Fishing - Other sports

Fish!

August 11, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Would you believe it? This morning I caught a real, living, breathing fish. I’d been out there less than ten minutes when a sudden tug on my line sent my adrenalin racing, just like all those years ago when I had a monster hand in a big pot. This was hardly a monster fish – it was about four inches long – but still. After I took the photo I promptly put little fishy back in the water. I think it was a caras, or a type of carp. I’ll check with one of my students who is a keen fisherman and, conveniently, should be showing up in around 45 minutes. The fish was near the edge of the water and I only had two maggots on the hook. I carried on for about two hours and didn’t get another bite, but it was nice just being out there, watching the snakes of various sizes and colours, and the dragonflies that appeared to change colour from green to blue.

Dad sent me pictures of two paintings he did of Mercury Palace (below), a building on the corner of Piața Traian, not far from Piața Badea Cârțan, where I often get my fruit and vegetables. The statue is of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce and prosperity. With the building being 109 years old and otherwise in a state of disrepair, it’s surprising that the statue has survived intact. I’m really pleased that Dad decided to make that view, which is now very familiar to me, into a painting. Even though it’s right up his street, who in New Zealand would buy a painting of Romania? Some of the Romanians based in Ashburton, perhaps? It’ll be interesting to see if it sells, or even if he attempts to sell it.

When I saw the Red Sox three years ago, I had no trouble getting a ticket. That’s mainly because the team weren’t doing very well. The next two seasons they were much improved but made no inroads in the play-offs. This year has been a different story; they’ve been absolutely killing it, and are likely to finish with a win rate of close to 70%. In a sport as finely balanced as baseball, that’s very high indeed. Last night they had a rare loss however, even though Mookie Betts hit for the cycle – single, double, triple and home run in some order or another, all in one game. That’s an unusual feat because four hits in one game is no simple achievement in itself, and triples are very hard to come by. Also last night, there was a crazy reverse-order team cycle, where the Seattle Mariners’ first four batters in the first inning hit a home run, a triple, a double and a single, in that order.

Travel: Romania

Deer Meadow — Part 2

August 6, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Poiana Cerbului was peaceful and relaxing. I had sunny weather the whole time I was there, and thankfully it was never too hot. On Friday evening a group of eight French tourists arrived in their two cars. Again I had dinner with the old ladies. After the meal I drank two glasses of homemade vișinată, an alcoholic drink made with sour cherries. Luckily it was pretty weak. I went out for a walk that evening and met two farmers who asked me in three languages (if you count “moo” as a language) whether I’d seen their cow. Unfortunately I hadn’t.

The next morning, after being given vișinată as part of my breakfast, I chatted briefly with the French people. I tried to speak French, but I was mixing it with Romanian the whole time. And of course, I’m so out of practice with French now. I’m sure it would come back pretty quickly if I spent some time in France. I’m envious of people who can switch between multiple foreign languages. Both parents of one of the families could speak English fluently, and the father wasn’t far off fluency in Romanian; in the nineties he’d spent 18 months in Romania for his civic service in lieu of military service. He told me all about his time hitchhiking on horse-drawn carriages, and how much the country has developed in the last quarter-century or so.

To save the taxi fare I decided to walk to Sighișoara. It was about ten kilometres, four along the shingle track and the rest on a main road. When I arrived in Sighișoara I found a very pretty and old town, if a bit touristy, full of cobbled streets designed so that all the water flows through the middle of the street if it rains. Sighișoara’s history is German and Hungarian, and the centre of the town is very well preserved. I walked up the clock tower, around the fortress, and up a covered wooden staircase. And down lots of cobbled lanes, and eventually into a park where I could just sit down for a while and check the news online (the guest house had no access, apart from in a small corner, and to be honest I liked that). Then it was time to trek back to Deer Meadow. After all that walking I was pretty tired and hungry. I have blisters on my feet as I write now.

My stay at Poiana Cerbului was certainly worth it, even if it took me an insane amount of time to get there and back on the train. (Next time, I’ll consider hiring a car.) I got to speak a lot of Romanian and realise, hey, I’m not actually too terrible at this. I might recommend the place to my friends in St Ives, if and when they next come to Romania. The talkative lady took my business card, saying she might want some English lessons over the phone. I wonder if she’ll actually call me. Yesterday morning she got me to write down some useful English phrases for guests, along with a pronunciation key. For “welcome”, for instance, I wrote “uel-căm”. On Friday she gave me a book about reiki to read. Many of the pages had been annotated with what looked like the ravings of a madwoman – political commentary interspersed with bits of astrology and numerology.

