I watch the Superbowl pretty much ever year, usually because of it's laboured hype as some kind of must-see sporting spectacular, but my understanding of its various complexities hasn't ever increased. I grasp the basic premise of trying to get the ball to one end of the field or the other, but past that I get well and truly lost.
I tried to play Madden, the American football equivalent of the Fifa or Pro Evolution Soccer computer games, once when I was in America, thinking that the game would become clearer to me when it was in my natural setting, the PlayStation. However, I struggled to work out which side I was meant to be playing, let alone the intricacies of it's tactics and rules.
To be honest, even if I did understand the game, I could never really imagine myself being much of a fan. American football is singular in the professional sporting world in that it is the only sport in which television advertising is built into the games rules. Only the Americans could dream up such a perversion. Any kind of excitement built up in the short bursts of play is completely drained by the frequent and over-long breaks. For anyone not reared to love the game from an early age, it is virtually unwatchable - despite annual predictions by sporting talking heads, an interest in either the American Super Bowl or any type of home grown aspect of the sport has failed to materialise in the UK.
Anyway, we already have our own equivalent. Protective headgear? Lots of standing around? Shorts bursts of semi-interesting action? Popular with the yokels? It's called cricket.
[It wont take too much research to work out how long ago I actually wrote this, I don't know why I never posted it]
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