Sporting Madness

“Once blood is shed in a national quarrel, reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men." - David Lloyd George "It's true, I'm a Rageaholic.....I just can't live without Rageahol!" - Homer Simpson [Satirical letter: please don't think this is real!] Dear Mike Giffin , I'm sorry to inform you that the single-game rushing record [myself, "The GBU: Queen's football versus Toronto", Sporting Madness ] you set Saturday [myself, "Football: U of T - Queen's live blog", Sporting Madness ] has been retroactively removed by the CIS bean-counting machine. In our infinite wisdom, we've decided that the initial game stats were wrong, and you actually only earned 212 net yards rushing, instead of 215. Now, we could have informed you earlier, maybe even during the game so that head coach Pat Sheahan could have left you in for another play or two to clinch the record. After all, he did say [myself, "Campus Corn...

Ben Knight has a great post on his globesports.com blog today about the creation of a Canadian Soccer Federation as perhaps the first step in the drastic overhaul or replacement of the troubled Canadian Soccer Association. I've written pretty extensively on the problems affecting the CSA before, so there's no real point in rehashing that. As Knight points out, probably the major issue at the root of these troublesome symptoms is the unnecessarily factionalized nature of the decision-makers, particularly on a board where provincial representatives looking out for their own organizations' interests make decisions affecting Canada at a national level. It's as ludicrous as those "Team Canada" missions where the premiers conduct international talks: you can't have provincial officials making decisions that affect an entire country, as they will always be looking after their own constituencies before the good of the entire populace. Knight also points out t...

Well, that was a surprise and a half: in what I had expected to be a protracted and hard-fought five-set duel between two 13-5 teams, the Gaels instead beat the Guelph Gryphons in straight sets Friday. The Gaels looked quite dominant at times, but I think it was more due to poor play from the Gryphons than a truly outstanding match on their part, as they never seemed to quite hit that top level they're very capable of. The first set was actually very close, but didn't produce a great clash due to sloppy play from both sides. By my count, Queen's committed five service errors in the set, while Guelph added six more: there were also far too many net violations, passing mistakes and hits out of bounds for both sides. The Gryphons took a 20-17 lead, but then let Queen's come back to tie, and the Gaels eventually claimed the set 27-25 off an odd play: outside hitter Joren Zeeman went up for a kill (at the middle position, of all places), and slammed the ball right into the G...