h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

These days, of course, the former British colonies take their revenge by thrashing England at cricket on a regular basis.

And Rugby

Tennis, football, hockey, and virtually every sport.

I'd take issue with the assertion that the former colonies beat the British at football.

Football is the one sport at which GB remains better than her former colonies. This is possibly because the upper classes, who introduced the various sports to Johnny Foreigner, don't play it much.

Not to mention the fact that her two most prominent former colonies choose not to play it at all.

Or that most players in England aren't actually English born?

I read something somewhere about a great plan to get British sport back on it's feet. This is the gist of it:

Brutally reconquer one quarter of the world, kill as many of the inhabitants as you can, enslave the rest, and then paint the new territories pink for no readily apparent reason. Then settle down, and introduce a ludicrous and completely pointless bat and ball game to the few surviving natives. Then wait two hundred years for the whole process to repaet itself.

Oh, they play it. They just affect not to be interested because they're rubbish at it (with the odd exception, e.g. Bosnich, Kewell, etc.).

Even with the current parlous state of the England team (all English born), I still wouldn't risk my last fiver on Oz or NZ (was that who you meant?) beating them.

I still think the reason that they have no real history at the game is that when the Empire builders decided, in their inimitable way, to 'teach the natives about the concept of fair play, what?', they only taught them the games that they themselves played. Football being a primarily Working Class game (apart from the very beginning), it got forgotten.

Reading that back, it sounds a bit po-faced. Sorry.

The US team aren't that bad. They're just not that good either.

In the UK, all the athletic types go out for football, with the more psychotic ones gravitating to rugby instead. In North America, it's quite different. In the US, they all go out for American football. Then baseball. Then basketball. The truly psychotic go out for hockey, if there's any ice to be found in the area. Sun dwellers will gravitate toward volleyball. And then, if you can't possibly play any other sport, the soccer team is always looking for players. At my high school, the soccer team was made up of 5' 2" Mexican kids. Not exactly an ideal talent pool for international competition.

Canada's priorities are a bit different (hockey being life there), but the story is the same. Do they even bother to field an international team?

I don't think so. You'd have to ask someone who knows. I agree on the Rugby point, though.

Actually it's a good thing for Britain. We have won the last 3 Rugby world cups by proxy.

'By proxy' meaning....

My apologies for being terminally thick, but several years of education will do that to a person.

"by proxy" - i.e. they did it for us, as Austalia and South Africa are all British, we won the last three Rugby world cups and the cricket. Sort of anyway.

I don't think it's wise to call Australians British. Might as well call the Americans "British" or why not the Indians? The idea that the British empire still exists is idiotic - the commonwealth - lol . Maybe Israelis can be called British?

Everyone is British in spirit, they just don't know it....

Oooh! Wowbagger The Incessantly Provocative strikes again! I wouldn't go to any Sinn Fein meetings and announce your theory of infinite Britishness if I were you!

Yeah, I don#'t really believe that, but I know a lot of people who would cheer if they heard it....

Here in Godzone New Zild, almost everyone forgets that"rugby is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans and football is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen".

Suid-Afrika is Britse? South Africa is founded on British people? Ag, boykie, care to take another look? Rugby world cup coming up soon...