Who said funny old game

Menu Sections. The 80s were full of famous fun double acts L egendary pair Ian St John and Jimmy Greaves were the most hilarious of the lot and, having enjoyed successful football careers themselves, they knew the game inside out. Sadly, when Sky won the rights to televise the Premier League from , the canny Scot and charismatic Englishman, who won 72 caps between them, were axed from the schedules.

What a pity, because while they always called a spade a spade, too many of today's pundits on Sky Sports tend to sugar-coat what viewers are seeing in front of them.

Receive today's headlines directly to your inbox every morning and evening, with our free daily newsletter. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up. That just doesn't sit with me. If a player wasn't doing the business I'd say it.

Maybe if I kept my mouth shut, I'd be on more! Greaves 73 , who scored 44 goals in 57 England appearances, and countless others for Chelsea, Spurs and AC Milan had a heart attack last year.

Renowned for his phrase "it's a funny old game", his pal St John said: "Greavsie is not a big football watcher, you know. His big love is cricket. But that, of course, is just one part of the game. Our problem as academicians is that metaphorically curling a yarder into the top corner has become so important that it dominates our day-job almost completely. This is at the heart of the paradox that we are paid to educate, but educating is not how we earn.

How do we get out of this sticky situation? Not easily unfortunately. Any deviation from a prevailing culture — no matter how flawed that facet of a culture is — is viewed as uncivil at best and an anathema at worst. Dissidents, I would argue, have the hardest job. Our learn-and-churn standardized testing culture favours those who can quickly perceive information distilled onto paper in black and white, retain it for a specified time frame and then regurgitate it upon demand.

As individuals and academic units we need, therefore, to identify different kinds of people: the ruminators who absorb information slowly and evolve ideas on relatively long timescales, or those who can assess a multi-component, dynamic environment such as a department and assess its strengths and weaknesses.

Similarly, as academics we need to be able to identify stout defenders who know where to position themselves in order to protect the team from distractions that are not core to the job. And just to pick one more example, as individuals and academic units we need to identify the creatives; those who can link disparate nuggets of knowledge, synthesize new ideas and change their environment in a completely unexpected way.

If we can identify these people, hire them and nurture them; if we can carve within our departments facets of leadership, creativity, critical thinking, citizenship and empathy, we can succeed. We need hard work, patience, diligence and diversity in all its forms… over multiple generations of chemists. But if we all do our bit, chemistry departments can evolve. After all, if football can understand the strength in diversity, surely academia can too.

Astin, A. Are You Smart Enough? Stylus Publishing LLC, Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Bruce C. Reprints and Permissions.

Gibb, B. Download citation. Published : 30 July Issue Date : August Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Subjects Careers Decision making Ethics. References 1.

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