Balls!

'Fast ball!  Fast ball!  Fast ball!'

Ah, the Six Nations.  Good because it’s rugby, good because it’s a major tournament, great because it’s one of the rare sporting events that is broadcast on the BBC.  If Sky and ESPN continue their domination of sports broadcasting, the only sporting choice left to those too tight to pay to watch their team perform disappointingly is going to be Little League and fights in pub car parks.

The thing about the Six Nations is that one starts the tournament with such high expectations and, because it is stretched out over a number of weeks, it takes a while for those hopes to be crushed.

'One can’t help but feel that cricket might be improved if the batsman occasionally 

chased the bowler around the pitch with his bat in response to irresponsible bowling'

There is also spectacle.  At Murrayfield they have a piper and a field gun, presumably to keep order if Scotland actually score a try.  There are the anthems, everybody singing, everybody crying.  There’s also the ever present threat of a bit of off-the-ball action, which is what a punch-up between players is referred to as.  This is not the sort of behaviour one would expect to see from professional sportsmen, although one can’t help but feel that cricket might be improved if the batsman occasionally chased the bowler around the pitch with his bat in response to irresponsible bowling.

The downside to watching the Six Nations is the commentary.  For some strange reason, the BBC’s rugby commentary team seem to be afflicted with a disproportionate number of old women.  Not that I have anything against old women, old women are lovely, it’s just that when an ex-rugby player is being unswervingly negative about a team who, whatever their performance, are sweating and bleeding and steaming in the driving rain in order to win the game, it does rather detract from one’s enjoyment.

This is the year though, when I add social media to the mix.  Have you ever watched a sporting event whilst following it simultaneously on Twitter?  It’s fantastic.  It’s like going to the cinema, watching a film and having everyone talking at once, sharing their ill-informed opinions and giving advice to the characters, all in neat little soundbites, but in real time and with the added bonus that there is plenty of ‘off-the-ball’ action between Twitterers (Twonkers?  Twypers?) who do not share the same opinion.

Following Twitter and watching telly has been something of a short-term craze for me this past week.  Once you get into it, it’s hard to stop until you have a breakthrough moment that you’ve seen it all before and, actually, it’s not adding to your enjoyment of ‘Bargain Hunt’ as much as you thought it might.

It is a great idea, real time updates on social media from people who are having the same experience that you are.  Like with so many great tech ideas though, it’s the execution that lets it down.  That and the users.

Because what you are really looking for is somebody to make amusingly cruel comments that add another layer of enjoyment to whatever you are watching.  There’s even an app that allows you to filter social media comments about live television and, in the short term, it is gigglesome but in the long term depressing that so many people are at home at five thirty on a Saturday night watching ‘Jurassic Park’ in their pyjamas.  That’s my thing, that’s not your thing, alright?

I’ve been in a stadium watching a rugby match as part of a social network known as a ‘crowd’ and the comments are, generally, kept to a minimum of ‘ooooh’, ‘ahhhh’ and ‘fast ball!’, which seems to get shouted an awful lot, along with hints and tips and advice for the players and the ref.  These do not, generally, make for good tweets.  Mind you, neither do the things actually being tweeted.

So I’m just going to assume that a live sporting occasion is a shared experience without relying on any actual evidence, and I am going to go on believing that the sort of people who tweet really do have better things to do on a Saturday night than watch ‘Jurassic Park'

in their pyjamas.

They are wrong, of course, there is no better way to spend your Saturday night.

This sporting life

One of the lasting legacies of the 2012 Olympics was to get the great British public interested and enthused about sports other than Association Football.  There is no doubt that the Olympics raised the profile of cycling in the UK, which was already riding high after Wiggo had won the Tour de France, not just a tremendous sporting achievement but that achievement that the English cherish above all others – Beating The Foreign At Their Own Game. 

That’s why the news that the Big Departure for the 2014 Tour would be in Leeds was greeted with such enthusiasm, as Brits who for years had associated bicycles with spindly rickets-ridden grocery delivery boys toiling up northern cobbled hills or district nurses built like the figurehead of a tea clipper sailing magnificently through country lanes atop a noble iron steed would instead be treated once again to the thrill of the road race and a sporting event which, when watched live, whooshes past you in a few seconds, allowing the rest of the afternoon free for drinking and talking about pies.

When the Olympics were in progress, unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the overpriced nancy-boys who, the public slowly realised, had not won a major international competition in their living memory, and Team GB who all appeared to live with their mums, went to bed at four in the afternoon and were assembling a hoard of gold that would put a dragon to shame.

