114. What was that for?

When you are watching a sport or a game, how can you be certain that what you are seeing is fair and honest?  

In how many sports or games can you be sure that it is the innate, natural ability of the competitors you are seeing and not the result of some medical enhancement or incompetent, possibly fraudulent stewarding by the appointed officials?  

There are some sports in which individual games or matches can certainly be affected.  Cricket, below test match level, is an obvious example of a sport in which certain passages of play, or even the outcome of the game itself may be determined by umpires who are either inept or who cheat. 

Nowadays, test cricket is probably “clean” although it wasn’t always so.  Until the introduction of “neutral” umpires (umpires from neither of those countries competing), some test umpires seem to have cheated as a matter of course or maybe, they kept making the same kind of error over and over again.

After the 1946-47 Australian test series with England, which Australia won 3 – 0, Wisden, the Cricketers’ Almanack and the adjudicator on all things cricket, said this:

“The weight of evidence suggests that the umpires were mistaken in giving Bradman not out caught for 28 in the First Test.”

Bradman’s innings eventually ended when he had scored 187.  Even Keith Miller, the Australian all-rounder playing in the game, wrote, 

“That decision was subsequently admitted in nearly every quarter to have been erroneous.”  

Bradman should have been out for 28.  

It was a crucial decision.  Bradman had defied medical advice to play in that first test match of that series and at the age of 38 and out for a low score, he might well have retired, but he carried on and in that series, he scored a further 652 runs at an average of 97.  The umpires for all five games in Australia in that series were Australian.  However, it is not just Australian umpires….

The Pakistani, Javed Miandad, was out LBW 33 times in test matches but only 8 of those were in Pakistan.  Between 1978 and 1985, Javed was never given out LBW in 24 One Day International matches he played in Pakistan.  

Since “neutral” umpires were introduced, this has been the effect on LBW decisions: 

16% of dismissals were LBW previously with home umpires but,

19% were LBW with two neutral umpires.  Pretty conclusive!

I cheated once.  On the last Sunday of the cricket season, the Finchley Over 30s were playing the Under 30s with the players umpiring on a rota.  It was a pleasant, relaxing end to the season.

When I umpired, I told a batsman that the next ball his brother bowled to him, no matter what the legitimacy of the delivery, I would call, “No ball” and so give him a free hit.  That ball was hit for six.  Everyone laughed - except the bowler.  

“That’s the first no-ball I’ve ever bowled in my life,” he screamed at me.  

“I don’t believe it.  You’re a cheat!”  

He was right - I was, but it was very funny.

Where to begin with rugby union?  I am certain that if the referee decided in advance that the points difference between two evenly matched sides were to be 12, he could fix it so that exact differential became the result and he could also determine which of the two sides won.

My first teaching job was at an all-boys secondary modern school where football (soccer) was the winter sport.  I introduced them to rugby.  After three months, I thought they were ready for their first competitive game.

I refereed the game against the local grammar school.  All the boys were 11 or 12 years old, but the grammar school team looked two years older than mine.  They were comparatively huge and after 5 minutes they had scored two tries under the posts.

Something had to be done - and so something I did.  I practised “altruistic cheating” for the rest of the game.  Not one of the players noticed.  Their coach did but he nodded approval and when I blew the whistle to end the game, about four minutes early, he grinned and all he said about it was, “Well done.”

My boys lost 21 – 9 but they were not humiliated.

Here are some extracts from the television commentators on this year’s Rugby World Cup that show how baffled they are:

	Wales v England
1	Commentator A:	“It’s a penalty to Wales.   No, it’s not.  It’s a scrum.”
2	Commentator A:	“…and the confusion caused leads to another Welsh penalty.”
	Commentator B:	“No, it’s not a penalty.  I think it’s a scrum.”
3	Commentator A:	He’s been penalised, possibly for collapsing the scrum.”
	Commentator B:	"No, it's for his binding."
4	Commentator A:	“England won it illegally and have given away a penalty.”
	Commentator B:	“No, the penalty is for offside a couple of phases before.”
	Ireland v France
	Commentator:	“There’s a penalty against Tommy Bowe of Ireland for going in with his shoulder…..Well no, it’s actually a penalty for Ireland against Nakaitaci (France).”
	Ireland v Argentina
	Commentator:	“It’s a fifty-fifty call but I think it’s a penalty to Ireland.”

