This from Rob Smyth in the Guardian:
‘On Saturday afternoon, as news of Lee Bowyer's punch-up with Kieron Dyer filtered through to press-boxes, bars and dressing-rooms up and down the country, there was an almost universal reaction. It wasn't astonishment. It wasn't disgust. It wasn't even sanctimony. It was extreme amusement.
‘The visceral response, however, was soon usurped by the rational one. By Monday morning, high horses everywhere were being straddled with abandon. Alan Shearer called it a disgrace; the Sports Minister Richard Caborn envisioned a blissful utopia in which chairmen infused players with an awareness of their moral responsibilities; a Blaydon MP, whose name we have to withhold for fear of satisfying his risible pursuit of publicity, called for the pair to be chucked out of football forever.
‘It is impossible to ignore the influence of class here. The gentrification of football, which began with Italia 90 and was completed with Euro 96, has a lot to answer for: the imposition of middle-class norms and mores on an intrinsically working-class game has led to an inevitable and uncomfortable jarring. An overwhelming majority of football fans savoured Saturday, like Eric Cantona's kung-fu kick, as a moment of classic black comedy. Nor were they offended by it. Rightly or wrongly, that's the way it is. But the agenda is set by a privileged minority, in the media and the FA, for whom only one response was socially acceptable. The behind-closed-doors reaction was one that dare not snigger its name.
‘Nobody wants to see thuggery prevail, and football has improved since the bruising days when the likes of Claudio Gentile made shinbones quiver, but in the last couple of years it has gone too far. The soul of football demands a certain degree of physicality: it is the fundamental to the contact sport - masculinity distilled to its very essence, demanding peaks that necessitate a rare mental and physical rigour.
‘Punch-ups in rugby and ice-hockey, for example, are de rigueur; there is almost a code of honour almost taking a right-hander uncomplainingly. Yet in modern football, you can barely touch someone without getting booked or sent off: Clinton Morrison was even charged with violent conduct for pushing Nicky Hunt in the shoulder earlier this season. Such prissiness is anathema.
‘Think of the defining contests of this dreadfully anodyne season: Arsenal 2 Manchester United 4 and Chelsea 4 Barcelona 2 - games in which silk went hand in hand with steel, artistry with aggro to create the richest sporting theatre. Football is not a beautiful game; it never has been. The sooner people get used to that, the better.’