A non-sporting friend has just commented, on seeing Andrew Strauss hit in the fleshy part where chest meets upper arm by a cricket ball going at 90mph, that a footballer experiencing something that caused an equivalent amount of pain would react as if his fingernails were being pulled out of his bottom with a red hot poker.
It is not a new observation that different aesthetic codes operate in different sports with respect to expected behaviour in the wake of physical contact. Everyone knows how rugby players and American footballers don't roll around whining, and footballers do. I'd sort of not really thought about how cricketers routinely get hit very hard by a very hard ball. Footballers are just doing what all other footballers do, but once in a while someone says something that reminds you that even though they have this excuse, it is only a sort of excuse, and they really do look pathetic.
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