Posts by Edward Siddle
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I totally agree with that sentiment about getting up in the middle of the night to watch sport, specially as a kid.
My first memory of middle of the night sport is the 1980 All black tour of Wales - sitting nervously wondering if the All Blacks could breach the scarlet line of Llanelli, and puzzling over the sloping ground at Stradey Park.
The FA Cup was certainly part of that, but I've got to admit that there are very few memories of actually good games. So often the two teams that make it seem to either be one strong one and one weak one and it ends 2-0 (eg. Chelsea/middlesbrough, Man U/Millwall) or else two strong teams who stalemate each other out of fear (Man u/chelsea). About once every 5 or 7 years you get a classic eg. the recent liverpool/west ham final for instance - pity about the result really. The memories are as much about the bright spring sunshine and gingham grass and how it contrasts with the cold and howling wind outside in NZ at that time of year.
And for whatever reason, the FA Cup has simply declined in stature, and with so much other football on between the English prem, Italian Serie A, Spanish La Liga, plus sundry other stuff like the Phoenix, there just isn't the demand to see a game in the middle of the night which could well be quite dull. I can see why no channel has picked the rights up.
this year it is chelsea/portsmouth which could end in a fairytale for portsmouth, but then with the way they have run their finances and are not paying people like the st john's ambulance i'm not sure I want them to have one last hurrah before they slip into the financial morass.
-
apropos of what uroskin said, some paper I read during a University statistics course found the rather surprising (to me at the time) conclusion that having a drinking age about two years below the driving age produced the best results in terms of negative drink driving stats for young drivers. the logic seemed to be that by the time they were allowed to drive, they'd had a couple of years at least to figure out how to drink (and what it did to them in varying doses). no way i could cite it now - the coursebook is long since gone - so cannot remember where the study was from and whether it would be applicable here or not.
of course there's no way that drinking at 16 and driving at 18 would be possible politically in nz.
-
Ah the Fall. Never seen that vid before, so thanks Phillip. I couldn't quite see which stadium it is, but it says "made in Burnley" at the end which suggests Turf Moor. Was crowd trouble there on the weekend too - things perhaps haven't changed so much since when Mark E Smith penned this little anthem and the accompanying video.
-
5 day tests, in the arse-end of March. Every year, NZ Cricket schedule something at this time, and every year, the weather gods respond with "what the hell were you thinking? Here, have some rain."
horse, friday on the bank was as warm and calm as any random day they could have chosen to start a test in january or february, and while saturday and sunday were windier, they were dry and occasionally quite bright. today was pretty horrible, but despite the wind they played for several hours (to quite good results for our lot). i'm not necessarily a fan of tests in march, but it's better than no tests at all. tomorrow should be ok too, so i think you're overstating things a bit.
from what i can tell, it was much more civilised round our part of the bank (square leg) on friday. i say from what i can tell, because what with the sun and a couple of preparatory pints of strong IPA at the malthouse, i was a little dozy on it.
-
Hard to tell if you were being facetious about the sculpture at the front of the Ring of Fire. It is Mount Taranaki, and symbolises the link between Te Ati Awa Wellington Maori and their ancestral homeland in the Taranaki (and I wouldn't mind betting that, at the time this awful stadium was opened in 1999, they figured it might make the point that the Hurricanes represented the whole region).
-
off thread but this thing that just popped up on yahoo reminded me of hayden - worst jerseys ever
http://nz.sports.yahoo.com/gallery/-/6918657/0 -
Paul: Get an away zone ticket, and just go and stand with the Phoenix fans. You will make friends. I did that years ago when I went to an Ipswich Town game at Aston Villa - good fun.
I agree with Tom about what crowds used to be like. I watched a 38 minute higlight package of the 1st Lions test in Dunedin in 1966 on an Air NZ flight recently and was surprised at the amount of crowd noise. Fantastic - and I wondered what happened to it. It's worth watching those old games for the difference in the play too - scrums that don't collapse because the front rows would be up as quick as possible to bind together and set the platform, and then the others joined in, lineouts that didn't take 2 mintues to set up....the game _moved_ - no need for irritating ear-splitting pop music to be played while players have drinks breaks.
Tom you also say the jury is out on the Phoenix. Well, certainly in terms of regularly getting big crowds, for sure. But through the dark periods of October and November they got 6,000 when playing poorly and made nearly as much noise. That at the moment is the core, and it is pretty solid. The key is to pick that up to around the 10,000 mark - apparently at that point it is pretty much self-sustaining from a financial pov.
-
Problem for me is that it is so out of season. When it is warm outside I just don't have much desire to sit and watch winter sports - in fact I don't have much desire to watch much sport at all - rather be outside with the cricket on the radio, or doing some cycling, or something like that. I have the same problem with the rugby starting in Feb here, or even football which I actually enjoy. Contrast that with when I was with in-laws in Germany/Austria recently: suddenly being inside watching the four hills ski-jumping tournament seems like the most obvious thing to be doing...
The opposite isn't true though. When it is winter here i'm happy to watch any old rubbish (except UK rugby league, motorsport or golf, which unfortunately make up a large proportion of Sky's offering).
-
I am more or less unenthralled with rugby these days, and certainly didn't bother watching any over the weekend when there was a Wellington Phoenix match on which used up my allocated sports hours for the weekend, but really, flux in competition structures is nothing new.
The NPC has fluctuated in format since it was inaugurated in 1976, not just following professionalism. There have been two regional divisions with various forms of promotion/relegation to the top division, varying numbers in the top division, and of course eventually playoffs from (I think) 1992.
The Cricket ODI world cup has a new format virtually every single time. The annual Aussie ODI triseries went through a number of revisions and has now been completely abandoned.
The Australian Rugby League comp has had a number of guises in my lifetime and probably before too I'd imagine.
The Football world cup is relatively settled at present, but took a long time to get to its current 32 team incarnation.
The English Premier league football comp is I see flirting with the idea of a playoff for teams in positions 4 through 7 to decide the final champs league spot; this after last year's "39th game" proposition (which failed). English's football's other competitions have been subject to minor revisions as to aspects like replays and when the big teams join in.
I could go on. I guess it is about relevance, or perceived relevance. The world changes, and competitions need to change with it. The Ranfurly Shield has barely changed since 1902 (or so) and look at it now - occasionally glorious, mostly mundane.
Certainly though I agree that the changes to (Not very) Super Rugby haven't been great. Mostly though I just miss watching rugger in the daytime. Atmosphere at football is better too, imo.
-
I recall some pretty big crowds at Athletic Park as well for super 12 games, particularly in the 1997 season when the Canes made the semis. They probably have been consistently bigger at Westpac, but my point was more that I suspect there may have been some agreement as well that the Canes would play a minimum number of games at the Westpac in order to justify the investment in building it. Whether or not such an agreement existed I don't know, someone else might, but certainly I recall there being such an agreement with cricket, with even tests to be played there, until people came to their senses and realised that the Basin was pretty much the jewel in the crown of NZ test grounds and you couldn't abandon it (i'd argue, particularly now, that they could have continued to play one dayers at the Basin too, and built a rectangular ground at Westpac instead, given that they hardly ever get a crowd for a one dayer at the Westpac that exceeds the Basin's old ODI capacity which was up round 12,000).