Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Demon Drawer's Tangenatal Thoughts, or D2T2 for short. For a while know I've realised that my brain goes off on quite obscure tangents at times and so I thought I'd start to share that with you dear reader of The Post. I do not promise that I will go off on a tangent every week but if I do The Post Team will be the first to know.

This weeks tangent:

The Olympic Games, the friendly games, are over. Qualifying for the next Football World Cup started last weekend. In the papers we are getting adverts of England Rugby team mates in their club colours threatening all sorts of nastiness behind the back of a friend The tag line 'The time for Friendship is over'. So what is sport? Is it war?

The Meriam-Webster dictionary definition is:

Sport noun

1. a: A source of diversion : Recreation b: Sexual play c (1): Physical activity engaged in for pleasure (2) : A particular activity (as an athletic game) so engaged in
2. a: Pleasantry, Jest b: Often mean-spirited jesting : Mockery, Derision
3. a: Something tossed or driven about in or as if in play b: Laughingstock
4. a: Sportsman b: A person considered with respect to living up to the ideals of sportsmanship c: A companionable person
5. : An individual exhibiting a sudden deviation from type beyond the normal limits of individual variation usually as a result of mutation especially of somatic tissue

So as you can see quite a variety of options there and it does in fact cover all the aspects you would expect and 1b which may come as a surprise to some.

So as for our sport it can be a source of diversion and a physical activity engaged in for pleasure or an athletic activity you engage in. Similarly it can be mean spirited jesting. So fans are still entitled to shout 'Who ate all the pies?' to the fattest player and still call it sport. Also all those sexual antics for £40 in Liverpool brothels by young footballers appear also to be covered by sport. This description above also seems to be all encompassing of one of Britain's more low brow papers.

But can sport be compared to war. Bill Shankley famously said 'Football is not a matter of live or death, it's more important than that'. This view however was wisely revisited on Merseyside after fatalities at Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s. The Romans of course enjoyed their gladiatorial sport to the death. The sight of Serean Williams dressed like Russell Crowe's character 'Maximus Decimus Meridius' in flushing meadow may question just who was being put to death. Especially as like in Roman times the theatre of sport is a cacophony of noise as everything else is going on around it and not necessarily associated with the sport.

Sport is a unifier. How many of you have been in a foreign country unable to speak the local language but united in watching sport in a bar or tavern, maybe with the local maybe with your countrymen. It binds people together. Sometimes there is trouble but by and large sport can be a unifying force. Aid workers in third world countries can produce a football and suddenly after a kick about are the children's favourite people. Soldiers in the first world war famously played football on Christmas Day 1914, unified in a common purpose for a few hours.

So back to the subject is it sport or war? Some recent football teams and games highlight that sport overcomes war. Iran played the USA in the opening came of the World Cup in France 1998. For many these two enemies was the crunch match of the tournament. The players displayed great sportsmanship and turned out an excellent performance. At the recent Olympic Football tournament who was the most popular team not Argentina who won it, nor the beaten finalist Paraguay claiming their countries first ever Olympic medal, not even the Italians in bronze. No it was the team that finished just out of the medals. The team from Iraq who received an enormous cheer as they
entered the stadium and were the peoples team to follow in the football. Overcoming war, oppression, repressive regimes and the political manipulation of the occupying state for their own ends. Iraq proved that sport is not war but reconciliation.

This is DD, in a sports field, the Northern Front.

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