- 10:30 AM
- 11/07/09
| Name: | nick sweeney |
|---|---|
| Member since: | April 06, 2002 |
| Last visit: | November 07, 2009 |
etagloh has posted 41 links and 610 comments to SportsFilter and 0 links and 1 comment to the Locker Room.
"...I realize that I did make a good choice. It's been worth it.": As the NFL takes its annual trip to Wembley, the New York Times heads up to Oxford to check on someone who chose not to enter the draft just yet: Myron Rolle, the Florida State safety who has just begun the Rhodes Scholarship he was awarded at the end of last season.
posted by etagloh to football at 04:58 PM on October 24 - 6 comments
"They don't know Luol Deng is Barack Obama's favourite basketball player. They don't even know that he is British.": A great piece from the summer basketball camp Deng has hosted for the past five years, reflecting on his ability to inspire young Britons while remaining a relative unknown to the sporting press of his adopted home country.
posted by etagloh to basketball at 11:47 PM on September 13 - 1 comment
Steven Cohen quits punditry, citing death threats, after long-running spat with Scousers: A familiar face and voice for US-based EPL fans, he's also a Chelsea supporter with an unfortunate habit of blaming Liverpool fans for Hillsborough, apologising, and then doing it again. After repeating his charges on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, a group of US-based Liverpool fans began an advertiser boycott; fearing a global backlash, a number of Sirius and FSC sponsors pulled their support; another apology wasn't enough to stop FSC from kicking Cohen into touch. On Friday, he walked away from his radio show, invoking the American tradition of free speech, citing antisemitism and death threats to his stepchildren, and blaming... pretty much everybody.
posted by etagloh to soccer at 02:19 AM on August 25 - 18 comments
England regain the Ashes: After a momentous day that began with the Australians looking like they could make history and challenge a huge total, England made breakthroughs when they least expected them to turn the momentum their way. Australian commentators complained criticised the pitch, but Ponting must rue leaving out his spinner -- or being unable to take an early lead back in Cardiff. Now, how well did you do?
posted by etagloh to other at 02:17 PM on August 23 - 14 comments
Women's boxing set for 2012 Olympics, golf and rugby sevens for 2016: The big losers of the IOC's executive board meeting: squash, once again stiffed because of its limited US presence and supposed unbroadcastability, and baseball and softball, having been axed for 2008. Golf is included, presumably, to get Tiger to the Olympics, though as Brian Cazeneuve suggests, it's hard to see the top players treating it with the same respect as the Majors... or bunking down in the athletes' village.
posted by etagloh to olympics at 10:55 AM on August 13 - 18 comments
There's clearly a few shades of grey here. There are competitors who take the money and passports offered by countries that want a fast track to gold medals. There are ones who get slightly advantageous treatment in order to compete under a nation's flag, such as Tanith Belbin, the beneficiary of a bill that removed (frankly stupid) bureaucratic impediments to her naturalization in advance of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Then you have Bernard Lagat, who, like many Kenyan long-distance runners, went to college in the US, but unlike them, chose to take US citizenship when eligible. And then you have those like Keflezighi and Freddie Adu who emigrated to the US as children.
International eligibility regulations for sport have always been somewhat askew from citizenship laws, as seen in Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland side, or in the flag-swapping of rugby players and cricketers. Athletics has generally been stricter in that regard, at least since the days of Zola Budd's fast-track passport: Lagat's 2004 Olympic medal for Kenya is still under question, and after revealing his new citizenship, he served out a mandatory one-year ban before competing for the US.
None of that means that an American-by-choice, who took the test and swore the oath is any less American than what you might call 'Americans-by-accident' whose citizenship is based upon geography or ancestry.
posted by etagloh at 02:58 PM on November 03
Wow. As one of the commenters there noted, Darren Rovell is technically an asshole. That's the kind of nativist BS that you'd expect to hear on right-wing radio. While there are unquestionably ringers in international sport -- Brazilian Georgians in beach volleyball, Kenyans who now run for Qatar, etc. -- Keflezighi clearly doesn't fit into that category.
Having been smacked around by commenters, Rovell has walked back his earlier piece, though his claim that "I never said he didn't deserve to be called American" rings fairly hollow. As someone said in comments to that piece, if the marathon had been won by a guy who'd emigrated from Dublin or Milan as a kid, I can't imagine hearing him being described as "technically American". To dig the hole deeper, Rovell says this:
I said that Keflezighi's win, the first by an American since 1982, wasn't as big as it was being made out to be because there was a difference between being an American-born product and being an American citizen.The winner in 1982? Alberto Salazar, born in Havana.
posted by etagloh at 01:47 PM on November 03
No one has heard of- nor cares about this blog.
ESPN cares enough about it to instruct its staff three years ago specifically never to use it as a source.
Harlow said the suit singled out Gawker as a defendant because of their "concerted" efforts to single out their client, despite the reporting of others.
