First - my apologies to our readers of the Shenshai tradition of Zoroastrianism - I forgot to wish you a Happy Noruz (New Year) last week - I hope you had a good festival.
I was watching a hockey game on TV and missed the end as I had to go out. (Note for North American readers - "hockey" in the UK does not mean ice hockey. Ice hockey is always
ice hockey. Hockey with no qualifier means the game you call "field hockey".) I tried to find the result when I got home. No luck. Even the
Eurosport website (the channel that had been showing it - they show a lot of minority-interest sports that other channels don't) didn't have it.
The England women's team had been playing in the European Championships.
If that had been (men's) football or (men's) rugby the newspapers would have had a minimum of four pages devoted to a kick-by-kick report of the game. Hockey?? Be lucky to get a result.
Last week I watched the World Championships in fencing on the same channel. No other channel covers it. No channel covers fencing unless it's the Olympics.
I've been trying to follow the Women's Ashes Series (cricket) but the only place you can watch it is online, on the
English Cricket Board's own website.
The Men's Ashes series?? Sky Sports 2 has been temporarily re-named Sky Sports Ashes and covers ever ball, every stroke, and analyses every blade of grass. All day.
Formula 1 racing has it's own dedicated Sky channel too.
I can't decided if it's the difference between sports where money flows like water, and players get paid in a week more than I earn in a year, and sports where players are amateur and have to pay their own expenses, or get paid a pittance and national organisations decide whether to enter competitions based on how much money they can scrape together to pay their players expenses.
Or if it's simply down to sports seen as men's sports (for rough, tough, manly men), and sports seen as women's sports, or women's (inferior) versions of men's sports, or sports played by both but which are seen (incorrectly) to be for upper-class men (who are not rough, tough, and manly).
Either way it annoys me no end.
What century is this again??
PS - England's women won and are through to the semi-finals. England's men have to have a play-off match with Ireland for a place in the semi-finals, (Dutch websites report on hockey - the Dutch love hockey).
Ze
