Ol' Blighty, where art thou?

England, history tells us, influenced people world wide by conquering and setting up their colonies. Also it gave the world all its most popular games; football, tennis, cricket, rugby, badminton.

It moulded the street fight into the most popular and charismatic combat sport—Boxing—and gave kids and men chasing each other a common platform to test their talents—Athletics.

Among the truly global games only Basketball introduced by the Americans and Golf, invented by their neighboring Scots are technically non English games.

With such a history and culture how is it that the Pommies aren’t a truly world force in any of their own games? Probably some of their colonies took to their games better than they themselves did!

Probably changing times and with it the globalization of these games might have eroded the native interest and talent—like when hockey moved from the more native grass to the global artificial turf in the ‘70s, India and Pakistan ceased to be superpowers!

Similarly, the Aussies invented the ‘volley’ in tennis and dominated the Tennis world in the mid 20th century.

Maybe the samba culture of Brazil had a lot to do with their dancing skills with the football (read dribbling skills). And definitely the more nimble footed and subtler reflexes of the Asians probably catapulted them to the top rung of the Badminton world.

And contact sport—Rugby—why look beyond the New Zealand All Blacks? The well-mannered Englishmen might still consider the tackling ‘barbaric’ while the Springboks and the Wallabies thrive on it. In fact, it makes me wonder if the contact sport culture of Australia and South Africa spills onto the cricket field too!

England’s so far behind the final putt that we’re in the need to remind ourselves that it is them who taught us to play all global sports! May be it’s time they stopped worrying about OBEs, MBEs, the Queen and come out in the open and enjoy sport they way it ought to be—something they taught the world centuries ago!

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