RANT: Fans out of the stands

Now, I'm not a soccer fan. I watch my neice play. I watch the Canadian Junior Team due to knowing personnel there and one of the players. They're pretty good, too [G]. And I watch major soccer events. Any sport, played at its best levels, is usually entertaining.

So, there I was watching the Euro 2004 championship match when I got to watch some mental midget running out of the stands to bring a slow game to a halt. The prematurely brain-dead jogger is lucky I wasn't in charge of security at the Stadium of Lights in Portugal. HAD I been there, snipers would have been stationed up in the rafters with instuctions to knee-cap any invaders of the soccer soil. Apologies would have been extended upon finding out the cranially-challenged chump wasn't a terrorist after all. But the idiot would have had a reminder of the cost of stupidity.

I'm a bit right of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney when it comes to (usually inebriated) fans invading the playing fields. I think the crap should be beaten out of them at the minimum. You think its a co-incidence that there's been few field invasions in football since Mike Curtis laid out such a adventurer with a bone-crushing tackle lo these many years ago? At least I think it was Curtis, maybe it was Ted Hendricks. At any rate, the right of players to take affront in football has been established. Heck, I'd electrify the seats of any morons who reach OVER the railings for ball STILL in play at a baseball game. Haven't worked out how to prevent injury to the players, but you have the basic idea of what I think about fans interfering with sports I sit and watch at home.

When Tom Gamboa got hurt bad enough to actually end his baseball coaching career by that father-and-son goon tag team in Chicago, I thought something stronger would be done with the laws surrounding making a jackass of yourself at a public sporting event. Maybe charge them with inciting a riot (a riot for THEIR blood, but a riot nonetheless). Whatever. It should say on the back of every ticket sold, and announced early, before the beer starts flowing, that going onto the field during play is subject to a year in jail and the confiscation of EVERYTHING YOU OWN. None of this one night in jail and a wagging finger in the face. Throw the book and everything else at them.

You know you are a moron when ... you find yourself on the field without a uniform, while the game is going on, and you AREN'T one of the officials.