Commentary on failure of recruitment drive at football matches from Surrey Comet dated 25th November 1914.

Football-Playing in War-Time. There has been great disappointment experienced at the failure of the recruiting meetings held on metropolitan football grounds on Saturday. There were many meetings and only one recruit! The public are therefore asking whether the continuance of the game is not having a bad moral effect upon the young men who play it or watch it played. It is a difficult question, but it takes much believing that all the young men still playing football have sufficient reasons preventing their enlistment in the Army, or that the crowds of spectators are all physically defective or compulsorily detained at home by business ties. We have said before, and we still think, there is something indecent about the spectacle of crowds of young men looking on at football matches when the Nation is engaged in a war which threatens its existence, and when we need our last man in the fighting line if we are to win through. There is a growing body of opinion which resents this sort of thing, and if attempts such as those made on metropolitan football fields on Saturday thus dismally fail, something else will have to be done. Says one commentator, "It was difficult to turn one's thoughts from conscription." We have always been against conscription, but in favour of compulsory "training," leaving "service" as an act of personal volition. Had we adopted universal military "training" a few years ago we should not now be taking six months improvising armies, and the Germans would probably never have got past Namur; and by this time would have been thrust back over their own border. If we get compulsion during the war it will probably take the form of conscription under the Militia Ballot Act; but true patriots will not wait for that to be enforced. An admirably-worded appeal to footballers appeared in yesterday's "Times," from the pen of Mr. A. Lochhead, and we take the liberty of quoting the closing stanza:- Then leave for it while the football told, And the lure of the flying ball Lest it dull your ear to the voice you hear When your King and country call. Come, join the ranks of our hero sons In the wider field of fame, Where the God of Right will watch the fight, And referee the game. See report in original format.