Early in the second half of that game, the commentators gave up trying to give the reason for decisions.  “Penalty to Ireland,” or “Argentina scrum,” was all you heard.

I could have given dozens of other examples where the commentators made it clear that they didn’t have a clue as to the reason for a ruling.   

“What was that for?” is the most frequent thing said by one viewer to another while watching a rugby match on television.  

When a penalty is awarded, as it is after many scrums, neither spectators nor commentators often have no real idea why.  

If the commentators, with their expert knowledge of the game and with the best view in the stadium, can’t tell what the hell is going on, what chance do the rest of us have?

After the England/Wales game, this official statement was released:

“The World Cup refereeing officials have conceded that England were wrongly penalised four times against Wales.”

The Times newspaper identified those four penalties, three of which resulted in nine points for Wales.  They included the one kicked from nearly 50 metres that secured the decisive lead for Wales.  England lost by 3 points.  

Therefore, that game, the most important for England rugby for 12 years, was lost by England because of a referee’s incompetence.  

Scotland lost to Australia in the quarter-final because of another wrong interpretation by the referee when he awarded Australia a penalty kick two minutes from time.  The replay proved the error.  The kick went over, and Australia won by a single point.  

Jeremy Guscott, the ex-England rugby centre, was asked if rugby union referees are inconsistent.  He said that they were not but that the laws of rugby are open to interpretation because of their wording.  

If that is the case, then rugby union has become like ice dancing or synchronised swimming, where adjudication is subjective.  That is not satisfactory.

Footballers cheat and they always have.  Sometimes, their attempts to gain some kind of advantage are pathetically obvious and laughable but the cleverer ones get away with it.  

The contactless fall in the penalty area is the most obvious example of cheating but attempts to deceive the referee happen all over the pitch, from claiming throw-ins and corners when the player knows that he touched the ball last, to writhing in distressed agony following the most gentle of interactions with an opposing player.

Retrospective citing in football, as happens in rugby union is needed.  If a post-match study of the tape showed that a player had cheated, whether the referee had spotted it or not, he could be banned for two or three games.  That would stop it.

So, what sports or games can a spectator watch with the certainty that all is fair and above board?  Forget about athletics.

Before the 1988 season, Florence Griffith Joyner's best time in the 100-metres had been 10.96 seconds.  During 1988, in less than 12 months, she improved that best time to 10.49 seconds, a ridiculously huge improvement. The 1988 Flo Jo would beat the 1987 Flo Jo by nearly 5 metres.

In a 100-metre race, FGJ would beat the second fastest female runner ever, by almost 2 metres.  It wouldn’t even be close.  A “clean” athlete may never break her world record. 

When Flo-Jo died at the age of 38, the coroner asked that her body be tested for steroids (a banned performance-enhancing drug) but he was informed that there was not enough urine in her bladder for a test.  Hmphh!

Marita Koch holds the world record in the 400-metres, set in 1985.  Only once since then has another athlete come within a second of that time.  That record will probably stand for another 40 years too.

There appear to be very few clean sports or games.  There have been recent cheating scandals in both Chess and Bridge.  Beta-blockers, that can be used to stop a player’s hands from shaking, have been found in 36% of dart players, 25% of archers and 17% of the golfers who were tested.

Curling appears to be relatively clean and honest.  Only 0.3% of curlers tested positively for beta-blockers but does anyone really care about curling?

The tragedy is that cheating seems to start very early.  I don’t know who taught him to cheat (it was probably his Auntie Caroline), but my eight-year-old nephew, Timo, beats me at chess every time we play.

