sportsportsportAAAARRGHH!!!!!

Regular readers (I believe you exist...) will know I don't just write about movies and may also know of my aversion to sport.

This summer has been a nightmare for the non-sport folks, like myself. The football season ended and then the never-ending Rangers saga took hold and is still pummelling our senses every day. We've had to endure even more football with Euro 2012. The build up to the Olympics is becoming unbearable. And Wimbledon. Well, I don't mind Wimbledon. My wife loves tennis and taught me the rules so I can watch a match (for a short time at least) and not want to shear my face of with a broken pint glass.

So, Andy Murray.

Good luck to the guy. But I feel a bit sorry for him. It's amazing he's gotten to the final (first for 74 years or something like that?) but the pressure on the guy from the media is staggering. I have to be honest and say I don't think he'll win. It's Federer and, even if he has an injury and isn't quite up to scratch, it's Federer.

And so all the gags about him suddenly being Scottish for not winning. Which is pathetic, really. There is such a bizarre culture in the UK of either congratulating failure (hello Scottish Film Industry) or eviscerating it. There's no such thing as accepting a situation, taking stock of it and planning ahead. We're just shit in the UK, or so the prevailing attitude from "geniuses" such as Charlie Brooker and Andy Parsons seems to teach us. We think encouragement is a bad thing. No wonder things aren't great right now. And that seeps its way into peoples' lives. How about we take things a step at a time, instead of meeting failure and then raising our collective hands up about other peoples' achievements and having a go at them? Folks who win see failure as a lesson and learn from it, a habit I'm trying to get into myself.

Rant, rant, rant. But I think my point is somewhere in there.

Best of luck today to Murray, Di Resta, Hamilton, Button and anyone else out there who's putting their arse on the line for the UK. Just remember to thank them.

And now back to our regularly scheduled rantings...