It's just as well Schroeder was so entertainingly florid, because water polo itself is a snore. With no commentary to accompany the match, his exhortations – running from 'FINISH IT!' to an impressively graphic string of swearwords – were the nearest thing there was to an audio track. The star of the match was undoubtedly USA head coach Terry Schroeder, a burly Will Ferrell lookalike who appears to have been entirely carved out of corned beef. I'd been wondering where he'd got to.įinally there was a men's water polo match between Romania and the USA. On the plus side, Barry Davies was commentating.

In the end, after the ball seemed to accidentally blunder into the net during a moment of confusion, America won by the only goal of the game. It can be brutal at times – the British captain was hospitalised for three nights after being clobbered with a stick in her opening match – but you wouldn't know it from this.

While there were a couple of surprises – despite the clue being in the title, the pitch was much bigger than I expected – the match did little to dispel the notion that field hockey is basically just a load of ponytails not scoring any goals for 70 minutes. And then the PA started playing Kasabian, and I went off it a little.įar less impressive was the field hockey on Tuesday evening a women's match between Argentina and the USA. By the end France had clawed back a draw, the players were exhausted, the commentator was ragged, David Cameron – in the audience alongside François Hollande – was on his feet and I had found one of the most compelling sports of the Games so far. Perhaps the French heard him, because their fightback was spectacular. It had the most scathing commentator of any sport I've seen so far, too, tearing chunks out of the fading French team for their lack of concentration and poor possession percentages. It's Speedball 2, basically, but without all the death.

It's relentlessly physical, too, with both teams sprinting and shoving and launching themselves into the air to ferociously pelt the ball at goal at a million miles an hour. It turns out that handball is faster than netball, more tactical than basketball and higher scoring than football.

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