I was on a stag weekend when I watched England’s dismal capitulation against Pakistan on Saturday. It didn’t quite ruin the occasion – when you go to a rugby match with a bloke dressed up in monkey costume, it’s kind of hard not to have a good time – but it did spark some pretty serious conversation about England’s depressing performance. First of all, let me tell you a little something about the cast of characters involved in the discussion. There was me, a trio of grizzled club league...
KP out of pocket, but still a winner
Did you see it? It was perhaps the worst lbw decision we’ve seen this millennium. The bowler was Raina, the batsman was KP, the ball pitched about a foot and a half outside leg-stump, the decision was out. No matter what you think of the DRS, there is surely one indisputable truth: no matter how many grey areas are thrown up by hotspot and the hawkeye’s predictive element, god awful umpiring decisions bring the game into disrepute to a far greater extent. None of this helps KP however. Instead...
India: a different sporting planet
If you have a thick skin, and the ability to ignore countless uneducated, one eyed and quite frankly aggressive and anti-English comments, check out the comments under cricinfo.com articles. They’re flooded with Indian fans that appear to either know nothing about cricket or have a habit of consuming narcotic substances before they sit down at a keyboard. Initially, it’s hard not to get worked up by what fanatics in Mumbai and Delhi write, but after a while your enduring mood will be one of...
Finally, cricket is the winner – day five at Lord’s
England beat India by 196 runs People’s Monday, they’ll probably call it. Extraordinary scenes of mile-long queues through St John’s Wood. Fans arriving at 2.00am to bag a seat. The ground rammed to the gills with ordinary cricket followers, on the fifth day of a test match. The best atmosphere anyone could recall at Lord’s for years. The cynic in me suspects the queues owed much to the amateurism characteristic of major cricket occasions. 28,000 paying customers...
The great DRS debate – sod logic, we’re India
This week the ICC made the DRS mandatory in all test and ODI cricket. But it’s not the DRS as we know it. Hotspot and stump mics will be used, but not Hawkeye, which is ‘only’ 97% accurate apparently – clearly not nearly accurate enough for India (the same India team which, incidentally have complained bitterly about poor umpiring in their ongoing test series against the Windies). There’s nothing like carving off your nose with a meat cleaver to spite your face, is there? According to the new...
Abolish birthday honours for sportsmen, and tell the Indians to get over themselves
I’m being serious. I’m fed up with the whole damn thing. It’s great that we won the Ashes. It’s great that Andrew Strauss was the first England captain to win a test series in Australia since the Henry VIII lookalike. It’s also great that Alastair Cook decided to sod the coaches, bat like he did when he was a youngster, and scored all those runs. However, making Strauss and Andy Flower OBEs, and giving Cook an MBE, is just plain silly. It’s also bloody unfair. Was James Anderson not integral to...
