Posted by Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Feel free to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. (In fact please, please, please do. No-one sends us any of those and they’re our favourite ones.)
Today’s cricket bat in an unusual place is from NXT TakeOver: WarGames, a WWE thing that happened at the start of the month.
The main event saw The Undisputed Era take on Team McAfee. (Somewhat disappointingly, the latter team aren’t bound together by their shared love of internet security. McAfee just happens to be the surname of one of the wrestlers.)
Midway through the match, Team McAfee’s Danny Burch – who is a Londoner – whipped out a cricket bat. As you can see in this video.
After one swing, he inexplicably ditched it.
For a while, everyone ignored it, but then his team-mate Pete Dunne (who is from Birmingham) picked it up.
At the exact same moment, something fully marvellous happened: Burch whipped a second cricket bat out of his kit bag and then held it aloft pretty much exactly like He-Man.
Then he did what He-Man definitely would have also done had he been holding a cricket bat instead of a big sword – he kissed it on the face.
Danny Burch definitely wishes he could have been Kim Barnett or Anthony McGrath or someone instead of Danny Burch.
After that, Burch and Dunne proceeded to use their cricket bats completely incorrectly.
Team McAfee somehow managed to lose the match. One of The Undisputed Era’s wrestlers did a diving knee drop onto a chair placed over the face of one of the McAfee wrestlers and apparently that’s how you win.
Hat-tip to Stephen for bringing this to our attention.
Would “The Undisputed Era” be Windies of the 80s or Aussies of the 90s?
Wasn’t it more Aussies of the early 00’s? If I remember correctly, they started their winning streak with Pakistan’s 1999 tour of Australia.
But there IS such a thing as cage cricket:
https://www.cagecricket.com/
It’s street to elite, apparently.
Joking apart, this sort of urban setting is part of the picture to increase participation in our sport. Not sure the wrestling angle helps cricket, though.
I’ve seen the future of cricket too:
http://www.cagecricket.com/2018/03/07/dwarf-sports-uk-tries-cage-cricket/
That is very good and worthy by the way. It just sounds so much like it has been written by a satirist.
This is a thorough mindfuck, so I greatly enjoyed reading about it instead of working on the paper I was supposed to. It certainly sounds like something a bunch of people with nothing better to do would come up with inside a boardroom armed with projectors and powerpoints.
“Cage Cricket is dynamic, visual, high octane entertainment fused with the attitude of youth culture and extreme sports”. So that’s why the the president and the ambassador are two old, fat fellows. Got it.
“6 Players go into the Cage – 1 will emerge victorious.” Why? Couldn’t everyone just die?
“Post match, you will be able to discuss achievements that were made within the Cage and offer general thoughts and observations. When you next see them you know each other from that game and experience you shared.” Oh for fuck’s sake.
“No one can blame the wicket, no one can blame the elements. It is just you, the Cage Cricketer as gladiator, in the arena and battling against all others to emerge victorious.” This just won’t do. Blaming something other than your own ineptitude for your failures is an essential life skill that all youngsters should cultivate carefully.
“The players spend equal time with the bat, the ball and in the field.” This is a mathematical impossibility. The last would at least be a sum of the first two, unless you hover midair during your exploits.
I’m so glad to have given you something enjoyable to do rather than that mind-numbing paper you are supposed to be working on, DC.
No-one likes the swat who hands his paper in on time, DC. Especially not the recipients of the papers, who have doubtless planned to use the scheduled marking time for some other purpose, after fielding a few hilariously thin excuses. 😉
It’s heartening to see you think I am young enough to hand in assignments to be graded, Ged. I am old and write papers and submit to a journal where some random referee looks through everything and decides whether or not…..oh wait, I see your point.
I found an interesting quote from Justin Langer today talking about the potential return of Shaun Marsh.
“You never discriminate against age. He’s doing everything possible. His numbers in Sheffield Shield cricket – not only this year but the back end of last year – were absolutely elite.”
It seems like Justin Langer still seems to have the elite ability to talk elite rubbish when using the word elite.
Langer is the Matthew Hayden of people who aren’t Matthew Hayden.
One point that really affected me when looking at the cagecricket website was:
“Cage Cricket has huge potential. It is a new, high-tech entertainment format built for arenas around the world.”
[Some of the images suggest that it is incredibly low tech and arenas is well, quite really a very loose term for the locations that some of the images suggest (A leisure center sports hall)]