One young guy from the French contingent celebrated his 17th birthday yesterday. They celebrated with breakfast birthday cake. I was thinking back to the day he was born, 5/8/01, when life had turned into a disaster zone for me. After breakfast I gave my hosts some money for meals, said goodbye, and then the French group kindly drove me to Sighișoara station. I had about two hours before my train left, so I called my parents on FaceTime. Nothing of note happened on the trains back. At Aiud I avoided that very unwelcoming bar like the plague, obviously. We clattered through five județe, or counties: Mureș, Sibiu, Alba, Hunedoara and Timiș. This reminded me of my train trip through five states from New York to Chicago. Late morning turned into afternoon, then evening and finally pitch blackness. We pulled in to Timișoara a few minutes before midnight.

Travel: Romania

Deer Meadow — Part 1

August 6, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It absolutely bucketed down as I walked to the station early on Thursday morning, and by the time I boarded the train I was soaked to the skin. I made a beeline to the toilet so I could change my clothes. We don’t exactly have bullet trains in Romania, and the journey to Aiud, 267 km away, took more than six hours. If I counted correctly, the train made 17 stops. It was a pleasant journey until a gypsy whanau (or whatever the correct term is) got on at Alba Iulia. They were dirty, smelly and loud, and amongst them was a pregnant girl of about 15. They were also ticketless. You’re allowed to buy tickets on the train in Romania, but they cost about 50% more than at the kiosk. We’d gone two or three stops down the line from Alba Iulia when the ticket inspector did his rounds. He quoted the fare to the mother (or boss) of the whanau, but she was having none of it. Things got pretty heated. The inspector must have called the police, who threw the group off the train at Teiuș, the next station.

When I got off the train at Aiud, I was hungry and in need of the loo. Aiud is about the same size as St Ives, the town I grew up in, and in parts it is quite pleasant. I found a bar in a prominent position by the river. It was well patronised. I couldn’t see anybody eating, but I was confident they could rustle me up something simple. Even mici, if need be. As I sat down, I was met by some stares, followed by comments about my bags. Who are you? I felt uncomfortable. Humiliated, even. I did the sensible thing, and I got up and left to a chorus of guffaws. Just when I think I have some I idea how Romania works, I get that, which I might have expected in a dingy basement dive, but not there. I wandered around the town, frustrated at the lack of places that served food, until I came upon a place that supposedly did pizza. I went in, and after banging glasses together to get somebody’s attention, I finally got a beer and a bite to eat.

I wandered back to the train station, and had a conversation of sorts with a bloke on the platform. I was glad when the train arrived. The trip to Sighișoara was uneventful. From the station, I took a taxi to my accommodation, which was further away than I thought. “You almost need a tractor for this,” the driver said as we bumbled along a narrow shingle road. We got there eventually. The ride cost me 40 lei. Poiana Cerbului, “Deer Meadow”, was quite a wild place, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A woman of about 70 greeted me, and I soon met her older sister. They gave me some meat and noodles, an omelette (the eggs came from their own hens) and a salad, again using their own tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

I had no trouble sleeping in my double bed, in an otherwise fairly basic room. For breakfast I had scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a large salad and some bread to mop up all that oil. At this point I was the only person staying there. I had a long chat with the two ladies. The 70-year-old lady talked a lot. The older woman had one good eye, not many teeth, and a crude DIY tattoo on her wrist which looked like the sort of reminder note I sometimes write on my hand. She was much quieter. I didn’t want to take a taxi to Sighișoara and back, because I’d only brought 710 lei with me, half of which went on my accommodation, so a few more taxi rides would have just about wiped me out. So on my first day I explored the wood at the back of the guest house (trying not to get lost), walked along the gravel road for a bit, and mostly read A Moveable Feast, a very readable account of Ernest Hemingway’s time in Paris. I also chatted to the old ladies. This was great for my Romanian.

