Extras

Mop-up of the day – Sweet, sour, bitter, savoury

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A bitter-sweet mop-up of the day today, like someone’s spilt a honey-and-lemon sore throat remedy.

Actually, maybe that’s sweet and sour.

A sour-sweet mop-up of the day today.

Sour

James Anderson is out of England’s tour of Bangladesh and probably won’t be back until halfway through the India tour. No non-international fixtures are scheduled for that trip, so it’s not easy to see how the management will be able to convince themselves he’s fit to play a Test. Squinting at him and crossing your fingers isn’t really acceptable these days.

They’ll probably find a match for him somewhere or other, but a greater concern is the frequency with which he’s missing matches at the minute.

Anderson’s never been an injury-prone Mark Wood type (Wood will also miss the Bangladesh tour), he’s always been pretty resilient.

It’s quite obviously the beginning of the end, but hopefully, like in the Lord of the Rings, the end will go on for bloody ages.

Sweet

Nabi! Love Nabi.

Mohammad Nabi took 2-16 off ten after opening the bowling against Bangladesh and he then made 49 as Afghanistan bobbled to the win. England can probably learn from this ahead of their tour. The main thing they should learn is that Nabi’s ace, although they should really have known this already.

We feel like the cricketers we particularly like need to be branded in some way. It’s awkward to say ‘cricketer who we’ve written about a handful of times and hold in high regard’. We thought we might instead start referring to them as ‘Cricketers of the Realm’.

We could call them knights, but cricketers are better than knights.

Savoury

The latest Cricket Badger’s out on Friday morning. It’s got Shoaib Akhtar in it.

Sign up here: sportsbadger.com

You’re really missing out if you don’t. Honestly. Even from an unbiased point of view.

OH NO!

Roelof van der Merwe just heard you haven't yet signed up for the King Cricket email...

...so he's on his way to see you!

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28 comments

  2. I’m bitter because my copy of badger has not turned up this morning.

    Not that I was expecting badger on a Thursday until KC promised it, warts ‘n’all.

      2. Unless we’ve developed some sort of split identity and have no knowledge of what the other bloke’s up to, we honestly didn’t.

      3. I’m clearly not having one of my better days.

        I would have sworn it said “today”, so I rushed to my e-mailbox to find it, only to return disappointed, bitter and (it seems) demented.

        I’ll go and lie down for a while…

        …but only after I have accepted the very generous e-mail offer an overseas attorney has just sent me, offering me a large sum of money just for processing an enormous lump sum for him. Would you credit it?

      4. Told you. The silverware has mangled Ged’s mind.

        Here’s hoping for a dash of relegation fever at Lord’s next year.

      5. Wouldn’t that just make him/us worse? Rocking silently back and forth, eyes shifting, hands grasping an imaginary trophy, lulling you into quiet security, only to let out an ear-splitting scream ‘OH MY GUBBINS AND MY RAYNER LONG AGO’

      6. It doesn’t take much to mangle my mind these days, Sam.

        Relegation fever most certainly would not help me; Balladeer’s spot on there. Indeed I think I’ll be in a much better frame of mind next season gently to perceive Middlesex competing at the very top of the tables for the trophies.

      1. Cricketers of the Realm accompanied by a set of cards detailing stats of each player: Top Stumps. Think I’ll get my coat as well . . .

      2. There used to be a really good online game that sounded a bit like that. So long I can’t quite remember what it was though…

      4. Is this game not meant to work? Is that the in-joke?

        “Cannot connect to database, check your settings in config.php”

        Or is the game to get the game to work?

  4. Whatever happened to all the other sporting badgers?

    Did they once exist, but have since been discontinued?

    Was there a plan for a Rugby/Kabaddi/Real Tennis/Manchester Log-End Darts Badger?

    Or was the Sports Badger domain name just cheaper and/or more readily available than cricketbadger.com (which is, I note, an actual cricket website “established by a small, but growing, number of cricket journalists”)?

    1. No, we were planning a few additional Badgers. However, our long-term experiment with how much unpaid media work it’s reasonable to do has thus far led us to conclude that it isn’t yet time to launch the others.

    2. Oh and think that other Cricket Badger site appeared in the long gap between the idea and execution stage. Cricket Badger wasn’t our idea for the name but we went with it anyway because we had zero suggestions of our own. Still doesn’t quite sit right with us because it’s not a term we’ve ever actually used. We’re sure we’ll warm to it with time though. It’s only been, what, three years?

      2. We like that explanation. It was the fact that other people used this term ‘cricket badger’ to mean someone really into the sport that bothered us. As it’s not something we say, it doesn’t feel right to use it.

    3. Excellent thinking, APW, I think I’ll start a real tennis badger right here, right now.

      REAL TENNIS PLAYER SPOTTED

      Ged writes: I was strolling around the Hampton Court maze, as one does, when I encountered Camden Riviere sauntering widdershins. I asked him what he was doing. “Getting lost”, he replied.

      Have you seen a dedanist doing something not all that significant? Maybe you’ve seen Rob Fahey tying a kangaroo down in Hobart. Whoever you’ve seen, whatever they were doing, email realtennis@sportsbadger.com and spare no mundane detail.

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