The zombie thing was ‘The Walking Dead’, which I wasn’t overly impressed by. It was great at building suspense, but then completely failed to use it. The whole point of anything zombie related is either to gross you out with decaying, flesh eating madness. Or build up stupid levels of suspense then make you jump. The building up they managed, but I didn’t jump once! Oh well, maybe it’ll get better as the series progresses. And maybe the protagonist will learn some of the basic rules for zombie survival. Like to stop leaving his guns lying around right when he’s going to need them! He was a bit of an idiot.
But that’s not what I wanted to blog about. What I wanted to blog about is Shinty/Hurling.
Shinty is a Scottish sport not unlike Hockey. The players thwack a ball up and down a pitch using hockey-like sticks called camen and try to get it into a goal or hail. The main difference from Hockey that I can see is that it’s a little more violent. Sticks can be used to block and hit over head so other players have to work hard not to get brained!
Hurling is the Irish equivalent and is mostly similar from what I can tell although the sticks, or hurleys, are much broader and can be used to flick the ball up off the ground and even to carry it like an odd egg and spoon race! The goals are also different with Shinty goals being like a football net whilst Hurling goals are like rugby posts.
The fun comes when the two are combined! Scotland vs Irland. Shinty vs Hurling. The rules are modified a little so that they fit but it’s pretty much like a fast and violent hockey match with goals scored by thwacking the ball between the hurley posts or into the shinty net. The Irish players flick and carry the ball, the Scottish players dribble and thwack and everyone tries not to get hit around the head and often fails. I saw at least one player who needed a broken nose patching up. But being Scottish he was back on the pitch barely two minutes later! (Almost as good as the motoGP riders who carry on racing with broken bones!)
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the most sporty of people. I mean I dislocated by elbow playing badminton of all things. The only sports I really do now are for the inter departmental league at work, which I only do because the rules state that each team requires at least one girl and I usually can’t find anyone else to bug into doing it. So there’s no way you’d ever see me playing this insane game...but watching it is another matter. The commentary was entirely in Gaelic; the players names the only bit I could understand except for a few brief translations from James. But that didn’t matter at all. It’s fast, often brutal and totally insane. I love it!
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