Is this the same West Indies side we watched letting balls through their legs at Old Trafford last year? With the honourable exception of Sir Shiv of Guyana they were a shower and were soundly beaten in the series by a rather flattered England side.

Australia seem to have had a few hiccups against them though. They were bowled out for 167 during the first Test, drew the second and are now 226-7 in the third. This isn’t very intimidating.

Australia will land in England this time next year. Come on everybody, there are only 365 days in which to pretend that things might turn out all right after all before reality ruins everything. Let’s make the most of this short halcyon period.

Tags: Australia, West Indies by King Cricket
6 Comments »

Thanks to Sir Allen Stanford, England will play a West Indies XI for a £10 million prize every year for the next five years. Each player on the winning team will get £500,000. Wish we had the job of picking the England side.

“You’ll get half a million quid. You’ll get half a million quid. You? You won’t get half a million quid. Why? Well it was a close-run thing, but I think Player A’s in slightly better form. Okay? Any problems?”

Player A will get a duck.

Of course it won’t really be a problem for the team, because they’re all mature adults. You know how mature everyone is when it comes to money. No-one ever gets bent out of shape over money. Particularly not HUGE amounts of money.

No problem at all.

Tags: England, West Indies by King Cricket
11 Comments »

Not many people would be undersold by a title like Lord Megachief of Gold, but Shiv is. If you haven’t been paying attention to the West Indies v Australia Test series - it has been clashing with crucial County Championship division two fixtures after all - you’ll not know how the rickety crab’s been doing.

He’s been doing well.

He hit a hundred in the first Test and he hit an unbeaten hundred in the second Test. The world might be chock-full of things that are frightening and new, but Shiv is Shiv and we can all sleep at nights knowing that’s always going to be the case.

Tags: Australia, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, West Indies by King Cricket
42 Comments »

In January we said that Andrew Symonds had disproved our feeling that he wasn’t the man you wanted at the crease if you’d lost early wickets and everyone rounded on us for not thinking he was the mutt’s nuts even sooner.

So we’re a bit uncertain what to say about his invaluable, counter-punching 79 yesterday. We’ve a vague suspicion that the title of the update has more bearing than the content itself, so we’ll test that.

Australia were 18-5 when he came in and if that’s not being in trouble, then what is? It was a fantastic knock, wresting back momentum from a West Indian bowling attack that rather pleasingly thought it was of a Seventies or Eighties vintage, rather than the inspid modern equivalent.

Tags: Andrew Symonds, Australia, West Indies by King Cricket
2 Comments »

This was the perfect example of how great batsmen play the situation. Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s an obdurate Test batsman. He hangs around for hours. In one-day cricket, he’s a different beast. He’s A BEAST OF WRATH. Controlled wrath, but wrath nonetheless.

The West Indies needed ten to win off the last two balls against Sri Lanka yesterday. It didn’t matter that they were nine wickets down, both balls had to exit the field of play. Shiv hit a four and then calmly volleyed a six. Job done.

You don’t get the coveted Lord Megachief of Gold title without being half decent, but Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s continuing to justify his selection.

Chamara Kapugedera had earlier hit a rescue act 95 after Sri Lanka had been 49-5. Kapugedera’s played a few matches, but this is one of the first signs that it might be worth learning his name. Maybe one day ‘Chamara Kapugedera’ will trip off the tongue as easily as ‘Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Lord Megachief of Gold’.

Tags: Chamara Kapugedera, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Sri Lanka, West Indies by King Cricket
19 Comments »

Burns in, takes 3-18, tricks you into thinking he’s finally arrived as a fast bowler, then takes 0-32 in his next spell and finally ends up with those same three wickets for about 120.

Stupid, round-armed short-arse.

Tillakaratne Dilshan’s saving Sri Lanka with 58 not out off 57 balls. We can’t quite believe that he’s 31 and we can’t quite believe that he’s averaging 37 in Tests. We thought both figures were lower. Another mindless, autopilot article about young players finally coming good goes begging.

Once upon a time, we weren’t bound by ‘facts’ and wrote what we felt like.

Tags: Fidel Edwards, Sri Lanka, Tillakaratne Dilshan, West Indies by King Cricket
4 Comments »

Malinda Warnapura was out first ball on his debut against Bangladesh, but he’s avoided following in Marvan Atapattu’s footsteps since then.

Atapattu benefitted from a good deal of generosity from the Sri Lankan selectors at the start of his career. His first few innings read as follows: 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 and 0. Even then he hardly set the world alight, continuing with: 25, 22, 0, 25, 14, 4, 7, 10, 26, 19 and 29, before finally breaking 30 in an innings of 108 against India in his 18th Test knock.

Malinda Warnapura shrugged off his ignominious debut to hit 82 in his second Test, thus avoiding the nickname ‘Atapatthree’ that we’ve just thought of and will have to file away until someone actually does make a dreadful start to their Test batting career. This week, against the West Indies, Warnapura continued with the run-scoring, hitting 120 and 62.

He seems like he’s all right against pace and he can’t be too bad against spin being as he scored successive hundreds when Sri Lanka A participated in the Duleep trophy - in much the same way as the England Lions batsmen didn’t, earlier this year. He managed to slip in 243 against Bangladesh A as well, not long after. Add to that a few years playing for Mirfield in the Central Yorkshire Cricket League and you’ve got quite a rounded batsman - and not in a Jesse Ryder way.

