That’s ‘cricket’ in Welsh, since the first Ashes test is being held in Cardiff. Assuming the rain holds off long enough for them to play, that is: it’s certainly not very promising in London, but of course it hardly ever rains in Wales.
Come on, England.
I’ve really been enjoying the Twenty20 World Cup, and the more I see of twenty-over cricket and the more it matures as a game, the the more I think it’s a brilliant invention.
Someone has finally invented a form of the game where every ball is interesting. Before it started, the assumption was that T20 would [...]
My cunning plan to make the UEFA Cup interesting and increase the significance of the FA Cup.
Forget the elections about to be held in the Canada/Mexico area, forget the way the Dow Jones and the FTSE are chasing each other up and down like a pair of territorial squirrels who both want the same tree trunk, something really newsworthy is happening.
Argentina have apparently picked a new manager for their national football [...]
MTMG Victorian Sports Personality of the Year 2008 « More Than Mind Games
‘In 1876, on May 25, at David M’Garrick’s Benefit he carried off the Egg Diving (12 eggs thrown in, 2 dives allowed); first dive, 9; second dive, 10; total, 19; and the following day, May 26, he met Mr. Charles O’Malley on level [...]
Well, I thought the London 2012 segment of the closing ceremony was… OK.
The whole bus stop routine was underwhelming, and the presence of David Beckham seemed a bit random, but the moment when the bus opened up like a flower was a striking image, as was Leona Lewis raising up into the air with her [...]
While I wait anxiously to see whether London’s contribution to the closing ceremony is horribly naff, here’s a thought: since the Games are so huge and expensive to host, perhaps the future would be to split them up between lots of different places. Embrace the technology of global communication. That way, countries that could never afford to [...]
Watching someone put on a burst of pace at the end of a fast 10000m is one of the best sights in sport. Amazing stuff from Tirunesh Dibaba.
And so much more exciting to watch than the sprinters.
I was thinking about whether Michael Phelps is the ‘greatest Olympian of all time’, and the relative value of medals in different events. For example, the fact that it’s even possible to enter eight events at the same Games means that Phelps has a medal-collecting advantage over, say, a boxer. And the 52 gold medals [...]
I wasn’t particularly excited about the Olympics, this year, but I just caught the last 15 or 20 minutes of the women’s road cycling race to see Nicole Cooke narrowly win our first gold medal in the middle of a downpour, and got completely caught up in it.
It’s magic. Never fails.
Watching Wimbledon, I was thinking about how much the appeal of tennis depends on the scoring system. You have to win games by a two-point margin and sets by a two-game margin, so at the key moments in the match, when it’s tightest, the drama is artificially enhanced: the balance can swing back and forth [...]
John Cameron and the History of English Football « More Than Mind Games
Fascinating essay over at MTMG about a footballer called John Cameron and the early history of English football.
(del.icio.us tags: football history sport )
BBC – Ouch! – Features – What’s your Sign Name?
Interesting article about 'sign names' – i.e. the nicknames deaf people give [...]
A much deserved win.
Which, incidentally, means that there are now 10 countries who have won a major international football tournament since England last did it. Germany, Italy and Brazil have won 10 between them in that period.
» Winners Spain, uploaded to Flickr by mwboeckmann and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.
BBC News:
“Thirty-five arrests have been made after clashes between pro-Tibet protesters and police as the Olympic torch made its way through London.
Of course, in the parallel world of the Chinese official news machine, the only thing interfering with the movement of the torch was a sprinkling of snow. Actually, to be fair, there is an [...]
It’s going to be really interesting watching the Olympics unfold. There had already been rumblings, with the protests last year in Burma and pressure over Darfur, but protests in Tibet bring it that much closer to home. And as the Olympics get closer, and more and more media attention is focussed on Beijing, the Chinese [...]
I’ve been wondering: what proportion of Premiership football matches this season have featured the players wearing black armbands?
It seems like they never take the field without them. And far as I know Britain isn’t currently experiencing a surge of extra deaths due to, say, an outbreak of the Black Death.
I know, it’s a completely harmless [...]
Watching Chelsea get knocked out of the FA Cup by Barnsley, followed by a big plate of ribs, greens and Hoppin’ John.
My version of soul food wouldn’t pass the Southern Grandmother Authenticity Test, btw, but it was pretty tasty though I do say so myself.
The Chinese government expressing their sadness and shock at the idea that anyone would be crass enough to sully the Olympic spirit with the grimy taint of a political agenda.
Well, today the Capello era really gets started. After two months of blissfully fact-free speculation, conjecture, analysis and day-dreaming, we have to get down to the sordid reality of playing actual football.
Even after the match, it’ll be too soon to tell much really. Not that that’ll stop the pundits. Obviously they have to offer some [...]
Wales beat England at rugby this afternoon, which (don’t tell my father) I quite enjoyed. I keenly support England when they’re playing South Africa, Australia, New Zealand or France, but against other teams I often find myself rooting for the opposition.
I guess it’s largely support for the underdog (today was Wales’s first win at Twickenham [...]
I had a bad feeling before the match, but I wasn’t expecting it to go quite the way it did. I was worried that playing a 4-5-1 and only needing a draw, England would defend deeper and deeper, as they so often have recently, only to be caught out by a goal too late to [...]
One of the minor pleasures of international sport is the way that sports change and adapt as they travel around the world. So professional soccer starts with one character and one meaning a century ago in grimy industrial British cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, and mutates into something different in Buenos Aires, Budapest, Milan, [...]