Uh, no: the suit singled out Gawker because Nick Denton has enough money in the bank to make it suing, or just subjecting it to the legal costs of defending the claim. And everybody's doing it these days. Frankly, I'd laugh and laugh and laugh if one of the anti-Gawker suits took Denton to the cleaners, given that he basically courts it, but my guess is that this won't be the one.
posted by etagloh at 02:15 AM on October 26
I've had an eye on Rolle since news of the Rhodes scholarship broke, and I think he'd be a standout regardless of the campus.
One factoid to take from that piece: Rhodes Scholars can choose to join any college, and while many sign up with graduate-only colleges, which have more international students but can sometimes be fairly cloistered, Rolle has gone with Teddy Hall, a traditional rugby-playing college slap bang in the middle of town with 400 undergrads and 200 grads. That shows a real desire to throw himself into the Oxford experience during his time there, both as part of the Rhodes House community and as an active member of his college. That usually works out pretty well.
There's a Q&A with Rolle on the NYT Quad blog, which touches on the situation at FSU as well as expanding on his experience so far in Oxford and his hopes for the future.
posted by etagloh at 06:10 PM on October 24
The ref is being "rested" this coming weekend. Meditation good for the judgment?
That's the sound of a stable door being bolted when the horse has disappeared over the horizon. I'm sure that every other Premier League ref is thinking, without admitting it, that they'd have let the goal stand too. And Gallagher, Poll and the other ex-refs, none of whom covered themselves with glory in their careers, are guffing when they say otherwise. I certainly believe that players or ex-players like Bruce had no idea of that rule in the book: the general rule of thumb has been to use natural stoppages to clear out any crap from the goalmouth. I can't even remember it being a game-stopper during the odd craze for inflatables in the late 80s.
More amusingly, LFC's entire stock of 'holiday beach sets' has been bought up, with suspicions falling on Evertonians, or the Man Utd fans visiting Anfield this coming weekend.
posted by etagloh at 02:02 AM on October 20
As the BBC commentators said, they should race at Interlagos every week. Or at least, have tracks of that quality for every grand prix.
Brawn GP sealed the constructors' championship today as well, and without taking anything away from Button, I'm sure that he'd lay plenty of credit his team -- on the brink of leaving F1 after Honda's pullout -- for helping make the opposition look pedestrian, particularly in the opening half-dozen races.
posted by etagloh at 07:01 PM on October 18
Former FIFA referee Graham Poll told the BBC the referee should have stopped the game and given a drop ball.
Graham Poll can bugger off. And Danny Baker has an obvious lead-in next week. I want to hear about park games with in-off-the-dog goals.
posted by etagloh at 11:15 PM on October 17
Here and here. I'd say "beach ball" over "balloon", but Liverpool definitely had the wind knocked out of them by it (ka-dunk).
posted by etagloh at 05:44 PM on October 17
Plaintruth either has a personal interest that he ought to disclose, talking out of his plastic-paddy arse, or trolling us.
posted by etagloh at 07:30 AM on October 17
"By Jesus, says he, I'Il brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here."
I can imagine it being a somewhat crude joke -- a flip on the Blazing Saddles gag about the Irish -- but his "explanation" suggests he just dug a hole for himself and kept digging.
posted by etagloh at 07:27 PM on October 16
The opening week is likely to be interesting. There might not be the same crosswind surprise attacks that came this year -- the route doesn't head directly west across Flanders, where that's always a factor -- but those drags across Holland and Belgium have a very different character to the ones in most TdFs, even without the pav, which is going to put the willies up all the teams.
The Pyreneean spotlight makes up for a fairly pedestrian first week this year, though I wonder if the dynamics of the race will mean that the teams will declare tacit truces on some of the mountain-top finishes, depending on the GC. Still, Cavendish is going to have to spend the offseason honing his survival skills if he wants a dig at the green.
posted by etagloh at 05:43 PM on October 14
Ah, the oligarchs are coming. So that means it's only six years until the Nets are banned from all trades and draft picks.
posted by etagloh at 03:58 AM on September 24
The touchline time-keeper and the stopped clock are already standard for NCAA matches. Having watched a couple of matches, it feels wrong to me, but that's clearly not sufficient as an objection. The TV timeouts are, though, and the continuous clock remains a defence against that.
The rugby model of blowing up for half- or full-time when the ball goes out of play feels wrong for more easily defined reasons: one distinctive element of football is that the players can't do anything to end a match. (That's why the golden goal rule didn't work.)
posted by etagloh at 05:39 PM on September 23
John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman love Delonte West, and if they didn't cover it in this week's podcast, they'll talk about it next week.
posted by etagloh at 04:39 PM on September 19
Women's Soccer Playoff Turns Ugly
Is anyone else surprised by how ESPN is covering this?
No, given that SportsCenter's coverage continues to make the ESPN Deportes team cringe.
Where's the ref? If you're going to play the hard-case centre-back, then you're either sneaky and get away with it, or blatant and go into the book. Blatant and getting away with it means the ref is AWOL.