Day-night cricket and the fire in the bin

1. This is one of those cases where American slang wins over the corresponding Brit one. Substitute ‘bitching’ for ‘moaning’ and the first paragraph reads much better. Such moaning aside, this conspiracy theory has much merit.

2. My conspiracy theories revolve around this. Look at their record! Look at the Australia tour! Out with them!

   http://www.espncricinfo.com/page2/content/story/547697.html

   1. kiwiviktor81’s comment makes me feel so, so sad inside. They could’ve… they very possibly should’ve… if only they had 🙁

   2. #jesuisinzid

3. I have never ever ever got my sums wrong in a quarterly report.

   Never.

   We do monthly reporting here at Ged Ladd & Co. Anyway, it is my underlings who produce the reports for me.

   We do, however, quite regularly have bin fires and monitor breakages. It’s going to be a tough appraisal round this coming month. Thanks for the top-off, KC.

   While I have your attention, your majesty, I sent you an e-mail on 25 November – not a match report for once – but it was the sort of e-mail that usually gets a fairly rapid reply. Perhaps you missed it in your deluge past week. Or perhaps it was on your screen at just the wrong “foot accident” moment.

   1. Tip-off even…

      …although bin fires with the top off are more spectacular in my experience.

      1. Because of the Fire Triangle, Ged Ladd! Any fire worth its sale requires heat, oxygen and a fuel source. As a fire marshal here at Faceless Corp. I am charged with knowing about these things. They even send us on biennial training courses where we listen to the same man deliver the same presentation on the same subject matter. Even the ‘jokes’ are the same! I suppose there hasn’t really been a huge amount of innovation with fire in the last, oh, 125,000 years or more when homo erectus first learned to control it. Except they didn’t have PowerPoint back then.

      2. *salt, godamm’t

      3. I see.

         So Homo Erectus learned to control fire 125,000 years ago, but it has taken all that time for Homo Sedeatis to work out how best to set fire to a bin using Powerpoint and some 125,000 year old jokes?

         Am I getting confused again?

      4. Currently going through the Christmas retail experience at work. Frankly, if Nigel Llong had had a day as bad as mine, he could have burnt down the Adelaide Oval for the good it would have done in distracting people from the immensity of his failure.

4. England ‘collapse’ again.

   I put it to you, the jury, that to ‘collapse’ a team has to be in a reasonably strong/advantageous position to begin with, prior to the flury of wickets. Does 48-1 constitute such a position?

   Likewise, a team cannot really ‘collapse’ to, say… picking an example entirely at random… 60 all out, can it?

   1. This theoretical “60 all out” (a truly ludicrous thought) would really be more of a slow subsidence back into the loam. Were it slow. Maybe “tripping face-first into quicksand” is the apt description. As in, “those Aussie ‘batsmen’ tripped face first into the quicksand at Trent Bridge (to pick a venue at random) and disappeared without trace to 60 all out.”

5. Super Over < Bowl Off.

   Watching bowlers miss the stumps when there was no batsman in the way was a wonderful thing (as well as a reminder of the inherent humanity and therefore fallibility of top-class sportspeople). Watching 12 more balls of attempted slogging with a break in the middle… less so. Even if Afridi is involved throughout.

   Phenomenal bowling from Jordan, mind.

   1. The Super Over does bring the potential for overthrows though – overthrows being the very finest aspect of cricket.

      1. I do like a bit of overthrow action, although I don’t know that the Super Over itself is more likely to feature overthrows than a common-or-garden final over of a tight match.

      2. More likely than in a bowl-off though.

      3. If Stuart Broad was playing, you might get overthrows in the bowl off…

         …and if Mohammad Hafeez was playing in the match, you might even get a crazy run out in the bowl-off.

   2. The problem for me with the super over is the tedious middle bit; specifically balls 2,3,4 and 5.

      If the super over were reduced to a more manageable length, for example a two ball over, it might just about be able to maintain my attention throughout. As it was, I found myself frequently distracted during the dull, lengthy process. Why oh why can’t they keep it short, sweet and simple?

      1. The Ultra Ball?

         That comes if the Super Over finishes in a tie.

         When’s the ICC Single Wicket World Championship, anyway?

   3. I think the cure for the bowl-off versus Super Over dispute is simple.

      Replace the coin toss by a bowl-off at the start of every match. Fairer than Lady Luck, surely, particularly in matches where the toss turns out to be crucial to the result.

      And then if we are very lucky we get a game with both a bowl-off AND a Super Over!

      1. I think y’all are confused by the recent TV trend and have mistaken a good old-fashioned ‘bowl-out’ for this celebrity bowl-off atrocity…

         “A bowl-out was first used in the NatWest Trophy in June 1991 in a match between Derbyshire and Minor County side Hertfordshire at Bishops Stortford. Derbyshire bowled first and Steve Goldsmith managed one hit from his two deliveries. Ole Mortensen, Alan Warner, Frank Griffiths and Simon Base all missed with both of theirs. Hertfordshire’s first bowler, Andy Needham, hit with his first ball but missed with his second. John Carr, missed with both his, Bill Merry, struck middle with his second attempt to win the match.”

         Fancy that – first-class crickets missing with 90% of attempted deliveries at unguarded stumps. Did Devon Malcolm not famously deliver a bouncer during such a bowl-out?

         I appreciate the superiority of the super-over in deciding tied matches, but in the event a super-over were not possible in a knockout match (complete washout) is a bowl-out, where some element of skill is required, not preferrable to the drawing of lots which would probably be the ICC’s method of doing things?

      2. Curiously I’d actually written bowl-out all the way through my post, then went back and changed them all when I checked it before posting, on the grounds it looked incongruous with everyone else’s. Should have had more faith 🙂

6. I’m still bitter and angry. About the topic of the article. Did I miss a hidden reference to PAKvENG or are King Cricket comments becoming like CricInfo comments, which soon turn to discussions about India regardless of the article content?

   Apparently I’m the only person here who cares that NZ got royally screwed in Adelaide, going from a good chance to win to no chance at all largely due to one bloody incorrect decision.

   Go away.

   1. When I feel this way, Jayne, I usually go and watch my DVD of the Adelaide 2010 test match. Cheers me right up, that does. I’ve yet to encounter a bad situation this doesn’t improve in my mind. If you listen carefully, you can pinpoint the exact moment when the Aussie commentators realise the game is up.

      1. Thanks, but no NZ victories are left on replay anywhere (Willow or WatchESPN) and that limited overs garbage in Southern Africa doesn’t count. No DVR & the husband hasn’t bothered to crack the secret of streaming video capture for me. But it would be great therapy.

         The best I can do is watch the much discussed bonkers T20.

      2. I spoke too soon. A wonderful friend has sent me extended highlights of CWC15 NZvAUS group stage.

         I couldn’t even have consolation sex with my husband after Adelaide because he’s bloody Australian.

      3. Robelinda2’s cricket stuff on Youtube is good – hi-def video and something there for everyone, even NZers I’d think. McCullum’s CWC 77 vs Eng is there probably.

         I’m onto Melbourne 2010 now, having skipped the Perth test for reasons of time, mainly. They showed the single that took Eng to 99-0, to huge cheers from the Barmies in a mostly-empty ‘G, completing the ten-wicket first innings victory. Later on in Eng’s first innings, sometime after Trott has got his 100 and Prior is flaying the bowling, there are a couple of bits of commentary where Warney sounds genuinely depressed. It’s quite wonderful.

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