Once the Olympics ended and the soccer season started, the normal order quickly reasserted itself and soccer dominates the media once more.  Although it’s probably fair to say that this domination is not as total as it once was, as editors realise that if the BBC were able to dedicate whole channels to single sports, like canoeing, the least they can do is dispatch a hack to a riverside in spate in Wales to record the activities of a bloke in a fibreglass shell trying to paddle up a waterfall.  Dickie Davis was decades ahead of the game, there is a World of Sport out there, beyond even the seasonal favourites of soccer and rugby.

They used to say that soccer was a game for gentlemen played by thugs, and rugby was a game for thugs played by gentlemen.  That’s no longer true, it’s fairer to say that, professionally at least, soccer is a game played by foreigners whilst rugby is a game played by blokes who, if they are going to punch an opponent, at least have the courtesy to do it in front of the ref.

More than anything, soccer is a tribal thing.  For many fans, the order of preference is Club, Country, Bird.  And it’s played everywhere, all you need are two boys, each with a jumper and you have the set up for a goalie, a striker and some goalposts, in short, a game.  It’s more difficult to organise an impromptu game of rugby, where you need at least two public schools with a bitter rivalry.

And while it is very easy to knock soccer, let’s not forget in these tough economic times the role that soccer plays in stimulating the economy.  Clubs change the design of their strip seven or eight times a season, necessitating their fans to visit the club shop on a regular basis to enable them to dress like a fat version of their sporting heroes.  At a local level, the players themselves spend money in bars, clubs and restaurants in a quest to maintain goal-scoring fitness levels.  At an international level, with so many players now being so foreign that they have to hold their arms out straight not just to celebrate goals but to properly display their twenty-seven syllable surnames, they are sending home a portion of their wages and so re-floating the Euro.  And of course let’s not forget their contribution to certain professions, eminent QCs with a good record of getting their client off charges of racism or sexual assault in time for Saturday’s match do not come cheap.

In rugby, of course, the players at least have the courtesy to commit sexual assault right in front of the ref, usually in the scrum.

Up and under – with fizz

The six nations is underway, which means that every weekend I can be found sporting my replica Scotland shirt and screaming at the television.

Screaming at the television is a very different occupation to shouting at the television. Shouting at the television is what you do when you are confronted with stupidity. This is, of course, something that happens every day in real life and we put up with without comment, but I’m buggered if I’m going to let it happen in my own front room without remonstration. Usually shouting at the television happens on the hour, as this is when news bulletins are broadcast.

There are occasions when the screaming turns to shouting and these are less to do with the performance of the team than the performance of the commentators. I don’t know what it is about rugby commentators but they are, at least the domestic ones, the most negative breed of people I’ve come across.

If a team wins, it’s because the other team made errors and beat themselves. If a team loose, then they are written off for the rest of the tournament (interesting to see if they learn the lessons of England’s amazing performance in the World Cup).

The real issue though, is the narrow lexicon of rugby commentators. A few seasons ago, you could not watch a match without hearing a commentator opine that ‘they’ve left themselves a mountain to climb’ when a side go more than ten points down. (Wales apparently left themselves with a ‘hill’ to climb on Saturday. Presumably we can look forward to other landscape protuberances being pressed into use, I especially look forward to hearing that a team has a tumulus to climb, as I’ve often seen them marked on maps but have no idea what they actually look like).

If they go fifteen points down, then ‘you’re just playing for pride now’.

This season, apparently, is all about fizz. Is the team fizzing, in a state of fizzment, has there been sufficient showing of fizz? With a new stock phrase added every year, by 2020 you won’t need a commentator at all, just a randomiser.

To me, commentary should be limited to who is passing to whom, how the pass was achieved and what local club they play for. If it’s the player’s birthday or his wife has just had a baby, this may also be mentioned. It used to be that commentary options were either listening or turning the volume knob down. If the match was on the radio, one listened to the (better) radio commentary as a matter of course (especially if it was Test Match Special). Thanks to the digital age, one now has ‘commentary options’ when watching a match. These though, are fairly restrictive, telly commentary or usually the local radio commentary from the home nation.

It’s coming to the point where I’m going to mute the teevee and stick on some music. You know how they cut together the ‘best bits’ of the match into a montage at the end and play ‘beautiful day’ or something over it? Well, imagine the whole match being like that.