I have come to the conclusion that, possibly, the only event in which you can be certain that the best competitor wins, is the pole vault.  Performance-enhancing drugs don't seem to have any effect and he/she either knocks the bar off or doesn’t.

 

The Royal Statistical Society made a survey of LBW decisions and this is a summary of their judgements:

“The findings show clear evidence of fewer decisions in favour of home teams with neutral umpires."

Dr Sacheti, the lead author of the study, said: “Our results suggest that when two home umpires officiated in Test matches, away teams were likely to suffer on average 17 per cent more LBW decisions than home teams."

When the ICC introduced the one neutral umpire policy, this advantage to home teams receded to 10 per cent.

"When two neutral umpires were required in every Test match, this advantage to home teams disappeared. This result holds even when we control for the quality of teams, the ground where the match was played and so on."

The researchers found that the bias by home umpires in favour of home teams had been particularly strong in Test matches played in Australia, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The effect of neutral umpires has been that the total number of LBWs has risen with the away side’s % staying about the same but the % of LBWs against home sides increasing.”

So, before neutral umpires, 16% of all dismissals in test matches were LBW.

Since neutral umpires, 19% of all dismissals are LBW.

The increase of 3% has been caused by a rise in “home” side LBW dismissals.

113. Yawn....

In July 2012 I wrote about some changes I have noticed in my life since Caroline and I moved from the suburbs of north London to rural Buckinghamshire (Rural Stress). In that post I wrote about the difficulties I find in obtaining the services of local tradesmen. 

I have stopped worrying about all that now.   I’ve either lowered my expectations or maybe I have adjusted my pace of life to that of the people I come into contact with around here.

My life is not stress free, however.  There is something else about living here, 45 miles north of central London, that irritates me daily and it is something that I can do nothing about.  The thing that irritates and is driving me mad is the BBC regional news.

When we lived in London, the BBC “London News” followed the BBC “News at Six” and every story in that local news programme was interesting and significant, not just to me but I am sure to everyone in London. 

Even a story about the opening of a new shopping centre in Streatham, which is on the far side of London, diametrically opposite from where we lived in Winchmore Hill, seemed relevant and germane.

Most evenings when I watch the east of England local news programme,  “Look East”, I usually feel that it is really nothing to do with me at all.  

Why we are classified as being in the Eastern region and not the Midlands, when we are only forty miles from the geographic centre of England is beyond me.

The first time I realised that “Look East” is a programme that had very little to offer, was the evening when the lead story was about an argument in Wellingborough to do with the Christmas lights.  I didn’t even know where Wellingborough was and I, along with probably 99% of the programme’s viewers, was completely uninterested in what sort of bloody lights were hanging in their High Street that Christmas.

Last week, the first story one day was about an upgrade of the railway line from Norwich to London and the main thrust of the story was that it wouldn’t be completed for ten years.  A topical story?

The next story was about the new Northampton railway station.  I’m sure that may have been of some interest to people living in Northampton but not to anybody else in the huge region that is the BBC’s definition of the East of England.

Another feature recently was about a doctor who had treated sufferers from Ebola in West Africa.  The only relevance it had to us in the East of England was that the doctor came from Norfolk.  I expect his friends were interested.

A series of stories was titled “Unsung Sporting Heroes”.  The first ‘hero’ was a diving coach from Letchworth in Hertfordshire.  He and other people in the series are ‘unsung’ because they are not very important or interesting and probably not particularly good at what they do.

Another story in our local news was about a stunt involving a racing car that drove underneath a lorry and out the other side.  Its only relevance to viewers in the East of England was that it was filmed at a disused airfield in Suffolk. 

If a story in the national news has any connection whatsoever with Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire or Northamptonshire, it will be repeated within half an hour on the local news.  Usually it is just a repeat of everything, including the same film and interviews that we have already seen in the main news.

