BLOWN IT

A well-known sporting pundit (and former performer), a fellow who nowadays is more likely to be selling the virtues of a packet of crisps asked a question the other day which went along the lines of "I wonder if non-sports fans know what they're missing?" to which my immediate reaction was to think "Well, yes we do, crisp boy, but we just find it hard to give a damn..." remembering those terrifying days in the Student Union Bar when a load of huge Welshmen would strip naked and sing at each other from table tops after playing in a game of rugby whilst wondering what some of us found so fascinating about the books we were trying to read.

Different strokes, fellas, and all that. I wonder if they knew what they were missing, other than a head full of braincells the next day...

Despite many attempts over the years, football continues to baffle me, as indeed does rugby and tennis, and the Olympics all but passed me by last year, so much so that I still don't recognise many of the Joe Farriers, the Bradley Hardacres, and the Jennifer Ennistons who are paraded in front of me as beacons of something or other by the various advertisers. On one brief morning I did get sucked in by the rowing finals, much as I had during the Greece event eight years before, but I couldn't tell you now who actually won what.

I do, of course, appreciate that a lot of people get very passionate about their team, or a particular individual when they're playing well, and some might even say that this is because they just admire watching someone else reach a pinnacle of human achievement that they themselves never could (although I expect some admire their wealth a little more), so you can't say that we don't know what we're missing because it's there, being paraded before us constantly by the media whether we're have any interest in the tournament in question or, perhaps more importantly, don't.

And it would be very easy to complain at the wall-to-wall blanket coverage of any of these "minority interests" but generally we don't, seeing that it makes a lot of people very happy, although, if you turned it all around and, for example, replaced an evening's programming with a ballet or an opera, I suspect the outcry would be phenomenal.

Which brings us, not very neatly, to Sunday afternoon's Champion's League Cricket Final which was much curtailed by rain but which did eventually get played in the early hours of Sunday evening.

It seems very strange to me that the mere mention of the game of cricket can bring the almost immediate response of "it's SOOO boring" from people who seem quite keen on those 11-a-side kickabouts that I find so tedious, because I found it fascinating, and, judging by the bellowing I was doing at my portable long-wave radio (for I have no sports-based TV channels available to me, obviously) at 8.30 on Sunday evening as the whole thing came down to the last ball after another typical display of ineptitude by the home side in managing to once again snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory, did remind me of that salt and fat peddling pundit and what he had said.

Yes, I do sometimes know what you're missing, but it seems that almost everyone else does too, and the focus of each one of us on our own particular passions is not to be sneered at...