Britpicking Resource: Sport
By which I mean that, although I know that, like religion, sport is life-alteringly important to a lot of people, unfortunately I totally fail to see the point. I go out of my way to avoid it. On those occasions-christenings, marriages, funerals, Wimbledon Finals day, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race-when it is impossible to avoid religion or sport, I suffer them in good grace, stoically, and with a stiff upper lip, as a good Brit should. However, wherever possible, I make my excuses and leave the arena to those who are gifted with the required spirituality, testosterone, jingoism or what-not that makes people actually give a fuck about these things.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good sing along. I’m as happy to participate in rousing renditions of “Abide With Me,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Jerusalem” as the next ambivalent unsporty atheist with a penchant for sanitised tribal warfare. But in general, in matters of sport, as in matters of omnipresent deities, I am somewhat of a bemused bystander.
For some reason this seems to annoy a lot of people.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are some musings on the subject of sport and the average Brit.
Britain, as everyone knows, invented any sport that is of any worth whatsoever. Next time Arthur is at the pub, watching the Six Nations rugby fixture between England and Wales, or part of a five-day test cricket match against Australia, with his sporty buddies, they’ll definitely point this out, at great length, especially if Australia are beating England at cricket. Bloody uppity colonists.
Our diligent Victorian forbears, or at least Arthur’s upper-crust ones (the rest of us had forbears who were diligently dying young in factories or up chimneys), at least, the male portion thereof (because even the upper-crust females were diligently dying in childbirth), had very little to do, on account of having tricked working class workers into doing all the work. To take their minds off the unpalatable facts of life-namely, that masturbation made you go blind (allegedly), and buggery was illegal-these frustrated males therefore spent all their leisure time writing down lots of rules to pointless games that they invented to whittle away the hours between oppressing the colonies, impregnating their latest child bride, and exporting the stiff upper lip.
In this way were several instruments of torture born. Golf, cricket, football, rugby, croquet, tennis, snooker, squash, rackets, fives, the wall game, rowing, boxing, lacrosse, horse-racing, show-jumping, dog-racing, sailing, hockey, and darts are all legitimate British sports and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The fact that people had been throwing, hitting, kicking and racing a variety of implements and other species, as well as each other, all over the world, since time immemorial, is irrelevant. The Victorians wrote down the rules, so we Brits get to keep them, and moan about the fact that the rest of the world keep beating us at our own game, until such times as these green shores are finally deluged by the melting ice caps.
So annoyed are we Brits by the enthusiasm with which foreigners keep beating us at the sports we claim to have invented, that we keep inventing new and ever more ludicrous contests. Then we sit back in utter bewilderment while these in turn are taken up by our international counterparts.
It is this process that we can thank for esoteric sports such as bog-snorkelling, cheese-rolling, pancake-tossing, welly-wanging, dwile flonking, and a recently invented contender, gravy wrestling. Oh, and we also have beer to thank. Copious quantities of dark-brown, nutty old ale. Because many of these games were invented in the pub, as an amicable way of resolving disputes about who spilt someone’s pint.
For example, bog-snorkelling was invented in a pub deep within the picturesque Welsh metropolis Llanwrtyd Wells, also the 2013 winner of the fine Welsh sport of consonant-wrangling.
Cheese-rolling is a bit like ski-ing, in that it involves hurling oneself off a cliff, only it lacks certain ingredients such as the snow, the skis, and the soft landing at the bottom. Instead, there’s a large Double-Gloucester cheese.
