81–90 of 169 posts
The "hand of god" of Cricket?
I think that's too strong. The underarm ball was a case of playing within the rules, but against most people's notion of fair play. The hand of god would fit most people's definition of actual cheating.
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> Americans Everyone not from one Uk, India... maybe Australia you mean?
Not even the whole of the UK - really only England and Wales (as a singular entity, rather than individually). The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!"), the grating public school chumminess of the commentators, and a rumour about a puerile "joke" which may or may not have been told on the radio coverage in the early 1980s. Honestly, it's a sport I suspec…
"Only" England & Wales ... which is ~90% of the UK population. It's a fair generalisation in a casual context like this.
We get it, cricket isn't wildly popular in Northern Ireland (nor Scotland). Why chastise the parent for suggesting it is?
But come on - don't shoehorn an indirect political point into a casual conversation.
And as if cricket was unique in having jargon? Hurling doesn't have jargon? Gaelic football? Football? Of course they do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even the whole of the UK - really only England and Wales (as a singular entity, rather than individually). The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!"), the grating public school chumminess of the commentators, and a rumour about a puerile "joke" which may or may not have been told on the radio coverage in the early 1980s. Honestly, it's a sport I suspec…
> The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!") You’re thinking of the fielding position “silly point,” so named because the chances of getting knocked out by the ball to the face are so high you’d be silly to stand there. By “midden” you might be thinking of “maiden,” which is a bowler competing a “maiden over” by completing their 6 balls without conceding a…
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Plenty of sports do have rules to prevent stalling tactics (either for sportsmanlike reasons or to make the viewing experience more engaging): the two-minute warning in American football, the shot clock in basketball, icing rules in hockey, etc.
Yeah. Passing the ball around the backfield is a risky tactic in association football (which similarly banned the goalkeeper just picking up backpasses because it was too easy to waste time). 'Taking the ball to the corner' is a much lower risk option, but it is possible to win the ball back and quickly go up the other end and score with good play. Deliberate time wasting between plays is a yellow card offence (even…
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There is still the remote possibility of a fumble or tackling the ball away from the defence in those cases. In the underarm bowling incident it was made physically impossible to win. In baseball terms, he had to hit a home run with the ball on the ground. (Though as a non-American, I am indeed mystified why the kneel is legal and not regarded as delay of game!)
I am a casual American football viewer but my understanding is that the kneel ends the current play but keeps the clock running. Each team has something like 40s to setup their formation and snap the ball after the previous play has ended. If the game clock is still running (this is concurrent to their 40s of "setup time"), the team that is in possession of the ball can just use the full setup time (idk the formal te…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_clock
There's also a full article about the kneel:
> Bruce Edgar, who was on 102 not out, was stuck at the non-striker's end the entire over. Now Americans can finally know how Europeans feel when watching baseball
> Bruce Edgar, who was on 102 not out, was stuck at the non-striker's end the entire over. Now Americans can finally know how Europeans feel when watching baseball
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I'm reading a book at the moment ( https://academic.oup.com/book/32137 ) in which the author makes a point of the distinction between "the goals of a game and our purpose in playing a game". My purpose in playing games is never winning for winning's sake, let alone winning at the cost of violating basic decency. But sometimes the purpose is best served by pursuing the goals quite single-mindedly. Competition can be f…
There’s definitely a time and place for both. Even in sport, “playing to win” can defeat the point when you’re doing it for fun. During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!
> During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!
I think this is actually a good example of setting up the game appropriately (in this case the teams as well as the rules) and then playing to win within those constraints. The end result is more fun and better training than you would get by departing from the 'playing to win' philosophy by, for example, having a tacit agreement that the faster swimmers will take it easy so as not to embarrass the others.
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The issue is countless teams had opportunities to do this in the past - they all knew it was an option - but they chose not to. Then suddenly one team decided “well there’s no rule…” even though it was clearly established that everyone agreed not to do it. It’s not like they discovered something new, they just broke convention with no warning at a very consequential time after many teams undoubtedly could’ve done the…
I actually suspect they didn’t know. When a sport is played one way for 200 years, you don’t read the rule book to check, you just copy what everyone is doing!
At the highest levels of the sport, they know the rulebook like the back of their hand.
This ties in with something else on HN recently - the end of long wave radio in the UK. Test Match Special was broadcast on the BBC's long wave frequency and for many people in Britain it was a quintessential summer listening experience: all day for up to 5 days per test match. Such long time stretches of continuous broadcasting meant that the commentators were adept at talking, stories, banter and general chatter, o…
Incomprehensible! “Didn’t quite get his leg over” - that’s the joke? Found a Guardian article and even they do not explain the joke [1]. Further ethnological research [2] explains it all - “to get a leg over” is intercourse. The story about the test match broadcast is really nice. Just goes to show how deep cultures can be locally ingrained. One could learn perfect English and never get to the point of getting this j…