Sooner or later we all fall prey to the pitfalls old cricket club sages warned us about. You know the kind of people? The unreconstructed types that played cricket every Saturday and Sunday for 40 years despite being married with 6 kids. When asked for their secret they’d simply reply that they “tell the wife, straight…” These people are always a curious combination of Geoff Boycott’s boorish self-confidence laced with the pungent aroma of roll-ups and Ralgex. Try their aforementioned pearl of...
The Golden Age Of Umpires
I am conscious of my own personal preponderance to wallow in nostalgia of late. Something I should give up based on the adage that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Too many backward glances down the old barely lit paths of the mind – at best a dodgy incursion into loose slabs and hidden potholes. It’s fun in moderation but gets a bit Victor Meldrew if you linger too long. However, the news that Jack Hampshire died earlier this month has me pining for what I consider to be...
What Are Your ‘Stolen Moments’?
My childhood was eons ago. It was a world before the internet, blanket media and instantaneous access to information. A world that my kids think is somewhere between the Jurassic period and Victorian England. A dystopian world where dinosaurs routinely knocked down buildings and feasted on mangled chimney sweeps. My oldest son once participated in a school project that featured a picture of a Victorian school. All the children had to add a slogan to be pasted around the picture. His was simply...
The Ghosts of Cricket Past and Future
Back in those hard hitting and intoxicated days before Christmas and the New Year – a mere stitch back in time when the elastic on my trousers was relaxed and my liver chipper and fighting fit – I wrote a morose piece on Why Red Cards Have No Place In Cricket. I promised or threatened, depending on how you look at it, to write a follow up on why day/night Ashes Test Matches are akin to the anti-christ. Well, with the New Year unwinding and my belly reminiscent of a furiously pumped...
Red Cards Have No Place In Cricket
“Say it ain’t so Joe” the little kid may have said to Baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. Or Ray Liotta, depending on whether he had seen the movie “Field of Dreams” or not. What we do know is it has been repeated multiple times in a million schmaltzy Baseball books and films. I am beginning to know how the kid felt. I am experiencing the same dream shattering unease about Cricket and the direction that its supposed guardians want to take it. Two imminent changes are at the root cause of my...
About Gary Ballance, Batting and Toffee
“You can’t bat for toffee” a South African gentleman once told me in a club cricket match. At least I think it was toffee. The mind is apt to play tricks, so it may have been some other kind of confectionary or maybe not confectionary at all, and something altogether earthier. The thought struck me at the time that this was a slightly unfair and subjective statement. It’s all about the context and comparison of course. Compared to Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting – the chosen...
