Places you've only heard about through sport

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

My knowledge of Yorkshire, outside of Leeds, Sheffield and York itself, is almost entirely just a list of Rugby League results. Batley. Hunslet. Castleford. Wakefield.

I have a similar knowledge of suburbs of Melbourne, somewhere I've never been within 3000 miles of, from 1980s Channel 4 coverage of Aussie Rules Football. Collingwood. Hawthorn. Carlton. Footscray. Essendon.

Any for you?

[Lang Spoon]

Green Bay. Buffalo. Rosario. Trabonzapor (till I read Black Sea).

[Southport Zeb]

Green Bay
Mönchengladbach
Aston

[Bored Of Education]

Mönchengladbach, Saint-Étienne, Harlem and a whole load of Scottish towns. Probably Barcelona, in thinking about it as well.

[Lang Spoon]

Peterhead, Elgin, Forres. And they are all within 150 miles of where I grew up ffs.

[Diable Rouge]

Stenhousemuir and Cowdenbeath are the archetypal Scottish examples. Duisburg and Kaiserslautern for Germany, Chateauroux for France and of course, highly unlikely that Borisov would ever have drawn attention, were it not for BATE.

[ad hoc]

Lake Placid, Albertville, Lillehammer, Nagano, Pyeongchang

[Diable Rouge]

There was that awful Brendan Gleeson film for your first choice, ad hoc, though long after 1980.

[ad hoc]

I haven't heard of that. (Or I hadn't until now)

[Lang Spoon]

Stenhousemuir and Cowdenbeath are the archetypal Scottish examples. Duisburg and Kaiserslautern for Germany, Chateauroux for France and of course, highly unlikely that Borisov would ever have drawn attention, were it not for BATE.

Rest assured Diable, the delights of Cowdenbeath and Stenny are best left to the imagination. Cowdenbeath is a bigger post mining as opposed to post abattoir Roscrea, after a war.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

My knowledge of Yorkshire, outside of Leeds, Sheffield and York itself, is almost entirely just a list of Rugby League results. Batley. Hunslet. Castleford. Wakefield.

I have a similar knowledge of suburbs of Melbourne, somewhere I've never been within 3000 miles of, from 1980s Channel 4 coverage of Aussie Rules Football. Collingwood. Hawthorn. Carlton. Footscray. Essendon.

Any for you?

Similarly the Rugby Union results on Grandstand extended any knowledge I had of the settlements of South Wales (I was familiar enough with the Scottish Borders from watching Border TV news). And following the NSWRL/NRL from afar gave me knowledge of the greater Sydney area that proved valuable when I went there to, erm, watch NRL games for two weeks.

I'd add Koblenz (went there eventually to watch football, but it was a famous venue for athletics world record attempts), Rieti (Ovett also broke a record there) and Watkins Glen (former US Grand Prix venue, I went close to it a few years ago and when it started appearing on road signs thought oh, that's where it is?).

Watching football and ice hockey on Germany trips has taken me places I probably would never have heard of otherwise - Bad Nauheim, Osnabruck, Iserlohn, Augsburg, Krefeld, Sinsheim.

[Patrick Thistle]

Monza, Imola, Spa, Silverstone

Most racecourses like Haydock

South Wales villages from rugby results

Most of the places Zeb goes to watch football

[ursus arctos]

Canadian junior hockey is great for this.

Flin Flon, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Kamloops, Chicoutimi. Salmon Arm, etc.

[Artificial Hipster]

Green Bay
Mönchengladbach
Aston

Knowing very little about Germany it wasn't until relatively recently that I realised Monchengladbach was a place in itself rather than being derived from Munich.

Hitching through France 30 years ago I was surprised to find myself in a city called Saint-Etienne when previously I'd assumed them to have been a team from Paris.

[Third rate Leszno]

I've been to Kamloops. Twice. Only place I've ever been approached by a hooker wanting change for a parking meter.

Early 70s motorsport venues would make most of my list - Anderstorp, Zolder, Enna-Pergusa, Trois-Rivieres, Longridge, Pau, Macau.

[Guy Profumo]

Yep.

Collingwood.

Thanks to the greatest film about sport ever commited to celluloid.

"The Club"

[Alderman Barnes]

In Germany, the equivalents are towns like Gummersbach, Großwallstadt and Lemgo that everyone knows from the handball but nobody could find on a map, or Tauberbischofsheim where all the fencers live.

There are also places where individual sportspeople come from which are only famous because of a quirk of German sports journalism, where writers are terrified of repetitions and pronouns, and instead use increasingly desperate synonyms.

A coveted OTF trophy goes to anyone apart from the German posse and the Ursus collective who can name a) der Leimener b) die Brühlerin c) der Elmshorner and d) der Kerpener.

[Levin]

As an odd coincidence I'm thinking of going to Bietigheim-Bissingen in a few weeks as some of the group stage games of the Women's World Handball Championship are bbeing played there.

Other places I only know due to handball include Veszprém (HUN), Kielce (POL) and (related to the above) Göppingen (GER)

[Wouter D]

d) Ralf and Michael Schumacher.

[ursus arctos]

Kielce is the closest town of any size to the hamlet where my mother’s family lived for generations.

We’ve discussed before how German clubs in “lesser” sports have tended to be most successful when they are based in towns that lack a dominant football club.

[longeared]

Roubaix. San Remo. Bastogne. Mont Ventoux. Valkenburg. Pra Loup. Pau. Puy de Dome. Kuurne. Wevelgem. Huy. Mount Baldy.

[Toby Gymshorts]

My knowledge of Yorkshire, outside of Leeds, Sheffield and York itself, is almost entirely just a list of Rugby League results. Batley. Hunslet. Castleford. Wakefield.

What's great about this post is that in my younger days, I followed my local rugby league team around, and I've been to all those places.

[Giggler]

Yep.

Collingwood.

Thanks to the greatest film about sport ever commited to celluloid.

"The Club"

Some truly brilliant names in the summer pools when it was Aussie Rules teams. I imagined every place looked like the dusty set of a Castlemaine XXXX advert.

[treibeis]

Kaiserslautern. And, indeed, anywhere in southern Germany except Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Hanover.

[treibeis]

Oh, all right, and Nuremberg. Because of the Nazis. And the Christmas markets. And André Golke.