Language teaching - Travel: Romania

How the other half live

August 1, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow morning at half-six I’m taking the train to Sighișoara. I’ll have to change at Aiud, which I remember being quite a picturesque town as I passed through it on the bus from Bucharest to Cluj in 2016. It seems to be most famous for its large prison. I’ve got 2¾ hours there; it’ll be quite a long day. My train is due to arrive in Sighișoara at close to 6pm. I’m not actually staying in the medieval town, but in the remote village of Daneș about 10 km away. My accommodation will come with a panorama of the mountains, but no internet access. That’s not such a bad thing. Trains from Sighișoara to Daneș exist, and they cost literally pence, but they’re very infrequent so I might end up taking a taxi. I come back on Sunday; I’m due to get in to Timișoara just before midnight. All in all, it should be quite an adventure.

Yesterday I had my lesson with Matei. I got him to read three poems, complete a simple crossword, and answer about 15 “Would you rather…?” questions, which seem pretty popular with kids. Then I introduced him to the Formula 1 game which was clearly a success. We played two games, winning one each. (In the first I spectacularly ran out of fuel on, I think, the fourth lap.) Before all of that he told me about his English camp and his two-week family holiday in Egypt. He described his accommodation as a “seven-star” hotel which seemed to include its own theme park. He told me all about the pyramids and Giza and the Nile and the Red Sea and riding a camel and the searing heat and dirty, stinking Cairo with its population equal to Romania’s. I think of Egypt as being a faraway land, but it’s only three to four hours by plane from here. One of his “Would you rather…?” responses blew me away. Amid all the questions where he had to choose between two superpowers, I asked him if he’d rather be paid 50 lei for every hour of homework he did, or receive no homework at all. No homework, he quickly said. But, but, it’s 50 lei! What do I need that money for? Fifty lei an hour would be a huge amount for most kids in Romania, and even most adults for that matter, and passing up that sort of money at his age would have been unthinkable for me. But he’s right, he doesn’t need the money. I earlier asked the same question of another kid, whose parents are in a similar financial position, and got the same reply.

Next time you might get some more photos.

Language learning

Serbian commentary 1 — The alphabets

July 30, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m trying to learn Serbian, which is a completely different animal from anything I’ve attempted before. It’s not at all like Romance languages such as Romanian and French. At least it is an animal, however. When I explained to my friend in the UK just how dissimilar Hungarian is to almost anything else, he said, so it’s like a fungus then. No, Serbian isn’t quite as off-the-wall as Hungarian.

I’m currently following a course of YouTube lessons. I like them because they explain the whats and hows and whys of Serbian, instead of just giving lists of vocabulary, which would be easily obtainable from a Google search.

First things first, the alphabets. Plural. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are in common use in Serbian. That sets it apart from the otherwise almost identical Croatian and Bosnian, where Cyrillic has largely been abandoned. It seems that the choice of alphabet in Serbia is sometimes politically motivated and emotionally charged. In that region, that’s hardly surprising I guess.

There are 30 letters in the Serbian alphabet. Using the Latin version, these are (in order):
A B V G D Đ E Ž Z I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S T Ć U F H C Č Dž Š
Crikey. Should I even bother buying a Serbian–English dictionary? I use physical paper dictionaries all the time, and I can look up a word in an average of around ten seconds, but alphabetical order (as I know it) is so hard-wired in my brain. There are, unsurprisingly, a few accented letters among that lot, but I’m used to seeing accented vowels. All the letters with accent marks in Serbian are consonants.

So how do you pronounce all those letters? Thankfully, Serbian is phonetic, unlike English which seems even more of a mess than it did before, now that I teach it. The Serbian letter C is pronounced “ts”, while Ć and Č are both similar to the English “ch” of chair, with Č being stronger. Ć and Č have their voiced counterparts Đ and Dž, which are both pronounced rather like “j” in “jump”, with Dž being stronger. Đ is sometimes written Dj, as in Djoković (or Đoković), which contains both the weak “j” and “ch” sounds. Then we have Š, which is like the “sh” sound in English, and Ž, which is like the “z” in “seizure”. Lj and Nj are pronounced similarly to the sounds in the middle of “million” and “onion” respectively. J on its own is pronounced just like the “y” in “yes”. Finally, there’s R, which is a really strong rolled sound. It is common for syllables in Serbian, and therefore whole words, to be completely devoid of vowels. An example is brz, which means fast, or srpski, meaning “Serbian”, which starts with five consonants in a row. But as far as I know, these vowel-free syllables all contain a syllabic rolled R.

