[The Saucepan Man]

However, if i was unable to attend, the last thing I would do was put a flag on my ruddy car! It seems over the top, almost non patriotic, demeaning to the colours, and and even a bit xenophobic.

Well, that's me told.

I think it's time we went back to sport in Middle Earth.

Yes, I suspected that my desperate attempts to keep my posts vaguely on topic by including reference to the White Tree would fool no one, least of all you Esty.

I agree that we should move back to the topic at hand before I am cast any further in the role of nationalist xenophobe.

So, in an effort to do just that:

... in The Hobbit there's a whole list of "quiet games of the aiming and throwing sort"that Hobbits play: quoits, dart-throwing, shooting at the wind, bowls, and ninepins. Now I have no idea what half of those are, but still, they're nice Hobbit-games.

Quoits is throwing hoops over pegs, isn't it? Bowls involves rolling balls in an effort to get nearest to the target jack, while ninepins is simply skittles by another name. No idea what "shooting the wind" is, though. They are all very much the sort of games that one would associate with Hobbits, being games that are tradionally played in quiet country pubs. I can imagine Hobbits liking nothing better than a nice evening of beer and skittles.

I can see Hobbits playing cricket too, since it fits in with the idyllic rural feel of the Shire (village greens and all that) and the Hobbit talents of "aiming and throwing", although I seem to recall (perhaps from his Letters) that Tolkien himself was not overly fond of the game.

But the references to football (and golf) were probably put in by the modern translator of Bilbo's There and Back Again.

Fair point with regard to the football references, but the circumstances in which golf is mentioned define what kind of game it is. So, whatever it was called, Hobbits must have had a game which involved using clubs to hit balls into holes. Unless they only played it when Goblin heads were available ...