This is rather a melancholic observation about how betting has transformed our relationship with sport, I recall watching football in the 1980s and 1990s before smartphones existed and one simply watched the match as it unfolded, if one had a bet on another match occurring simultaneously you had to wait for teletext updates or radio coverage, there was no possibility of constant score refreshing and consequently one remained more engaged with the actual sporting contest, nowadays I find myself watching a Premier League match on television while simultaneously monitoring six other matches on my phone, refreshing every few minutes despite the fact that the scores will not change significantly in that brief interval, the compulsion to check is quite irrational yet impossible to resist, Margaret used to chastise me for this behavior noting that I was not truly watching the football but rather watching the scores update, she was correct of course, the physical act of watching sport has been replaced by the abstract monitoring of numerical outcomes.