An important thing to realise is that the digraphs Dž, Lj and Nj (and also Dj, if you write it like that) are each single letters. I noticed this in Serbia, when visiting a money changer, or menjačnica, like the one below. Notice that when the word menjačnica is written top to bottom, the NJ is written on one line, squashed together, like a simpler version of what happens with Chinese characters. You can also see a squashed NJ above the window, but that appears to be a stylistic choice. I’m guessing this is a fairly old photo and they just haven’t bothered with the decimal points; otherwise those exchange rates make no sense.

It isn’t that unusual for languages to have digraphs that are single letters; Hungarian even has a rare trigraph letter: Dzs. English could do something similar with, say, ch, sh, th and ng if it wanted. At least Serbian, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t like Welsh, where (for example) ng can be either one or two letters depending on the situation. That makes alphabetising a real pain.

For my own reference I’ll write out the Cyrillic version of the alphabet:
А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш

Finally, here’s a picture I took from a market in Belgrade, where you can buy fruit and vegetables, cups of coffee, pasta, household bits and pieces, and, um, coc. However those C’s in COC are actually the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, which corresponds to Latin S. The word seems to mean “sauce”. You can tell it’s Cyrillic because the next word is MAPКET. Note that the text above the kiosk windows is Cyrillic written in italics. A lot of the Cyrillic letter forms completely change when italics are used, or in handwriting. For instance, I think the letter that looks a bit like a w with a bar above it is actually a T. Madness!

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Saddle sore

July 30, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my bike trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’m glad to be back: my arse was starting to really feel it, and I’d slightly underestimated the amount of water I needed on a 30-degree day. Just like me, my bike isn’t quite up to the job. People regularly eased past me in a blaze of lycra. (There wasn’t nearly as much lycra as you’d see in New Zealand though. This is Europe. You’re allowed to ride bikes even if you’re not training for a sodding triathlon. In fact a lot of the blokes who whizzed past me were bare-chested.) At the other end I grabbed an insanely cheap beer, spoke to my parents on FaceTime while at the bar, and read a book in a small park next to the town hall. For some reason my book piqued the interest of two kids.

goat_on_car
There’s something very Romanian about a goat standing on an abandoned car.

This morning I had another attempt at fishing. Still no luck. I’m competing with people who use four rods each, the maximum allowed, and one particular dynamic young fisherman who casts his line, reels it in 30 seconds later, and rides his bike to a different spot nearby to repeat the process. My latest batch of maggots had died in the fridge almost instantly, but I imagine fish will eat dead maggots just like live ones.

I’ve got a new student. She’s coming tomorrow evening. We spoke Romanian on the phone; she described her level as intermediate. People tend to underestimate their level, or are just modest, so I expect her to be quite good. On Tuesday I’ll have my first lesson for a while with Matei. He was telling me on the phone about his new dog, a pug.

My Skype lesson on Friday was interesting. My student was happy with my idea of studying a song. I chose Hotel California for him, and sent him a link to a YouTube video which showed the lyrics. I expected him to casually peruse the lyrics, but no, he memorised them all. Had them down pat. I was blown away. That song has a lot of words, some of which are pretty opaque. “Tiffany twisted”? I used that song with another of my students in one of our fortnightly “song and articles” lessons. That time I removed about 15 words from the lyrics, made a list of the missing words, and asked him to fill in the gaps. On Wednesday I had my usual double bill of lessons with brother and sister. The girl went first, and our 90-minute session passed without a hitch. As usual, however, the hour with her little brother was much more of a struggle. Anything that looks vaguely educational is strictly off the menu, as far as he is concerned. He’s getting bored of Last Card now. I’ll bring in the Formula 1 game next time; it’s certainly been a hit with one of the other boys I teach. In fact I’ll try it out on Matei too.

Scrabble. So yesterday I ended up with four losses, including two Jean Van de Velde-style ones, and finally two wins. To hopefully sort out my time troubles I’ll attempt a bunch of quick-fire, five-minute games on ISC. I’m bound to lose a lot and my rating is likely to plummet, but they should benefit me in the long run. My favourite word yesterday I thought was FILLIP. Six-letter words are relatively uncommon, but this one got rid of some very unpromising tiles and scored well, 32 if I remember rightly.

