TAKE a peek at any professional football match this weekend. Whether it be at an actual game, a live televised showdown, or highlights of several matches, there’s going to be one certainty.

Even more sure than a loud appeal for a throw-in, corner, goal-kick, foul, booking of a rival, perhaps even a free programme, will be that several players, who have been clipped, knocked, barged, or felled in a challenge, will roll around as if caught in a hail of machine-gun fire not seen since the days of Prohibition in the America of the roaring 1920s.

Yet without exception – if you are seriously injured then no-one, not one single player will dervishly disport their stricken frames around the turf – they will soon be up and about their day job.

Let’s not be mistaken. Football can result in some of the most serious physical injuries. The span of trouble can include anything from concussion and the inherent dangers of that, through to torn muscles, sinews and cartilages, and on to major compound fractures.

You only have to recall horrific injuries endured by the likes of Coventry’s David Busst, international Patrick Battiston, Leedsborn Alan Smith while playing for a certain club that wears red in Manchester, and Arsenal striker Eduardo da Silva.

But that will not be the case for the con-merchant twirlers and twisters upon the turf.

Contrast those exertions with the endeavours of the assembly of athletes in the Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi.

These are sportsmen and sportswomen, whose bodies have been brutally rendered incomplete in some way or other.

Yet in spite of their disabilities and the varying degrees of such, they hurl themselves into the sort of events that the majority of the fortunate able-bodied among us would never attempt.

As one supreme example, consider those visually impaired skiers, of whom several have yielded precious metal for team GB these past few days in the Paralympic Games.

As someone who has attempted skiing once, over two days while in holiday in America, and whose sum achievement of a nerve-shredding whoosh down a nursery slope for barely a minute was greeted by yours truly as a veritable Herculean feat, the very thought of skiing when your vision is far from perfect is outrageously frightening.

Just what can be going through their minds in the final seconds before levering themselves down an ice and snow-bound mountain at many kilometres an hour and balancing on what is, in truth, a pair of extended fence posts?

Oh yeah, I momentarily forgot - they cannot see what’s around them with their perilous descent aided only by a mic-ed up guide a few metres ahead. See what I mean about scary.

That’s not just putting absolute trust into the ski-racing buddy, but also in their own matchless nerve, courage, belief.

Cripes, I’ve been known to stumble and crash while putting the recycling containers out on a dark winter morn.

But facing literally mountainous obstacles, GB Paralympic aces like Kelly Gallagher just get on with it.

And not only plainly get on with it, but gain medals to boot.

Gallagher and Co are an inspiration to anyone wanting to take up sport, desirous of pitting themselves against adversity as well as adversaries. Their exploits, which, thanks to the decision of Channel Four to broadcast the Games from Sochi, are the stuff of dreams and daring, of sheer bravery.

So this weekend when you see those footballers from Premier League to amateur hours and a half flopping to the ground seemingly mortally injured get active yourself.

When they finally arise from their tortuous injuries give them a sneer, or assail them with chants of “grow up, you con-men”, or just clock in your memory bank how off-putting the offender is.

And don’t forget, apply the same derisory treatment to those players who sport the favours of your own team.

Should they take offence, and no doubt they will as their precious egos will have been wounded, then just holler “Paralympics” at them.

Meanwhile, whether the Paralympics will get much coverage in tomorrow’s sports pages, especially the heavies, will be open to question.

Today is the conclusion of that annual piley-on extravaganza, the Six Nations rugby union championship, and tomorrow is the start of that yearly festival of fuel-filled mechanical merry-go-round otherwise known as Formula One.

So expect the deforestation of areas the size of Wales – it is always Wales isn’t it when it comes to geographical comparisons – to cover every drop of sweat, spit and petrol…and yet more to bore.