Conor Bates | Sports Editor
Easter has the propensity to be a very stressful time of year. Essay deadlines amass and pass in great quantities, the impending exam rush is the main fixture of all your thoughts and somewhere in the back of it all there are lingering, fleeting brainwaves about summer plans to break the pattern. While the strains of exam season can certainly be enough to break a person, there are a number of techniques favoured to fracture the hours in the library, to wind-down from a day’s study or to just generally take your mind off things for a while; endless tea breaks and TV show box-sets are among the favourites, with exercise surely completing a very competitive top three.
Exercising during exams can be beneficial. However, some people prefer a more relaxed approach to sport.
The benefits of exercise during exam season cannot be espoused enough. Boosts in serotonin, mental stimulation from physical activity and a good old fashioned breath of fresh air are very valuable to anyone under the weight of books, reports and projects at this time of year. But what if you don’t have enough time? What if you left your jogging gear at home? What if you just generally prefer your sporting involvement with a greater element of comfort and sedation? The answer is close at hand.
The run-in to the Premier League looks fairly exciting this year. With, realistically, three teams battling for glory in what is often deemed the best league in the world, there will surely be something worth casting your eye over on a Saturday afternoon or evening. This will undoubtedly prove to be a favourite outlet of sports based procrastination/relaxation for most pundits, given the popularity of the English game in Ireland, and worldwide. However, recent years league roundups have shown us that viewing soccer may not be the most relaxing pastime. Sergio Agüero’s last minute title winning goal, for example, gave most of us palpitations, and the level of nervous energy associated with the game may not be the most helpful when we’re in an already wound-up state. Perhaps something a bit more placid would be more suitable.
An appropriate alternative? The Masters at Augusta is a good place to start. Regarded as the most prestigious of the four golfing majors, the Masters pits the world’s best golfers against each other, and one of the consistently toughest courses in the game. Augusta National, in Georgia, provides the legendary home to one of the biggest challenges in modern golf, and the tournament is always a competitive affair. The nice thing about golf, however, is that while the competition is real, and at times fierce, the traditional nature of the game always means it is tempered. Watching the Masters holds the same competitive sporting value as watching a cup final, but with an incredible degree of serenity.
The Masters is a pinnacle of golfing standard and contains some incredible views; a great exam relaxant.
This is added to by the stunning backdrop provided by the south USA. Dixieland provides the viewer with an array of natural beauty to complement the well-polished fairways. Hours of watching seventy men thwacking a small white ball on a large green canvas is an immense pleasure, and the voice of Peter Alliss in the BBC commentary box will also serve to soothe those fans in search of some recuperation from the woes of study. However, it is not the climax of sporting procrastination; the issues being that it only lasts four days, and it’s on quite late in the evening, meaning that even the most enthusiastic punter may have found themselves too tired to indulge in the occasion. There is a higher pinnacle in the grand order of sports.
The ultimate sporting relaxant, to be prescribed for any student under the exam cosh, is the World Snooker Championship. Starting from a rather coincidental point, there seems to be something calming about hitting a white ball with a stick. Similarly, the baize covered tables provide a green centrepiece for the play. Even the repetitive clack of snooker balls is familiar to the sound of a well-placed golf shot. There is no doubt that the two sports do their bit in terms of stress reduction, but snooker’s dignified pacing is truly on its own in terms of tranquilising the ever-worrying scholar.
Again, for those who like their sport on the competitive side, there is no shortage of talented maestros in the realm of snooker, and one viewing of the World Championship will confirm this in earnest. In fact the balance and contrast between the casual safety play and the exciting pot-shots is one of the most enjoyable things about the top echelon of snooker.
What makes it different from the Masters, in terms of a student relaxation process, is the accessibility; for two weeks, the snooker will be on the television all day, every day. The snooker will be there to accompany all of your tea/coffee/general breaks away from the rigours and stresses of study. It will be there to distract you and lull you to sleep at night, after a long day with your head in the books. Most importantly, it will be available for your enjoyment, to see who is crowned this year’s world champion. For this, we are grateful.
