Excellent, I hope Gary Neville's arranged a days golf with Pogba to discuss his move away from Man utd or is that against Sky rules disrupting one of it's darling clubs
Leave it to Americans tasked with coming up with a new name to rub their pointy little heads together until they produce lead and pencil shavings. "Guardians" is a good name for a team of chaperones. So I like it, since Cleveland are Pittsburgh's rivals. I was once working with a team from the now oh-so-deservedly-semi-defunct Radio Shack, who had to come up with a name for an educational robotics kit meant to compete with Lego (or LEGO, as Lego insisted on). It was pretty straightforward: find a simple, memorable name with no negative connotations. They came up with Vex (VEX, actually). As in VEXED and VEXING. I couldn't be making this up. Nobody asked me, but two much better names than Guardians are Rockers (since the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is there) and the Lake Effect. If the former, all they'd need would be an expansion team called Mods for a well-themed rivalry. For the latter, the idea of fans dressing up like winter blizzards (the product of the lake effect) would be picturesque. Can you tell I'm a designer? The Burning River (a famous Cleveland phenomena) would be nice, too. I'm grateful Cleveland didn't change their name till now, because I think it was only the Fates refusing to award a title to a team with a racist name in 2016 that let the Cubs win a championship. MLS have a number of truly wretched copycat names, including, tragically, a couple of Uniteds. But one of the copycat names is fun: Houston Dynamo....though Houston Lokomotiv would obviously have been better. The Washington Football Team would have been a good name if more than 2 of their players ever touched the ball with their feet. The Cincinnati Reds aren't bad, mostly because when the dipsh**s from the House Un-American Activities Committee told them they should not have a name associated with communists, the owner said, "Then tell the communists to change their name. We had it first."
Real Salt Lake and Inter Miami CF. An American side being called Royal is so obviously and utterly wrong.
I find that slightly less offensive, even though it's still a bit stupid. It's essentially Kansas City Sports Club, which isn't too bad. Sporting fans get very upset if you mention where the club's based, for some reason. Bit like if you mention the Milan part of Inter.
Inter is the one that's annoyed me for years You don't hear Italian pundits banging on about "Ever Liverpool", yet ours do so for just as ours don't talk about "Juve Turin", but that one has stuck
Remember the faces of the Chinese mixed doubles table tennis team Mainly because they're off down the uranium mines the second they return home after that bottle job...
As I've mentioned before, the common names of the two clubs who play in the San Siro on the Italian city of Milano are Inter and Milan. Milan is deliberately spelt the English way as a homage to the game coming from England. Literally nobody in Italy would call them Inter Milan and AC Milan. (AC is literally the Italian for FC so would only be used in a formal description, not to differentiate from Inter).
Pundits saying "AC Milan" also bugs me, because it's not like they say "Chelsea FC" and nor do their Italian counterparts, as the only people who do call them that are the club's accountants and legal team If I want to see team names getting mangled, I watch Premier League coverage on 1990s American TV. Their pronunciation of Leicester still haunts me to this day...
True but when they adopted the Italian prefix for football club they didn't change to Associazione Calcio Milano
England captain Joe Root’s batting in the Hundred. 2 matches, 1 innings, 1 ball faced, 0 runs, average 0, strike rate 0
Probably because of the circumstances surrounding it. They were forced to use Milano for a while by the fascists.
San Marino have won their first ever medal at the Olympics, picking up a bronze. Alessandra Perilli came third in the Women's Trap, one of the clay pigeon shooting disciplines. She beat Silvana Stanco, who came 5th, representing Italy. Perilli was born in Rimini and shoots a Beretta...
And so we come to the part of the Olympics in which I am both like and hate the most (it's a hard time for me). It's the athletics. What is so great? I absolutely love the 4 x 400m relay and several other events. Getting from one place to another as fast as you can really resonates with me. What do I hate? The fact that I can't be sure if the athletes are clean. And that the IOC does not seem to do as much as it can to ensure that happens. There also seems to be a few athletes that are very arrogant, and that also winds me up. There's also a better balance of medals available than say, swimming or gymnastics. I mentioned it before, but I am uncomfortable if it is possible for someone to win seven golds. It suggests that the events need too similar attributes. It is just about possible, but incredibly unlikely to go for four golds on the track, which sounds better to me. Also mentioned the weird swimming stuff like butterfly that nobody really does outside competition, you may as well have a medal for running backwards or hopping. Seriously. And the bad. I can't be sure that the winner had won fairly. This is a big thing! A large number of 'athletes' have been caught, but does that give me confidence that everyone who is cheating has? Absolutely not. Even worse I'm not sure about the bans. Surely the ultimate use of the 'shot themselves on the foot' cliche is when Bolt finally gets beaten by *twice banned* Gatlin. There is an argument that the first ban should be final, but to still be around after two? Pathetic. And the guy has five olympic medals - they should be taken away. And if they are really serious in testing the athletes then they should publish when and where the tests take place, and how many get missed. And three missed tests should result in the equivalent of the most severe ban. There can be no excuse. Instead we have several previously banned people taking part, and suspicions over others. I know someone that was in the British team at the South Korea Olympics (not athletics). He said there was drug taking on an industrial scale there. Remember didn't all (or almost all) of the competitors in the 100m final subsequently get banned? I heard a disturbing radio commentary during the London Olympics, but nothing like it on the TV. It was on a women's middle distance race, I think 1500m, but could have been 5,000. The expert they had alongside the commentator was a trainer (sadly can't remember the name) and he effectively said that half the athletes running were cheats. He said that the IOC focus on particular areas (male / female / sprint / distance etc.) and hadn't got to grips with womans middle distance at all. I heard nothing similar in any other commentary. And it turned out to be true as a lot of the runners were subsequently banned and I think all the medals ended up being withdrawn and reissued. Disgraceful not just because the problem hadn't been tackled before the event, but that the true winners never got to receive their medals at the time in the same stadium. More recently they've introduced a better system for giving the new winners the chance to get their medals in front of a crowd, but of course it could be years later and it's not exactly the same. Finally (and well done if you got this far) I wanted to mention arrogance. It's often associated with excellence as we know, but it seems athletics, and particularly the sprints, seem prone to it. Linked to this is something I cannot stand. This is where a sprinter slows up before the line. This is both horribly arrogant, but also completely disrespectful to fellow athletes. Once or twice someone has got overtaken doing this, and that is so funny, but not nearly often enough. Needless to say someone who does this that is also a drug cheat is about the lowest of the low. Edit: Forgot one more thing. The "Russian Olympic Committee". Russia is banned from the Olympics but there are over 300 Russian athletes taking part. They are currently fourth in the medal table. I thought only countries could take part? Is the whole thing right?