Tag: sport

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the Ashes get closer

No tournament in cricket or rugby is ever going to have the cachet of the (football) World Cup – the pool of teams is too small. Apparently, for the last World Cup, TV audiences in Thailand were bigger than the global TV audience for the last Rugby World Cup. On the other hand, having less teams is a hell of a way of building up rivalries. Especially since, if you’re English, the main nations that play rugby or cricket – Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, West Indies, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and France – are all either ex-colonies or local rivals. Local rivals being a polite term for ‘ancient enemies’.

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countdown to the Ashes

We haven’t beaten the Aussies at Lords for 70 years, and our record against other countries isn’t great either. It seems unnnecessarily sporting of us to always play the first match of a series at a venue where we usually lose, and the last at one where we do well. And there’s an entertaining interview with Justin Langer in the Sunday Times.

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the Open

I don’t really think golf makes a very good spectator sport, but I quite enjoy watching the Open just because of the scenery. All those links courses with undulating fairways and clumps of gorse, the sea in the distance, and an enormous blue sky. I find it much more attractive than Augusta, which is spectacular but looks so artificial – like a Brobdignagian window-box.

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Liverpool vs. TNS

The Ashes haven’t even started yet.

The first football match of the new season – Liverpool’s Champion League pre-pre-pre-pre-qualifier against Total Network Solutions – was yesterday. I watched a bit of it, but it just felt wrong. The Ashes haven’t even started yet! Has the world gone mad?

[And if you had a club called something as fabulous as Llansantffraid FC, wouldn’t it make you die a little every time you heard it referred to as Total Network Solutions? Mind you, two of the other teams in the Welsh Premier League seem to be called Connah’s Quay Nomads and Afan Lido, so perhaps Llansantffraid FC just seemed a little plain.]

But anyway, I shouldn’t be doing football blogging now, because the Ashes haven’t even started yet. Shame on me.

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Dover’s Cotswold Olimpick Games

Fittingly, 2012 will be the 400th anniverary of the Olimpick Games held in Chipping Camden every year, featuring events like ‘Throwing the Sledgehammer’ and ‘Shin-kicking’. Not to be confused with the Olympian Games in Much Wenlock in Shropshire, which, famously, gave Baron de Coubertin the idea.

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NOTHING IS USED FOR TO RUN

Jean of the Fountain, one of the florets of the French literature had however affirmed it: “nothing is used for to run, it is necessary to leave at point” a maxim finally applied by London which, launched tardily in its Olympic countryside, gained with the sprint the organization of Plays 2012 vis-a-vis in Paris, engaged as for it in a long marathon. In vain. The English capital was right of its French rival, finally, by 54 votes against 50.