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If, as a cricketer, you’re going to be remembered for just one moment, you might as well make that moment the climax of the most exciting passage of sport many of us will ever see.
Even if it wasn’t the hardest catch, for safely taking it England fans will forever owe Geraint Jones a debt. We’re not saying he could get away with murder, but we could probably let burglary or hijacking a plane slide. Surely even Surrey fans wouldn’t begrudge his leaving cricket with a win in the domestic one-day final.
Not only did Jones top score for Gloucestershire on the day, he was also involved in the pivotal moment of Surrey’s innings. When Kumar Sangakkara slapped the ball to mid-on, Jones should have been there – but he was off the field having a slash. Will Tavare safely took the catch and Surrey promptly folded. With those utterly reliable hands of his, Jones probably didn’t even splash upon hearing the roar.
Are we absolutely sure that the pivotal moment actually took place during the 21 seconds (approx) that Geraint Jones was on the metaphorical urinal oche?
The duration of Geraint’s slash is now the subject of award-wining research,btw, as the following link to the appropriately-named PNAS research into this subject won an IG Nobel Award for physics earlier this week:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/11932.short
Bert will no doubt be well-versed in the science involved.
Exciting? You’d found that exciting? I was nearly dead.
Too exciting, obviously, but still exciting, yes.
This appears to be the first piece you have ever written about Geraint.
He got a couple of mentions on the old version of the site, but faded from international cricket around the time we moved here.
Any discussion of “that test” at Edgbaston ought not be just mentioned in a blog post and it certainly ought not to be linked to, even with warnings. There should be a notice period- “regular readers are warned that in a week’s time reference will be made to a match the contents of which we are all aware but that discussion thereof is likely to cause increased blood pressure and accelerated heart rate.”
Two other observations:
(1) He has a great name,
(2) He has played international cricket for Papua New Guinea.
These additional facts allow us to excuse a wee bit more from him.
A wee bit more, or indeed a bit more wee, depending on the circumstances.
As Bumble would no doubt observe: if you’re going to slash, slash hard.
Maybe he was having a poo.
Daisy and I are spending a couple of days in Brighton.
Walking the front yesterday, we tried to find the scene of Monty Panesar’s “slash hard” crime.
We considered filming a reconstruction of the event, but couldn’t work out how to make the camera angles work, especially as our equipment merely comprises a couple of iPhones – plus my personal equipment for the act itself, of course.
So we settled on buying a couple of 99s and walking on.