“*2” = “times two,” meaning that the England World Cup was watched all over the world.
You seemed to be somewhat impressed that the guy puked live on TV. I was saying that the video showed a guy puking on live TV for much the same ‘pumped’ up reason in front of a live audience of almost certainly 500-1000 million people.
The world cup is HUGE.
That’s all I meant and that was also the point of the linking to the video.
A England game during the World Cup in Germany 
Oh. Well, hell. I’m a Murkan. I don’t know nothin’ 'bout your poofy European sports.
A’hem, poofy English game 
We have a game call Hurling over in Ireland. Think of Ice Hockey and then put the ball in the hand and the the sticks at head height. No rules call for helmets etc. You can always tell a Hurler. They’re the one with no teeth and big dents in their head.
Most do wear helmets nowadays but they don’t have to.
A taste of the game. It’s said it’s the fastest field sport in the world and it’s hard to argue with that.
100% amatuer BTW. The final is played to close to 90,000 in the stadium.
Looks a lot like lacrosse.
Knew that’d get ya. 
I’ve seen hurling before. Great game. Reminds me a bit of lacrosse. Lacrosse came from the Iroquois, and it was not at all uncommon to have all sorts of cracked bones. As you can see from the last half of the linked vid, it’s still pretty rough-and-tumble.
Guinness used to run a commerical here in the US that featured hurling. (Wow, that’s a rather amusing sentence.) I haven’t seen it in quite a while, but it was one heck of a commerical.
Oh sure, one guy gets hit so hard he has to have surgery after a game to keep from dying from internal bleeding. Once in awhile a Joe Theissman discovers his leg can’t been backwards. So the Rams have had a few quarterbacks who’ve been hospitalized with concussions.
This is America dammit! We won’t be happy until at least three players on each team die during a game. Preferably one that goes into overtime.
Why do you think they call it “sudden-death” overtime?
I won’t be convinced that a sport is truly hard core until they start offering the losing team as a human sacrifice again.
They did away with hacking as a means of stopping a player with the ball. That’s right, the approved method of stopping the ball-carrier used to be kicking the feet from under him. Rucks (a sort of scrimmage-like affair that takes place ad hoc after the tackle when the ball’s on the ground, with lots of people pushing and shoving for possession) are now brought to a stop if the ball’s buried and not about to come to light, whereas once upon a time they’d just carry on for as long as it took, with small regard for whoever was getting trampled, kicked or piled on at the bottom of it. But chiefly, there are precious few allowable reasons for laying hands on anyone who hasn’t got the ball, and even the tackle must be made with the intent of catching and stopping the ball-carrier - you can’t just smash into him making no attempt to hold on.
Talking of being sick on the field of play, google up Dean Jones some time (Australian cricketer). He played a great and famous innings in sweltering heat and humidity in India circa 1985-86 and during it he was being sick about once every over (six pitches), pissing his pants, having to be ice-bathed at every interval in play, and losing about twenty-odd pounds in weight.