Big Ears Wrote:CH you surprise me not being into rugby, as the southern hemisphere are always the threat to us - in both codes. I like cricket too. We had a spell of Australian rules football being showed here and I loved it, but we don't get it in any more. Walcott was a very promising young player at Southampton, but was sold to Arsenal almost straight away.

Steve - As you say, Genesis were two different bands and you can't go far wrong with the early albums. Canada had a very good rugby union team with, I think, Gareth Rees, who was born to Welsh ex-patriots and played for top English clubs. But, would I be right in assuming ice-hockey is the Canadian priority? Yes, the batsman in cricket is out if the bowler hits the wicket or if the batsman is caught out. Matches do take days, but the limited overs cricket (much faster) is becoming popular, except with the purists. In tennis, the players take it in turns to serve for a game, which is part of a set. Men can play up to five sets in a match (women three).

jazzbo - Michael MacDonald is an interesting example. I always liked his voice, but never really liked him with anyone. Sometimes you get good singers who sing the wrong material, but that's another thread.

Big Ears Wrote:Women play less sets because they have been traditionally regarded as less physically strong. The debate over whether they should play more sets, crops up every year with Wimbledon. There was a famous incident when Bobby Riggs claimed an average man could beat the best woman and he challenged Billie Jean King. Very cleverly she resisted and then agreed, with the proviso that if she won, there would be no return match. Riggs had already beaten the tough Margaret Court, but he lost to Billie Jean (she thrashed him) . . . and that was the end of Riggs and his argument. There was later a match between Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova, which he won, but he was far from average.

As you say, the Australians are traditionally good at tennis as are the Americans. There have been plenty of good Canadian tennis players, like Mary Pierce, Greg Rusedski, Aleksandra Wozniak and Eugenie Bouchard.

Yes, the server can lose on their serve. The idea is that you hold your own serve, while breaking your opponent's serve. The top players tend to hold their own serve more often. Some players, like Bjorn Borg, did not always conform to this and relied on tie-breaks at the end of the set.

A bowler in cricket bowls six balls to an over. There are ninety overs in a test match. Limited overs is played in one day with 20 to 50 overs. In other words less balls are bowled. This is linked to your question about matches taking so long. In test matches, a batsman may slow down to wear down the fast bowlers, at the expense of the number of runs he (the batsman) achieves. Equally, some bowlers bowl slowly in order to slow the batsman's rate of runs at the expense of the number of wickets he (the bowler) takes. It is psychological. Some batsmen and bowlers play fast all the time, like England's Ian Botham or most of the Jamaicans, so their matches are relatively short anyway. With limited overs, everyone has to play fast, because they only have one day in which to score, and batsman are running almost before they've hit the ball - a bit like baseball.

Do Canadians mind being referred to as Canucks? I used it once on a forum and it went down like a lead balloon. We don't care if we are called Brits, Limeys or even whinging Poms.

Music Head Wrote:Milo Greene on Conan show

never heard of them

[video=youtube;5HOVxtJ8p9M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HOVxtJ8p9M[/video]