Tuesday 14 June 2016

I'm Forever Blowing Blitz Games

You thought Magnus Carlsen was a Real Madrid fan? Maybe so, but this is a West Ham song.



Turns out Magnus had a ticket for the opening match of Euro 2016 (a game your correspondent missed due to being on a working holiday in Menorca, which may account for the recent absence of posts) and had taken the trouble to pick up a song in honour of the Irons' international midfielder, who repaid the world champion's faith in him by hitting a top-notch winner a few minutes before the end.


Presumably as Magnus was singing the English-language original rather than the French version he must have picked it up off the good people who follow West Ham rather than learning it in Paris.

Anyway the clip was first shown on Norwegian television, so the total number of YouTube hits is not by any means the total number of people who have seen it, but even so, it's odd that this entertaining clip of the most famous player in chess had, in two days on YouTube, been seen by only 495 people


by the time I wrote this entry (a little after the Ireland-Sweden game finished, since you ask).

Well, not really odd. Just odd if you think, like Nigel Short, that chess
is played by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
You'd have thought some of those hundreds of millions would be more interested.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

There are currently eight versions of the clip on YouTube, the most popular of which has had 41,231 views.

ejh said...

You're quite right John: I make it about 44 thousand viewings between all eight of them - well, seven of them as one poor bastard has had no views at all. An elementary error on my part (although I think the wider point still stands).

Viewings of your man's goal currently at about half a million...

Anonymous said...

Haven't seen this before, Stone Cold Steve Austin calling WrestleMania 32 Main event a 28-minute chess match.

http://uproxx.com/prowrestling/stone-cold-steve-austin-wrestlemania-32-main-event/

"I don’t think you make him in a 28-minute chess match. This match needed to be all about excitement, explosion, and testosterone out of Roman and that’s how I think they should have booked it."

Laar said...

PhosAgro announcement: "Hundreds of millions of the most educated, and therefore most successful, people in the world will follow the match. "

Unfortunately, you'd probably do better advertising to the least educated? (sarcasm)

Anyway, it seems that picking exact numbers (605) has gone out of fashion, probably because it is more falsifiable.