Posted by There was a phenomenon in Premier Manager 2 where all of your team’s young players would improve by about 20 per cent over the summer break. If you stacked your side with teenagers and managed to avoid the sack, you were all but guaranteed promotion the following season.
Has something similar happened with Nottinghamshire’s Jake Ball? Has he gone from being Very Good ***** to Outstanding? Those five asterisks denote the highest level of Very Good, by the way. Don’t count them wondering whether we’re being filthy.
Ball’s said to have added the clichéd yard of pace over the winter (when will cricket go metric?) and has duly taken a five-for in the first match of the season. April is just about the worst time to judge a seamer though. It’s a little like judging an Olympic rifle competitor by how many barrel-fish they can shoot. Still, it’s all we’ve got to go off at the minute, so we might as well count the carcasses.
Five. Plus one in the first innings.
Fortunately, the modern world being what it is, we’ve more to go off than in days gone by. Nowadays we can get wrong-end footage of events in the County Championship.
Here’s some wrong end footage of Jake Ball’s five-for.
Someone @englandcricket should consider? Watch @JakeBall30's excellent five-for at @TrentBridge earlierhttps://t.co/sgyvied2yy
— County Championship (@CountyChamp) April 13, 2016
I do love a little bit of wrong end footage to whet my appetite for seeing county cricket again.
Thank you, KC.
I have several questions.
Was Premier Manager the one where you could bet on your own team to lose?
And does Jake Bell have enough room for us all to keep our tabs on him?
And will it be our cans of Tab Clear, or our Northern cigarettes (or our “second or further documents or pages that can be opened on a spreadsheet or web browser”) that we will be struggling to balance on his head?
It was the one that DID have Witton Albion in it.
However, while you couldn’t bet against them, you could launch a two-player game and sell all of Halifax’s best players to them. At that point, you could retire player two with player one continuing in charge of a Vauxhall Conference superteam.
We’ve previously claimed on this website that Witton Albion weren’t in Premier Manager 2. That is incorrect.
http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/if-zimbabwe-are-woeful-what-are-bangladesh/2011/03/04/
We’re just like a proper newspaper with this corrections and clarifications page.
This astonishing article raises two very serious points. Firstly, wrong-end coverage was exactly half of all cricket coverage in the 80s. Any reversion to the Gold Standard of sport (the 80s) is by definition A Good Thing.
(I’m also a fan of the wrong-end wrong-angle coverage often seen on regional news round-ups from the grounds. A single camera on the third-man boundary is far and away the worst possible angle to view the game, and much to be admired for that.)
The second very serious point is that I can’t think of any five-letter swearwords, apart from plural versions of four-letter ones (chuff isn’t really a swear). Am I missing something obvious, or are five-letter words exceptionally puritanical as a group?
“Shite” surely counts.
Also “Shane” and “Warne”.
Surely *****?
Or even *****?
I want all cricket coverage to be first person. Stick a camera on every player’s head.
Oh wait, it’s obvious! Just think: what is Giles Clarke?
…not meant to be a reply to Daneel’s swear-free comment, strictly speaking.
Disappointing. I thought someone was replying to me.
You Giles.
First person shooter games suck. Hate counterstrike, love MaxPayne.
Granted that’s a weird reply to your comment, but a reply nonetheless. And a stinging one, mind you.
He’s a fuckwit (7), a twat (4) and an arsehole (8), to name but a few. I’ve a decent few more (4)s as well, but no (5)s.
Also, Giles doesn’t really work, because of Ashley and Brandreth.
Prick (5)
Good call from Deep Cower, but I was thinking of “twunt”.
Also I’m an RPG fan myself. The genre not the gun.
http://bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/35884471
Found the BBC county season preview a bit underwhelming, but it did contain a fascinating gem of information.
Leicestershire have two County Championship wins in three years.
Which leaves me wondering, who were the other county to win the title in this time?
Ah, the halcyon days of Phil Simmons, Vince Wells, Iain Sutcliffe, Darren Maddy, Aftab Habib, James Whitaker, Paul Nixon, David Millns, Alan Mullally, Jimmy Ormond…sniff.
Astonishingly, the team that won in-between was Glamorgan.
I forgot Ben Smith! (just like England did)
I have a strange feeling that this isn’t quite what Auntie intended to refer to, but great call.
(Can we call their online offering “Auntie” or is that only telly and radio? I have only seen their web coverage reduced to “the beeb” which doesn’t seem as homely somehow.)