Despite being an ordinary geek, I’m not normally a sports fan. That may sound a little abhorrent as the words “geek” and “sports” don’t normally mix unless there is the letter “e” thrown in there somewhere but really, sports fanatics are ordinary geeks. They pore over statistics and have encyclopaedic knowledge over things that really don’t matter. Not only this, but a lot of them will play something like fantasy football which is quite frankly a couple of twenty sided dice away from Dungeons and Dragons. It even has the word “fantasy” in the title. If die hard sports fans aren’t geeks, then they are exceptionally close cousins.
A friend of mine at work was telling me about the Raeburn Shield and I did find this to be quite an interesting idea and thought I would share.
The Raeburn Shield is a non-existent-but-tracked prize in the rugby world that traces all the way back to the first officially recognised international game between England and Scotland. The way you win this is by beating the team that currently has it (and it being rugby that is sometimes literal as well as figurative). If you have the shield and you are beaten by another team, they then have the shield. It doesn’t matter what sort of match it is that you’re playing, it is simply that if you beat someone who has the shield, you then have the shield. As an example, South Africa currently hold the shield and when they play against Australia later on in the year, if Australia win, they will take the shield away from them.
I find this a fantastic concept. It adds an extra meta element to the game and could potentially give matches a little extra significance. There’s actually a fairly decent list of reasons why the Raeburn Shield is beneficial to the game that essentially boil down to “it makes it more of a sport” found on the Raeburn Shield’s official website.
If you are at all interested in rugby go and have a look at their site for a much better explanation and some of those sport based statistics that true sports fans crave. They’re currently trying to promote the award and give it a wider recognition and if you think it is worthy, you can lend your support by doing Facebooky things and what have you. My friend tells me they’re getting coverage from ESPN and now of course a mention by Chaotic Tortoise, so it’s all good.
My initial response to this is actually that I can apply the Raeburn Shield concept to an ongoing problem I have with a couple of friends that I occasionally play pool with. For the sake of argument, we’ll call these two friends Dan and Matt. The (slightly subjective and simplified) facts are as follows:
-Dan is very good at pool. He will always beat me. Dan is therefore better than me.
-I am ok at pool and often beat Matt. I am therefore better than Matt.
-Matt is actually quite good at pool and will often beat Dan. Matt is therefore better than Dan.
As you can see, this is a bit of a mobius strip of a result, so it gets difficult to ascertain bragging rights. However, with the Raeburn Shield idea, it would…
…Actually it wouldn’t change anything, but it would give a little focus to the chaos, because there would be some kind of conceptual totem changing hands that would give us a little direction and qualification behind the declarations made concerning who is the best.
Additional Notes:
Of course, I never declare that I’m the best. Any time that I come close to suggesting I might be, the white pops down one of the holes, off the table and onto the floor, or flying across the wall into somebody’s pint/head.
I hated rugby with a passion until I didn’t have to play it any more. Then it became ok. In your general rugby team, there’s normally one skinny guy who can run really really fast. I forget what the term is, but that was the role they used to put me in. There was however one fatal flaw in this: Whereas I fulfilled one half of this criteria at the time, I could not and never will be able to run really really fast. At best I can manage a slightly-faster flailing walk. It lead to a few bruises and the best piece of advice I have ever been given in relation to sport: “Just run like mad and stay away from the ball.”
Incidentally, sorry for the potentially misleading title on the post. I realise that after talking about Dungeons and Dragons quite recently, you might have thought this was about that.
I now seem to have got it into my head that I might be able to get this post Search Engine Optimised so that it pops up if you type in “rugby+dungeons and dragons” into google. I can’t of course imagine that many people do that search. I think I’ll see how that works out in a couple of days.