Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

We used to play water polo as a "treat" for swim practice once or twice a year. It sounded fun, or at least more fun that doing a 5,000-meter workout, but it was absolutely exhausting. It's a hundred times harder to tread water for four or five minutes than it is to do a hard swim for the same amount of time. Our pool had a deep end that was 12 feet as well, so you had no choice if you wanted to really play. Playing defense or cherry-picking in the shallow end was a very popular strategy for a young Batman.
On the other hand, the way we played was akin to animal ball in the pool. Nearly drowning your teammates -- or almost getting drowned by them -- because one of you refused to give up the ball was a hoot.

 

No CFCG thread yet, but this is real

 

Plus, when you do swim you're usually sprinting or swimming with your head up so you can see and control the ball. Everything about that sport is exhausting. Like I said, when I was in shape I could handle a hard 5,000-yard workout just fine. But 90 minutes of water polo had me saying "no mas."

 

All I know about water polo is the couple times I covered it, the games were over in about 45 minutes.

 

The guys I feel for are the goalies. Along with it being impossible to stop shots on goal when you are up against someone who really knows what they are doing, you don't really get to swim anywhere, you don't have another player to lean on when you are on defense and you are just treading water for the length of the shot clock while your team is in the offensive half.

Now if we're talking hard play-by-play, field hockey. Seems simple on the surface, but I don't know if coaches can explain all the rules and what causes a foul.

 

I have a rudimentary grasp on the rules of cricket, but rugby and all of its unions and leagues is a byzantine maze to me.

 

One time I was working the night desk and boredly flipping through the wire and I saw a story about the cricket world cup. It was in indecipherable maze of jargon, so I started looking up what each term meant. I got intrigued enough to start watching it semi-regularly. I think it's infinitely more interesting strategically than baseball, which likes to imagine it's got lots of strategy but 99% of the time it doesn't matter.

Rugby I learned through an EA sports game in the mid-2000s. It makes for a very good video game.

 

The Calm app has a very entertaining and informative cricket explainer sleep story told by the Vin Scully of the sport.

 

For reasons that I have no idea, my cable gets Willow, the cricket channel. I notice that all the players are very cut, so cut I don't think testing for PEDs is like a thing. Also any sport where the biggest rivals, India and Pakistan, hate each other AND have nuclear weapons does have a certain zip to it.