Some perspective on a week of rain and cancellations

The rain. It never stops, does it? So there goes another week of wasted Oxford sporting talent, and they say more downpours are on their way. A total of fourteen football matches were rained off last week, with games cancelled at the beginning of this week as well. a sign that perhaps the last weeks of term will be filled to the bursting point with footie , if the rain doesn’t get there first. A week when we missed what could have been an epic Keble vs St Hugh’s 2nd XI match and instead had to put up with watching snooker on the TV. One can easily speculate as to what could have taken place as these gladiators of sport battled in their favourite arena, but that would be utterly pointless when I could also quite easily spend the time watching the likes of Mark Selby, the ‘jester from Leicester’ or Dave Harold, the ‘bloke from Stoke’. Which brings me on nicely to nicknames. What is their point? Why do Colleges darts teams spend more time thinking of what rhymes with Bernard, rather than their favourite 123 ‘out shot’. Let’s hope the weather improves so that we will not have to do a two-page spread on the sport of sports that is ‘underwater hockey’, or college mascots, however with the weather as it is, maybe it is time that we took these less ‘comercial’ sports a lot more seriously. In fact now is the perfect time, Pool Cuppers only essays away and the darts league reaching an exciting climax, Oriel leading St Anne’s in Division 1 by a mere two points.So come on readers, get involved. Cement yourself in College bar history with the first 9 dart finish, or by your encyclopaedic knowledge of college darts league tables. As my horoscope tells me, it is time to try something new, so why not ‘tiddlywinks’? One thing for certain is that I will not be doing a ‘rain dance’, and perhaps the popularity of ‘dance-sport’ may be the reason for the floods in the first place. Thinking back, this whole article seems to be more based on games and societies rather than the classical sports that our forefathers played back in the thirteenth, or make that twentieth, century.by Matthew Gold