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How very unsporting

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I'm not a very sporty person. I've never found one I particularly enjoy, and always managed to find something more interesting to do with my time instead.

I work in an office environment where many of my colleagues have at least one sport that they're keen on. For most, it's football. One of them is an aggressively keen Arsenal supporter, while another supports Coventry City, which probably doesn't count. Their conversations, especially around the bigger events in the football calendar, are always baffling to me and my only realistic course of action is to leave them to it. The prospect of watching men in shorts chasing a leather ball from one end of a field to the other on the off chance one of them can put it into a little net just doesn't excite me, regardless of who is playing it.

Another colleague loves golf, and will quite happily bore you to tears with it should the opportunity present itself. Unlike the football fans, he does actually play golf when he gets the chance, but such occasions are few and far between and I know he'd like to play more. It's another sport I have absolutely no connection to, however. I can't get excited at the prospect of hitting a tiny little ball hundreds of metres, only to walk after it and do the same again. There are better ways to keep fit.

Rugby is another source of confusion. Once again, I don't understand why anyone would play it. It seems little more than a fight with a ball and tends to result in a lot of rather large men walking off bleeding (and women too, though having not paid much attention to any form of the sport, I've been less exposed to this). From that perspective, I can almost understand the appeal in watching it. Violence always seems to attract attention. But again, we're ultimately watching a ball move from one end of a field to the other… often quite slowly.

Cricket is possibly the worst of the lot. It's one of the few spectator sports I know of where the spectators take something with them to do. Television coverage suggests it consists mostly of people with badly applied sun lotion standing in a field waiting for something to happen. Occasionally, one of them will throw a ball and another will attempt to hit it. Personally, I'd sooner undergo major surgery without anaesthetic than have anything to do with it.

It's not all ball sports. I actually quite like tennis, and while I haven’t played the game myself for many years, I do occasionally manage to catch a couple of the big matches if they're on television. I also like playing games like snooker and pool, but couldn't watch them for any length of time unless I was looking for a way to get to sleep in a hurry.

It would seem that the only sports that are able to capture my attention these days are those one can play at one's leisure on the Wii. It's more fun than being a spectator.


Tags: sport | cricket | football | rugby | golf | snooker | tennis | pool | Wii