It’s now raining, and I can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It’s just as well I got out on my bike when I did.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Travel plans

July 28, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother this morning. He now has a beard. Yesterday was his 37th birthday. He and his wife have just put their house on the market: they might soon be expanding. The UK has been experiencing a heatwave the likes of which they haven’t seen since 1976.

I’ll have four work-free days in a row soon, so at the end of next week I’ll take the opportunity to do some travelling within Romania. I plan to visit the medieval town of Sighișoara, which is pronounced roughly “siggy-shwara”, just like the place I now call home is “timmy-shwara”. The -șoara suffix is some kind of feminine diminutive, and it comes up in a lot of place names, as well as in words like Domnișoara, which is the equivalent of the English Miss. (Mrs is Doamna.) Because of its prevalence in place names, I got really confused when I saw scorțișoară pancakes for sale. Where’s that, I wondered. The word in fact means cinnamon.
The only trains from Timișoara to Sighișoara take a circuitous route, and they all leave at an ungodly hour. Unfortunately I’ll miss the annual festival, which is taking place right now, so I might end up going somewhere else. But it’s been on my list for some time.

Six games of Scrabble since I last wrote. Three big wins against lower-rated opponents, two of whom resigned before the end, but the others were all close. In one game I found an early low-scoring bingo but my opponent drew both blanks, bingoed with each of them, and kept scoring heavily enough to snuff out my comeback chances. I lost that game by 27. My next game showed that bingos aren’t everything. Both times I bingoed, my opponent had the tiles and the presence of mind to make big scores immediately afterwards. I clung on to win by 22. I was particularly pleased to find BLOOPED in that game. B and P don’t go well together, and it’s easy to give up with a rack like that. I won my final game by just 11 points after going over time by a few seconds and getting stuck with a W. My score of 323 was my second-lowest in a winning effort since joining ISC.

Update: I’ve since had a nightmare game which I had in the bag with both blanks on my rack, only to lose by seven. But for the ten-point time penalty, and possibly the sinus headache I was grappling with, I would have won. Time management is a massive problem for me. Well, it’s not time management as such, it’s just that I can’t see the best plays fast enough, especially towards the end of the game when the board gets blocked. My opponent played all his words in just six minutes. Straight after that horror show I had a lesson with an Italian guy. He didn’t want to do our customary IELTS writing exercise so I half-jokingly suggested we play Scrabble. He agreed. He went first, played SPENT, and on my turn I found SPINDLES through the P. I then had to explain what a spindle was.

Update 2: It’s getting worse. Three more losses on ISC, by 51, 16 and 8.

Update 3: Now two wins! By 27 and 16. Could easily have lost both of them. In the first game I was 133 points down (that’s a lot!) before I remembered from somewhere in the recesses of my mind that CANG was a word. That allowed me to play GLUMmER and gave me just a glimmer. In the second game I led by 109 but was swamped with consonants and swapped tiles three times, and only because my opponent was overrun by consonants at the end was I able to sneak a win.

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Time for a trip?

July 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.

The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.

With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.

The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.

I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.

I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.

Tennis

Should Wimbledon introduce tie-breaks in the final set?

July 21, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

That question got a whole heap of airtime after – and during – last Friday’s marathon Wimbledon semi-final between Kevin Anderson and John Isner, which Anderson eventually won, 26-24 in the fifth set. The match took six hours and 36 minutes, and wreaked havoc on the schedule. The second semi between Djokovic and Nadal was billed as the main event, and it was a marvellous encounter when it finally got underway. Unfortunately that wasn’t until after 8pm, and thanks to the council-imposed curfew, the match couldn’t be completed in one go. It too went to a long fifth set, and the women’s final, which has started at 2pm on Saturday for as long as I can remember, was pushed back two hours.

People weren’t complaining only because the timetable was thrown out of whack. Some commenters were fed up with watching hours of so-called servebotting. Others thought it was inhuman that Anderson and Isner were kept out there so long, with no endpoint in sight, and whoever came through that match would be a wreck for the final. (For the first two sets against Djokovic, Anderson pretty much was.) Then there were debates about whether Djokovic and Nadal should have played part deux of their match under the roof on a sunny day in what is supposed to be an outdoor tournament. Even though neither of the men’s semi-finals will be forgotten by any self-respecting tennis fan in a long time, the lack of a tie-break in the fifth set did cause some major headaches.

