waring

"strange that the largest sporting event in London and the U.K. this year i suspect, perhaps in London's and England's history - 95,000 fans "

95000? A Grand Prix generally brings in 135,000 (capacity 185 000) spectators.
(Formula One, a very popular motorsport in The Rest Of The World).

PalenQ

waring - I said sporting event! duh!

waring

duh! and motorsports are now not sports? duh!

PalenQ

flanner - i meant to say Starbucks not Borders - i actually was jesting about Borders, which i actually wrote about its UK demise in a recent post.

flanneruk

When did I say Starbucks wouldn't survive?

PalenQ

My apology flanner - i mispoke - i just assumed you would have said the same thing about them as any other American crapola.

but no i do not know if you did and regret the charge.

flanneruk

Mind you, the trade press has been carrying rumours that Gap have threatened local staff they'll pull out of the UK.

PalenQ

MIND THE GAP

Dukey

I can think of a lot worse ways to make money than playing "blouseball"...the players don;t care if you show up or not.

PalenQ

Author: Dukey
Date: 10/24/2007, 03:21 pm
i wonder if the "lager louts" will be rioting at Wembley during the upcoming "blouseball" match. Any ideas on that one, Pal?

Ooops, I forgot..Flanner won't be attending so I guess not.

Good Q Coach K:

the answer will be NO - real football fans are civilized so i do not expect the legions of baton and shield-wielding cops to be there as they would if it were an English soccer match

from the comments of Brits on American football it's obvious none of them have any idea of the game and the types who play.

flanner i think is really an American sycophant and lover of all things american and probably was amongst the first to score ducats to the game.

RM67

It's a very long time since I saw batons and shields at any Premiership matches, Bob.

The swearing might come as a bit of a shock to the uninitiated, but apart from that it's family entertainment all the way - we even have seats now, dontcha know! 8-)

PalenQ

Sounds like soccer is more family fare than NFL football where there are often drunken fans with boorish behavior so parents may be aloof to take their kids

i'm sure the swearing won't be a bother either

sorry about the goon squad of batons and shields - like Waring says i'm just making it up as i go along - really just what i expected.

waring

"i just assumed you would have said the same thing about them as any other American crapola."

Don't fall into the "does my bum look big in this?" paranoid syndrome about thinking that American stuff is universally hated.

A lot of American crapola is very popular, Starbugs, MacDogs, Rat-In-A-Bun (KFC), bowling, Cancer Cola, TV and films.

A line has to be drawn though. US crapola generally fills a gap in the market, for which none exists for Lardball.

We have both Rugby League and Rugby Union, which are the original and direct ancestors of Lardball, so why try and introduce a 'lite' version of it, which is entertainment rather than sport.

Take a Lardball player, trim off the considerable amount of fat, teach him to both handle and kick the ball, tackle and have him run like a bastard for 80 minutes, and you may have an athlete.

This is as opposed to having someone scream a bunch of numbers, have everyone run around bumping into each other like a bunch of chubby drunken toddlers for twenty seconds, then leave the field for the rest of the game.

PalenQ

Actually waring you are prescient about what is happening in American college football which is just as or more popular than the pro game

my college team has drawn over 100,000 fans a game for some 25 years straight or such (and no payroll!)

but in college ball the 'spread offense' - relatively new is changing the game away from fat ass brutes to more athletic runners who can outrun the lardbutts

spread offense features a quarterback who can run or pass if he has to but not the smashmouth run up the middle if you lardasses can knock the other lardasses on the ground enough for the runner to dash thru

the wave of huge upsets in college football this year has been attributed to in part the weaker physical team doing the spread offense to run away and around the brutes.

waring

So the the players play the whole game?

If you want Lardball to succeed in The Rest Of The Foreign World, I suggest the following.

a) Drop the cissy boy Joan Collins shoulder pad body armour and Power Rangers outfits. It is nancy and unnessary.

b) Limit player changes to three per game (barring injuries). This will eliminate the bubble butts with a ridiculour BMI.

c) Do something about dead balls. Restarting the whole kit and kaboodle every time the ball goes dead is deadly dull.

Rugby Union has a great rule that once tackled a player has to release the ball which stays in play.

d) Have them touch down the ball for a touch down. I assume the American rule that they simply have to run across the line, rather than put the ball on the ground is that most players can't even touch their toes.

flanneruk

All bantering aside, there's a really good reason why I'm convinced Blouseball will never take off among the British population, and that's because its promoters are going about it entirely the wrong way.

Mass-interest games don't get popular because businesses market them. Serious sports - from cricket to golf - got popular because enthusiastic players took their enthusiasms around the world with them. Indeed tennis started being popular outside Britain only after commercial interests stopped promoting it as a patented money maker.

Mass fascination with watching those sports then developed from players' enthusiasm for playing them.

Personally, I'm not convinced Blouseball is inherently more boring than real football: it took me about as long to fall off to sleep at Wembley watching the first Liverpool-Everton cup final as it did watching a Blouseball match there. The real reason most people in the world find Blouseball soporific is that most people haven't played Blouseball, or watched their brothers and sons (and often daughters) play it, from the moment they could walk.

And outside the US, successful teams - from Real Madrid to the Chipping Piddlecombe village cricket club - are deeply connected to the community they represent. No-one really "buys" Manchester United: however many "mine's bigger than yours" stunts majority shareholders might play, even the world's richest sport team is viable only if tens of thousands of Mancunians remain committed to it.

Now the NFL might make money staging occasional high-profile games in London, because there are enough expats and cultists for whom London is easy to get to that it might be able to attract an audience. But the massive, overwhelming majority of Britons will still be more interested watching the darts final down at the pub.

Sports don't get popular through top-down promotion, and it's just sloppy strategic thinking to think they do.

PatrickLondon

Well said, flanner. That's exactly the point - and indeed the reason for so much unease among the traditional fans of major soccer "clubs" that are now trying to run themselves like American-style franchises.

>>spread offense<< - is this something to do with

http://tinyurl.com/23j6rg

W9London

"Abuzz"? Hmmm I haven't heard anything about it and none of the people I know (including a handful of American colleagues) have been talking about it. But then again, I'm not into professional sports much myself... Though I've seen NHL and NBL games at O2 Arena (fka millenium dome)... Maybe they figured out there is money to be made out of Europe?

Cholmondley_Warner

There was a small article on this on page 15 of the Telegraph's sports supplement today - and interview with one of the fat transvestites.

But other than that i have seen no coverage at all - compare this with the Tour De France which was the talk of the town for weeks.

Is it even on the telly?

alanRow

<<< even the world's richest sport team is viable only if tens of thousands of Mancunians remain committed to it. >>>

Don't you mean thousands of Laandeners and Surryites?