Category: sport

Busy day reimagined

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Apparently, there’s a Level 1 wind warning out for the Western Cape today:

A Yellow Level 1 warning: Damaging winds which may result in localized problems for high-sided vehicles on routes prone to strong cross winds (especially in the N1), exposed high level roads/bridges and risk of localized runways fires are expected over the southern parts of the Northern Cape as well as the central and northern parts of the Western Cape.

See?

It’s not been that bad, but there are a few branches down here and there, an over-confidently placed shoe ended up in the swimming pool, and there has been quite a lot of ear flappery of the beagle variety.

The weather is unhelpful, as half the family is off to an outdoor concert this evening (the wind looks likely to moderate by sunset), and another quarter has outdoor dodgeball training. But before that, one of the quarters which is going to the concert has an outdoor horseriding session in a dusty arena. It’s going to be hectic.
Me? I’m the final quarter and I’m just the taxi service for all these things. And that’s going to involve dashing from Hout Bay to Wynberg to Kirstenbosch to Pinelands (all the exciting places covered then) with minimal time in between.

Except…

Within a couple of moments of one another, the riding and the dodgeball were both cancelled. The former because it was “nasty” in Hout Bay (their words, not mine), and I’m not sure what the weather had to do with it, anyway; and the latter because of the risk of injury from “balls flying out of control and in different directions”. Just sounds like a good night out on Somerset Road to me.

Careful now.

And so, with the concert unlikely to be pulled (international artist, don’t you know?), the fun can continue, and the afternoon has got a little bit easier to navigate through, albeit at the expense of some equestrian entertainment and some important training.

2 days left to enter the raffle at the time of writing: click the link and buy a ticket or ten, PLEEEEASE!

So… looks like a bit of Germany v Japan in my comfy chair for me, rather than trips to Hout Bay and Pinelands.

What a pity.

This week’s posts summed up

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Busy afternoon and evening ahead, but here’s a nice, concise round up of a couple of my posts from earlier in the week. Namely this one, and this one.

Indeed.

Sadly, the FA seem to have backed down on the One Love armband thing after threats by FIFA, whose corrupt clown boss “felt gay” just a couple of days ago. And that’s brought annoyance from some people in the UK, who have moved really quickly from “the armband thing is a poor show” through “England shouldn’t even be playing” to “Well football is awful and just should be banned anyway”.

If you thought FIFA were tone deaf…*

* you’d be right. my point is that so are these pearl clutchers.
the damage is done. the message has already been sent.
that it will inevitably fall on deaf ears is not England’s (or any other team’s) fault.

Will I watch?

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Yes, I will, as I have previously described. But I can’t say I’m very excited about it.

I’m well aware of the human rights abuses and general nastiness of the Qatari regime, but my not switching on the TV for Morocco v Croatia isn’t going to make any difference to how that Government feels about homosexuality. And it was abundantly clear from the very start that this was just a massive, corrupt spend on reputation laundering; an attempt which I think has already backfired massively. Realistically, how many people who previously hadn’t considered Qatar as a potential destination for business or pleasure (no, not those sorts of pleasure – naughty!) are now looking at the nation in a more favourable light?

Exactly.

It’s all a massive f-up and the only good bit about any of it is the football, so I’ll watch that.
However – like Musa Okwonga – it will be without my usual enthusiasm:

After all, a World Cup is something to be celebrated: at its best it is a global event where, for all its excess, society somehow seems to move forward. Witness, for example, the beautifully-curated 2010 tournament in South Africa, which allowed the hosts to take centre stage in hearts and minds across the planet. Or the 2002 World Cup, superbly organised by Japan and South Korea, which saw Brazil win in a style that was true to football’s loftiest aesthetic ideals.

Sadly, though, the last three World Cups – Brazil, Russia and now Qatar – have in succession managed to perform a sort of asset-stripping of the soul of this competition, tearing away much of its sheen and leaving us with its basic elements: that is to say, a well-run series of games that is available to whoever may be the highest bidder.

