The (nerdy) sporting weekend

It’s amazing what can pique your interest, hey?

This weekend, I’ve enjoyed watching some really great sport. The football on Friday was great, but it was Sheffield United, so of course I would be interested, and they won, so of course it would be great.
But it was other events this weekend that made me remember that it takes something extra special to get you invested when you’ve got no skin in the game. And those sort of things are fairly rare.

Sure, there are artificial ways of generating interest, like a small bet on the outcome (thank you, Aston Villa) or a fantasy football match-up (curse you, Aston Villa), but when you are just watching because you enjoy the sport, and you’re not rooting for one side or the other, well, it needs to be wow! to generate that same sort of interest.

That’s happened twice for me this weekend.

This morning’s game in the Australian NRL Finals was a superb watch, with both sides giving it absolutely everything for the whole 80 minutes, and Manly winning only after a – literally – last second field goal attempt missed by a couple of metres. 50,714 in the stands, 26 on the pitch, probably hundreds of thousands in front of their TVs across Australia and the world holding their breath as Matt Burton launched the ball into the Sydney night air. I was in the gym and I had to stop cycling to give my full attention to that last play of the match. Because concentrating and pedaling is hard.
And then the instant juxtaposition of relief, jubilation, heartbreak and despair as my legs realised that they had to start exercising again the rugby result was set in stone.

But even that had nothing on the Geoguessr World Cup final. And I know that I keep banging on about this, but just so you know, I could have been doing something much, much, nerdier this weekend…

…and maybe I did.

But that’s for another blog post.

Because that final. Best of 5 games – or first to 3 if that’s your preference – and wow, did it deliver.

As a very basic introduction, players each start on 6000 points (I know, right?), and lose points the closer their opponent is to the correct location, and the further they are away. Ten 1 minute rounds per game.
When you run out of points, you lose the game.

I’ve just enjoyed watching stuff. I don’t mind who wins. I’m not invested. Yet.

The favourite, a French guy called Blinky, is already up 2-0 and cruising to a crushing victory, and comes within a whisker of wiping his opponent, America’s MK, out and winning the World Cup. Based on the fact they could have been dropped anywhere in the world (but ended up in Latvia), if Blinky had been just 5km closer to the actual spot or MK just 5km further away, it was all over.

Here’s the twenty minutes of madness that followed.

The score is 4035-46. No typos here. No missed digits. One guy is basically two games up and four thousand points clear. The other is on forty-six points. It’s nothing. It’s impossible to turn this around with just two rounds of the third game to go.

But obviously, he does. It’s an amazing comeback. But it’s still only 2-1.

And in the eighth round of the fourth game, Blinky has MK down to 66 points again. The event is being staged at the City Hall in Stockholm and there’s a crowd of a few hundred watching it live. And as they hit the tenth round, it was like that field goal attempt (which hadn’t happened yet, but still). Held breath. Wide eyes. And then just sheer incredulity as MK drags in back to 2-2 with a guess just 12km off in the middle of rural Mexico. Literally a horse in a river.

How?!?

This is now running almost an hour overtime, but nobody is going anywhere.

Final round. The decider. NMPZ. Just a single image of a place anywhere in the world.
No moving. No panning. No zooming. WYSIWYG. Where G is guess.

Round one. It’s rural. Literally nothing to go on. And yet they both immediately plump for Mexico: about 50km apart from one another.

But it’s Ghana. Everyone is confused. They players look at each other and both laugh. Even the best in the world get it horrifically wrong sometimes. And when that happens, they usually both get it horrifically wrong the same way.

The tension is broken for a moment.

Heads are shaken. They reset. We go again.

Round two. There’s a guy burning some leaves in a wooded area. That’s all you’ve got. Both players go for Thailand. It is Thailand. Of course it’s Thailand. You don’t get two Ghana anomalies in one game.

Round three. It’s a slightly overgrown path in the field. It’s Peru. Blinky is closer.

Round four. It’s a brown dirt road. Nothing more. They both go for Argentina within 4 seconds. They’re each about 50kms out.

I’ve completely given up on Bournemouth v Chelsea now.

Round five: It’s a road and a mountain in Turkey. Obviously, they both go Turkey. It takes them 7 seconds.
Mind blowing.

