I often attend to young patients covered in bruises. When I ask them what happened, "Got them from playing football" is the usual answer.

The usual list of injuries: sprained fingers and feet, lingering pain from blows to the chest, feet trampled on, followed by a fall causing a bump on the head, and also grazed knees, or "scraped ginger", as the injury is more commonly known among players.

While tending one such patient's wounds, I sighed and said to him, "You can of course enjoy your game and try even harder in a match. But at the end of the day, what matters the most is to play safe. It's not a game of death. You'd better hold back a little." He then cried out in pain, and said the bruises had been caused by the blows he had suffered when trying to gain control of the ball.

Boys are like that when they play football. My younger brother is a male nurse. One day a few years ago, while delivering the medications in a cart, he felt his left leg giving in a little and, letting out a cry of "Oh!", he slumped and fell down on his knees. The left knee swelled up right away. The pain was so bad that he couldn't even stand up.

It was a real shame for him to make such a spectacle of himself by falling down on his knees in his ward. So he immediately made arrangements for MRI. It was found that a cruciate ligament in his left knee was torn. As it turned out, it was an old injury from playing football. One time, he got his knee badly sprained, but bit the bullet without telling anyone. When the pain got less, he could not help going back to playing football with a vengeance. The injured cruciate ligament was eventually subject to endless blows over the years, until that day when it got so bad that it snapped.

In the end he had to undergo knee surgery and was bedridden for months on end. Like it or not, I have to say that it may be understandable if you were David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo. Football is their career. Winning or losing means much to their teams and their countries. So they would give their best in every match and, even if they get hurt, it would still be worthwhile. But if it is just a game between school friends using rock-paper-scissors to divide themselves into two teams, well, why make it a rough sport?

By Dr Singsit

*Translation from Chinese article.