Monday 30 June 2008

The perfect sporting storm

Poor Lauren. She's been a sporting widow for these last few weeks, as Tane's perfect sporting storm came together. Down at the pub on a Saturday morning to watch the All Blacks thumping England, obsessively trying to find out the score in New Zealand's cricket tour of England, spending almost every third night in front of the tv watching the greatest tournament I've ever seen - football's European Championships. Well done the Spanish! Nice to see attacking flair come out on top, for once. And nice to see the horribly dull, defensive Italians leave early.

It's been great. I've done much male bonding while swilling beer, scoffing chips (or crisps, I should say) and playing armchair critic. The highlight though was been some actual live sport - Wimbledon!

It was one heck of a memorable event - even for the queueing alone. We arrived at 9.30am, and got into the ground about 1.30pm. We queued for a queue card, then we queued for tickets, then queued to watch an actual game. Crazy. Fortunately, this was the first year that organisers had decided to start the queue in a nearby park. So most of the wait was, almost literally, a picnic.

Lewis and Johnathan chill out in the queue.

The English take queueing very seriously indeed. Surely only at Wimbledon would do you a guide to queueing, as well as an official queue card. Mine was number 9482. Yep, that's a lot of people waiting.

Fortunately, we managed to get to a court in time to see the end of up-and-coming Kiwi Marina Erakovic's third round match. It was a tight and entertaining third set, but sadly, she lost.

Marina Erakovic gives it her all on Court 11.

The next game on that court was a thriller. This was the first time I've seen top quality tennis up close, and it was amazing. They're sooo fast. Even the women hit with enough power to make my forehands look as strong as wet noodles. Especially scary giant Russian Davina Safina. Her arms were like my legs.

Wine without cups. We were the classiest people in Wimbledon.

After a couple of sets of that, it was off to "Murray Mountain", where thousands were watching the new British hope, Andy Murray. He won, to much cheering, but today lost to Rafael Nadal.


Then, as the evening wore on, we rounded out watching some doubles and men's singles. What a great venue, what great sport. I'll be back again next year - and with Lauren. Sporting widow becomes sporting wife!

1 comment:

Helen and Ryan said...

nice pics~! I especially like the tennis-overhand-jumpshot and the norman-castle-picnic