Originally Posted by Jools

Perspective is exactly what I was writing about.

As you've said, football is just a sport, a game, it's humanity at play and a mere pastime. However passionately people feel about it, however much hype surrounds it, ultimately football is completely inconsequential in the great scheme of things. The fact that England lost a game of football to Portugal means nothing in terms of history, it is already yesterdays news and will not change the course of mankind one iota.

At the same time, our national culture has been degraded by a dismal tabloid mentality into one where the mass media feeds on itself in a frenzy of vacuous celebrity. The likes of the Beckhams, Jordan, the latest Big Brother contestant and even complete nonentities like Jade Goody get whipped up by the tabloids, daytime magazine TV and publications like Hello magazine into cult figures who are accredited with a status far in excess of their actual contribution to mankind.

The feeding frenzy results in tabloid hacks having to find yet more superlatives to write about people whom they've already built up into little tin gods, and their paucity of imagination leads them to grossly devalue the word 'hero' in applying it to footballers.

Yes, let's get some perspective into this, you don't have to die to be a hero, or be engaged in the futility of war, but in my book a hero is someone who shows extraordinary courage in the face of extreme adversity. Somebody who goes into a burning house to rescue people regardless of the risk to themselves, somebody who dives into a raging torrent to rescue a drowning child, somebody who speaks out for their people against an oppresive regime regardless of the risk of arrest, persecution or assasination. In my opinion, these are hypothetical examples of a fitting use of the word hero - an event where there is a great deal at stake and one that shows breathtaking bravery from the person who performs it.

To apply the term hero to a few guys that ran around for a couple of hours playing a game of football doesn't even compare, the only adversity they face is a spot of humiliation at letting people down. They'll probably ease this sense of humiliation by keeping their heads down for a few weeks on Necker Island. The trouble is that the lazy journalists who can't be bothered to think beyond trite stock phrases in calling them heros do a great disservice by devaluing the truly heroic people in this world - that's the perspective that's needed.

I won't even begin to give my response to the assertion that footballers "don't do for themselves but for other people", which is frankly risible, or that "football does more to unite people than anything else" otherwise comparisons may need to be drawn between drunken football fans throwing chairs at each other and the worldwide public response to the Tsunami.