Faith, facts and failure in Test cricket

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Faith is what you need when you don’t have facts. More accurately, faith is what you resort to when you don’t have facts – ‘need’ isn’t the right word. Faith is a way of sticking your head in the sand and even when you’re looking for something at the beach, that’s rarely a productive pastime.

The pertinent fact regarding Bangladesh is this: most of their players are 24. This explains their miss-and-hit-and-miss Test efforts to some degree, but it increasingly seems to us that not a year goes by without all of their ages going up. Not one year. Not one, single year.

We’ll never resort to faith when backing Bangladesh, which is why we’ve wavered a bit after they lost a Test match to Zimbabwe. The 4-0 one-day series win over New Zealand is still fresh enough in our mind that we’ll forgive them this blemish, but it would be good if they could help their own cause a little more.

Sometimes it feels like being a real die-hard fan of a band who you always thought had a lot of promise. You keep going to the gigs, you convince yourself there’s still a spark, but eventually you find yourself in Fibbers in York and there’s nine people in the audience.

As you’re walking into the toilet before the band have gone on, the lead singer walks out and says: “You’re not going for a shit are you mate? Only I’ve pissed all over the seat.”

It is at that moment that you finally accept that the promise was only ever a fleeting illusion.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

8 comments

  1. I like a bit of Bangladesh but I love a lot of Zimbabwe, always have. This was an awesome effort by them, regardless of any seatpissing.

    1. Yep – there’s nothing wrong with sticking with a perennially underachieving team through thin and thin, just waiting for that special victory to come along, but it seems you’ve backed the wrong perennially underachieving team.

      Hang on to your hats – this is the start of a roller-coaster ride for Zimbabwe. You know, one of those roller-coasters that has a very small hill at the start and then bumbles along at the lowest possible level for the rest of the ride. The Underachievinator, or something like that.

  2. Well, Zimbabwe have Ray Price and Taibu, they’re pretty much lovable by default. Bangladesh, though, that must be an effort.

    1. We contacted an SEO professional. He said: “You need to up your SEO count. Your number of SEOs is not high enough.”

      We asked what we had to do to increase the number. He told us to say ‘shit’.

      We don’t dare argue with experts.

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