Militant Moderate: SportBlog Roundup, #1

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

SportBlog Roundup, #1

Greetings one and all, and welcome to the very first SportBlog roundup. The idea here is to showcase the very best of sportsblogging from right across the world, so whether your football is oval or round, your rugby is played with 13 men or 15, or if your hockey is played on astroturf or ice, there should be something for everyone. The idea is to get more people aware of the sports bloggers out there, so feel free to nominate anything that caught your eye, by emailing me at sportblog at googlemail dot com

First up is Eric McErlain at Off Wing Opinion, who has some thoughts about teenage prodigy Freddie Adu and his dispute with Major League Soccer club DC United. Eric also runs a "Carnival of the NHL", for those of you who are fans of ice hockey. For more ice hockey goodness, Steve runs Puck Update, a good dissection of what the critics are saying.

Quinn at the Obscurer wins the award for the best post title of the week - "Red Devil's Advocate", which is all to do with Manchester United's upset of Chelsea (how strange it is to be saying that). He doesn't think that United fans will be as upbeat after the result as the press might suggest.

Imagine my consternation when I opened up my inbox to find a missive from "arseblogger". Surely the spambots hadn't got my address quite so quickly? And no, they hadn't; it was a message asking me to promote Arseblog, which gives you all you could need to know, and much, much more, about Arsenal FC. It's been particularly good this week for a Gunners fan's perspective on the Mourinho-Wenger catfight, sorry, public spat.

England are currently embarking on a cricket tour of Pakistan, where at the moment they seem determined to prove the Ashes was a temporary blip, and what we really should be expecting is more of the top-order collapses characteristic of the mid-90s. Dave over at Infoholic will be blogging his views on the tour, and asks for me to include this piece from the archive. As it's the first roundup, and it's giving the sage advice of wearing a helmet when batting, I'll let him slip it in. For a different view of the tour, Zainub will be covering it from Pakistan.

The Yorkshire Ranter has this on the identikit nature of Antipodeian rugby league players - not only are they all the same size, when they're together on a team, they all end up with the same result. Great Britain lose, that is. For those of you who prefer proper rugby, on the other hand, had a good preview of the South Africa-Argentina match this weekend, followed up by this report.

If you'll forgive the digression, a friend on my university course the other day wondered why I blogged so much on baseball, and hadn't mentioned (American) football at all (despite me being a big NFL fan). My somewhat delayed response is that professional baseball seems to inspire more loyalty to the franchises than in the NFL. The seat of passion in that style of football centres around the colleges; not being an American student, I don't have the connection to any one university. This is a long way of saying here is a great testament to the fan culture of college football.

Whilst we're on the subject of the NFL, here is a recap of last night's clash of the titans between the Patriots and the Colts. It's amazing how one loss can inspire so much introspection!

Finally, returning to cricket, Michael Jennings writes a touching lament of the decline of West Indies cricket.

That's all for this time; I hope to run another roundup in a fortnight's time - thats 22nd November. Please email submissions to sportblog at googlemail dot com - and spread the word!