Missing you already

Every Monday the Guardian Sport section have a backpage feature called 'Stats that aren't true but ought to be'.

Here's one -

17 seconds - the average length of time after Steve Smith comes on to bowl that it takes one of the commentators to mention another bleach blonde Australian leg spinner.

I Can See For Miles

Or not, as the case may be...

"Although I'm a good psychic, I never saw this one coming."

Hiatus

Sorry about the recent lack of posts.

I got a bit pre-occupied with the election, and even fleeing to Spain to avoid the inevitable Tory crowing didn't work. By the time we got back they'd only just sorted out the mess and the Liberal Democrats had sold their soul for a few seats in the cabinet.

More posts soon, so keep checking in.

That was the week that was

Alleged corruption
Influence peddling
Tax evasion
Bomb explosions (two of them)
Missing documents
Collusion
Two men fighting over a South African model

It makes the 'Stanford Experiment seem positively idyllic.

As a poster on the Guardian website said -

"All this, and Cameron imploding too. It's been a good week for Schadenfreude fans."

It's a rich man's world.

KP feels that England bowlers should have made more of an effort to get involved in the IPL. (Link)

He has a point, in terms of making yourself into a better player by competing against the best opposition you can find, but his main contention really is symptomatic of where cricket is heading at the moment -

"The difficulty in England when the IPL came about was that it was all a question of money, money, money. But it has become a 'World Cup' tournament."

In my book 'World Cup tournaments' don't take place every year - or at ten month intervals, which is the gap between the T20 World Cup in England last summer and the next one in the West Indies in a few weeks time.

And it's still very much a question of 'money money money'.

Crossing the Indian Ocean with the Adverts

A friend of mine is currently working out in Mumbai. We spoke on the phone a couple of days ago and his default position had moved to permanent incredulity when discussing the IPL.

'Every game is sold in the same way the FA Cup Final is in the UK - massive build up, pre-match analysis, posters and flags all over the place - and that's just for a simple group game. Lord knows what it's like when the final is on - the whole country is likely to explode.'

'The quantity of ads during play is remarkable. It makes Sky look restrained. They even manage to slot ads in between balls!'

The commentators are like that Hollywood director who said 'start with an earthquake and build up from there'

'One ball' or 'No ball'...

There's no other word for this but mind-boggling.

“He had come to them one day and asked whether he might watch an eleven of cricket at play so as to become initiated into the mysteries of our national game,” writes Locker- Lampson. “They welcomed him, of course, and wrote out the rules for him in the best British sport-loving spirit.”

First reaction was the check the dateline, making sure I hadn't accidentally slept away 14 days and it was now April 1st.

On closer perusal, you start to see the cracks - Rothermere actually owned The Daily Mail, not the Mirror - coining the charming headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' as Mosley's thugs were marching through the East End. Would Hitler have still been 'recovering from his wounds' five years after the war ended? And why were the British officers still in Germany at that time?

Then you realise that Mr Locker-Lampson MP was one of a frightening large group of Nazi sympathisers in the Tory Party at the time, so there's a big potential ulterior motive for trying to 'humanise' Hitler in this way.

So I'm calling 'bluff'.

Thanks to Tone for the heads up though.

A stroll round the boundary edge

A meander round the cricketing blogosphere, going from post to comment to post and so on, stopping to add our two-pennorth...

Starting with The Old Batsman's timely comparison of Graeme Swann and that chap who was going to be England's No. 1 spinner for about a decade... what was his name again?

From there, via the comments box, we have Wes's thoughts on the Australian top order and a possible replacement for Marcus North.

Then Andrew F at the alarmingly named 'Cricket or Death' site is hell bent on bigging up Angelo Matthews.

At Bored Cricket Crazy Indians, they manage to shoehorn Vince McMahon, Volleyball and Sepp Blatter into the same piece...

Remaining on the sub-continent, which after all is where all the action is at the moment, Naked Cricket starts a post by asking what if Sachin Tendulkar played for Pakistan? Brave man!

Finally, for now, Soulberry looks at the whole issue of cricketers with potty mouths.

If a picture paints a thousand words...

John Howard set to become head of the ICC.

That'll be this happy old soul!

Happy Idiot

A positive and negative from yesterdays victory over the 'mighty mighty Bangladesh' -

Positive - Eion Morgan's innings, which was the best English ODI effort I've seen since Paul Collingwood in Australia on the 2006/2007 'tour that never gets mentioned'.

Negative - Bob Willis's commentary. I know I've banged on about this before but, seriously, it almost made the broadcast unwatchable. At times it was like watching the game with an eight year old schoolgirl, but one with a whole series of petty vendettas she wants to carry out against most of the England side.

The sound of relish, approaching jubilation, in his voice when Broad spilled the skyer off of Collingwood was astonishing (this from someone who was a veritable carthorse in the field during his career) as was the similar reaction when Wright, Swann and Bresnan got themselves out in quick succession.

It seems that his pre-ordained agenda is that England are pathetic - anything that supports that contention is treated with a strange mixture of barely disguised glee with faux outrage.

It's just a shame that the slight time delay means you can't turn the sound down and listen to the radio broadcast instead, like in the good ol' days.