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I read that the average NFL match lasts for three hours, but the clock runs for only one hour. Are there any other sports, games, pastimes or other activities that involve more dead time than actual game time? Alice Holliday, Lancashire

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Readers reply

Golf. More time is spent walking than actually golfing. In that regard, golf is a good walk spoiled. Sagarmatha1953

Hockey at school during games lessons. I was never picked for the team, so hung about on the sidelines with the other non-athletes. Goldgreen

Any school sport, really. All fine until the wet, heavy leather football smacks you in the head because you were looking elsewhere. unclestinky

And that was by the basketball court. Or was that just me? RichWoods

Most of athletics, especially the jumps and throws. I saw an interview with the recent winner of the women’s shot put at the World Indoors, and she said that she had spent about an hour between two different throws – each of which lasted about 30 seconds. Leafar

Three-day eventing. Takes three days. Actual competition time is between 12 and 15 minutes. Leoned

When going sailing, the time it takes to change into a wetsuit, layer up with fleeces, spray tops and titanium socks (that last one is real – look it up), get all the ropes and appendages in the right place on your boat, launch the boat and find a gust of wind to get you going, can really mount up. Then, of course, you have to do it all again backwards when you go in, by which point everything is wet and tangled and you just want to go home. But it’s worth it for the fun you have while you’re actually sailing your boat, and the pride you feel when you successfully harness the wind’s power to carry your boat skimming across the surface of a lake. artisticallyinclined

Have you seen American baseball? dashiell_Hammett

They’ve implemented timers to make the game faster. Jrth98

American football is truly the worst – certainly at pro level as presented on TV. Some Brit commented it was 30 seconds of violent mayhem followed by 10 minutes of committee meetings. I would add that those 10 minutes are filled with TV ads and commentators pouring out incomprehensible statistics on “rushing yardage” or whatever. There seems to be no enjoyment in either individual skill or team coordination. And it’s a game that has separate teams for offence and defence, and mispronounces both those words. Notoriety

I believe that quip should be credited to US columnist George Will, who thinks baseball is more of a mental game than football and could not be more wrong. bdure91

Everton’s outfield players averaged about 6½ miles (11km) each over the course of yesterday’s game. The average NFL player covers about 1¼ miles in a game, though that average includes players who hardly move at all, so running backs and wide receivers do a lot more running than that. I suspect the total includes the yards they trot on and off the field every time possession switches and the entire team is substituted. rab1827

I’m not here to defend the NFL, as I find it mind-numbingly boring. However, I’ve watched a family member in a high school football match and it was fantastic. I love rugby and this had many of the same features – evasion, physicality, passing etc. They didn’t faff around in huddles and the game progressed at a decent pace. So it’s not the sport that’s the problem, but the dull commercial juggernaut that is the NFL. Still, if you like ball in play time to be high, plus physicality, speed and skill, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t watch Australia’s NRL, which is by far the most entertaining elite contact sport competition I can think of. guyeverton

American football is made up of a series of plays. There is a lot of “downtime” in between them. However, this makes each play more potent: the players can substitute to keep high levels of physicality involved as they tire, and either team can score in any play. It’s a your best shot v mine with strategy at levels of chess combined with human physicality, magic and error. Other sports, for example British football, run closer to the clock time, but most of the match is spent passing the ball around at the back, not actively trying to score, but to control possession waiting for an opening. Personally I find this very boring. LinkyLee

Pro basketball is similar to American football in the amount of playing time v non-playing time. A typical NBA game lasts 135 to 150 minutes while the ball is in play for only 48 minutes (four 12-minute quarters). Football (soccer) is better, but not by as much as you might think. In a typical Premier League game the ball is in play for about 60 minutes. Including stoppage time, the game ends at about 95 minutes, so it’s out of play for 35-ish minutes. If you add the 15 minutes for the half-time interval, you end up with 50 minutes of non-playing time and 60 minutes of playing time – still balanced in favour of playing, but not by much. Dave Mellinger, via email

Relative skydiving. Cumulative airtime is logged. So, say, six jumps over a weekend adds two minutes to your total! It might take 120 jumps to reach an hour. Two whole days have been taken up with travelling to and from the drop zone, running around helping others, packing club rigs, counting the points of other teams, planning, helping with the manifest, and getting home at least two hours later thanyou might have said. gedparker

So, don’t go skydiving with relatives. karmakuiama

Similarly for downhill skiing: hours spent queueing for the lift up, seconds spent getting back to the bottom. Rinse and repeat. rab1827

Or scuba: a complex deep dive will have lots of planning. Then travel, etc, and once you’ve done it you can’t do it again for a time. wjelly

Potentially sumo? Most bouts last a few seconds (it feels like most to me, anyway), and there’s a four or five-minute wait between each bout.

