I don’t think Sepp Blatter has figured out that he has been found guilty and banned for eight years from soccer. He sees his indictment as a mistake in what, according to him, was otherwise a superb investigation in bringing the corrupt to justice. And so now we move to the next chapter of what would be a comical defense in this sordid saga if it wasn’t all so tragic.

And speaking of tragic we have all read the book , seen the movie. Someone has two courtside tickets to the Lakers game and he gets the girl, signs the big deal, clambers a few rungs up the career ladder. Those tickets are arm-twisting golden.

Not if you ask Aussie golfer Jason Day following 130 kilos of LeBron James colliding and injuring his wife, Ellie, as the couple watched the Cavaliers in full action earlier this week. The ‘sore and exhausted’ victim compared it to a mini car accident when LeBron couldn’t stop his momentum from chasing a ball going out of bounds and slammed into her. Ellie was carried off on a stretcher but the incident has once again brought attention to the issue of spectator injuries.

Flying hockey pucks, golf balls raining from the skies, cricket balls and baseballs whizzing into crowds, these are some of the most dangerous things (sung to the tune of Raindrops on roses). Remember Tiger last year at the World Championships hitting a German fan with his tee shot and then clonking a spectator a little later in the same round. Rory McIlroy hit a shot that bounced off a rock and whacked a bystander who then tumbled into a cactus plant in what gave double jeopardy a whole new meaning.

In the US over 100 people are injured watching ice hockey every year on an average. One study showed that more people join the ‘walking wounded’ after being hit by foul balls at a baseball game than are injured on commercial flights that are involved in incidents.

Acts of prowess can often be trumped by acts of petulance. England cricketer Matt Prior was so upset being given out at Lords in 2011 he flounced back to the pavilion, flung his glove and a bat violently. The bat hit a window pane and the shards injured a female spectator. Perhaps the most people hurt in a single incident was in 2013 at the Daytona 500 when a car pile-up injured 28 spectators. In 1955, at the legendary Le Mans racetrack in a largely forgotten horror, 83 people died when a car lost control.

The list is long and varied and there has been a de facto acceptance that it is a risk you take when you go into a stadium to watch a game. Goes with the territory, so to speak. Technically, unless the ticket or invitation issues you warning that you could be injured by participants or equipment and that you are willing to take the risk, you do have legal grounds to sue. Hardly anyone issues the warning in print but if Ellie Day wanted to sue the NBA she could. They placed her in danger without sharing the risk factor and the possibility of injury with her.

In 1930, a woman watching her first ice hockey match was hit by the puck. She sued.

“At trial, she argued that “[t]he defendant gave no notice of the danger from flying ‘pucks’” and that the arena “failed to perform the duty which it owed to her as its invitee to use due care to see that its premises were reasonably safe for the intended use or to warn her of dangers which were not obvious.” In turn, the arena argued that “persons attending such a game must be presumed to know where they are going, and that the risk is in effect an obvious one which the patron must be held to have assumed.”

She won the case because the court upheld her compensation on the grounds that she had no information alerting her to the possibility of pucks whizzing around and the fact that a three foot netting was in place was not an indicator to her that there was a risk.

The case hinged on the fact that there was no written caution.

With VIPs now nudging themselves closer to the playing area and players increasingly flinging victory memorabilia into the stands the odds on someone being hurt in the eye or suffering concussion are pretty good.

With that warm thought for you to ‘mull’ over, merry Xmas and a happy new year.