You know what England fans sing in games against Germany?

“Two world wars and one world cup”

There is nothing more insufferable than an England football fan.

Colombia with James Rodriguez is a much better side than without, but he’s been injured. A lot of the ratings / calculations don’t take that into account.

It’s like referring to Red Sox fans as “yankees”.  Well, yes, I suppose that’s technically correct, but...

I’m English; nearly all of my feed are England fans, so that doesn’t work for me.

That worked out pretty well, as did the Italia’90 team.

Nah, there’s Ivanka first.

Japan and South Korea both got automatic bids in 2002.

Rather than reading something - imagine trying to understand baseball without ever having seen a game, and with someone explaining the infield fly rule first - I suggest just listening to games. BBC’s “Test Match Special” is streamed over the internet, and while it’s supposed to be UK-only, it’s generally pretty easy…

It’s annoying that MLB.TV won’t let you listen to the radio announcers.

PS, seriously, if you like baseball on the radio, then try cricket on the radio. It’ll take a while to get the hang of the rules, but you really don’t need to care on the radio - I listen to both and they very much have the same rhythms.

BBC used to let you choose between TV announcers, radio announcers and stadium sound for cricket matches.

St. Martin’s college?

There’s a long-running argument about European games, whether you should support the team from your country, or support the opponents of your rival team.

Rugby League has had “choose your opponent” for the top-seed in the playoffs intermittently. They called it “Club Call” in England in 2009-2014.

(they gave it up because the number-one teams complained that it was a smaller advantage than just reseeding).

If you want amateur sports, then it’s easy to get them. Ban revenue.

Up to the country - as long as the country will issue you a passport, you can represent them. Some sports have rules requiring at least one grandparent, birth in the country, or X (usually three or five) years’ naturalisation, but the Olympics as a whole doesn’t.

Snoke is Jar Jar Binks. I thought we all knew that?

In 1990, Volkov and Krikalev launched into space and the country didn’t exist when they got back.

No official flag for Norn Iron.

Roughly translated as: are you fucking kidding me? No, whatever we pick is going to piss someone off on one side or the other, and that means pissed off people with bombs. We are not getting in the middle of that one.

In sports where coaches are mostly ex-players (unlike, say, football where there’s a separate career track for coaches), it’s noticeable that the best players rarely make great coaches for that exact reason - they can’t explain how to do something because they never had to work out how they were doing it themselves.

Not just Dorne. Stormlands and the Reach are also south of King’s Landing. The Iron Islands would certainly be OK, and the Vale and the Westerlands are both highly-defensible and not on the main path from the North to the Crown Lands. The North and the Riverlands would be utterly devastated, of course, but that’s not…