The annual cheese-rolling contest at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester was officially banned in 2010, because there were too many casualties in former years. In 1997 over 33 people were treated for injuries from splinters to broken bones. Nevertheless, cheese-rolling fanatics continue to stage the event unofficially.
http://www.soglos.com/sport-outdoor/27837/Gloucestershire-Cheese-Rolling
Welly wanging originated in the Yorkshire village of Upperthong, near Holmfirth. It is thought that the sport originated following an incident where a pint of ale was spilt into a local resident's Wellington boot. Welly wanging is a wonderfully inclusive sport; the Upperthong village website states it is open to all people irrespective of age, sex, race, creed, religion, nationality and colour. It also, generously, extends the criteria to cover people from Lancashire.
http://www.upperthong.org.uk/?page_id=404#sthash.xax0mJzr.dpuf
The Scots have their own panoply of bizarre and unfeasible sports such as sword-dancing, sheepdog trials and cabre-tossing, in which extremely fierce and well-muscled men put on blue make-up, dress up in skirts, and throw tree trunks around. They also have cyclist Sir Chris Hoy who has thighs like tree trunks. The next logical step for the Scots will be to invent a sport in which they toss Sir Chris Hoy around.
They say that in London you are never more than 2 metres away from a rat; the same sorry state of affairs can be said of the supposedly-dead British class structure. As with so many things British, you can’t follow sport in the UK without revealing something about your class background. If you like polo you are a toff. If you follow rugby, rowing or fives, you are a posho. If you follow football you are a chav. Nearly everyone in the UK is a chav. This means that we all shop at Primark, say “innit” at the end of every sentence, and have an opinion on how Sunderland managed to beat Newcastle 3-0.
Football is what Americans call soccer. Everyone else in the entire universe calls it football, because it involves connecting two things: a ball, and your foot. Yes, the foot is generally wearing a sock. For some reason, the sock bit is important to Americans, which I think is why they call it soccer, although why it has assumed a greater importance than for example the boot, or the jock-strap, that the player is also wearing, I am not sure. I personally would pay good money to watch a sport called jock-strapper.
Football is a genuine religion in Scotland. If you’re a Catholic Glaswegian, that means you worship Celtic, whereas Protestant Glaswegians worship Glasgow Rangers. The grudge match to end all grudge matches used to be the clash of the “Old Firm” when these two Glasgow teams played against each other; however, this entertaining spectacle was brought to an abrupt halt when Rangers became bankrupt recently in a whiff of mismanagement and hubris, so that they now play in the lower leagues against obscure little teams like Forfar and Airdrieonians. No longer do legions of scarf-wearing Scots have this excuse to spit at each other over a pint of heavy in Glasgow pubs. It has spoilt everyone’s fun.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-black/glasgow-rangers-bankruptcy_b_1671703.html
This sense of a city divided along football lines is not unique to Glasgow. Every club has a particular hated rival, often very local, which adds an intoxicating mix of spice and vitriol to the ever-present scent of mass-produced beer and sub-standard meat pies when the two clash in a match known as a local derby. Fixtures such as Manchester City versus Manchester United, Liverpool versus Everton, Tottenham versus Arsenal, and Aston Villa versus Birmingham City are always well attended, and the fans are always in good voice.
Fans like singing at football matches in Britain. Each team’s legion of supporters draw upon a wide repertoire of heartfelt, touching songs with thoughtful lyrics about the credentials of the opposing team, their manager, and the referee. Going to a football match is a great opportunity for getting your kids to enjoy singing; it’s like listening to a badly trained, alcoholic, 40,000-strong male voice choir.
My particular favourite football song is a delicately worded Arsenal song which goes: “My old man said ‘Be a Tottenham fan’: I said fuck off, bollocks, you’re a cunt.” Sheer poetry.
What the Americans call football is something which is superficially similar to the thing we Brits call rugby, only the Americans wear full body armour to do it, and have adverts every 30 seconds, because the national sport in America is actually a thing called capitalism, which means you have to be able to see the logos on the mens' kit, and it wouldn’t do if the kit all got muddy.
I may be biased, but it seems to me that hiding all these fit, buffed-up mens' bodies under a layer of body armour seems to be a little bit of a waste.
