Skill Tip! – The pleasures and benefits of the half-time orange
Football treasures unearthed by Derek Hammond & Gary Silke...
There’s something about sucking an orange quarter at half-time that’s entirely different to sucking an orange segment after a Chinese meal, or peeling and eating the orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking.
The half-time orange is a sporting institution – nature’s way of replenishing a dehydrated body with much-needed liquid and energy-giving Vitamin C.
And sucking a half-time orange until it’s dry gives every player the opportunity to curl his lips over the fruit so it looks and feels a bit like a boxer’s gumshield.
Then he can tap a colleague on the shoulder, gesture at his orange ‘teeth’ as if they were a novelty, and punch him playfully on the shoulder.
There was no beri-beri on the nations’s football pitches during the first half of the 20th century. This handsome orange label dates back to the 1920s, when a proper 10-minute break was enlivened as God intended – stuff your TV adverts, keep your extended opportunity to sell corporate client customer consumers overpriced fast food, to heck with your ‘isotonic’ benefits – by listening and moaning, with a cup of tea, a hastily-sucked cigarette and a half-time orange.
Up the tangerines!
Blog Tags: 1920s, Skill Tips
