Sports highlights: NASCAR, EPL, Bundesliga, Champions League, World Series

It has been two really intense weeks back home and I missed quite a bit of playoff actions from NASCAR and Major League Baseball in the States. Glad that I was able to catch Game 6 and 7 of the World Series. Thumbs up to the Astros winning it all. Any pro team from Texas winning a championship is always welcome, especially beating a team from So Cal, my #2 "disliked" team LA Dodgers. The road to WS victory was definitely a tough one even though they played very well in the regular season, they were almost eliminated by the Yankees in ALCS. And if they didn't mount a big comeback in Game 5 of WS, LA just needed to win one of the next 2 games at home to win the series!

I didn't bother to record the 3 NASCAR races I missed but relied on Comcast's On-demand "condensed race" replay of Talladega 2, Kansas 2 and Martinsville 2 (the first race of the Round of 8.) I guess I still watched most of the highlights, e.g. key passes and crashes :P The race at 'dega featured a tons of the latter as expected. And I've finally understood how the new point system works! So basically there are 3 different types of points: the "original" points drivers used to get based on their finishes at the end of each race, the "stage" points that were given to drivers finishing in Top 10 at the end of each stage, and the "playoff" points that were given to stage and race winners. Additional playoff points were awarded based on the end of regular season standings. And playoff points came into the picture during the playoff (obviously!): these points are added to each driver's total points after the point reset for each driver at the beginning of each playoff round, and carried over through out every round and every race in the playoff (except the final race) So drivers have incentive to win stages and races to accumulate the playoff points which would help getting to the final race.

The interesting matchups during the past few weeks in Champions League for me are Real Madrid vs the Spurs and Manchester United vs Benfica. Looks like it's finally time for Real Madrid to have a down year: only able to tie the Spurs at home and lost 1-3 away. The first Man U-Benfica match was a thriller: Man U scored a lucky goal but the 2nd win seems more convincing. (Oh yeah, their victory over the Spurs during the past weekend was a good one too!)

Bundesliga is the only domestic league that my dad followed and Bayern played Leipzig again right after they met in the German cup (which went to extra time) The latter had a player sent off for both games and lost both. (Also lost their Champions league match to Porto!) I guess the team is still not ready for too much spotlight.