Us English like to think that we gave sport to the World. We sing songs about how football is coming home when we hold a tournament and at the Olympic handover ceremony the London Major was banging on about how we gave the world table tennis. The only drawback is then everyone has a point when they say how come if we invented all these games we are so crap at them, fair enough.
England fans are accustomed to losing at sport and on the whole we accept it in good grace but there are some countries that just seem to sting a little more when they beat us.
Losing at anything to Australia hurts, as does getting beat by France, Germany, America or South Africa. Losing to Scotland, Ireland or Wales also cuts just that little deeper but it happens so rarely that we can pass it off as a once in a generation fluke.
In contrast to having certain countries that we hate to lose to, there are some that we almost don't seem to mind when they roll up and beat us at whatever sport it is we invented and everyone else is now better than us at it.
For some reason, we seem willing to accept being beaten by Holland, Brazil, West Indies, Canada and New Zealand which is just as well as it happens so often, with the exception of Canada of course that isn't that great at sports that doesn't involve ice skates and men hitting each other with sticks.
I say as we gave the games to the World, we can take them back and follow the American baseball example and hold a World Series with just us in it. Would be great for our self-confidence and we can top the Olympic medal table in 2012. Yay us.
1 comment:
Well, at least you don't have to be an American when America loses to Texas every other year. But I guess that's better than they expected to do.
I've always wondered too about why we call all of our championships "world championship" even though they are not "world" championships. It is kind of arrogant to do that.
-Nog
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