Anyway, this is the polar opposite of rugby. The whole point of rugby is to get as muddy as possible, as quickly as possible. Rugby is a complicated sport, with unfathomable rules. It involves very large, muscly men. Once coated in a slimy layer of mud, the men grope each other's wedding tackle in a seething morass of sweaty bodies known as a scrum. Sometimes an odd-shaped ball appears on the pitch, but this is rather tangential to proceedings.
Rugby has a large and passionate female following.
Some Brits also enjoy a game called cricket. They will probably claim that it is a cerebral sport, because the rules of the game don’t even make sense to most of the players, which is why they keep asking the Umpire "Howzatt?" It's the Umpire's job to make things up as he goes along. Umpires, being sober, get really bored during cricket matches, and have private contests to see who can invent the most ridiculous cricketing terms, which is why cricket has gifted us such phrases as "bowling a googlie", "silly mid-on," and "innings". Cricket's quintessential Englishness is epitomised by the fact that it is the only sport which contains a mandatory tea break.
Cricket matches take place over five consecutive days - basically they are an excuse for a protracted, five-day bender. Britain’s “barmy army” of cricket supporters are renowned throughout Britain’s myriad former colonies (i.e. Australia) for their competitive drinking abilities. While all the drinking is going on, sometimes one bloke tosses a small red ball at some sticks while a bunch of other blokes try to hit the ball with a large bat. Again, this is somewhat tangential to the main agenda, which is to drink as much beer as possible and develop ever-more creative ways of insulting the Australians.
Women do participate in sport in the UK. However, this is somewhat of an underground activity. The mainstream press do not report about Women’s sport, unless someone’s got particularly nice tits. This is because the British media are run primarily by cynical (male) aristocrats, misogynist (male) Australians, or Russian (male) oligarchs for the entertainment of what they perceive to be the average man on the street. They haven’t got wise to the fact that the average woman on the street might be quite cheered to know that the England women’s cricket team thrashed Australia, or to see close-up photographs of Sir Chris Hoy’s thighs for a change, rather than the view up some female Russian tennis player’s skirt.
Alas, it is time for me to wrap up. I have probably forgotten some really important sports, for which I sincerely apologise, unless you mean motor racing, which I have deliberately left out, because Jeremy Clarkson likes it, and he’s a first-class twat.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good sing along. I’m as happy to participate in rousing renditions of “Abide With Me,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Jerusalem” as the next ambivalent unsporty atheist with a penchant for sanitised tribal warfare. But in general, in matters of sport, as in matters of omnipresent deities, I am somewhat of a bemused bystander.
For some reason this seems to annoy a lot of people.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are some musings on the subject of sport and the average Brit.
Britain, as everyone knows, invented any sport that is of any worth whatsoever. Next time Arthur is at the pub, watching the Six Nations rugby fixture between England and Wales, or part of a five-day test cricket match against Australia, with his sporty buddies, they’ll definitely point this out, at great length, especially if Australia are beating England at cricket. Bloody uppity colonists.
Our diligent Victorian forbears, or at least Arthur’s upper-crust ones (the rest of us had forbears who were diligently dying young in factories or up chimneys), at least, the male portion thereof (because even the upper-crust females were diligently dying in childbirth), had very little to do, on account of having tricked working class workers into doing all the work. To take their minds off the unpalatable facts of life-namely, that masturbation made you go blind (allegedly), and buggery was illegal-these frustrated males therefore spent all their leisure time writing down lots of rules to pointless games that they invented to whittle away the hours between oppressing the colonies, impregnating their latest child bride, and exporting the stiff upper lip.
In this way were several instruments of torture born. Golf, cricket, football, rugby, croquet, tennis, snooker, squash, rackets, fives, the wall game, rowing, boxing, lacrosse, horse-racing, show-jumping, dog-racing, sailing, hockey, and darts are all legitimate British sports and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The fact that people had been throwing, hitting, kicking and racing a variety of implements and other species, as well as each other, all over the world, since time immemorial, is irrelevant. The Victorians wrote down the rules, so we Brits get to keep them, and moan about the fact that the rest of the world keep beating us at our own game, until such times as these green shores are finally deluged by the melting ice caps.
