Mop-up of the long weekend – SHIV!

2 minute read

We’ve been away. We’re not really up to speed. Thanks to Roscoe H Spellgood, we know that speed equals distance over time, so we suppose that we’ll just sit around for a while and hope that we recover the ground.

Doubtless you can help us out by providing a few nuggets in the comments because we only really caught three pieces of news.

We saw that Eoin Morgan was probably going to moan about an umpiring decision and then we later saw a headline saying that he’d done precisely that. We didn’t read the article because moaning about umpiring decisions is the lowest form of the already low art of the post-match interview.

Ben Duckett sort of paid a visit to the trope about teams getting more out of players by encouraging them to play how they normally play (rather than encouraging them to develop any sort of adaptability whatsoever).

“Cookie spoke to us – ‘we’re going to try to bat all day here, whether it’s 20 runs off 160 balls’. That isn’t my game. I did try to do what we were asked. On another day, my way of batting for the draw is actually trying to get 120 off 160. It’s tough just trying to prod back.”

Duckett is presumably aware that there was no guarantee that he’d have survived 160 balls had he played his own way because earlier in the interview he admitted that he didn’t have much confidence he’d have made any runs in his that Test no matter how he’d approached things.

It strikes us that this is a close cousin of the ‘natural game’ myth.

The third piece of cricket news to make it past our eyes and into our head was Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s return to Lancashire. There’s no real need to say anything about how we feel about this.