playing time

again, my blogging energies have gone to the hand mirror, with a 9/11 commemoration post of sorts. i also wanted to write a post on the 60 minutes piece on the nz al-qaeda terrorist suspect but i'll have to leave that for tomorrow.

yes, i watched the rugby world cup opening ceremony (but i had to do that from the tvnz on demand site - which thankfully meant i could skip the speeches), and no i didn't watch the game. so totally missed the taking-off-shirt incident. but i'm not particularly sad about that, as i would have been quite bored watching 90 minutes of game for 20 seconds of fun.

one of the problems i have with rugby is that there is not so much playing time. this is the same for games like baseball and grid iron. so much time is spent setting up plays (or coming onto or off the field in terms of baseball) that the actual play time is just not enough to sustain my interest. compare this to basketball or soccer, which is pretty much continuous play - and soccer adds additional minutes for injury time, so that you get to watch 90 minutes of actual play.

tennis is probably about in the middle, and worst when you get players who need to bounce the ball 20 times before they'll serve. golf would have to be the absolute worst in terms of actual time played and i really can't understand why people would actually want to watch a game live. getting a summary of the shots seems to be a much more sensible option to me, but who know, maybe there's something about the atmosphere or scenery or chance to get near famous players that makes up for all the non-playing time.

so yeah, not much rugby watching will be happening by me.