A Closer Look at Sports Around the World

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

I have a colleague that watches it so maybe I shall ask her…

I hear that some guy called Tom has just retired from sport at the tender age of 44. Won 7 Super Bowls in his career and been an all round astonishing kinda guy with many wins and much to retire on the back of…

You see football to us, happens over 90 minutes and involves 22 players with minimal changes and no ad breaks. To the US, football is an entirely different ball game. In fact, there is apparently a popular North American song about taking your kid to a ball game… but it ain’t even that type of ball game! You can see how easily we get confused by it all…

THAT ball game is a bit like the kids’ game we play – rounders. And y’all take it like real serious… I know that there is also a World Series that seems to involve just America. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a lot of time for the posh version of rounders played a lot in the UK, where it just seems to be rounders with dodgier rules – cricket – and I have little or no interest in that sport at all, and baseball similarly leaves me cold.

As for Ice Hockey, I have a bit of a flirtation with it as my hometown had a pretty successful ice hockey team at one time – Ayr Bruins – so know a little about it – not a lot. Lots of people fight in it and the referee does not intervene till, they end up on the floor apparently. I think this would be a good rule for many other sports… Maybe I am just thinking of a few sportsmen… like some guy with a bat who hits a ball from Serbia…

Sports and how they emerge is something I find fascinating. Tom Brady’s retirement got a bit of press in the UK, partly because there is quite a following for American Football in the UK, and as I mentioned my colleague watches it – she stays up to watch it at the weekend and she and her husband go over to the US and catch a game or two – remember in the good old days of international travel…

I also know that the World Series has nothing to do with the arrogance of believing that the US is better than the world at baseball but down to a sponsorship deal with the World Newspaper at its inception as a tournament.

I also know about the growth of ice hockey in Europe as I visited both Finland and Lithuania and could not believe the fervor on both countries for the sport – the amount of ice outside my window daily should have been a clue!

So, we may be a little confused at first, but the truth is that we do actually get it most of the time. Sport is a universal fix.

Recently I have mulling over this because of reports of the English Cricket team who have been playing very, very badly. I noticed that their “World” Cup only has the likes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia in it. There are a few more minor countries Like Zimbabwe and Ireland, and yes, even Scotland, but why were those countries so interesting? Because each of them is a former British colony. The growth and development of cricket seems to have happened in places we used to run. OK Holland also play it but that is, to me the exception proving a rule because they are not very good at it…

There has also been an explosion in netball on television and again I was fascinated to see that this is a Commonwealth Games sport – where the former colonies of the British Empire are combined together in a loose federation with a common interest – but it is not an Olympic one. Too few countries play it to get into the Olympics; almost all of the countries who do pay it are… former British colonies.

Perhaps the fact that so few Americans leave America, or have a passport is one reason why some of your best sports are played only within your own boundaries? You seem to need an Empire to build an international sporting competition, if you are Britain and then you can bask in the humiliation of being worse than your former colonies when playing it as has been proven by the English cricket team…

Oh they would make a decent offer to Tom Brady to spend some time in their line up, I am sure!

Of course, in Scotland we have always had a desire to be good at sport but struggle often to find the international prowess we should display. But just remember that right now the World ‘s Strongest Man is a Scot and so too is the Darts World Champion so if ye upset us, we can come and get you in more than one way…

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…)

And today’s Scots word tae bamboozle ye…

Each time we see ye, we shall try tae leave ye wi a word o oors tae replace a word o thine. Jist fur the sake o learnin, ken!

Quines – What women are called in and around Aberdeenshire, in the North East of Scotland in a dialect of Scots known as the Doric.