Round six: It’s a grey road and some trees. It’s in Russia, but Russia is big. They’re both a long way off.

Round seven and Blinky is holding a decent lead thanks to that Peru guess, but we’ve seen this all before in the last 20 minutes.
Another road. Some green grass. Both hit central Bulgaria inside 10 seconds. It is central Bulgaria.

Round eight, It’s north east USA. MK’s home turf. They’re both there in about 10 seconds again. Nothing to choose between their guesses. And we’ve got a maximum of two rounds left.

Nkunku scores and I hardly notice.

Round nine: As the crowd sees it, there are gasps. Because it’s a town, and there are French flags everywhere. Does Blinky recognise the place? He zones straight in on Colmar in Eastern France… MK goes further north, closer to Belgium. Aaaand…

It’s Germany (despite the flags) but it’s only just over the border. It’s enough. Blinky wins.

I am emotionally exhausted. God knows how they feel.

270,000 viewers online. That’s four times the figures for last year’s World Cup.

Maybe there will be a million in 2025*. Maybe I’ll be there in the finals**.

I almost feel sorry for Spurs and Arsenal today.
Because they are surely never going to get to that sort of drama.

Are they?


* very possible.
** not possible.

The Geoguessr World Cup is on…

…and while Geoguessr might not be your cup of tea, it really is like watching that niche sport at the Olympics, in that you really should give it a go, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

It’s all livestreamed on the Geoguessr Youtube Channel. Completely free of charge, with full expert commentary on the A-stream.

Some beautiful locations on show alongside some absolutely insane knowledge. Different matchups and game modes, including the dreaded NMPZ: No Moving, Panning or Zooming. This is basically just a static image from a random Google Maps location anywhere in the entire world and you can watch in amazement as they pinpoint it to within a few hundred metres.

Once you get invested… wow, it can get quite intense.

GO AND WATCH SOME OF IT!

But the best bit for me is that you can have a go yourself – not competing directly with the best of the best – but using your skill to see how close you would get to the eventual answer. And then playing the same sport and wishing that you knew which sort of telegraph pole that they use in the midlands of Sumatra*.

* I’m appalled to note that I do actually know this one.

Day 599, part 2 – Bafana Bafana out of World Cup thanks to this “penalty” “decision”

Full disclosure: I didn’t watch the match – way too late for me right now.
Just catching up now and… well… wow. This one needs sharing for posterity.
You’re Ghana love it.

Thoughts and prayers with the player involved. Unlikely to ever play again, looking at this.
Less sympathy for the referee’s bank account.

Ghana’s 1-0 win (the goal coming from this decision) means that the final table looks like this:

…meaning that South Africa don’t qualify, but Ghana do.

Convenient.

And you can talk all you like about missed chances and winning games you only drew and and and, but there were plenty of other close calls across the world yesterday (not least this amazing game – or this one), whose outcomes weren’t then ruined by a really, really, dodgy decision.

Africa stays laughable. And losing.

England arrive in Brazil

With all of South Africa giggling at this (admittedly rather amusingly captioned) photo of the England football team arriving in Brazil:

earr2

I did feel that some degree of perspective may be required:

50649443

😉

Right, I’m off home in disguise so as to avoid the lynch mobs.

Minority Sports Night

Last night, I ended up watching a whole evening-ful of minority sports, quite by accident. I’m not sure I could watch any of them for any longer period of time, but it was different enough to entertain me for a once off. In case you want to try something similar, here’s my guide to what I saw and what I thought.

You will need: Some red wine, a couch and some minority sports.

It started accidentally with the second half of some women’s World Cup hockey. New Zealand’s Black Sticks (you’d never get away with that here) versus hosts and world number one team in hitting a ball with an inverted walking stick, the Netherlands. Given that I was making bacon sandwiches before I started flicking through the channels, I missed the first half and with it, the only goals of the game. But it was fairly entertaining still, with New Zealand giving it a bit of a go and some exciting counter-attacking by the ladies in orange.
The rules are a bit difficult to work out if you are watching it for the first time and the commentators were – reasonably enough – assuming that the viewers had watched some hockey before. I have, but it was on ice and the players were bigger and wore more padding. So I was a little confused from time to time, but I gathered that the aim was either to score goals (obviously) or to hit the ball at your opponents’ legs (less obvious). If you manage the latter, you get a free hit of the ball, at which point you either to score a goal (obviously) or to hit the ball at your opponents’ legs (now more obvious).

