Archive: September, 2009

Ravi Bopara is keen but not too keen

He’s confident without being arrogant; humble without being meek; aggressive without being irresponsible; watchful without being bogged down.

That’s what he’d say anyway. England’s cricketers know they have to say the right things and it’s painful to hear at times. They have to remain positive otherwise the media call them weak-minded and if they’re too positive, they’re branded complacent or cocky.

Bopara’s been talking about how he aims to get big scores that win matches for England:

“I am desperate to do that. Not over-desperate because that’s when things can go wrong, but I want to be the main man for England.”

What is the optimum level of desperation?

An Ashes win equals big money

You’re an England player. You’ve won the Ashes. You get in touch with your agent:

“Commercial opportunities. What have you got for me?”

Your agent’s silent a minute and you can hear him shuffling some papers on his desk.

“Hello. Are you there? Commercial opportunities. What have you got?”

Your agent clears his throat and says: “Er… belts?”

Matt Prior clearly did some DAMN GOOD WORK on this photo shoot, but Stuart Broad seems to be a rank amateur, so they made him say some stuff as well:

“I absolutely love the Druh Belts range and the colours are just amazing. They’re perfect to wear on a casual night out with jeans or with chinos and a jacket for a more formal look that is just a bit different.”

Everyone loves chino-friendly belts.

Day night Test cricket

Our knee jerk-reaction to suggestions that day-night Test cricket be played was that it was a shocker of an idea. We’ve always thought of knee-jerk reactions as being worth clinging to in the face of subsequent strong evidence against your point of view, but on this occasion we’re softening our stance.

Day-night Test cricket has a place in this world. However, that place is not England.

We can well imagine enjoying a balmy night of Test cricket in Sri Lanka or southern India. If it’s unbearably hot and humid by day, it makes sense to play when the sun’s gone down as it’ll still be warm.

In England, the sun definitely helps when you’re watching cricket – especially in May, when England appear intent on scheduling a day-night Test match against Bangladesh next year.

The ECB suffer from all three major types of retardation.

Tim Paine, Australia’s wicketkeeper

Name of a professional wrestler.

Face of a junior tennis player from the Home Counties.

Are you sick of 50 over cricket?

The conventional one-day game is probably the least popular format in England right now.

Seven 50 over matches have been tacked onto the end of a summer that’s already seen a Test and one-day series against the West Indies, the Twenty20 World Cup, the Ashes and what would have been a couple more Twenty20 matches if it hadn’t pissed it down. That scheduling hasn’t done the format any favours, but even without that, people are getting a bit tired of it.

People have talked about getting shot of 50 over cricket altogether and we’ve a lot of sympathy with that point of view, but we wonder whether it would be worth retaining the World Cup.

When we say that, we mean retain just the World Cup – no other one-day internationals whatsoever. It’s kind of harsh on some of the associate nations who rely on one-day cricket fixtures, but we like the idea of all the world’s best players getting together only once every four years and just about nobody having the first clue what’s likely to happen.

It would be an event and it would be worth talking about.

England’s one-day cricket and life

We’re warming to the idea that England’s one-day cricket is like life – all crushing disappointments and anticlimax.

You want to be a winner. You want to succeed. You try so very hard to become competent at something, but everything you learn seems to be immediately rendered irrelevant by some development in the wider world. You’re irresistibly drawn to mediocrity whatever you do and more people than you can count are massively disappointed in you pretty much all of the time.

You’re there in body, but essentially you’re just killing time until the umpire raises his finger.

It’s a time of pessimism and things dying

Autumn. The cricket season ends. The plants die. Every sunny day is tainted with the thought that it might be the last. On the field there’s the Pro40 and one-day internationals and all there is to look forward to is the Champions’ Trophy. If a cricket tournament could be a November Sunday morning in Redcar, then the Champions’ Trophy would be just that.

We’ll be honest. We’re struggling a bit right now. But don’t worry, we’ve got a ludicrously buoyant post coming up tomorrow that’s all sunshine and positivity. It’s about England’s one-day cricket as a metaphor for life.

How old is Brett Lee?

Brett Lee is nearly 33, but he’s tried to obscure this fact by getting a spiky haircut.

Unfortunately, spikiness is only considered a youthful hair quality among the middle-aged, so Lee’s made an error here. It’s the kind of hair that looks like it should have a Global Hypercolour T-shirt underneath it – and in fact, in that one-day kit, it pretty much does.

That said, he’s still bowling at 95mph, so he’s not quite ready to embrace caravan holidays just yet.

Ashes or one-day cricket?

As an England supporter, it’s tempting to think that you’d take the Ashes over a one-day series win.

No other nationality would think like this. Most people would at least entertain the idea that their side could win both and might even be persuaded into thinking that they were in fact more likely to win a one-day series after beating the same opponents in Test cricket.

But we’re not like that. We’re English. We’ve won the Ashes and now we have to pay for it. Life is about enduring almost perpetual misery to justify fleeting moments of happiness.

It’s about three months of rain making one day of sunshine so much more cheering. It’s about growing up eating corned beef sandwiches so that you can go abroad when you’re older and be impressed by every meal. It’s about having Optimus Prime for a day, accidentally breaking his arm off and then having a rubbish, one-armed Optimus Prime for three years, at which point his other arm breaks off and you’ve got a no-armed Optimus Prime from then on.

In short, it’s mostly about being unhappy.

England cricketers playing football

We know that many of you spent your childhoods betting how many quail eggs your servants could find in half an hour, but we went to a normal school.

We played football pretty much every day for five years and never once got injured. When England’s cricketers get a football out, it’s like a battle scene from Braveheart. Even Andrew Strauss admits it, saying ‘it gets the blood flowing’.

Joe Denly’s injured this time, but Matt Prior and James Anderson have also fallen foul of this seemingly life-threatening sport within the last year or so.

Maybe this is what happens when you pit competitive individuals against each other in a sport they can’t play. We move that the ECB force the players to wear huge foam costumes when they warm-up from now on, like from It’s A Knockout.