Sporting With Egon
Created | Updated Mar 19, 2004
Both Egon and several are here with sports this week.
Rugby Parade
The triumphant English Rugby team celebrated their World Cup victory in Australia by parading the Web Ellis Trophy through the Streets of London on Monday.
The Web Ellis Trophy is the proper name for the World Cup, named after William Webb Ellis, a student at Rugby School who invented the game by picking up a ball during a game of football and running with it. At my school, we called that cheating. At Rugby, it's inventing a new sport. The Australians refer to the Webb Ellis Trophy as Bill.
However, the important thing is that the England Rugby Team won it, and 750,000 people spilled onto the streets of the capital to cheer the open-topped buses carrying the squad and their coaches (led by Clive Woodward) on their route from Amrble Arch to Trafalgar Square. Once they'd got to Trafalgar Square, they gave non-comittal answers to some questions from the BBC's John Inverdale on big screens, and buggered off to Buckingham Palace, where they had tea, cucumber sandwiches and a photo-opportunity with the Queen.
It was then back to their hotel and off to 10 Downing Street, where the Rugger boys drank Champagne and were probably bored stupid by Tony Blair and the other assorted politicians.
Jonny Wilkinson was back at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday to get his MBE from the Queen, having been involved in a car accident on Monday night.
So, that's the Rugby news over with.
Football
Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal get closer and closer at the top of the Premier League, Real Madrid beat Barcelona, and Everton and Manchester City play one of the most tedious football matches of recent years. Chelsea are amongst the teams to claim a place in the second round of the Champions League, along with Manchester United, while Rangers crash out and things are, at the time of writing, looking promising for Celtic and Arsenal. Sparta Prague dumped Lazio out of European football altogether.
Football: World Cup Qualifying Draw
The qualifying rounds for the 2006 World Cup were drawn, with England, Wales and Northern Ireland all in the same group, along with Austria, Poland and Kazakhstan. The full draw for the qualifiers can be found at the official FIFA website.
Cricket: England In Sri Lanka
Having deftly hung on for a draw in the first test in Galle, England chose a very batting-oriented side for the second test in Kandy - only two specialist bowlers, two all rounders and some 'batsmen who can bowl a bit' offering bowling options. But after one day, Sri Lanka lie at 247-7, English left-arm spinner Ashley Giles the star with three wickets, having taken career best figures in Galle.
Ludicrous Tabloid Story of the Week
Dwain Chambers is apparently considering a career in American Football. Yes, of course he is.
And now, here's several with more sports...
Yes, it was a big week in American sports, with money-grubbing behind most of it, even in (supposedly) amateur sports.
As I tried to explain in the 27.11.03 Post, American college football does NOT have a national championship playoff tournament, rather the question of who's Number One was voted on by separate polls of A) the coaches and B) representatives of the media, and there were often differing human opinions. So the teevee networks threw a bunch of money together and developed a new toy called the Bowl Championship Series which combines the two human polls with computer evaluations for a third opinion on where to spend the teevee booty of nationally-televised games.
Thus the human/toy tabulated this week that the #1 team in the human polls, the University of Southern California Trojans, was actually the #3 team in the nation. Confused? So am I, but that's what these boxes of circuits are good for, in my own humble opinion. In short, the whole system is messed up and much more work is needed before the human/compu-toy interface is workable. I think this is what science fiction has been writing about since HG Wells - something that Douglas Adams and others founded the Hitchhiker's Guide upon.
But that's only me.
For the record, while the h2g2 Post is on vacation for the upcoming holidays, immense gigabytes of internet space will be taken up on speculation, game reports and statistics on websites such as ESPN and Sportsline and the like for us sports junkies who NEED MORE INPUT NOW on the fortunes of favourite teams.
I could do a summary of Amfoot, a recap of the latest in the major league baseball negotiations and how players are starting to force their agents into taking less earnings to play where they wish to, or that South Korea and Japan have advanced to the final of the East Asian Championships in soccer, each winning 1-0 matches against China and Hong Kong. I could also tell you about how tennis player Kim Clijsters won't play for Belgium in the Olympics because the team wears uniforms made by one company and she has a signed contract to wear only another company's brand label... there are many things I could tell you that you can find on other websites, if they are of interest to you, personally.
That's how we humans use our toys. To spend more money and entertain ourselves. To isolate ourselves AND form a community, byte by byte... Is that a contradiction? You betcha! We do work so we can play.
Nothing wrong with that, is there?
This is several, a/k/a random commenting.
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