The chant in the stands at the badminton on Thursday was not one you hear often: “Let’s go Falklands, let’s go! Let’s go Falklands, let’s go!” Let us just say that it didn’t have quite the required effect, but the odds here were never very good.
The Falklands’ men’s doubles team is plucked from the Stanley Badminton Club, the only one on the islands. The club has 24 members. Duane March and Douglas Clark were playing an Australian pair; there are 200,000 Australian players. Not a fair match.
The longest odds that I’ve seen at the Commonwealth Games this week came in the boxing ring when the welterweight, Xavier Mata’afa-Ikinofo, from Niue, fought Rohit Tokas, from India. Niue is a Pacific Island with a population
