The Commonwealth Games are taking place in Melbourne right now, I think they wind up on Sunday. The Commonwealth Games are basically like the Summer Olympics, except the only country allowed to play that’s really good at sports is Australia. So the whole thing is an absolute Ozfest, and not in the Black Sabbath kind of way. Pretty much you turn on the TV and there are Australians winning gold medals in something.

It’s about what you’d expect if the US held a Monroe Doctrine Games with all the Latin American countries. We’d lose baseball, basketball, and soccer, and then dominate the medal count in everything else. That’s what going on here, basically.

So with all the excitement about the games and the local heroes, we couldn’t miss the chance to see some international sport. We wanted to go to lawn bowls or (field) hockey, but both of those sports were sold out on the day we wanted to go. So we ended up watching squash, which turned out to be really exciting.

We saw some mixed doubles and men’s doubles matches at the center “show” court. Here’s South Africa losing to Malaysia in mixed doubles:

Several of the matches were very one-sided…I’m guessing that Malawi, for instance, just doesn’t have a huge squash-playing population to draw from. And it showed on the scoreboard.

We skipped one of the mismatches, and wandered into the “outer courts”, which had no stands area and were just like courts you’d find at a health club. There was a women’s doubles match going on, between an Australian team and a New Zealand team. I later read that the Kiwi team (Kitchen and Leevee) is the number one ranked in the world. It was a very exciting match! It went five grueling sets, and the Kiwis barely pulled it out. There were about a hundred spectators, standing and watching through the glass. Many of us in the back rows were standing on chairs and tables. The match finally ended around 10pm, and the competitors were roundly cheered by all.