Following promises made in the post about yesterday’s Run In The Sun, I’d like to inform readers that the only bits of me that are sore are all of them.
But it’s a “good sore”, as if my body is grudgingly acknowledging that it needed a bit of a push to move it towards some greater degree of fitness.
Younger readers may not appreciate my concern that tomorrow morning, being a critical 48 hours on from the exercise in question, may be a whole different story.
We played football this morning. Just a 10am kickaround to blow the cobwebs away before the, nothing too strenuous this early in the year – we’re not stupid.
Or are we? Because there were definitely echoes of that fateful day as I jumped out of the car at Century City. I’d left home about 15 minutes earlier at 22ºC and with a pleasant southeaster blowing. Upon my arrival at the venue, I was already seeing 28ºC and there was not a breath of wind. An eerie stillness prevailed, almost as if someone were waiting for 10 slightly unfit white blokes to die from heatstroke.
Or something.
We played: some admittedly more than others. Most (all?) admittedly more than me. As I repeated often – safe in the knowledge that there’s basically no way it can ever happen here – stick me on a field in -2ºC and I’ll run for days. But I’m far too European to be able to sprint around a 5-a-side court for 75 minutes in the hot African sun and actually survive.
There can’t have been a lot of sprinting then (as I’m sure my teammates will happily testify), because I am still alive.
I came home and stood in a cold shower, trying desperately to balance the urgent need to reduce my body temperature to something resembling normality with the precarious water shortages in Cape Town.
The former won out in the end, and I emerged somewhat wrinkled but thankfully much cooler, several hours later.
So was this The Worst Idea Larry Ever Had II™? No, no it wasn’t anywhere close to that bad. That day and its consequences will live long in the memory, whereas this one will simply go down as an hour that could have been… more comfortably spent.
A braai this afternoon – accompanied by copious amounts of Energade – will surely mean that I’m in tip-top condition to face the rigours of lab work (and possibly even the rigors of a body in extreme shock) in the morning.
I’ll let you know.
It’s been 10 years since Sheffield United’s last league game against Arsenal. Sure, there have been a couple of minor cup games since then, but it’s exactly 10 years since this game at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane:
Look at that result! And look at the strength of the opposition! Van Persie, Cesc Fibreglass, Rosicky, Toure, Clichy, Gilbeagle Silva.
And then the fact that we played the last half hour with no goalkeeper. Golly.
It’s that “small team” spirit that frustrates Sky Sports commentators, “big club” managers, and ably demonstrates the reason that Pep Guardiola isn’t going to have things his own way in the most competitive league in the world.
Things are (finally) looking up this season, which means that we may only be 18 months or so from the next Blades v Arsenal game at The Lane*.
* Terms and conditions apply.
Last night was the club’s annual award ceremony and it involved some ridiculously good food and some not inconsiderable drinking. Three different sorts of beer, three different sorts of wine and an interesting whiskey later, I arrived home (via Uber with 1.6x surge pricing, nogal) in a tired and emotional state.
My bed has been crying out for me since I left it early this morning to go Christmas shopping, and it’s only now that I happily find myself reunited with my favourite pillow. I have a drive down to Agulhas to look forward to tomorrow, so I’m going to accept its generous invitation to treat my head to a little lie down and hopefully we can stay together until morning.
More on that Agulhas trip “soon”. [He means tomorrow – Ed.]
I extracted the SD card from the camera to upload the photos from this weekend’s Cape Town 7s experience and was immediately confronted by all (or more) of the photos I took last weekend. These hadn’t been uploaded because the intervening 7 days were chaotically busy.
So, I sorted that, and you can see the results here.
From there, it was a fairly straightforward leap to yesterday’s amazing day out at the stadium. My photos are here.
Obviously, I don’t know what sort of show the Dubai or Edinburgh or Nuuk (?) 7s put on, but I have to say that what Cape Town does seems to be very well received by all those involved. (Although of course they’re hardly likely to turn around and slag the place off in these days of mutual ego massaging.) The atmosphere was amazing, the entertainment was superb, the rugby was absorbing and even the final was balanced upon a knife-edge right up to the final kick. This being my kids first 7s experience, it was always going to be that way – never forget Alex’s first footy match was a 7-0, and their first cricket match finished with an incredible SA win off the last ball after a missed run out opportunity.
This time around, England were the beneficiaries of the last minute miss, and really the only disappointment of the day was how few people stayed around to see the trophy presentation. ‘Bad losers’ might be a bit harsh, but after the phenomenal support and sporting reception given to all the teams throughout the day, that extra 10 minutes would have made a big difference, especially given just how tight that last game was. Sadly, all the photos of England’s presentation and celebration are against a backdrop of empty seats. That’s not how it was for the previous 9 hours, nor how it should have been for the last ten minutes.
As Tom Mitchell stepped up to take this second half conversion right in front of us, I remarked on how important it was going to be, and so it proved, being the 2 point difference between the teams at the end.