Tuesday 22 September 2009

Homegrown hysteria

Not that you would know it where I'm living but back home in Melbourne, Australia, people are going understandably mental about the Geelong Cats making their third grand final in three years.
After last year's painful loss, the Cats should bounce back to take this one against the Saints. My girlfriend's hoping that's not the case so we'll no doubt be at odds this weekend.
Nothing much more to add right now, thanks for tuning in

Monday 7 September 2009

Back in action

No time for blogging over the past month, away in Scotland for a family reunion and then the US for three weeks and also started a new job in online medical publishing at f1000.com.
I'll start back blogging now that I have some more time, a couple of things I wanted to mention.
I've complained before about the state of basketball in the UK and my trip to the States helped to revive my angst. In a country that created the sport you would expect it to be big, popular and host to the best players (not always the case: English cricket, save their recent Ashes win?) I took in an afternoon at Venice Beach in LA, home to one of the most well-known courts and though the playing standard was lower than I expected, still left impressed and with renewed faith in the game.
The Times today has a great article on Luol Deng and the British team's Eurobasket chances. I say great partly because it's so rare to see the game mentioned in UK press but then that's a key feature in the article's text.
Deng's comment that many Brits "still don’t know we even have a British basketball team" isn't surprising given the generally poor coverage and lack of interest by free or pay TV in screening games in normal (ie not 2-5am) programming.
It's excellent to see LOCOG spending big on basketball, hopefully they'll continue the promo push to get more kids into the sport. Though a top three finish is unlikely at the 2012 Olympics, taking a big scalpy down would be enough to hope for at this stage.