Neve mind that **** Murray. Surely the two biggest British bottler's are Colin Montgomery and Neil Lennon?
A couple of things. It doesn't make you a bottler if you are simply not as good as your opponent. He never said he hated the English. He made a joke about football with a big grin on his face and other papers who never got the interview twisted the quote to make him look bad. No surprise there from our honest press. It's only ****ing tennis anyway. A game for posh ****s. Lastly and most importantly, I give you Phil 'The Power' Taylor. A British sportsman at the top of his sport. A proper ****ing sport too. Plenty of bottle. The man should be Knighted.
Sadly I have not long got in from work. I shall be retiring shortly as I start again at 6.30 in the morning on a murderous 16 hour shift. 8 of those hours are overtime so I can't really complain.
The UK as a whole is doing very well in sport right now: 4th at the last Olympics behind the might of USA, Russia and China 4 or 5 players ranked in the top 10 in golf England destroyed Australia in The Ashes England are Cricket 20-20 World Cup holders England have come 1st and 2nd in the last 2 rugby world cups There has been at least 1 English team in 6 of the last 7 Champions League finals 2 young Formula 1 champions in recent years
I ****ing hate Andy Murray. Although he didn't say anything bad about England, the reporter said as a joke 'Are you going to be supporting Scotland at the World Cup' and he said 'I'll be supporting anyone but England, haha' Still a **** though.
I know what you mean,but at least Andy seems to put up a fight until he faces someone usually far better then loses. Our national team just doesn't seem bothered.
We have just never produced consistently really top athletes in international sports that can deliver in the biggest occasions, and have underachieved considerably as a consequence since at least the first part of the 20th century. Some of that is due to cultural reasons and some due to more individual reasons (i.e. poor coaching in football as to why we're rubbish at that). I do think we are more prone to a lack of mental strength than other countries though, else why do we have such a bad record in penalty shootouts? Why has Murray reached 3 GS finals and not taken a single set against players he has beaten before? Why have we got so many top golfers with no majors to their name? Perhaps we drill into them the wrong attitude from an early age, that it's the taking part that counts, rather than the winning, or maybe it's the pressure of becoming part of an elite (British athletes that have actually won stuff). All in all we should be doing so much better considering we gave the world half these sports.
Where we concentrate and put real effort in we do well. Just look at the number of cycling champions we've produced over the past ten years. That's due to a concerted effort. We have a real problem addressing sport in this country. Politicians are only interested in the short-term, hence the amount of money being spent on sports is small. Even in football, 90% of the money is distributed amongst just a few clubs. A lot of these clubs prefer to buy ready made players from abroad rather than nurture their own. The truth is Andy Murray is only as good as he is because he spent a lot of time learning tennis abroad. If he'd stayed in Britain he probably wouldn't even be in the top 20.
The thing about our cycling though, considering we have all these world champions and are meant to be great at it, why haven't we ever won a Tour De France when half of Europe have?
Our footy players are severely overrated and yeah we've done well in F1 with 2 separate champions in the last 5 years. I do wonder though whether they'll only be 1 hit wonders, while Vettel goes on to prove he is a true great gathering championships like they're hot dinners. Even so, it is a sport where the car does most of the work.
Overrated? They're among the best players in the champions league every season, hardly overrated. They've just never played well together, for whatever reason.
