Boring but Practical/Sports

• Hand-to-hand fighting:
  • Certainly martial arts styles like Tae Kwon Do and Capoeira seem very visually appealing, with all the fancy flips, cartwheels and jump kicks, but even these flashier ones usually cut the crap in serious situations.
  • In most competitive martial arts sparring, 95% of the points are scored with the most basic moves.
  • In Mixed Martial Arts, basics have dominated, and coaches will often chastise their fighter if they try to go crazy. Exotic submissions and acrobatic striking moves rarely work, though some fighters have developed reputations for the efficacy of their flashier moves.
  • Grappling and wrestling overall are often regarded as this trope in MMA fights. Fighters often manage to simply control their opponents for the duration of the fight en route to a safe decision victory than take a chance with more exciting offensive moves for a stoppage.
• The neutral zone trap in hockey. Essentially, it's a very heavy defensive strategy that prevents the attacking team from getting close to the net by pinning them in the neutral zone with no way to get around the defense. Critics complain it is extremely boring to watch (neither team really gets a lot of scoring chances as a result,) but if done effectively it is very difficult to beat.
• Baseball:
  • The majority of runs are scored as a result of "boring" things like walks and singles. Home runs are great when they happen, but even the most prolific home run hitters can hit a home run only about once every thirteen plate appearances on average. Plus watching a baseball team play as a team, emphasizing practical base hits and competent fielding and generally playing baseball rather than playing prima donna is a pleasure in itself.
  • Walking in itself could be considered this. For most of baseball's history, no one paid much attention to the ability to draw walks, and batting average, which did not take walks into account, was by far the most widely-used statistic to measure offensive output. With the rise of sabremetrics, or objective statistical analysis, in the twenty-first century, the value of the base on balls has since come to be recognized, to the point where it's no longer an undervalued skill.
• American Football: Big passes and fancy trick plays are crowd-pleasers. But teams can often get even more mileage out of quick passes to the center of the field. It's not difficult to get 5 or 6 yards minimum per pass this way, and if you have a good tight end or receiving tailback, or a wideout that runs a lot of short patterns to the middle, they can rack up yardage while the big-play players are given more coverage. A team who can get consistent gains on boring runs up the middle will quickly wear out the opposing defense, which will leave their opponent helpless to stop either their running or their passing attacks in the late stages of the game. This is why there were so many Super Bowl routs from the mid-'80s to '90s: the AFC teams, with their flashy passing attacks led by quarterbacks from the 1983 draft class and their light 3-4 defenses, were physically dominated by the power running games and smash-mouth defenses of NFC teams of the time.
• In basketball, two of the most reliable sources of points are layups and free throws. Also, the shot clock was introduced largely to eliminate the viability of the "four corner offense", actually more of a defensive tactic which consisted mostly of passing the ball around without even trying to get a shot for as much as five minutes at a time.
• Played straight (and later subverted) in Association Football, which suffered from an overdose of Boring but Practical heavy defensive tactics during the early 2000's.
  • Johan Cruijff's quip: "Football is simple, but the hardest thing there is, is to play simple football."
  • The catenaccio or counter-attacking family of tactics falls under a similar category. The aim is for the team to defend with as many as 10 men, whilst only one or two players remain in attacking positions, hoping to get to a loose ball and create an opportunity from it. Due to the difficulty of attacking a team that is defending with many players (especially when done well, like Inter in the 50s/60s) added to the lack of attacks created by a team using this technique, many pundits now call this "anti-football". It is however extremely effective in levelling chances between teams of different level, so most teams that expect to lose a game will play in this fashion.
  • In football, heavy defense tactics are meant to frustrate the opponent team by preventing it from scoring in any way possible. This goads the opponents into attacking your goal more desparately, while you wait for a "lucky break" for a surprise attack on their weakened defenses. At this point, the heavy-defenders then usually go into an even heavier defensive to protect this advantage in score, making it even less likely to see more goals later in the game. The result, for everyone but the diehard fans of the defensive team, is that the majority of the game is itself extremely frustrating and usually promises a very small final score (1-0 and such). The period culminated in the 2002 World Cup, where the German team made extremely effective use of this technique for the majority of the tournament, winning the first three elimination rounds at exactly 1-0 each. However, this was subverted when they lost the final to the Brazilians, against whom defensive tactics don't usually work.
  • Boring but Practical came back with Greece's performance two years later, at the UEFA Euro 2004, winning the whole tournament in the process.
  • Also, Chelsea beat the flashy and seemingly undefeatable Barcelona in the 2012 UEFA Champions League with this extreme defense (at times, 9 or 10 players would be next to the goal...).
• Mountain climbing has lots of cool gadgets. But Mount Everest was conquered with a lot of Sherpa porters backs. Not to mention their oxygen rich blood which even their cousins from neighboring tribes don't have.
• One of the best ways to fish, assuming you don't care about having a challenge, or about collateral damage to random other fish is to toss something explosive into the water and depth charge the fish. Most fishermen do not regularly pack grenades of course but it has been known for soldiers tired of rations to do this when they pass a body of water.