great political dimensions.

It was gained huge crowds.

It's a very, very good to know on Moscow side,

but really the football was only part of the story.

...