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We rather love Twenty20 finals day, which has always seemed to strike a good balance between elite sport and village fete.
A lot of short format competitions seem to be striving for the po-faced tribalism of football, but the annual climax of the original has always erred on the side of fun. It’s a day-long festival centred on cricket. There are worse things in the world. Like AIDS.
You probably didn’t need an example.
We only managed to follow this year’s edition via the intermittent checking of scorecards. In a world of video clips, Twitter and live blogs, it was a refreshing experience. There’s something to be said for telling the story to yourself based wholly on a bunch of numbers.
We see Samit Patel did well, which is never a bad thing, and so did Steven Mullaney. We’re afraid that no matter what he does in his career, the latter will always be the guy whose mum’s his biggest supporter.
We’re also aware that the Natwest lady jammed her angular trophy into Dan Christian’s eye at the post-match presentation.
How’s it looking @timbresnan @danchristian54 pic.twitter.com/WdCdxhDDXu
— Stuart Broad (@StuartBroad8) September 2, 2017
The one thing we couldn’t find was a scorecard for the mascots race, so if someone could fill us in on how that one played out, we’d really appreciate it.
With regard to the mascot race. A former colleague of mine, who attended, posted on Facebook that ‘Lanky was awful’. That’s all I know
This link to the mascot race vid wasn’t hard to find.
http://www.skysports.com/cricket/news/12123/11017606/t20-blast-mascot-race-can-alfred-the-gorilla-win-for-second-straight-year
Is the Natwest lady one of the suspects for the Oval projectile incident. She is seemingly one of a rare breed that courts aggro with cricketers through the application of pointy metal objects.
We were actually quite looking forward to piecing together a garbled whole from assorted random fragments, such as AP Webster’s above.
If there’s one thing better than watching a mascot race, it’s crowd-sourcing a mascot race report from a bunch of people who weren’t really paying attention and several of whom were half-cut.
The same NatWest lady fell off the podium after presenting the trophy to Varun Chopra in 2014.
Wow. Top facting.
I tried to find linkage too and, based on the promise of actual photos from the race in the google results preview, clicked through to this:
http://www.espncricinfo.com/natwest-t20-blast-2017/content/image/1119383.html?object=207428;dir=next
There may or may not be mascot-based imagery but I could get no further than image 6 (captioned ‘Hilton Cartwright takes flight’) which is something of a classic.
The dog was cheating. Blatantly.
I went for the first time this year. Part of me loved the carnival atmosphere and the high quality cricket and the exuberant fun. Part of me hated it as large sections of the crowd were more interested in singing “don’t take me home” and “Sweet Caroline” and getting royally hammered – the cricket seemed a byproduct for them.But perhaps this is no bad thing, cricket needs attention more than ever before. It just feels at times like the cricket is happening and a large proportion of the crowd couldn’t care less, which is a shame as there was some excellent stuff played, Samit’s innings was an absolute gem as was Gurney’s bowling. Overall I think I enjoyed it.
Broadly speaking, Twenty20 crowds can be Sunday afternoon families or Friday night lads getting on it early. Not particularly a fan of them mixing.
But why didn’t you provide a random mascot race detail?
I was a little disappointed that you meant the “Natwest lady jamming her angular trophy into Dan Christian” quite literally.