Let’s Rip Those Brits To Bits And Other Australian Olympic Sports
Until the Australians have a proper football league, they simply don’t register on the sporting radar. Their win against England in a meaningless friendly was treated as though they had won the trophy.
As for boxing, Australians are OK at fighting kangaroos, but have made no impact whatsoever on the proper Queensbury variety. The best-known Australian pugilist is Aussie Joe Bugner the Hungarian-Brit who went to earn a living out there once his days as a serious fighter were over.
It’s a curious fact that, for all their macho posturing, Australian males prefer to avoid the boxing ring, and concentrate on tennis, swimming, and other girls’ sports that Englishmen wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. One need only consider their preposterous Aussie rules’ game, with its tight shorts and boob tubes, to see that something pretty rum is going on.
“What about Australia’s legendary drinking culture?” I hear you say. “What about David Boon’s 52 tinnies on the plane in ’89, surely that’s pretty macho?” Hardly. Australian beer bears about as much relation to the real thing as American root beer does, and frankly, one wonders why Boonie could manage only 52.
Even with booze that a baby could safely drink, the Australians can’t master the basic pub games. The
Australian record at darts is dismal, and in pool the situation is even worse, with Australians conspicuous by their absence in the game’s upper echelons, despite the fact that more than 30 per cent claim to play ‘cue-based sports’.
As for bar-room brawling, forget it. Those humorous ‘No Fighting’ signs on pub walls are purely for the benefit of English tourists.
Let’s Go Whinge About
Upon publication of the above argument, all hell broke loose. Or rather, a typically feeble Australian version. Hiding anonymously behind their computer monitors on the other side of the world, they laboured night and day to manufacture their puny grenades. Our inbox was crammed to the gills with furious emails from thin-skinned Aussies unable to take a joke or, in some cases, to even understand one.
Revealingly, many of them referred to us as fat, and here they were on to something. Such shrill abuse failed to hide an underlying insecurity. Although they had never seen us, they clearly realised that, as true Englishmen, we habitually enjoyed our fill of beef, Yorkshire pudding and good British beer.
Needless to say, this was all meat and drink to us. Australians in full tantrum mode are an amusing, even endearing, sight. After all, when a child throws his toys out of the pram, the instinctive response is to laugh.
Cricket is still a minority sport, of course, but it is our sport, and it is right that Australia should no longer be allowed to use it as an excuse to hoodwink impressionable types into falling for their world champs line.
We here at Anorak are bracing ourselves for more feeble flak from Down Under. But not very hard.
But if we need more swimming rubbers to make our Australian cousins happy, then we will endeavour to conjure them as soon as the football finishes, which thanks to one Rupert Murdoch, it never does…
Posted: 8th, December 2008 | In: Key Posts, Sports Comments (5) | TrackBack | Permalink
