Showing posts with label sport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sport. Show all posts

Friday, 11 June 2010

You can keep your world cup...

I've not had the most enjoyable week at work for reasons I can't quite get my head around. Am I bored? Not really. Do I feel like I'm not working hard enough? Possibly.

Whatever the story, it's done now.

The perfect antidote to it all, after a headwind-tactic bike ride home, was making tea for the weeWeir, getting almost as wet as she did without actually being in the bath and then drawing fish, sharks and crabs for half an hour before bedtime.

You can keep your world cup, just let me play.

(PS, I have nothing against sport or the world cup, I just enjoyed un-mediated interaction!)

Monday, 8 March 2010

Authenticity: listening to sport.

Okay, here's a thing.

I've listened to sport on the radio for years. Back in the days before there was obscene amounts of money in the game of football, there was much less coverage. So, rainy Saturday afternoons playing with Lego, I'd have BBC Radio Scotland - and Sportsound - to keep me company as I built something fun with bricks.

And during summer holidays, there was Test Match Special on Radio 4 Long Wave. Yes, I listened to cricket on the radio now and then. I'd never really *seen* cricket, but picked up the lexicon a little and it was always interesting background chatter.

As I got older (and particularly when I'd passed my Driving Test and was able to scoot about on my own, Radio 5 Live was a frequent source of, well, everything. News, Sport, Chat. Okay, so not everything.

However over the last 18 months I've been less bothered by sport. I'm still interested in what's going on, and who is winning. But it's not so much the match that I am interested in (other than international Rugby). I've realised this week that what I'm facinated by are the way people conduct themselves. How people (in particular those who coach or manage team) interact before and after a game.

I have found myself checking news websites - and even contemplating buying a newspaper! - so I could check out what they had to say in the pre- and post- match content. It's what's said, and what's not said, that I'm interested in. When Jim Jeffries came back to Hearts, I'd just added a couple of twitter feeds relating to that club. The stream of information is much less about the game, but about what is happening in the meantime.

Sure, there's a whole thing about marketing, about putting out the stories you want people to hear and all that.

However, more often than I think we are told by our mediators (ie the news agencies), there's some straight-talking being done and - I hope - a lot of authenticity.

So, I'm really not so bothered by what is going on when you're playing the game, but tell me how it made you feel, what you liked and what you want to do differently and I'm all ears.

Over the past few years, I've stopped listening