Football Accidents.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7176, 29 May 1891, Page 4

Football Accidents.

♦ [Sheffield Independent.) A list of killed and wounded in the football campaign of the season now expiring has been laboriously compiled by an industrious statistician. But it lacked what seems to us to be the most conclusive reply to the question, "Is football dangerous ?" That answer is to be found not in the details of the casualties, but in an analysis that concentrates their teaching in three figures. This we have taken the trouble to make, with the following results : Deaths twenty-three, limbs broken fortyseven, other injuries twenty-seven. Now even admitting that there are included in "J. T. C.'s" list some few ca_e_ of death or injury for which football per se cannot fairly be held responsible, that is surely a terrible record. Hunting has its dangers, steeplechasing its tragedies, cycling its accidents, shooting its catastrophes, cricket its hurts, skating its fatalities ; but we may safely say that six months of football produce- a grim bill of mortality and injury far exceeding that of all other athletic sports put together. The combats in the Spanish bull-ring are inocnous in comparison with those of the football field ; the matador's is a safer life for insurance then that of the football player. Why, many a smart action in the tented field, and many a desperate charge by hordea of fanatical Arabs on a British Bquare.have ended in smaller loss of lifo and limb. If by one concentrated catastrophe there 6hould . perißh twenty -three young Englishmen in the prime of the vigour of early manhood, and there should be at the same time injured seventy-four of the same class, the country would echo with lamentations and with demands for prevention. But because these things are scattered in their locality and diffused over six months of time, we pass them heedlessly by, and proudly point to the football field as the training ground for English hardiness and endurance. It is certainly one way of arriving at the survival of the fittest.