Anything that Greg Rutherford, the Olympic gold medallist, achieves that is worth a mention on the national news, is blown up for all its worth on “Look East” because Greg Rutherford is from Bletchley in Buckinghamshire.

Sometimes, the producers at “Look East” are so desperate to fill 30 minutes every evening that what they tell us is risible. 

When John Hurt was knighted, it was a lead story for us because he owned a holiday home somewhere in the region.

The death of Roger Lloyd-Pack was newsworthy apparently, because some years previously he had owned a house in Norfolk.

The lead item one day in March 2014 in the East of England news was about the funeral in Newry, Northern Ireland, of Lord Ballyedmond, a Northern Irish peer.  It was the most important story for us in the east because he had been killed in a helicopter crash near Beccles in Suffolk ten days earlier.

You may wonder, as I did in January 2014, why “Look East” featured a story about a couple who were murdered on their yacht in St Lucia, 4200 miles away in the West Indies.  Perhaps they were from one of the region’s counties? 

No, they were from Cannock in Staffordshire, in the west of the country. The somewhat tenuous link the story had to the east of England and therefore to us in Buckinghamshire, was that when they had started on their yearlong voyage, they had set sail from Lowestoft in Suffolk.

That association was both absurd and ridiculous!

The lead stories in “Look East” tend to fall into one of three categories.  The headline story is always either about transport, schools, or health and hospitals.   It is so dull.  The “London News” programme has its own Arts Correspondent!  

A new low point came when the entire “Look East” programme came live from a sheep farm near Ipswich.  All afternoon the trails told us that we would be seeing lambs being born.  You may imagine what happened – absolutely nothing!  Thirty minutes of tedious anticlimax, listening to an overawed, inarticulate farmer telling us what we could be seeing if we were there at another time.

If the BBC needs to save money, one of the first things they could do is terminate “Look East” and all other local programmes around the country that have to scrape the barrel in order to find content.  I’ve had enough of it.  I feel sorry for the hotel owner in Overstrand, Norfolk whose hotel is at risk of slipping over the edge of the cliff, but Overstrand is as far from me as Wrexham in Wales. 

I am not bleedin' interested!!

112. Sugar, Sugar, Everywhere...

Sugar, Sugar Everywhere

Why have I become so fat?  There is really only one reason why I, or anyone else, gains weight. 

As long as I burn off the same number of calories every day through exercise as I consume as a result of eating, I will not gain weight.  If I don’t burn off my daily calorie intake, I gain weight – simple!

I don’t eat a lot.  Honestly, I don’t!  Much to Caroline’s consternation and she was brought up in a northern household where to waste food was a sin and plates were always left empty after meals, I often leave quite a lot of food on my plate.  I stop eating once I am no longer feeling hungry.  I accept that it is wasteful but as I paid for it and no one is offended as I cooked it, it doesn't matter.  I rarely eat between meals.

So, it must be the kind of food I eat.  I must be eating high calorie food.

According to the medical profession, the maximum sugar intake per day for a healthy life is 30 grams.  Have you any idea how little this really is?

Breakfast is the meal I look forward to most.  First thing in the morning is the only time of the day when I am really genuinely hungry.  I eat a sort of lunch every day, which is maybe a sandwich or something like a boiled egg and I always eat in the evening but I am never hungry before either of those meals.

I have come to realise recently that I eat lunch and dinner every day almost out of a sense of duty - I’m not really hungry but as it’s a mealtime, I eat. 

I am retired and I no longer work.  Caroline works full time and gets home between six and seven every evening.  She is always hungry because she leads an active, sometimes frenetic life, both physically and mentally:

“I didn’t have time for lunch,” is an almost daily refrain.

What we eat in the evening is whatever I have prepared that afternoon.  I sometimes wonder if I would prepare and eat dinner every day if I lived on my own.  I am fairly sure that I would not.

When I was 55 and before my liver problems, I weighed 165 pounds (11 stone, 11 pounds).  During my illness, my weight fell to 138 pounds (9 stone 12 pounds).  Since I have made a full recovery, cooking and eating are two of the few remaining pleasures left open to me.

