Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports. Mike BushellЧитать онлайн книгу.
It just shows what is possible with the right tuition!
To see for yourself, whether at school or your nearest club, contact the British Rope Skipping Association at www.brsa.org.uk or www.jumpruk.com. The next World Cup will be in 2014.
TABLE FOOTBALL
It’s the one sport that made me nervous when around my grandma Olive. There was something about the metal bars and the plastic rotating players that changed her character completely. She had the meanest defence in the family and would live and breathe each headed clearance as if she had pulled the shirt on herself. Even in her seventies she would be like a cat on hot coals, with her wrist flicks and shrieks of passion.
For most of us, it’s just an absorbing family tradition or a game in the pub, but there is now a flourishing British ‘Foosball’ team with a national BFA league planned for 2013. Indeed the British team went to Germany in January 2012, for the European championships and competed in front of 5000 people, in a packed sports hall in Bonn.
There are seven different stories about how table football began. One cites early children of servants spending time in backyards, using clothes pegs tied onto a pole. Another popular myth is that the game was started by a Tottenham Hotspur fan, Harry Searles Thornton, in the 1920s. Those who believe this version say he wanted to replicate the beautiful game at home. He had his lightbulb moment when fiddling with a box of matches. As he lay the matches across the box, the idea of bar football came to him. Some players dispute this tale – ‘We won’t ever agree on how it started,’ said Ben Mason, coordinator of the British team.
There are now table football federations around the globe and a world ranking system, with Americans dominating most recently. The World Series is like the tennis tour, with five world championship events culminating in the end of season series finale, for the top 32 players in the world, in France, every January. Players and teams come from as far Kuwait, Argentina, Costa Rica, Iran, Malaysia and Japan. There is also a player to outshine even the likes of Federer, Sampras and Nadal. Belgian Frederic Collignon is the 19-time world champion.
HUMAN TABLE FOOTBALL
The other branch of this sport’s development started as a joke. In their 1976 Christmas special, Morecambe and Wise gave us an insight, into what it must be like for the players being stuck on a pole and spun around. But it is no longer just a sketch, because table football has gone life size, and it is an increasingly popular team building exercise. Now we can all be those players my grandma used to spin and twist.
The pitch is enclosed by a giant inflatable frame, with metal bars like telegraph poles lying fixed across it. Human table football has been modified for health and safety reasons since it first started, soon after the Morecambe and Wise sketch, and so nowadays you are no longer harnessed to the bars. Instead there are two hand straps for each player. It’s far less intimidating for beginners to know that they can slide their hands out if the bar moves too quickly or starts to spin. It’s non-contact so different ages can play together, but don’t let this fool you into thinking that it’s not a physical workout.
I was on a team taking on one of the top table football sides in the country, from Oxford. We wanted to see how they would adapt to this giant version. I was on a bar in midfield, alongside the towering former Southampton player Brian Hague. Being at a bar together was actually nothing new, because he is landlord of the White Hart pub at Stoke in Hampshire, but now Brian and I had a different kind of bar work to do. As we were both attached to the metal bar everything he did, I had to match, and vice versa. He was twice my size, a gentle blond bear of a man, and so getting in sync with someone much smaller required some nifty footwork. If I went left for a ball, he had to watch and come with me, otherwise – as happened twice – one of us would be yanked over in a battle of opposing forces. So teamwork and communication are key, which is why it has become a hit at sports clubs and corporate events.
There are also similarities with the table-sized game. It is like being in a pinball machine, and is hard to keep up with the light inflatable ball as it pings around. In the middle of the pitch, a delicate touch is required, because if you kick it too hard, it lifts up, rebounds off the pole in front, and can smack you in the face. And of course I wasn’t allowed to move my hands up to protect my now red nose.
The captain of the Oxford team was shocked. ‘I thought this would just be a nice little kick around,’ he sighed, ‘but there are a lot of tactics involved. I have seen people playing off the walls to each other.’ The Oxford striker was applying his usual table top strategy. ‘One of the main things is look into the keepers’ eyes, just like in normal table football. They don’t know if it’s coming down the middle, or at them off the side of the one of the walls.’
Our keeper, David Strauss, had indeed been bamboozled. ‘You can’t see it coming, as the ball flies at you so fast.’
It doesn’t really hurt, even if I had been stretched in ways I hadn’t imagined possible. A certain level of fitness might be useful though, because the striker on my team was stretchered off with a strained hamstring. It was almost as bad as when a friend of mine, David Gilmore, broke an arm playing Subbuteo in our secondary school days.
To get involved in human table football, then there are now several websites offering the experience. If it’s the real deal, you’re after and you want to see what got Grandma Olive so worked up then contact the British Table Football Association about joining a league or even working up towards the national team in time for the next World Cup. www.britfoos.com
GEOCACHING
‘There are screams coming out of bushes right across the country,’ beamed Sue Gough as she clutched her husband’s hand. We were standing on a hill overlooking the Chilterns, and she was right. I had stumbled into another world, one in which country walks would never be the same, and one which has provided the world with one of its biggest family weekend activities.
It’s one of the great problems for any parent. How do you tempt the kids out for a walk on a cold, wet January afternoon when they would much rather stay cosy in front of the television and on their computer games? Well, we all know a bit of bribery works, so just offer them some ‘treasure’ and the shoes and coats will be on quicker than you can say ‘geocaching’.
It’s a sport with a very short history. There are no records of ancient Egyptians doing this activity, although the basics of hiding and seeking do go back a long way. We can trace geocaching back to one day: the date when the much hailed ‘great blue switch’ in America was flicked to ‘on’. It was 2 May 2000, and 24 satellites around the world were upgraded so that in an instant, the accuracy of GPS technology across the world was radically improved. A day later, a GPS enthusiast wanted to test the accuracy of the new system, so he hid a container in the woods and marked down the co-ordinates with a GPS unit. He thought he would see if someone else could find the exact spot, using their own GPS device. A note was left: ‘take some stuff and leave some stuff.’
For the first few months, it was just experienced GPS users who played this form of hide and seek. It only became a worldwide phenomenon when a web designer from Seattle stumbled on the activity and created the first geocaching website. He started with the motto: ‘if you hide it they will come’. And they did. Families, children, anyone who could download the geocache app to their mobile phones or tablets.
It sounds like you’re a part of a secret society when you claim to be a geocacher. The ‘geo’ comes from the word geography, while the caching is simply the process of hiding a cache. Now, 13 years on, wherever you are it’s more than likely there will be little boxes or containers hiding in the verges, trees and walls around you. Geocaching is an outside exploration activity which you join by getting a GPS device, or by downloading the app onto a mobile phone. You then register on the website, and get the rough locations of ‘treasure’ in your local area.
There was no stopping the children, teenagers and dogs in the group of 30 I joined at Longwick near Princes Risborough. We had split into groups of three and the race was on to find the first hidden boxes.