Saw an ad for a local Jujitsu center that advertised they taught ninjitsu. I couldn’t help laughing.
It’s a sport almost as nuts as quidditch.
I love how you say that like it makes things better.
Fortunately, the inventors of those sports are smart enough not to tweet their social justice positions.
Well, dead enough, at any rate.
I’m 4-3 in my Wednesday night league; last game of the season is tomorrow.
At least in curling the broom is used in a more appropriate way.
Job in fiction is to protect your players, by hitting it at the opponents. So that mostly works for the grounded sport (my brother was a beater). There’s three bludger balls, but a team can only control two at once, so there’s some strategy in knowing when to try to take out an opponent in a threatening position but risk losing majority control vs to sit back and not get aggressive.
It’s not terribly Calvinball like when it’s mostly quaffle play. One main focus with some heavy contact around the play, with some dodgeball stuff going on around the periphery.
It gets stranger when the seekers come in to play. Depending on the snitch of the day, it’s either a long distance run or a wrestling match without weight classes. And depending on the score either both teams want the ball or one seeker is playing defense, plus the beaters get more active. As of about a decade ago they had at least mostly gotten rid of the rule where the snitch can be anywhere on campus and the chase goes all over the damn place and kept it close to the field.
It seems to be a thing where fictional broom tech has increased in leaps and bounds right before Harry gets on the scene. The long games we hear of are all decades ago, but with the arrival of the super racing brooms that have come in to the game, snitch catches seem much easier. There are lots of pure speed grabs in the books that don’t match up to the trickery and cunning we hear referred to in the past.
Why would a team want to catch the Snitch if it would lose the game by doing so?
Then again, didn’t the World Cup Final in the books end with the team catching the Snitch losing the game? IIRC, somebody commented that it did it because the team had little chance of getting back to within 150 and just wanted to end the misery quickly.
Yeah, it might be like an American Football game where a team is down 3 scores and there is less than a minute left, and they get the ball deep in their own territory. The game is over and there is no way to win, you’re unlikely to even score, so just kneel out the rest of the game so that you don’t risk injuring someone over a useless gesture that won’t get you anything.
Also, you might have a seeker who’s a total asshole and wants glory for him or herself regardless of the team. They grab the snitch for personal victory even if the team loses.
Rowling actually wrote that. Or as I recall, she wrote that the Hungarian (IIRC) seeker wanted to end the game on his own terms.
The problem is that the score was 160-0. So, in effect, because of the scoring system, Hungary was losing by exactly one goal. If they just score once, catching the Seeker makes it a tie game.
Also, I don’t think Rowling ever explains if there are rules around three obvious areas of gamesmanship.
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If the score is 160-0, the seeker on the losing team clearly does NOT want the snitch caught. So it makes no sense for her/him to do so, but can they also physically prevent the other seeker from catching it? It was never super clear to me what level of physical contact was permissible between seekers; can I do anything at all to interfere withthe other seeker? If the scores are less than 150 points apart my goal will clearly be to just catch it, but if I’m losing by more than 150 I want no one to catch it.
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If the above scenario is true and I am in a position to catch the snitch, but do not want to, is there a way to control it that does not constitute a legal catch? Like, I know it’s a tricky thing to control, but if I can corral it can I dribble it back and forth between my hands? Could I stick it under my shirt and let it fly around in there? Is a trap (holding the ball down to the ground with my hand, but not grasping it) a legal catch?
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Is there a tiebreaking rule?
That, and I assume that the scholastic sport uses different equipment than the pros, with pro snitches being much harder to catch. Harry is quite good by the standards of scholastic players, so he tends to catch the Snitch quickly. But he recognizes that he’s nowhere near the level of Krum, a professional seeker. Put Krum up against the Snitches that Harry has been seeking, and the match would be over before it’s begun, and put Harry up against Krum’s Snitch, and he probably would be at it for days.
This one, I will say annoys me. Presumably, the rulebooks say something about ties, but we never find out what because it never happens to come up. But with the way the game works, it would have been so easy to change the rules ever-so-slightly to make ties impossible, which surely would be better than any tiebreaking rule: Just make the Snitch worth either 145 or 155 (or 147 or 154 or whatever if you just want to be different), instead of 150, and now games will never be tied.
About to reveal that I’ve read the books a slightly embarrassing number of times.
Bulgarian
Yes, there is one match where the other Seeker, Cho Chang, pretty much spends the whole game just trying to block Harry. Blocking though, not physical contact.
I don’t think so, but it is not clear what happens if you touch the snitch but don’t catch it. It’s later revealed that snitches have ‘touch memory’ and record who was the first one to touch it when there is a disputed catch
For Hogwarts games, the points were cumulative across games in some way that wasn’t made entirely clear.
I think that the cumulative points were only relevant if two teams had the same win-loss record. When Griffindor won all of its games, it didn’t matter how much the other houses were running up the score. Lots of real-world sports have rules similar to that, for determining who wins a league.
Though come to think of it, at Hogwarts, a clear champion on win-loss record could only happen when one house is undefeated, because each house only plays three games. And a full season with only six games total, three for each team, would be pretty boring. The larger leagues are probably more interesting.
Harry’s broom, if I remember correctly, is a Nimbus 2000. Rowling was writing at a time when the number 2000 had connotations of a high-tech future. Soon, though, we’ll view as the quaint and primitive past.
So there might be a situation where you need the game to end before the opposing team runs up the score too much against you, so you go ahead and grab the snitch and lose the game, but win the cup based on your cumulative point score.
Or just say if it ends in a tie the team that caught the Snitch wins.
Which I guess is the same as making it worth 155.
Rowling is British; why would she need a tie-breaking rule?
None of this. The fact that the snitch is worth 15x the goal scoring and ends the match is unworkable in a sport. No one would ever really play this way (as demostrated by muggle Quidditch).
Touchdowns are 2x what field goals are, not 15x. And they don’t end the match.
This simply isn’t true. In real sports, teams in the same league rarely outscore opponents 15-1. And if they get a lead that big, one team will not be trying to catch the snitch at all. They’ll be doing all they can to prevent the opponent from catching it. There’s not way they’d end the match by catching it without winning (especially in a World Cup). The snitch is the only thing that counts. As long as a team is within 150 points of their opponent, the goals are meaningless. And if they do get that far behind, they just need to park in front of the hoops and wait for the snitch battle to resolve. It’s an incredibly dumb game.