Because this is about Andrew Flintoff.
Flintoff hid a blinding fifty and produced match-winning bowling figures of 3-17 off his four overs in Lancashire’s stunning Twenty20 quarter final victory over Middlesex, which might conceivably not have happened.
One thing’s for certain though, a man/boy who doesn’t know the difference between a W and a V didn’t hit a hundred for Middlesex. Nope. No sirree. No way.
Ssh.
Joe Denly hit a hundred. Go No Pants. Steve Harmison took four wickets. Durham still lost by a mile.
Essex beat Yorkshire.
The end.
Not literally under his captain. That would be painful, even allowing for Rob Key’s new, racing snake physique.
Against Surrey, Martin van Jaarsveld hit two unbeaten hundreds and took 5-33, even though he’d never taken more than two wickets in an innings before.
When asked what precipitated this rare spell of form, he responded:
“I’ve been having trouble with my backlift of late. I was trying to iron things out in the nets when Rob came past, mumbling. I think it was some sort of incantation because there was a sudden, blinding light and the next thing I know I’m in the physio’s room and my lunch money’s gone.
“Pretty much the same thing happened the next day and the day after that. By the first day of the Surrey match I was feeling a bit light-headed with having missed the majority of my meals, but there was a calmness in my delirium and everything just clicked.”
Van Jaarsveld then added: “The bowling was a fluke though.”
We’ve come up with an ingenious plan that will make England’s bowling attack the envy of the world: tell each of the bowlers that he’s playing for Durham.
Seriously. Tell someone - anyone - that they’re playing for Durham and they’ll take wickets. The presenters of Loose Women could take wickets in Durham shirts. Higgins from Magnum PI could get a five-fer.
Hell, even Ajit Agarkar could take wickets for Durham, just hand him the ball and point him at the stumps and he’d flatten batting line-ups like a steamroller flattens a plasticine Matthew Hayden voodoo doll.
Who’s Durham’s most successful bowler thus far this season? It’s impossible to tell.
Steve Harmison maybe, with 29 wickets at 23.10? That would be good enough for most sides.
Liam Plunkett’s just come back. He’s taken 6 wickets at 19.83. Mark Davies is doing Mark Davies things – 15 wickets at 21.93. Graham Onions has 13 wickets at 14.15.
That’s one whole overperforming bowling attack already, but there’s more. Ben Harmison has chipped in with nine wickets at 23.55 and Paul Collingwood has five at 12.40.
But still we’re not done. There’s also Callum Thorp.
Callum Thorp is a 33-year-old Australian who’s played just 28 first-class matches. In that time he’s taken 79 wickets. To put that in context, Steve Harmison, at 29, has taken 572. Even Paul Collingwood’s cracked 100.
Callum Thorp has taken 20 of his 79 wickets this season at an average of 17.65.
Someone tell us, does the Chester-le-Street pitch resemble that bit in our garden where we had a go at returfing?
He is both a cad and a bounder and you should beware his dandy ways.
24 first-class wickets at 40.62 and somehow he bowled Rob Key first ball.
Some facts about Jade Dernbach:
(1) His nickname is obviously - and also correctly - ‘Dirtbag’.
(2) He looks like a gone-to-seed Cristiano Ronaldo, only far less ugly.
(3) He would spend his last £10 on hair products. FACT.
One other fact that we like is that according to Cricinfo he was educated by St John the Baptist. At least that’s the way we’re choosing to read it, even if it is factually inaccurate.
It’s okay - it’s a good line. It’s the line you have to cross to get written about on King Cricket.
Tim Bresnan has been having one of those quietly productive seasons in which our Ones To Watch seem to specialise. Despite having taken more wickets than anyone else in division one so far this season - 29 at an average of 23.34 - his 5-94 against Durham yesterday was remarkably his first five-wicket haul.
Complementing his quietly productive bowling has been some quietly productive batting: 295 runs at an average of 49.16 with two fifties and no hundreds.
Liam Plunkett is making his first County Championship appearance of the season in the same match after playing a few Twenty20 games over the last few weeks. Plunkett is having a Bresnanian match himself. He took 3-70 and hit 68 not out, batting at nine.
Give Simon Jones a mop and present him with a flexible rear appendage and he will GET TO WORK.
Jones took 5-30 against Leicestershire yesterday, clean bowling eight, nine and ten to finish the innings. It’s not the first time this season he’s bulked up the wickets column by polishing off tail-enders, but the overall impression we’re getting is still of a bowler clefting county cricket in twain.
That’s right. You heard. Clefting county cricket in twain.
This is what we’re pommily whinging about. Graham Napier hit ‘mense amounts of runs off negligible balls due to a ‘mense number of sixes. Yet where’s our report?
Napier’s innings ended during the beer hours and we can’t be expected to remain coherent at that time.
How much more ‘mensely dissatisfied with our performance could our readership be? The answer, of course, is ‘none’ - none more ‘mensely dissatisfied.
We’re going to the Twenty20 match on Friday, then we’re away for a week. As usual we’ve written stuff in advance, so you probably won’t notice or care that we’re gone.
Two things:
(1) When we say we’re not going to be here - we’re not going to be here. If something monumental happens, it won’t be covered. There are no prizes for saying: ‘Hey, how come you haven’t written about Rob Key’s triple hundred/Mark Ramprakash’s hundredth hundred/Andrew Symonds’ sex change’.
(2) There’ll be no-one moderating comments. If you comment for the first time, it’ll be a week before it shows up.
However, if you’ve commented before, your comment appears straight away. With that in mind, maybe you should comment now. You know, just in case. We’ll moderate the comments this evening, give you the green light and then you can all enjoy yourselves while we’re away.
Presumably you’ve got nothing to say at this minute, so we’ve a commenting task for you. Name the county you support, only give them a better nickname than the crappy official one.
As you can see, we support Lancashire Lemurs or Lancashire Legomen. We like ‘Lancashire Lancastrians’ in a perverse sort of way too, but we suspect you’re ever-so-slightly less in thrall to really blunt stupidity, so we’ll play that one down.
See. See how we played it down.
Test duck-scoring shortarse with a point to prove, Ravi Bopara, proved his point weeks ago. Ravi’s now had his point embossed on his batting glove and his systematically punching everyone in the face with it. If you don’t know that Ravi Bopara is serious about playing for England, you’ll see it indented in your forehead next time you look in the mirror.
This season’s first-class average of 85.66 is better than okay. His Friends Provident Trophy average of 91 is mighty. Hitting a one-day double hundred - 201 not out to be precise - is just supreme.
One-day double hundreds are rare things indeed. No-one’s ever managed one in one-day internationals and this was only the eighth in senior limited overs history. The most recent was by Mohammad Ali for Customs v Defence in Pakistan. Not THE Mohammad Ali, we’d guess - a different one who’s hit 207 of his 752 one-day runs in one innings.
The highest one-day score of all time was Alistair Brown’s barely-believable 268 off 160 balls for Surrey against Glamorgan. Even more amazingly, that wasn’t Ali Brown’s only one-day double hundred. Nobody else has ever scored a second.
To return to Ravi Bopara, we previously said that his failures in Sri Lanka might have brought a technical flaw to his attention. Apparently it did. We also said that that might prove invaluable. Bopara says he’s worked on a few things and has eliminated one of his ways of getting out.
That word again: ‘eliminated’. Strong words. Strong words backed up by increasingly strong performances.