Joluku

Chess. I paid £20 to watch Nigel Short v Garry Kasparov, game 6 of the World Chess Championship in 1993. Three and a half hours of non-playing in the sense of only thinking. The actual physical action of moving the pieces of wood probably added up to three minutes or so in total. For long periods one or the other wasn’t even on the stage at the board. It was a draw. And it was fantastic! BobDoran

But is thinking “sport”, from a spectator’s point of view? Is thinking in American football distinguishable from thinking in chess or in cricket? It may be, if the spectators are busy thinking about the same thing the players are; but what if they’re just thinking “I must put the spuds on to boil” while a scrum is reset five times? jno50

I remember when they tried to televise live chess. They would join a game randomly for 20 minutes and would be lucky if a player actually made a move in that time! Peter_l

And that was the highlights. BobDoran

I went to the Magnus Carlsen v Fabiano Caruana chess world championship in London a few years ago. Similar situation as you described. And I was hooked too (even though every match finished in a draw). Bakwaas

If you can nominate chess based on the ratio of time when things are happening v the time preparing … I nominate target shooting. Mike345

Golf. Less than three seconds to hit the ball, more than four hours to complete the game! Graham Miller, via email

I still think it’s Test cricket, because for a substantial amount of time between the start and end of the match, the players are actually asleep. Presumably a five-day Test match is considered to include the three nights that have play on either side of them; then there are breaks for lunch and breaks for tea, and then rain stops play … SpoilheapSurfer

When I worked in north-west London’s few years ago, we had to keep an eye on the score, because if it was close, things changed quickly; the snoozing 30 or so old guys watching the first few days would suddenly be swelled by the arrival of fans from all over the city, driving over in a crazy hurry to catch the interesting 45 minutes or so when those at bat got within 50. b971mutant

Test matches are superb. The strategy, the field selection, the batting, the bowlers, the hundreds of decisions each team makes, the way a game can change over four innings. If a match goes the full five days and goes right down to the wire – it’s brilliant. Now T20 – no thanks. No time to build an innings, no long bowling spells, just whack and smash for 120 balls and let off some fireworks. karris

Yes, while you could say that there are 103 hours between the scheduled start of play in a test match and the scheduled close, with planned breaks for the players to eat, take tea and sleep, this means that the game is in some sense “live” throughout whole 24-hour periods and can thus be followed while still active anywhere in the world. With shorter formats, if you can’t follow while the game is being played, all you can follow is results, and there’s less interest in that. FlightlessHedgehog

Rugby union: the ball is in play for about 35-40 minutes. OldHairyNose

I think the England v South Africa semi-final in 2023, taking place in the rain, had less than 30 minutes in play. PeteTheBeat

And they still run about five miles. RichWoods

I once went to an ice hockey game. Similar experience. They play for an hour, split into three 20-minute parts. It’s very stop-start, and every time it stops so does the clock. It took 50 minutes to play the first 20-minute block. That was as much as I could stand, and we left. Peter_l

Other than the two intermissions to manage the ice, hockey is the fastest-paced, most consistent sport, with the least interruptions. JohnDough

If you exclude thinking time, and only count ball (or equivalent) in play time, then most sports have less time playing than not: snooker, darts, tennis, cricket, baseball, curling. Rugby has a lot of standing around with the ball out of play, often with the clock running. Soccer, hockey (both types), basketball are exceptions. It really depends what you consider to be playing the game. American football is quite strategic, but the strategising is between plays. A golfer would argue that walking between shots is part of playing the game. For American footballers the huddle is part of playing. From a spectator perspective, both are equally dull. Begamot

The France v Wales Six Nations rugby union match in March 2017, when referee Wayne Barnes ordered 12 scrum resets after full-time. He even sin-binned a player who had time to come back on, it took so long. We were there and couldn’t believe it. LMCollis