If you’re like me, then you will be disappointed that all of the home nations have been knocked out of the Rugby World Cup. If you’re really like me, doing some maths related to rugby will cheer you up…
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Under a (probably) cloudy sky the eyes of a silent, expectant crowd – sated with Pimms and strawberries and cream – fixed on the ball as it was gently tossed from the server’s hands and arced in a gentle parabola; the whisper of a collective intake of breath broken by a sharp ‘toc’ as the tennis ball made contact with the onrushing racket and went hurtling towards the opponent. People have been watching a similar sight since real tennis came into being in the Middle Ages, derived from the French racket-less game of jeu de paume (which also gave rise to handball). One such person was Sir Isaac Newton, who in a paper written in 1672, wondered why it was that a tennis ball was able to follow ‘such a curveline’ as it went from its origin to its destination.
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Football, for a fan, often feels like a week of torture followed by 90 minutes of hell but never more so than when your team is involved in the play-offs. This Bank Holiday weekend sees the League 2, League 1 and Championship play-off finals take place at Wembley, prompting Sir Alex Ferguson to announce that it’s “squeaky bum time” and football commentators around the country to confidently proclaim that “it all boils down to this,” where ‘this’ is a tumbling maelstrom of apprehension; a cacophony of swirling butterflies; a mind electrified, distracted, unable to hold onto any thought that does not involve ‘this’. With only two days to go, with nerves drawing closer to a Himalayan precipice, the fan is liable to search for straws ever more frantically and clutch at them ever more possessively, taking solace in the company of similarly-afflicted supporters of the same team and football’s blurred lines of fact and myth.
