Crap Match Report
To the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park! …on Sunday afternoon to see Standard Life Team GB Basketball Vs Puerto Rico.
Is that sufficient Regal and corporate endorsement for you?
The buck stops here when it comes to Monarchy and Monterrey bollocks. You can bugger off if you think Her Madge and the company that drained all life out of my ISA [FOOL!] is going to get continued Crap Match Report name checks.
It didn’t stop the rather energetic game MC from repeating the repulsive endorsements throughout the afternoon. You could be forgiven for thinking that the ISA bloodsuckers are the saviours of British basketball, solely responsible for putting the GB boys back in the ball game.
You don’t need to sign up the City dollar to enjoy your dunking - just look at the ACE wheelchair basketball game taking place between Team GB and Help for Heroes ahead of the main action.
And so corporate bollocks dealt with and dismissed, what of the Olympian ideal of legacy [URGH]? A pro- muscular agenda for social well being [URGH, URGH] is supposedly pumped at you the moment you take a hop skip and a jump within the sanitised sporting space that is the Olympic Park.
The pre-game hype suggests that the cleaned up banks of the River Lea are the new Olympian Lourdes. Any clubfoot centre back clogger [hellooo!] will miraculously be morphed into a muscular GOD as soon as you walk past Westfield and set foot in soulless FUN-dome (that is lacking a little in fun some twelve months on.)
This was my first return to the Olympic Park since 2012. I loved EVERYTHING about London 2012. It didn’t take a corporate backer to convince me that sport is the solution for many of life’s micro and macro struggles.
The rabid populist opinion twelve months ago was that it was treason to criticise 2012. However… the Olympic Park wasn’t the sort of place that you would choose to hang out in unless you had tickets for, um, women’s handball.
Take away the Olympic ideal; add in a shitty scrotum of ISA draining dickheads and it’s fair to say that I wasn’t overly impressed with the Olympic Park on Sunday. It’s still a work in progress with only a limited patch now open to the public.
It took us 25 minutes to walk from the station to the Copper Box. Cycling was considered, but the promise of opening up a pedal-friendly park to continue London’s love affair with the bicycle has been lost along with all the legacy hype.
A great big chuffing trunk road now eats into the Olympic Park. Where sporting dreams were once made out of the inspiration of Our Best Ever Team, there now sits gridlocked traffic. The route to the Olympic Park is a well-trodden path. Diamond Geezer covers the entrances and exits with the expected clarity and sarcasm over here.
Sunday saw the austere Games Maker Lite army of Better event helpers pointing their big green arrows to guide you around the building site to reach the Copper Box. Military cut backs in the real world have been mirrored with the Games Maker Lite army. The enthusiasm and GRINS remain, but you’ve got to be able to find the friendly faces first.
Ahh, but what of the basketball?
BRILLIANT, along with the Copper Box itself.
It is the perfect venue for The Nu Milton Keynes Lions to inhabit - that isn’t in Milton Keynes…
Oh the irony of a Milton Keynes sporting franchise [URGH] being shipped off to play in the capital. Is it too much to hope that a London based EIHL team can’t become joint anchor tenants in the building?
It is spacious, still smells spanking brand new and has the second best sporting public toilets in London. Competing with the Art Deco splendour of Lord’s takes some heritage. The power hand dryer was so bloody good that I washed my hands for a second time, and then stood back to enjoy the warm sheen coming out of the dryer to complete the job.
All that is absent from the Copper Box experience is a jumbotron - which seems something of an oversight. Sitting directly behind one of the baskets, we couldn’t see the current game score directly in front of us. At least it made it easier to construct a Crap Match Report.
This game was the first back on home soil for Team GB since London 2012. It was also an opportunity for new Head Coach Joe Prunty to try out some game plans ahead of the team’s trip to Slovenia for Eurobasket next month.
A nervous start to the ball game followed for both teams. This was never going to be a high scoring match with game moves to test and refine. It soon became a free flowing with offensive risks opening up.
A five-point gap for Puerto Rico at one stage in the first quarter was pulled back to 14-15 in favour of the visitors when the first buzzer sounded. This became a 30-30 ball game at the break, the signal for me to dry that perspiration from my clammy hands in the half-decent toilets.
Team GB pulled away in the third, going into the final quarter with a 44-42 point lead. It became slightly physical, ending with the comical japes of bums being slapped.
Not your average NBA run out.
Hit and hope shooting saw both teams through to the final buzzer, with Team GB running out 61-55 winners. The in-play commentary even contemplated that:
“A few floaters have been flushed.”
Not in the half-decent toilets one would hope.
And so a useful first run out for Coach Prunty against a competitive Puerto Rico team. We walked back though what is currently open within the Olympic Park and reminisced over some of the memories that were made twelve months earlier.
The sporting legacy [URGH, URGH, URGH] of a useless Monarch and a shitty ISA sales company are unlikely to inspire me over the next twelve months.
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