So annoyed are we Brits by the enthusiasm with which foreigners keep beating us at the sports we claim to have invented, that we keep inventing new and ever more ludicrous contests. Then we sit back in utter bewilderment while these in turn are taken up by our international counterparts.
It is this process that we can thank for esoteric sports such as bog-snorkelling, cheese-rolling, pancake-tossing, welly-wanging, dwile flonking, and a recently invented contender, gravy wrestling. Oh, and we also have beer to thank. Copious quantities of dark-brown, nutty old ale. Because many of these games were invented in the pub, as an amicable way of resolving disputes about who spilt someone’s pint.
For example, bog-snorkelling was invented in a pub deep within the picturesque Welsh metropolis Llanwrtyd Wells, also the 2013 winner of the fine Welsh sport of consonant-wrangling.
Cheese-rolling is a bit like ski-ing, in that it involves hurling oneself off a cliff, only it lacks certain ingredients such as the snow, the skis, and the soft landing at the bottom. Instead, there’s a large Double-Gloucester cheese.
The annual cheese-rolling contest at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester was officially banned in 2010, because there were too many casualties in former years. In 1997 over 33 people were treated for injuries from splinters to broken bones. Nevertheless, cheese-rolling fanatics continue to stage the event unofficially.
http://www.soglos.com/sport-outdoor/27837/Gloucestershire-Cheese-Rolling
Welly wanging originated in the Yorkshire village of Upperthong, near Holmfirth. It is thought that the sport originated following an incident where a pint of ale was spilt into a local resident's Wellington boot. Welly wanging is a wonderfully inclusive sport; the Upperthong village website states it is open to all people irrespective of age, sex, race, creed, religion, nationality and colour. It also, generously, extends the criteria to cover people from Lancashire.
http://www.upperthong.org.uk/?page_id=404#sthash.xax0mJzr.dpuf
The Scots have their own panoply of bizarre and unfeasible sports such as sword-dancing, sheepdog trials and cabre-tossing, in which extremely fierce and well-muscled men put on blue make-up, dress up in skirts, and throw tree trunks around. They also have cyclist Sir Chris Hoy who has thighs like tree trunks. The next logical step for the Scots will be to invent a sport in which they toss Sir Chris Hoy around.
They say that in London you are never more than 2 metres away from a rat; the same sorry state of affairs can be said of the supposedly-dead British class structure. As with so many things British, you can’t follow sport in the UK without revealing something about your class background. If you like polo you are a toff. If you follow rugby, rowing or fives, you are a posho. If you follow football you are a chav. Nearly everyone in the UK is a chav. This means that we all shop at Primark, say “innit” at the end of every sentence, and have an opinion on how Sunderland managed to beat Newcastle 3-0.
Football is what Americans call soccer. Everyone else in the entire universe calls it football, because it involves connecting two things: a ball, and your foot. Yes, the foot is generally wearing a sock. For some reason, the sock bit is important to Americans, which I think is why they call it soccer, although why it has assumed a greater importance than for example the boot, or the jock-strap, that the player is also wearing, I am not sure. I personally would pay good money to watch a sport called jock-strapper.