What do I think? Well, honestly I’d be fine if the rules didn’t change. Anderson–Isner-style matchups in a grand slam semi are pretty rare. Near-seven-foot goliaths don’t get that far very often, and on this occasion both players saved match points on the way there. And for me, there’s something conceptually cool about a set that can feature theoretically unlimited games. I’ve always been a bit of a numbers geek, even as a kid, and I always got excited when I saw big yellow eights and nines and double-digit numbers on the right-hand side of the scoreboard. However, the current rules (tie-breaks at 6-6 in all sets except the last) were implemented at Wimbledon in 1979, since when tennis has become much more physical. A marathon five-setter takes a far greater toll on one’s body than it did back then. And perhaps the clincher for me is the fact that the game state at 24-24 in the Anderson–Isner match was exactly the same as at 4-4, two and a quarter hours earlier! Rightly or wrongly (and I would suggest wrongly), we no longer live in a world where that is OK.

The Wimbledon committee are probably a bunch of old blokes and the not-so-old Tim Henman, so there’s not much use predicting what they might do. But I have a sneaky suspicion they’ll change the rules in time for next year’s tournament, and in a typically British compromise, bring in tie-breaks at 12-12 in the fifth set. They might even exempt the final from the tie-break rule. I also expect the Australian and French Opens to do the same, or even go the whole hog and have tie-breaks at 6-6, à la Flushing Meadows. Third-set tie-breaks for the women will almost certainly come in too, for the sake of consistency, even though marathon women’s matches are a non-issue.

It’s interesting that Anderson–Isner appears to be a line in the sand. Here are some other matches I can remember that went very long in the fifth (reaching at least 12-12), but for whatever reason didn’t leave everyone clamouring for a tie-break:

1992 Wimbledon doubles final: John McEnroe and Michael Stich beat Jim Grabb and Richey Reneberg 19-17 in the fifth.
This was back in the day when top singles players – even former champions – played doubles. At 33, McEnroe didn’t inhabit the very top echelons anymore, but he had quite the tournament, reaching the semis of the singles and winning the doubles with Stich, the previous year’s singles champion. This match was played on the old No 1 court, and was finished on the Monday, having been suspended at 13-13 the night before due to bad light. I don’t remember any complaints about the suspension or the length of the match, but McEnroe always drew the crowds, and at any rate, ’92 was a much calmer time when nobody could tweet to the @Wimbledon account that it was fucking bullshit.

1997 Wimbledon third round: Tim Henman beat Paul Haarhuis 14-12 in the fifth.
The first week of Wimbledon had been ravaged by rain, so they needed to play serious catch-up. This match, therefore, was played on the Middle Sunday, in a football-style atmosphere. I felt sorry for Haarhuis, who served for the match in the fifth set but double-faulted on match point. No complaints from the crowd, who once Henman had finally got over the line, probably thought it was “coming home”.

1998 Wimbledon semi-final: Goran Ivanisevic beat Richard Krajicek 15-13 in the fifth.
This is the closest precedent to last Friday’s marathon semi. Goran missed match points on his own serve in the fourth set, and in the fifth a holding pattern, quite literally, developed. In truth it wasn’t much fun, and just like last Friday, the crowd were eagerly anticipating the second semi-final, in this case between Henman and Pete Sampras. Had the match gone on much longer, and had it taken place in Twitterworld, there would surely have been calls for tie-breaks. For the record, Tiger Tim played a great match against Sampras, but in the end the great champion just had an extra gear.

2000 Wimbledon third round: Mark Philippoussis beat Sjeng Schalken 20-18 in the fifth.
I watched this in Penang with my grandmother. It was played on an outside court and took five hours in total. “Scud”, or “the Poo”, recovered from this ordeal to beat Henman in round four, again in five sets.

2003 Australian Open quarter-final: Andy Roddick beat Younes El Aynaoui 21-19 in the fifth.
The crowd really warmed to El Aynaoui; they hadn’t expected him to push Roddick so hard. Unusually, Roddick broke in the extended final set, but in a twist, was broken straight back. This added drama, plus the fact that it was a night session with no matches to follow, helped this match attain classic status. I don’t remember any tie-break talk.

