The Importance of Sport (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

He'd get the same today. Throwing a match and betting on a match are two different things. Only one being a criminal offence. I remember the Tony Kaye case. Wasn't 'Bronco' Layne also involved? I also remember, as with all similar cases, thinking, "What on earth possessed these dudes to take such a huge risk for such a paltry reward?" Not the jail time, the life ban.

[Mick Harper]

Grant Wuz Right

So I turned on the computer and saw an email that showed 'What a match'. That irritated me, I hate knowing about something before watching it and this referred to Milan vs Barcelona. Which I couldn't watch because it's on Amazon Prime and would have to watch the half-hour highlights on TNT. Which I've recorded.

I turn on TNT. I get a Frank Lampard tuition programme or something. That tells me they're running late, which tells me there must have been extra time in the semi. Frank finishes, we move on to Milan. They are two up, it's half time, the half-hour programme finishes, I've made the rookie mistake of not recording the following programme on the offchance. So now I know Barca must have steamed back in the second half.

The next showing is at noon today. I've got a dental appointment at 12.20. I won't know the result until I get back. So don't anyone tell me. I bet the dentist will. He won't be getting a tip if he does, NHS or no NHS.

PS Both teams were playing a brand of football Arsenal cannot even aspire to.

[Pete Jones]

The Minnesota Timberwolves missed 24 three point shots last night, out of 29 attempted. The three-point shot's spirit animal, Steph Curry, injured himself in the game and didn't play the second half. Still, the Timberwolves avoided taking advantage and lost anyhow. In the last two games, the T-Wolves have missed 64 out of 76 three-point attempts. And it's performance like this that causes people to judge the decisions based on the outcome.

Sidenote: announcers avoid talking about a member of the Minnesota team in the same way they talk about, say, a member of the Los Angeles or San Antonio teams. Calling someone a Laker or a Spur is acceptable, but going with Timberwolf is apparently not.

[Mick Harper]

Though of course they could be called 'the Lakers' on account of Minnesota being the 'land of a thousand lakes'. Indeed they once called themselves the Minneapolis Lakers. When the team moved to Los Angeles the nearest they had to lakes were tarpits and were going to be the LA Tarpits until someone pointed out this would be shortened to 'the pits'. They are still looking for a suitable name.

PS The new Salt Lake City women's football team were running a competition for a name and wanted something that would evoke the Jazz, the city's only well known team (men's basketball). On my suggestion, my sister who lives there, wrote in with Salt Lake City Slutz. But didn't hear back.

[Pete Jones]

Utah Jazz is tied with the LA Lakers for most absurdly inappropriate names. New Orleans Jazz once even had Pete Maravich, the jazziest white boy the NBA has ever seen. Actually, it's not a tie, for two reasons: no one equates Mormons with freestyle music (or any style at all), and LA Lakers has the benefit of being alliterative (despite being nonsensical).

The Memphis Grizzlies teeter on the fence of sensibleness, if only because there were probably grizzlies in Memphis at some point before the white boys arrived on the continent.

Salt Lake City Slutz would cast a new light on the sister wives phenomenon. But the alliteration is excellent.

[Pete Jones]

Sports could use a taxonomy. I think there are two types for sure, call them Encroaching Sports and Combat Sports.

Sarker, basketball, American football, hockey...all require encroaching on your opponent's territory.

Wrestling and boxing but also tennis and volleyball are combat sports. Also all forms of racing.

There's a third type, where it's man vs obstacle, but these are indirect sports because the competitors aren't really engaged with each other. Golf, darts, gymnastics, track and field (except racing).

Attempts to simplify into one thing will have to be so abstract that American football and golf would be equated

[Mick Harper]

All very excellent though unwieldy. My own contribution to (professional) sport taxonomy was simpler. Divide them into two:

1. Those where everyone goes to your place or mine e.g. football, cricket, basketball.
2. Those where everyone gathers together at one place e.g. golf, formula one, caber-tossing.

[Mick Harper]

Talking of unwieldy, here's a steaming pile of inchoateness.
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Bib and tucker. The Premier League at play. April 30, 2024

A lot of you have been asking me why, on Match of the Day this weekend, Arsenal were playing in what looked, for all the world, like training bibs. Rather fewer of you asked me why Nottingham Forest were playing in training bibs identical to Arsenal’s.

It’s a long and complex story that has its roots in the nineteenth century so if you’re only interested in the football results you can leave with our blessing. There’s nothing wrong with being a stats person.

Britain’s largest armaments factory throughout the Victorian era was the ‘Arsenal’ in Woolwich, a south-eastern suburb of London. In 1886 its directors (a.k.a. the merchants of death) decided they needed a works football team for both employee morale and wider prestige purposes.

The employees weren’t much cop at football — many of them were women for instance — so decent footballers had to be sought from elsewhere. In London at that time this meant Old Etonians and Royal Engineers who wouldn’t be seen dead south of the river so the recruiters were sent to Nottingham where Notts County was the oldest professional football club in England.

Indeed, the world. One might even say ‘the known universe’ so naturally they told the jumped-up counterjumpers from ‘that Lunnen’ to take a hike. They wouldn’t be seen dead south of the Trent.

So the armament manufacturers turned to Nottingham Forest FC, a club of lesser lineage and lower expectations. Three of their players readily accepted the Queen’s shilling and were told to show up for training Monday morning, nine sharp, and to bring their kit with them.

