Watch Sports or Films on Zoom* With Family & Friends

My friend and I were feeling a little glum yesterday evening, both seeking a bit of company but not really having much chat between us for a video call. Then we had a bright idea, why don’t we watch the end of that Superbowl that we had given up on at halftime in 2017. The word on the street was that it had been rather exciting.

Does this really need a blog? Probably not, but I am determined to go viral during this pandemic and my selection of classic football matches and Superbowls clearly weren’t infectious enough. But perhaps this is the one…

It’s pretty simple to be honest, so will be bit of a challenge to stretch it over more than a paragraph, but here goes. As I said, we were both a bit down, and wanted some form of contact, but didn’t fancy having to stare at each other for an hour. And we all know how blokes (mostly…girls are (mostly) much better at the chat than we are) roll, if we have something to occupy us — darts, pool, football, poker — we’re fine, but sit us down opposite each other with no distraction to retreat into if things start to get a bit heavy and we’re useless.

So, I fired up Zoom*, stuck on the Patriots v Falcons Superbowl and shared my screen. My friend logged into Zoom, and we spent the next hour watching Tom Brady lead the biggest comeback seen in Superbowl history. What is particularly incredible about that game, is that even though we knew the eventual outcome, we couldn’t really believe that it was going to happen, as Brady continued to be sacked, and the Falcons continued to execute some incredible plays. But there were three moments that changed the entire game, one that almost defies belief. At one point I said that it must be fake news, not least because we were watching the Fox coverage.

Wow, three paragraphs. Ok, so it worked, really well. We loved it and are going to do it again next week. And we are going to have a movie night with my family on Sunday to watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It’ll be a bit different from the watching sport, but there is definitely something about the collectivity of watching a film together.

*I’m sure that this could be done on Skype, or Slack or whatever. But we used Zoom, so there.