Sri Lanka won the Test. Chaminda Vaas took five wickets. Good (increasingly) old Chaminda Vaas.

Tags: Malinda Warnapura, Marvan Atapattu, Sri Lanka, West Indies by King Cricket
4 Comments »

Do you want the better batsman or the better wicketkeeper behind the stumps for your team? That argument’s been represented by any number of individual duels over the years. Recently though, we think you’ll all agree that the better batsman’s been winning out, in general.

Blame Adam Gilchrist. He’s a great wicketkeeper, but his batting’s so spectacular it easily overshadows that fact. International sides want wicketkeepers who average 50 now, let alone 40. They’ll never get it because Gilchrist’s a one-off, but it won’t stop them trying.

But there might be some hope for the thoroughbred stumpers. Might Twenty20, that impure bastard version of the game, bring wicketkeeping skills to the fore once more?

Here’s our rationale - obliterate it in the comments with your usual gusto. How many batsmen do you need in Twenty20 cricket? How many do you really, really need? We reckon five - five specialists at any rate.

Presumably at least one of your five bowlers won’t be Tufnell-esque and presumably any eligible keepers are at least half-competent with the bat. If you’re serious about winning, then you don’t really want to be losing more than five wickets in 20 overs. Things aren’t going your way if that happens.

So you can fairly happily pick your best keeper. And you know what - there’s an added incentive.

In Twenty20 cricket, with scoring being so low and tight, batsmen get cheeky. It’s not totally unknown for them to take a run off a ball which goes straight through to the keeper. They like to jump around as well to disrupt the bowler’s line and length, coming down the pitch or batting out of their crease.

So wouldn’t it help if you had a keeper who was good enough to stand up to the stumps to fast-medium bowlers? No cheeky byes. No batting out of the crease. The wicketkeeper’s having a real impact there.

Twenty20: saviour of the wicketkeeping tradition. There’d be a touch of irony in that.

Tags: Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Zimbabwe, county cricket, wicketkeeping by King Cricket
8 Comments »

Despite Shiv’s bat and Dwayne Bravo’s best efforts with the ball, South Africa look like getting a first innings lead. This is a shame because while the Windies might continue to put up a fight while ahead, you feel that they’re liable to crumble if they fall behind. You never know, mind.

The architect of the West Indies’ destruction was Dale Steyn. This is good, because the world needs fast bowlers, but as we said above, it’s bad for the match. He took 4-60.

We used to work with someone called Dale. He was small and ginger and was allegedly training to be a wrestler. Not that his hair colour had anything to do with it - he was going bald, you see.

On a barely-related training note, we’ve recently started ‘running’ again. ‘Running’ appears to be a form of bouncing walk from what we’ve achieved thus far. We’re pretty sure we’re doing it right.

Despite having calf muscles that are so minuscule as to be invisible to the naked eye, this ‘running’ has led to stiffness and pain in that area far in excess of what might realistically justified by the muscle mass.

We mention this only because we’re a ‘pom’ and therefore obliged to whinge. This is the first opportunity we’ve had to fulfil that remit in the last two years.

Australians can talk anyway. Who else would ever whinge about their Test side winning too often and too easily? Now that’s REALLY making an effort to whinge. At least the English have got some worthwhile whinging subject matter.

This post’s rather gone off-topic, hasn’t it?

Tags: Dale Steyn, South Africa, West Indies by King Cricket
3 Comments »

He’s got more than his fair share of elbows and knees, but that hasn’t prevented him being given the highest honour in international cricket; the award that the players most respect and yearn for. This year’s Lord Megachief of Gold is Shivnarine Chanderpaul.

England might have spent most of winter watching Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene do their thing, but every match they played against West Indies revolved around this man.

Chanderpaul started the year with 149 not out off 137 balls against India and pretty much took it from there. He averaged 76 in one-day internationals in 2007, hitting four unbeaten hundreds in 20 matches, but it was Test cricket where we spent most time watching him.

The West Indies played England this year and lost 3-0, but that was no fault of Shiv’s. His five innings in the series were 74, 50, 116 not out, 136 not out and 70. In the other Test he’s played this year, against South Africa, he hit 104 and, disappointingly, eight.

We saw that 116 not out at Old Trafford. Much of it was made on a fifth day pitch and in the company of tail-enders and it was an absolute masterpiece. A real, genuine, stand-the-test-of-time, against-the-odds masterpiece. It wasn’t first-day domination on a flat pitch, punishing the bowlers. It was an innings where the conditions, the bowling and the match situation were against him.

When the West Indies lost their last wicket, Shiv shook his head in disappointment. Never mind that he’d played a superlative innings, it was worthless to him. All he’d wanted was to succeed in what would have been a world record run-chase.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s the perfect example as to why you shouldn’t think of batsmen as solely one-day players or solely Test players until you’ve seen them in both formats.

If the first time you saw him was in a one-day international, playing the ball over the top and squirting it into ‘unusual areas’, you’d think he’d never make a Test player. You’d say his ‘technique’ was no such thing.

Conversely, if the first time you saw him was in a Test, as he batted for ten hours scoring about one run an over, you’d say he didn’t have the range of shots or the speed of scoring to warrant a place in a one-day side. Just goes to show that the best batsmen are adaptable.

It also shows that sidling around the crease like the Artful Dodger with rickets is no barrier to success.

onlinecasinosuite.com - the best online casino sites and poker rooms

Tags: Shivnarine Chanderpaul, West Indies by King Cricket
10 Comments »