It makes you want to scream... (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

It makes you want to scream...

6:55am Thursday 31st May 2007

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See if you can guess the sport from the following list of “audience outbursts”.

1. In the hole (normally yelled in an American accent two seconds before the shot is actually struck).

2. Arruz, arruz (uttered in a softer, more complimentary tone by several members of the audience)

3. Hit him! ****ing hit him! (delivered in a high-pitched shriek by a member of the fairer sex)

Not the hardest quiz in the world, I admit. Obviously, the first answer is golf and the second darts (local pub final, you understand, rather than the riotous chanting you get at the Circus Tavern or Lakeside Country Club).

The third answer is boxing, and this leads me to my experience at the Hilton Hotel in Bradford on Sunday for the show headlined by Nadeem Siddique.

The “Hit him! ****ing hit him!” howl made several of the 700-strong audience laugh out loud. I mean, honestly, what else is a boxer supposed to do when the bell rings?

I understand that boxing attracts a partisan crowd and what with the electric atmosphere generated, people can get a bit carried away, but the gentleman who, for the duration of the Femi Fehintola fight, kept bellowing “Burn him! burn him!” got right up the noses of the cornermen, who had security staff remove him from earshot.

God only knows what he meant by it, but small-hall boxing shows can do without vitriolic outbursts like that.

You wonder whether his thirst for suffering would have been quite so intense if he had been inside the ring at the time, stripped down to a pair of glitzy shorts and boxing gloves?