2009 Wimbledon final: Roger Federer beat Andy Roddick 16-14 in the fifth.
I didn’t see this match. There was a lot on the line here, not least Federer’s legacy. Could he break Sampras’s record of 14 grand slams? With that in mind, and it being the final, nobody was particularly bothered that it took a while.

2010 Wimbledon first round: John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut 70-68 in the fifth.
70-68. Eleven hours. Jaw-dropping stuff. So why were there fewer calls for tie-breaks as a result of this match? A few reasons. One, the match reached such unprecedented proportions that people were in awe of it. Two, not many people actually watched all those aces and service winners. They were going about their everyday business while this animal, this colossal thing, was prowling in the background. Three, neither player was a real contender for the later stages. It didn’t have much bearing on the rest of the tournament. Four, we hadn’t quite entered the age of intense polarisation, where something as unimportant as a tennis match can cause people to lose their shit on social media.

It was perhaps because of Isner’s match with Mahut that his encounter with Anderson provoked such negative reactions. Oh no, it’s Isner again! Please make it stop! And unlike eight years ago, millions of prime-time eyeballs were directed at it.

Other sports - Tennis

It’s all over!

July 16, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

No, I’m not leaving Romania or anything that ridiculous. But the month-long sport-fest finally came to an end today. It’s been a nice distraction, I must admit.

France won today’s highly entertaining final of a marvellous World Cup. One of the goalscorers, Mbappé, has such a fun name to say and even type. It reminds me of a certain Hanson hit from the nineties. Four members of Pussy Riot invaded the pitch early in the second half. I wonder where they are now. Even the presentation at the end provided drama: it was absolutely teeming with rain. Putin was duly provided with an umbrella, while Macron and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (the Croatian president, who was decked out in national football attire) were left to soak. Croatia played very positively throughout the tournament and will have won plenty of fans. So France have now won two World Cups in my lifetime, as have Germany. And Brazil. And Italy. Argentina and Spain have won one each. Hang on, so that means I’ve lived through ten World Cups, so I must be nearly f… Oh shit.

To be honest though, over the last few days, my sporting mind has been in London. The later stages of Wimbledon were staggeringly good. I didn’t see it all, because I have to work occasionally, but I did pretty well. Much better, certainly, than I ever managed when I lived in New Zealand and it all happened at night. Anderson’s crazy 6½-hour semi with Isner was much better, and less serve-dominated, than some people made out. I was just the bit after 11-all in the fifth (admittedly quite a long bit!) that started to become monotonous as both players were holding with ease and not doing a whole lot else. Anderson was clearly the fresher of the two players as the fifth-set game tallies hit the twenties, and his improvised left-handed forehand while down on the ground was the killer blow in the end. Wimbledon will quite possibly change the rules in time for next year to prevent a 50-game final set from ever happening again. I’ll write another post on that topic specifically. Then came the other semi, itself an epic at 5¼ hours, which was played under the roof and spread over two days. It was probably the best match at Wimbledon since that final ten years ago. At 8-all in the final set, my parents phoned me from their hotel room in Singapore. They were stopping over on their way to New Zealand (they’ll now be on the plane). Mum is quite a big Djokovic fan and she was following the live scores on her phone, in the absence of tennis on their TV. I commentated the best I could (which isn’t very well) for what turned out to be the dénouement.

Predictably, Anderson was buggered today, after playing a stupid amount of tennis to get past Federer and then Isner. Although he found a second (third? tenth?) wind as the match progressed: he suddenly started to produce on his first serve and forehand, and Djokovic did extremely well to prevent a fourth set. Anderson came across as a thoroughly nice bloke, and is now firmly on the tennis map, even for fairly casual fans. Yesterday’s women’s final was a little disappointing, with Serena spraying errors everywhere, but she was so gracious in defeat and Kerber equally so in victory. Kerber was unbelievably consistent – only five unforced errors in the match, according to Wimbledon’s (possibly generous) stat-keepers. I even saw the men’s doubles final last night: extra drama was provided when they closed the roof between the fourth and fifth sets. The Kiwi Michael Venus came oh so close to grabbing a Wimbledon title.

So that’s it. Back to reality, and it’s just as well that’s not too bad these days.