One of the joys of hockey (field hockey if you are in North America) is that young and old can play together. This is not just knocking a ball about; you will often see fathers and sons and mums and daughters playing in the same teams in competitive matches, particularly in the lower leagues. You even see parents taking the game up just so they can play against their kids.
The youngsters tend to be not quite as strong as the oldies, but can outrun them, and are often more technically skilled, having learned the game on synthetic rather than grass pitches. However, they can usefully absorb tactics and gameplay from the more experienced players around them for a couple of years, before moving on to try their luck against players closer to their prime.
This works because hockey is a non-contact sport. Essentially, if you make body contact with someone when you are tackling, you commit a foul. Not every tackle is clean, of course, but the differences in size, strength and speed are small enough to make it a reasonably fair contest, and everyone has fun.
The non-contact nature of the game means that juniors get a chance to play with the adults at quite young ages. Rules vary league by league, but where I play, boys are allowed in from 14. It’s quite common to see talented girls given a run out at age 12, if they’ve been through their growth spurt.
My coaching role is to help girls through this transition from kids’ hockey to the adult game. Mostly, we’re playing friendlies with teams made up of juniors, with a few adults thrown in to provide guidance. However, occasionally, we are called on to send a few extra players up to the ladies’ section to make up numbers. I pick the biggest and most skilled girls – the ones I think can cope.
However, when this happened a few weeks ago, we got a nasty shock and I think came quite close to disaster. That’s because the opposition turned up with a transgender player, in physical prime, built like something out of the backs division of a rugby team, and who played like it too – faster, stronger and much more aggressive than anything the girls are used to.
Some of them were clearly frightened, and stood off tackles. Some tried to get stuck in but were so completely outmuscled that it was mostly fruitless. Then, about a third of the way through the game it got very unpleasant.
Our striker, a girl of 15, is something of a rocket ship. Tactically, we get a lot of joy feeding her balls to run on to because there are so few in the league who can catch her. But not this time. Despite a 10-yard head start, and running at full speed, she was closed down by the rugby player over an astonishingly short distance, and was tackled. And as the stick landed, she crumpled, going to ground in a heap. The impression was of watching a wildlife documentary; a leopard taking down a gazelle, perhaps.
She was down a long time, but eventually was able to get to her feet and step off the pitch. She had been on the end of a tackle that crossed the line from non-contact to contact. It was a slight touch, nothing more, but the difference in weight and speed between the two players was enough for her to be wiped out. And it was enough to mean that she ended up with injuries to hip, wrist and – more worryingly – to her neck. Her match ended there and then.
While it was open to the umpires to issue a yellow card (or another colour) to the offending player, neither felt it appropriate. They agreed that it was an unfortunate touch, and nothing more; there was no malicious intent. And that’s the nub of the problem. Even in the absence of malice, and in a non-contact sport, there is a serious risk of injury to players if there is a major imbalance in size, weight, speed and aggression. Make no mistake, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
But we are dealing with a transgender player, so we are walking on eggshells. What should we do?
Some of the parents think we should speak to the authorities, but it’s fair to say that most people within the club are fearful of the consequences if we do. Nobody wants to be labelled a bigot. “Don’t say the word ‘transgender’, and don’t say ‘juniors’,” is a common theme of our soundings on the issue. So we are forced to go along with the pretence that neither of these characteristics had anything to do with what happened. We are forced to live a lie.
Some of the parents of the girls in the team have also told us they do not want their children facing such risks. They are right to do so – they could see the danger, as could I. As the responsible adult, I know that fingers will be pointed at me if we do get another injury, so I have undertaken to tell them if I think a fixture will feature a transgender player, so that they can absent themselves. In reality, in a team in which more than half the players are juniors, that will mean conceding matches. That’s grossly unfair to the children, some of whom don’t get to play competitive fixtures often anyway. Worse, if a transgender player appears unexpectedly with an opposition team, we may have to refuse to play on the spot. That’s unfair to everyone, but is an inevitable consequence of the pretence that the girls are simply playing against another woman. And it’s better than a child being seriously injured.
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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again