When is it ok to speak critically in Saskatchewan?

It's Saturday and I am sitting on the garden swing on a lovely Summer's day. We are starting to see some friends here now. We only have a couple months here in Canada so we will have to make the most use of our short time. Melody's parents had this in mind when they took us to the CFL football on Thursday night.
For those who are slightly curious, CFL is similar to the NFL, but has a few rule variations. The CFL is not a big competition with only 8 teams. I can't quite work out how the economy of the league works. Tickets are way more expensive than the AFL in Australia, yet the players get paid less and there are less teams to go around. I guess each team has more players to pay.
Saskatchewan is in the grip of Roughrider fever. (Roughriders is the name of their team.) Last year the Roughriders won the CFL championship, called the Grey Cup. The whole province is still celebrating this win. The celebration continued in 2008 with Sasatchewan winning their first 6 games straight.


I am beginning to discover that my parents in law are actually big football fans. They were quite excited about the game. It required us driving down to Saskatchewan's other city of Regina which was a 3.5 hour drive.


The game was in the evening, it started at 8pm. The first thing that I learnt is what it is like to watch a game in a one team town. The game was against the Calgary Stampeders. I saw only a handful of Calgary fans, my guess is that there were no more than a couple hundred out of a crowd of 30 000.
The second thing I learnt is that nearly everyone was wearing Roughrider clothing. Melody's dad had bought t-shirts for us all to wear.
The third thing I learnt was that everybody had an unwaivering faith that their team would win. I found this strange because they carried it to the point of delusional faith.


Melody and I went to a game some years back, so I am not a complete stranger to the game of CFL. This was a strong reintroduction into Canadian culture for Melody, she felt a little out of place.


As far as the game went it was nearly a blow out. Melody's brother Dan sent us games last year to watch, and Saskatchewan lost nearly all of them quite badly. It was a bit of a surprise to us that they won the championship last year. Melody and I joked that Saskatchewan would surely lose because we were present watching. Saskatchewan started out scoring the first 4 points, but by three quarter time they were down 30-4. In the last quarter Saskatchewan decided to start playing football. They scored three exciting touch downs in the last quarter, which made the game worth watching and saved the trip to Regina from being wasted. But it was too little too late, Calgary won 30-25.
You would never have known that Saskatchewan lost though. The crowd left feeling very bouyant. As we drove home we listened to the radio and people calling in to praise their team. It left me drawing a conclusion (added upon many earlier stories in Canada) that Canadians really do not like speaking too negatively or critically of others.
My summary of the game: Was this actually the team that won the Grey Cup last year? (To be fair, they have a lot of injuries). Their defence was nearly non existent all night. Two of their touch downs were actually quite lucky, none the less quite exciting. The loss was respectable in the end, but the team only played one quarter of football, and there is no excuse for this.
It was a fun night had by all.

On topics related to Russia in the news: "I reckon those people in Alabama must be pretty concerned about Russia invading Georgia."
(I try not to comment on politics too much, but will say that it is ironic that much of the world can recognise the independence of Kosovo but will not recognise the independence of South Ossetia, even though they held a successful referendum in 2006 and declared their independence following the fact.)