At one level, this is utterly trivial, at another it's kind of sinister. There was an incident in a Premier League football match yesterday where a player fell over and rolled over on the touch line, falling into the manager of the opposing side. The manager then kneeled down on the player and put his hand to his throat. The player got up, did not retaliate and tried to get back on to the pitch. The manager hung on to him preventing from doing so.
All the comments I've seen (e.g. on Match of the Day) or in the papers have refrained from saying that the manager behaved in some kind of outrageous and absolutely out of order way. Instead, they've described it as 'strange' or that he has 'questions to answer'? What is this mealy-mouthed crap about? If it had been a dust-up between players, the commentators would instantly have denounced the player doing the holding and threatening and approved of the red card etc that would have been administered.
So why the double standards? Is it because some person in authority has behaved like this? Do they know something that we don't know? Why wasn't the manager sent to the stands?
Ironically, the manager of the other team received a ban for doing a kind of head-butt against a player last season. On this occasion he pleaded with the manager doing the threatening to lay off.
At one level, it's all silly boys' stuff. At another, it's about how the hierarchy of a professional sport deals with its hierarchy. This probably tells us something about all hierarchies, I suspect.
