Goals 'n' service with a smile

A couple of blogs to go with an intense sporting season.

Even if you're not an inveterate football-watcher and (like me) you can't tell an offside from a penalty corner, it's probably been difficult to maintain indifference in the past few weeks. World Cup (WC) enthusiasm is infectious and if you have friends who are heavily into the sport, chances are that you've visited a pub at least once to cheer wildly at a large plasma screen, or participated in conversations about the relative skills of Zidane and Ronaldinho.

My interest in WC06 was stoked by online developments as well, specifically by the World Cup Interview Series on a fine site called Sportolysis: The World Sports Blog (http://www.sportolysis.com), maintained by Pratyush Khaitan. What Khaitan has done is to interview 32 keen football fans - one from each of the participating countries - thus providing a common man's perspective; this is often more insightful than expert analysis, and it's a friendly way to get football-virgins involved in the sport. The questions cover such territory as the football history of each country, which also makes the interviews a useful reference source.

Of course, there's more to Sportolysis than this series - it's one of the very few dedicated sports blogs in India, with plenty of features and links on a number of different sports, all neatly categorised on the sidebar. Khaitan covers everything from cricket and football to athletics and the NBA. "Sports blogging provides an instant publishing tool in your hands," he says. "You no longer have to cringe that X sport is not talked about while Y is. You can throw your opinion at the world." He was heartened by the response to the world cup interview series, which was widely linked to on various high-traffic websites and at one point fetched over 4,000 page views - excellent by Indian blog standards. "There are only a handful of Indian sports blogs at this stage," he says, "but as the sporting graph of the country rises, more can be expected to appear."

Vamos, Rafa! Hard though it is to believe, football wasn't the only thing on the sporting radar in the last month. Spanish tennis sensation Rafael Nadal's incredible run on clay and his remarkable achievement in beating world number 1 Roger Federer in four consecutive finals (including the French Open) this year has made him one of the most popular young sportsmen in the world. Nadal's emergence means that there is at last a chance of a genuine rivalry in the men's circuit (which Federer had dominated for the last two years).

All of Nadal's exuberance and candour comes across on the blog set up for him by the ATP (http://www.atptennis.com/en/blog/nadal.asp). Here the youngster discusses aspects of his play, sizes up his opponents and shares off-court vignettes and sightseeing photographs. More than anything else, what you get from this blog, are the quiet moments and interludes in a professional sportsperson's life.

Jai Arjun Singh, aka Jabberwock, blogs at http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com