But, yes. I’ll still be watching.

Although, if I believed in spooky signs from the netherworld, there’s loadshedding right when it’s kicking off. Which could either been seen as a bit of a hint, or could be just because we have loadshedding several times a day, and one (or more) of them was always going to coincide with some of the matches.

You decide.

Fit by jogging (apparently)

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Glancing through my apps while waiting out a loadshed-interrupted Dodgeball World Cup training session, I found my “Garmin Fitness Age” on my Garmin app. Well, where else would it be?

And what does it mean?
Google is your friend here:

What Does Fitness Age Mean in Garmin Connect?

Available on select Garmin watches, Fitness Age is an estimate of how fit you are compared to your actual age. Compatible Garmin watches will calculate your Fitness Age using your VO2 max estimate.
While your VO2 max estimate describes your current fitness level, it is not always easy to know what it means. Fitness Age reinterprets your VO2 max score in terms of age to make it more relatable.
Regularly engaging in the right types of physical activity will help you boost your VO2 max estimate score and will reduce your Fitness Age.

OK. So run a bit and you’ll get fitter. Wow. Whatever next? Steps?

Anyway:

If your Fitness Age is lower than your actual age, then you are on the right track. If it is higher, there may be some areas you can work on to improve it.

Right. Well, I’m on the right track. In fact, according to my Fitness Age, I’m the same age as I was when I moved to South Africa a whole 18 years ago. Ha!

I must say that I have been working really hard to regain some fitness since you-know-what, and I’m glad that it appears to be paying off, but I certainly don’t feel 18 years younger than I am right now. I might be able to run like that occasionally, but people 18 years younger than me don’t wake up each morning wondering if their knees are going to work that day.

At least, I didn’t when I was that age.

Anyway, now I know what’s going on with my Garmin Fitness Age, I fully plan to drag it all the way back to my late teens, when I was pretty-much unbroken (L5/S1disc excepted). So, look out for me on the road: I’ll be the blur of velocity racing past you (and everyone else), pretending that I’m still 18 years younger than I actually am.

No. Just no.

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It’s the last day of real football today, before we go into this weird, unwanted Qatar World Cup break for the next month or so. Look, I will be watching – because it’s football – but I don’t think that I’ve ever been more disengaged and uninterested in any World Cup in my whole life. And I was only 8 months old for one of them.

Actually, the break could not have come at a better time for Sheffield United, as we might be able to get a few players back from injury while they aren’t playing thirteen matches a week to fit the tournament in. And the injury list is long: Daniel Jebbison, Jack O’Connell, Jayden Bogle, Max Lowe, Oli McBurnie, Rhian Brewster, Rhys Norrington-Davies (who should be on a plane to Qatar with the Welsh squad), Sander Berge, Tommy Doyle, Jack Robinson, Anel Ahmedhodzic and John Fleck. That’s more than an entire first team unavailable because they are broken. We started yesterday’s game with an academy player in midfield, and two more on the bench, and even then we had to add an extra goalkeeper to make up the numbers. Carnage.

(Still won, though.)

So that’s the only positive for me, but that doesn’t stop the constant stream of businesses and organisations trying to make me be interested. The latest one of those is Facebook. And they are very clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this nonsense:

Which team will have more corners? wut?

This assumes that a) I am interested in the World Cup, b) I am interested in England v Iran, c) I am interested in how many corners each team will get, and d) my extensive footballing acumen would allow me to predict such a meaningless statistic anyway.

But hey, Joãozin Albuquerque and 5.8M others are playing…

I have no idea who Joãozin Albuquerque is, by the way.

If you’re watching a World Cup (or any other) game just to see who gets the most corners, you’re either part of a match-fixing cartel or you’re doing football all wrong. Both of which do kind of fit with the whole Qatar 2022 vibe, but that’s really beside the point.

Just stop trying to make this happen. It’s not going to happen. Leave me alone.