Pêl-droed a Phethau Eraill
A blog by Thomas Blayney
Since my last post, I've penned a few articles and interviews on the conference. 'Is it ethical to cheer for your country?', 'The controversial history of sports in Warkus' and 'The ship of Theseus, but for football clubs'. Irritatingly enough, they're my most viewed articles by far. As a nation, we must value academics so much that we care more about academic takes on sports than actual domestic sports coverage. Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to write about the 'crank stream' I mentioned in the last post. My editor didn't want me to attend any of the crank talks, let alone write about them, but it was an interesting experience.
The crank stream talks were mostly assigned to the Wednesday afternoon and early evening, presumably to give the more respectable presenters and attendees some time to get away from the conference. Attendance shot right down around that time and the only attendees left were unaware 1st year grad students and people who came to gawk at the crazies. And the crazies themselves, of course. The first crank speaker provided an interesting twist on the usual 'the referees are biased' conspiracy theories. He argued that refereeing and umpiring, in all sports mind you, was controlled by the descendants of a fallen undersea kingdom (when I looked it up online later, it turned out to be a mythological realm which often finds itself mentioned in wacky conspiracy theories). These 'mer-people', as he described them, instructed referees to deliberately make poor decisions in order to rile up the common man. Another speaker argued, in a confusing and incoherent manner, that football was the work of the devil and that the actual football itself is a transubstantiated devil's eye. The third crank talk I attended was about how football results are secretly determined by a powerful computer running what she called 'scoreware': special software that generated each game's score. She claimed that aliens run this computer, which is located inside an invisible spaceship, and secretly abduct new players before their first cap to insert a chip into their brain which binds them to the computer's will. The last talk was in some ways the most and least bizarre of them all. It was a theology talk that had nothing to do with sports given by an older man. I couldn't really follow what he was saying, but it didn't really matter because it only took five minutes before a group of elderly men (I previously assumed they were the speaker's friends) loudly interrupted him and aggressively argued with each other. The only thing, content-wise, that I actually remember was the oldest-looking man in the audience speaking with a heavy accent and repeating the words "Is mystery, is mystery" the whole time.
On the qualifiers, we've had some surprising ups and some unsurprising downs, but we're settling into a comfortable spot in the bottom half of the table. We had shock wins over Captina Island, who currently sit in 3rd, and Sangti and the Filindo Isles, who sit in 5th. But Equestria took the full 6 points from us and Farfadillis showed us their true strength by smashing us 3-0 at our home ground. The other top half sides, Milchama and Kamijiro, also picked up dominant wins against us. A draw against the winless The August Islands was a bit disappointing, given that they currently look like our easiest opportunity for scoring a full 3 points. It'll be interesting to see how the next few matches turn out, as we head to Middle Alba next who sit one place above us with the same number of points. A win against them would be a tall ask, especially given how they beat us at home last time around, but it could allow us to aim for 7th or 8th (or even 6th!) in our group.
