Jump to content

Wish me luck, fellow forumites, I'm about to take France on at their own game...


Recommended Posts

...no, not striking or surrendering or eating cheese.


It is in fact petanque!


I'm off to Marseille in the morning with a motley crew of merry men.


(and women).


Once there we shall compete in the Mondiale de Petanque de Marseille.


It kicks off on Sunday and is something of a knockout tournament so if we don't win our first game then it's an early Pastis bath for the chaps.


I'll report back next week and let you all know how we got on.


A bientot...


Horse

Field of gold, field of gold, vive la petanque anglaise, allez lez chevaux!!!


The irony of a mondiale in marseilles is a rich seam, wherein more poetic than me could plough, but am un petit peu ivree, so only courage mon brave.Am a cheese-eating-surrender-monkey-ophile, but if we can beat them at the boudin noir, we can sure as hell take the metal ball challenge to them.

More a sign that we no longer see former colonials as much of a threat at anything anymore so we now plan to dominate at other nation's national games.


If only the Safas had managed to get round to inventing a sport rather than having to play all of ours we could go on a trip there but in the meantime we look forward to an easy test series this summer....


....led by our best player, a South African.


Ummm, I'm sure I had a point here somewhere???

Hopefully the South African leadership will stop the English team from taking their ball away and locking themselves in the dressing room until our nasty fast bowlers go away or promise to play nice.


Anyway sorry about the silly buggers on your thread Hosebox (I think we've got one somewhere for sledging) Best of luck in France.

This looks heaps and heaps and heaps of fun. Horsebox, did you meet any of the clebs in the video?


And there's sort of a mention for you here:


"Des joueurs venus des quatre coins de la France et de plus loin encore. Quatre-vingt-sept d?partements sont cette ann?e repr?sent?s, quatre de plus que l?an pass?. Les DOM-TOM ? travers la Martinique et la R?union seront pr?sents aussi. Pour cette 47e ?dition, 12 nations prendront le d?part : des p?tanqueurs venus de Suisse, d?Alg?rie, du Portugal, de Belgique, ou d?Angleterre? (voir ci-contre)"

It was massive fun and as expected we went crashing out in the first round, 13-1, but at least we didn't have to kiss fanny .



Didn't meet any celebs, Ted Max, but did see the eventual winners play in the semi final in the vieux port, which was a very good match.

Talking of celebs, It seems that as we were the only English team registered, the sports desk from La Marseillaise newspaper sent a local hack down to cover the game and do a small piece on our team which is more of a result than we got in the game itself :)-D


You can read it here

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Latest Discussions

    • I think the only way to sort this is to ban loud fireworks for private sale (and preferably ban fireworks altogether except for public displays). I don't know whether that has implications I'm not aware of eg I have no idea how many people are involved in firework manufacture.
    • Very happy to recommend Tommy Rooney's excellent work again. He's been servicing my boiler for years now, but this time he swiftly fixed a leaky radiator valve. I put out a call on Friday and it was repaired - and improved - by Monday evening. I asked him if he had an opinion about my other radiators, and he reassured me as he pointed out the leaky bathroom rad was a non-standard length, which was why it caused problems. There followed a brief but detailed history of improvements in regulations for valves and fittings over the years, so that I could understand precisely what the issue was. How many plumbers will do that for you? "I've just got a memory for weird things," says Tommy modestly.
    • Wanted 2 x Adult and 1 x Children tickets for Dulwich fireworks tonight please!
    • Labour have changed a number of things overnight.   1. VAT on school fees - this has resulted in 25,000 moving until state education. 2. Increasing NICs adding billions to the cost of going to work. 3. Introducing the Employment Rights Bill causing employers to stop hiring. This and item 2 have added 100,000 people to the unemployment scrapheap. These are also causing businesses to relocate further harming the economy. 4. Scrapping all the small boats deterrents meaning 60,000 illegal migrants have arrived in small boats since they were elected. 5. Dishing out huge public sector payroses with no conditions so we have a massively increased payroll and doctors etc arestill going out on strike. 6.changed IHT and non domicile tax rules causing 16,500 millionaires to leave the UK and stop paying any tax here at all forever. 7. Alongside 6, leaving the budget up until an historically late period after the last budget has caused a house price crash, killing the market and decimating government stamp duty receipts. 8. Their profligate borrowing (£100bn extra in just one year) to fund all their lavish promises means the government can now only borrow at the highest ever yields on records. They are more beholden to the bond markets than Liz Truss was. 9. The rate of inflation has doubled under this government. It was a healthy 2% when they came in. For most of the last year, as a result of all of the above it is now nearly 4%.   These are all decisions the Labour government took that have immediate cause and effect.  Its no good harking back to 15 years ago. The current administration was gifted the fastest growing economy in the G7 and within 15 months they have destroyed it.    And things are only going to get worse this winter.      
Home
Events
Sign In

Sign In



Or sign in with one of these services

Search
×
    Search In
×
×
  • Create New...