I don’t smoke and obviously, I never drink alcohol.  My ongoing problems with severe arthritis mean that any type of aerobic physical activity is beyond my capability.  I cannot walk more than 50 metres without experiencing severe pain and I can’t jog any distance at all. 

Consequently, almost all my time is spent sitting and not moving and therefore I am burning very few calories.

My weight is steadily rising.  I have kept a record:

In August 2009, it was 147 pounds, 10st, 7lbs.

In August 2010, it was 165 pounds, 11st, 9lbs.

In August 2011, it had risen to 186 pounds, 13st, 4lbs.

By August 2012 my weight had risen to 195 pounds (13st 13lbs) and it has stayed there, ± 3 pounds, for the past three years.

As a result, I am 35 pounds, or more than two stone heavier than I should be. 

Before I put any sugar on my Weetabix and All Bran this morning, I put two and a half dessertspoons of sugar that I always add (I know!), on to the scales.  I was astounded by the weight of sugar: 35 grams!

I put the sugar back into the jar and then weighed the two teaspoons of Demerara sugar that I would have had with the first of my two cups of coffee that accompany my breakfast: 9 grams.

That means I consume 50 grams of sugar and that is almost twice the recommended healthy daily intake.  That is just at breakfast - no wonder I am so fat!

You probably think that more than 50 grams of sugar a day is an outrageous amount and I agree, but I do have an excuse - of sorts: I was a child of the 50s.  In September 1953, when sugar came off ration, I was 6.  This was the opening paragraph in the Daily Telegraph the next day:

Children all over Britain have been emptying out their piggybanks and heading straight for the nearest sweetshop as the first unrationed sweets went on sale today.

My diet as a 6-year-old was quite unlike that of a child of today.  In August that year, my 4-year-old brother and I had sat in a sidecar, alongside our parents on a motorcycle combination, as my father drove to Barcelona and back.  The trip took over five weeks. 

There were no official campsites in central France in 1953 and every evening we sought permission to camp in a farmer’s field and the following morning we drank warm, unpasteurised milk from that farm.  I can still recall the distinctive taste. 

The water wasn’t safe to drink.  There was no bottled water and so my brother and I had to drink rough, local wine.  We never liked it.  Butter and margarine couldn’t be stored in mid-summer without refrigeration and so bread and jam was just that – bread and jam.

I can’t remember it but I expect that after rationing ended, only a week after our return to the UK, I was spoiled by having sugar with virtually everything.  I even remember going to nursery with a sugar sandwich as a packed lunch.  Hence, I suppose, my problems with sugar until today.

As I write this, at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, my sugar intake today, so far as I know, is zero grams.  I say “so far as I know” because I have no idea how much sugar is in processed foods.  I have looked at the sugar content of a 150ml tin of Schweppes tonic water: 5.1g per 100ml. 

That means that there is about a quarter of the recommended daily intake of sugar in just one small tin and I sometimes drink three tins a day.  Not anymore!  How much sugar is in supermarket bread?  What about ‘healthy’ yoghurts and soups?

Weetabix without sugar is just about edible but hardly enjoyable but coffee without sugar is fine.  If my experience with coffee, mirrors that which I had with tea, when I gave up sugar in it some forty years ago, I will soon adapt.

I expect that the pounds will just fall away.  We’ll see.

March 9th 2016

They didn’t!

Well, that’s not quite true because they did to begin with but then it stopped.  I lost 10 pounds over first the three weeks of my “no sugar” regime. 

I was on a plateau for a few days but then, even though I was keeping to this new diet, the pounds slowly began to return.  Six weeks later, I was back to my original weight.   

What now?  I can’t reduce my sugar intake and so I’ll just have to try and move about more.  But my ankle pain is getting worse and I can hardly walk.

I have surgery scheduled for June.  This time next year, I’ll be jogging and at least a stone lighter.