Final score 2-0 to the Netherlands.

Over then (accidentally again) to the EFC fight between Cape Town’s Don “The Magic Man” Madge and Joburg’s Boyd “I’ve Got No Nickname” Allen. It was at the Grand West Arena and I’m guessing that Parow was completely empty last night.

Crickets. Tumbleweeds. A solitary tolling bell, perhaps.

Again, I don’t know a lot about EFCing, but apparently, this was a big fight and there were a number of EFCing people who were talking it up beforehand. Of course, they would do that. No self respecting sports channel sticks up soundbites of experts saying stuff like:

No mate – this is going to be rubbish. Save your time and go and do the washing up instead. Yeah, I know there’s a lot of it and the kitchen is freezing, but believe me, you’ll die of boredom if you sit down and watch this. Save yourself: go and soak that bacon pan.

Now, my experience is also that these things can be over-hyped in the extreme, but given that there was only the washing up to do and the kitchen was wholly unheated, I decided to sit through it.

What followed was rather incredible. Two guys, very evenly matched in every single statistic, both 70kg of pure muscle, kicked seven bells out of each other with amazing power, energy and determination for 25 minutes. I don’t mind telling you that I was transfixed. I even missed all the sponsors’ names. You know, the one who sponsored the fighters’ gloves, their shorts, their walk into the ring (sorry – “the hexagon” – as if a boxing “ring” isn’t actually “a square”), the actual sponsors of “the hexagon”, the company that sponsored the replays, the company that sponsored the company that sponsored the replays, the company that sponsored the ring girls (OMG – no-one tell the feminists!), the company that sponsored the energy drinks in the break between rounds, the one that sponsored the third LED globe from the left on the overhead lighting gantry and, of course, the betting company that sponsored the whole fight… so – you know – go and bet. Or something.

The aim of EFCing is to hurt your opponent as much as possible, but you’re not allowed to hit a hockey ball into their legs. However, you can just hit them or kick them, or shoot them (can we check that last one is right before publishing, please? – Ed.).

The fight went the distance, amazingly, with one guy having a big cut on his head and the other nursing a bloodied nose (who knew?) and was then declared as a draw, which seemed fair enough. However, by all accounts, including the breathless and sycophantic wonderment of commentator Sias du Plessis, I feel that I may have inadvertently ruined my future watching of EFC by starting with the best fight ever. This tweet, from regular commenter, biobot, summed it up nicely:

Looks like it’s all downhill from here.

Final score: A draw.

I avoided the (heavily sponsored) post-event press conference and switched onto the Isle of Man TT Races.

My links with the Isle of Man mean that I usually watch the TT for the flashing glimpses of scenery, rather than the actual motorbike racing. And to be fair, while I have a passing interest in the zoomy bikes and the nutters who sit on them, this was pretty much the case this time around too. It’s a difficult thing to watch in any other way, given that the course is nearly 38 miles long and there are only so many cameras to go around, so a lot of the incident, such as it is, happens away from where you’re actually looking.

Technology though, is making a bit of a impact, as you can now stick smaller, better cameras in more places – namely on helicopters and on the actual bikes. The latter works better, as the bikes now go so fast that the helicopters can struggle to keep up with them. That said, there’s still an awful lot you (sometimes thankfully) don’t get to see, like the fatal accident of Sheffield rider Karl Harris during the race I was watching.

The commentary is great, with just enough information to let you know what’s going on, but not so much that it drowns out the noise of bikes. It’s presented with good humour by ex-riders too, so it’s down to earth, honest and insightful. And behind it all, there’s still the glorious Isle of Man scenery in HD. There’s more TT programming on Supersport tonight and over the weekend, so delve in and have a look at my beautiful island.

Final score: Michael Dunlop won. Again.

None of these things will ever come close to replacing football in my list of great sports I like to watch, but I actually enjoyed a quick trip outside my sporting comfort zone last night, and I’ll certainly be giving it a go again soon – I believe there’s some international egg-chasing this weekend, so I might give that a go.