High summer is upon us, and anyone who habitually bleats about not liking sport (women, nancy-boys and other net-non-contributors to the economy, mostly) had better hire themselves a field in Somerset, bugger off there and listen to some rubbishy music with like-minded idiots who are happy to pay £1000 for 3 days of sleeplessness and 50-deep queues for chemical toilets.
Wimbledon is now in full swing, and massively honourable mention must go to John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, who are deadlocked at an astonishing 59 games all in the final set of their second-round match. A regular best-of-five-set match should last around 2 and a half hours, maybe add an hour if it goes the distance. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s massive epic final in 2008 lasted 4 hours 47 minutes. The previous longest match in history lasted six and a half hours. Mahut and Isner are currently at the TEN hour mark, and are still going - that’s longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (watching rather than reading), longer than Serena Williams took to play her entire winning Wimbledon CHAMPIONSHIP last year, and a whole bunch of other stats. The fact that this match is completely dominated by booming serves and thus (whisper it soft) actually quite boring is irrelevant; the titanicism (titanocity? titan-eousness?) of their efforts is incredible. (Mind you, I played table-tennis last night, and because I arrived late had to play two consecutive games. Twenty incredibly intensive lung-busting minutes of occasional small side-to-side movements later, I was shattered. AND I didn’t have free water / crowds applauding me / gimps picking up my discarded balls like those pampered tennis wussies do.)
On the minus side, it’s been another record-breakingly-shit week for British tennis hopes. Apart from Andy Murray, who doesn’t count as British because he hates Britain, isn’t English which everyone takes to mean British, speaks in a broad Glaswegio-transatlantic drawl and won’t bow to our queen or something (probably), ALL of our players in the men’s AND women’s draw were knocked out in the first round. £30 million a year is lavished on these cack-handed twots by the LTA; just to put that in context, the team behind the brilliant BBC Wild Night In programme on Sunday was ecstatic because, after months of fundraising effort, it had managed to raise £1 million for vital biodiversity projects around the world. SIX measly pounds is enough to make an acre of rainforest safe from the palm oil planters. FIFTY pounds is enough to buy food for an orphaned orang-utan for a year. And TWENTY pounds is enough to buy me a soap-box for standing on whilst hectoring you with irrelevant and utterly specious comparisons between sums of money involved in charities and sporting events. (Make it twenty-five, and I might even shut up.)
And then, of course, there’s the World Cup. Aaahhh, the World Cup. More on that later…
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