Football is a genuine religion in Scotland. If you’re a Catholic Glaswegian, that means you worship Celtic, whereas Protestant Glaswegians worship Glasgow Rangers. The grudge match to end all grudge matches used to be the clash of the “Old Firm” when these two Glasgow teams played against each other; however, this entertaining spectacle was brought to an abrupt halt when Rangers became bankrupt recently in a whiff of mismanagement and hubris, so that they now play in the lower leagues against obscure little teams like Forfar and Airdrieonians. No longer do legions of scarf-wearing Scots have this excuse to spit at each other over a pint of heavy in Glasgow pubs. It has spoilt everyone’s fun.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-black/glasgow-rangers-bankruptcy_b_1671703.html
This sense of a city divided along football lines is not unique to Glasgow. Every club has a particular hated rival, often very local, which adds an intoxicating mix of spice and vitriol to the ever-present scent of mass-produced beer and sub-standard meat pies when the two clash in a match known as a local derby. Fixtures such as Manchester City versus Manchester United, Liverpool versus Everton, Tottenham versus Arsenal, and Aston Villa versus Birmingham City are always well attended, and the fans are always in good voice.
Fans like singing at football matches in Britain. Each team’s legion of supporters draw upon a wide repertoire of heartfelt, touching songs with thoughtful lyrics about the credentials of the opposing team, their manager, and the referee. Going to a football match is a great opportunity for getting your kids to enjoy singing; it’s like listening to a badly trained, alcoholic, 40,000-strong male voice choir.
My particular favourite football song is a delicately worded Arsenal song which goes: “My old man said ‘Be a Tottenham fan’: I said fuck off, bollocks, you’re a cunt.” Sheer poetry.
What the Americans call football is something which is superficially similar to the thing we Brits call rugby, only the Americans wear full body armour to do it, and have adverts every 30 seconds, because the national sport in America is actually a thing called capitalism, which means you have to be able to see the logos on the mens' kit, and it wouldn’t do if the kit all got muddy.
I may be biased, but it seems to me that hiding all these fit, buffed-up mens' bodies under a layer of body armour seems to be a little bit of a waste.
Anyway, this is the polar opposite of rugby. The whole point of rugby is to get as muddy as possible, as quickly as possible. Rugby is a complicated sport, with unfathomable rules. It involves very large, muscly men. Once coated in a slimy layer of mud, the men grope each other's wedding tackle in a seething morass of sweaty bodies known as a scrum. Sometimes an odd-shaped ball appears on the pitch, but this is rather tangential to proceedings.
Rugby has a large and passionate female following.
Some Brits also enjoy a game called cricket. They will probably claim that it is a cerebral sport, because the rules of the game don’t even make sense to most of the players, which is why they keep asking the Umpire "Howzatt?" It's the Umpire's job to make things up as he goes along. Umpires, being sober, get really bored during cricket matches, and have private contests to see who can invent the most ridiculous cricketing terms, which is why cricket has gifted us such phrases as "bowling a googlie", "silly mid-on," and "innings". Cricket's quintessential Englishness is epitomised by the fact that it is the only sport which contains a mandatory tea break.
Cricket matches take place over five consecutive days - basically they are an excuse for a protracted, five-day bender. Britain’s “barmy army” of cricket supporters are renowned throughout Britain’s myriad former colonies (i.e. Australia) for their competitive drinking abilities. While all the drinking is going on, sometimes one bloke tosses a small red ball at some sticks while a bunch of other blokes try to hit the ball with a large bat. Again, this is somewhat tangential to the main agenda, which is to drink as much beer as possible and develop ever-more creative ways of insulting the Australians.
Women do participate in sport in the UK. However, this is somewhat of an underground activity. The mainstream press do not report about Women’s sport, unless someone’s got particularly nice tits. This is because the British media are run primarily by cynical (male) aristocrats, misogynist (male) Australians, or Russian (male) oligarchs for the entertainment of what they perceive to be the average man on the street. They haven’t got wise to the fact that the average woman on the street might be quite cheered to know that the England women’s cricket team thrashed Australia, or to see close-up photographs of Sir Chris Hoy’s thighs for a change, rather than the view up some female Russian tennis player’s skirt.
Alas, it is time for me to wrap up. I have probably forgotten some really important sports, for which I sincerely apologise, unless you mean motor racing, which I have deliberately left out, because Jeremy Clarkson likes it, and he’s a first-class twat.