With three people already in Nottingham Forest apparel, it was obvious to the cheapskates that ran the British armaments industry (as we were to find out in the Boer War) they might as well adopt the general colour scheme, red, for the other players too.

Somewhat later a Czech-speaking, football-loving citizen of the Habsburg Empire was in London on official business but took in an Arsenal match. He was so entranced by the experience he founded Slavia Prague who, to this day, play in Arsenal colours. Or Nottingham Forest colours as Nottingham Forest have it.

You would think it ought to be Lincoln Green but not even Lincoln City play in green. Nobody does because it clashes with the pitch so people wouldn’t be able to make out their team-mates, would they? Stands to reason. Apart from Plymouth Argyle, England’s most westerly team, which tells you everything you need to know about incest in Devon and Cornwall. Or it’s the argon from the granite, as local theorists have suggested.

Nobody plays in brown either as English pitches are bereft of grass by the end of September. Or used to be. A visionary known to his friends as Arsène Charles Ernest Wenger OBE became Arsenal manager in 1996 and thought football might be possible beyond September. He did this by adopting two simple devices that hadn’t occurred to anybody in the known universe before the turn of the twenty-first century:

1. Ask the groundsman to use hard-wearing strains of grass, mow it very short and water the pitch profusely at two-thirty every other Saturday afternoon. It was like playing on a giant billiard table.
2. Not allow anyone else on the sacred turf apart from the first team. (And grudgingly the opposition.)

Soon everyone was doing it and football has never looked back, necessitating the coming of the dreaded Fair Play regulations to prevent Russian oligarchs, Arabic oil sheikdoms and American sporting billionaires reducing the world’s most popular game to their own private kickabout. Or at any rate make it a competitive kickabout.

But to get in ‘under the cap’ economies have to be made. Hence the training bibs. Arsenal 5 Chelsea 0.

[Mick Harper]

PSG 2 Arsenal 1 (agg 3-1)

Arsenal were certainly two goals better than PSG 'on the night' but the result was still unexceptional. The totally weird absence of a competent striker in the Arsenal squad came home to roost. I'm not talking about a hundred million superstar, I'm talking about a 30-50 million 'established goalscorer at the top level'. They've never had one in the whole Arteta era (and before).

This has long been masked by the play of Odegaard and Saka but with the former so disastrously off-form as to be not worth his place in the side since Christmas and the injury and fitfulness of the latter, the team has nosedived.

These shortcomings, we are being assured, will be addressed with a big splurge in the summer window but the feeling that this particular iteration of Arsenal has shot its bolt is widespread. It has certainly reached me. Back to there or thereabouts.

[Mick Harper]

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

Is the essence of sport its taxonomy?

[Mick Harper]

This sounds like a reprint from this thread.
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The Greatest Game On Turf June 2, 2024

Football is the world game and the best football teams are from Europe. Club sides, not national ones. Football improves by leaps and bounds every year so it follows that the Champions’ League final is the greatest sporting match-up there ever was in human history. Until next year.

Borussia Dortmund 0 Real Madrid 2 therefore deserves attention even from the great unwashed who believe Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers have some sort of claim. (49ers/claim, geddit? Please yourselves © Frankie Howerd.)

Unusually it was actually a good game (I watched the highlights). The Hun swept all before them for forty-five minutes but the Dagoes swooped to conquer in the second half. English interest was confined to seeing how Jadon Sancho and Jude Bellingham* performed for their respective Euro-masters and they done good.

* After reading a full page encomium in the Guardian detailing the life and times of Jude Bellingham on the morning of the match, I have formally withdrawn my recommendation he be made captain of England and prime minister of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. No way is such a Mother Theresa suited to either job.

Also whether the Wembley turf was up to hosting the greatest game on turf. They’d forgotten to schedule the Royal Military Tattoo the previous weekend so it just about passed muster. (Military tattoo/ muster… ah, forget it.)

But why weren’t we there? I’m talking about football now, we’re always well represented at the Royal Tattoo. The simple fact is that the foreign foe has caught up with us. For a coupla decades a combination of Russian oligarchs and television squillions has kept the Premier League outasight, but no more.

We’re not back in the Dark Ages when a combination of primitive tactics and a lack of darkies meant we would go out to Slovan Bratislava in the second round after a bye in the first but we’re gonna have to get used to not always being there or thereabouts.

If only we’d done what the Yanks did. Invented the game but not let anyone else play it.

[Mick Harper]

I agonised over the use of 'darkies'--I had already been banned and reinstated for racism--but decided it was so egregiously antique Medium wouldn't know what I was referring to.

[Mick Harper]

I hate it when two English clubs reach the final, as Manchester United (as you have to call them since Chad returned from the grave) and Tottenham Hotspur (to give them equal billing) have in the Second-Raters' EuroCup.

I wouldn't watch them if they were playing one another in the Premier League so I'm certainly not going to bother when it's some Mickey Mouse match. If it was Man U versus Johnny Foreigner I'd be there on my recliner with my rattle.

That's not to say it's unimportant for them. They say winning the final eliminator for promotion to the Premier League is the most valuable prize in sport, but getting into the Champions' League or not must run it close.

That's not to say I don't have a preference about who wins this one. I would normally favour Spurs over any northern swine but on this occasion I'll be rooting for the bad guys because they will surely survive the Champions League prelims. Spurs prolly won't. Same reason I'm hoping for a Chelsea/ Man City/ Newcastle combo to keep out Forest and Villa in the top five.