Posted by Epic, they say. Monumental. Alastair Cook batted for 836 minutes against Pakistan. That’s almost 14 hours. Or, in other words, not even two days’ work for a normal person.
So before we start lauding Cook’s extraordinary powers of concentration, let’s just stop a minute and ponder whether he could spend a full 37 and a half hours working on the same bloody spreadsheet. No six-hour shifts with breaks every two hours either – proper, long, miserable stints where even taking a lunch break is frowned upon.
How would he cope then? It’s pretty easy to avoid playing an airy-fairy cover drive – most of us achieve this goal daily – but how would he cope trying to work out which cell contains a buggered-up formula? How long could he spend methodically entering data without getting a decimal point in the wrong place?
That’s concentration, Alastair. That’s work. What you did was what kids do at playtime.
Review it you plonker
Review it you plonker
Review it you plonker
OH YOU PLONKER, don’t just wave your bat and walk off, REVIEW IT!
For goodness sake. Even that notorious full-plum plonker Shane Watson would have reviewed it. You can review things too chef.
Alas alack, three days at bat goes to waste. Plonker.
He should’ve reviewed it! He’ll never make 300 now – there’s simply not enough time in a test match!
Looking back at the archives, Boycott was dropped for ‘selfish’ batting after scoring 246 off 555 balls (SR: 44.3); Cook, meanwhile, makes 263 off 528 (SR: 49.8). The Boycott innings, however, featured at least some degree of acceleration on its second day:
http://www.cricketcountry.com/articles/england-drop-lsquo-selfish-rsquo-geoff-boycott-after-the-opener-crawls-to-an-unbeaten-246-27653
PS. Boycott’s effort took ‘only’ 573 mins to Cook’s 831 – says something about today’s over rates…
I have a dreadful feeling that Ali Cook would have been an irritatingly accurate data processing clerk or spreadsheet geek.
But we’ll never know for sure.
Because it would have been his job, and so he’d have done it, and done it bloody well.
If he was trying to work out what cell contained said formula error, he could do worse than use the ‘trace dependents’ option in the formula menu. Depending on what version of Excel he was using.
Although that wouldn’t really be his style, he’d probably just steadily check 4 cells every few minutes by pressing the same combination of keys over and over again until he’d found the error. By which time everyone else would have left the office to go to the pub without him.
I am so glad you have this alter ego O King.
What alter ego? What are we normally like?
“Post Author” always reminds me of The Gift by Velvet Underground
Grandson given out by forceps at 03:47 this morning, he gave up stern resistance, starting his innings on Tuesday morning . Reports are that conditions in the middle were hotter and more humid than the UAE. Allegations abound that the NHS attack were using banned substances in the fight.
Pah, Captain Cook, that’s proper resistance!!
Well played, everyone. Congratulations.
boy, did i turn on the tv at the right time or what? for four and a half days i’ve been keeping an eye on things without actually watching any of it (yes, yes… great opener’s innings and all that… but 263 with just 72 in boundaries? really? might be a wet dream come true for geoffrey b, but not my idea of entertainment)… i finally start watching with pakistan five down, just in time to see misbah’s crazy swipe and the landslide which followed. mad stuff…
… but of course, in the time it’s taken me to type that first para i’ve just seen mo ali hole out. never mind england, could pakistan actually win this?!
btw, i’ve not checked in for a few weeks and your site now looks completely different from last time i was here. the writing looks as if it’s intended for OAPs and i can’t see half the buttons. i’m using firefox on win 10, is there a different combination which you had in mind..? (has it been redesigned for viewing on phones and tablets or something? if this has all been covered in some previous discussion, just point in the right direction please…)
oh ferfucksake, stokes has just holed out in almost exactly the same way/place as moeen. this was always the risk i suppose…
Yeah, it’s supposed to be better on mobiles and whatnot. What buttons can’t you see? What buttons do we have?
erm, good question. was it not supposed to have an “appeal” button at the bottom of each post though? i can only get to that now by clicking on the appeals. no, it’s not really a major difference i suppose… it’s not a gigantic inconvenience, but am i viewing the site properly?
Bloody hell, this is entertaining. Bell and Cook to bludgeon us to victory?
This is frankly the worst Test match I can remember.
For a brief moment it exploded into promise, then rapidly imploded into farce.
What a waste of five days for 22 players, the coaches, the umpires, the ground staff, the commentators, the camera men, the TV producers, the media technical support, the crowd, the viewers and listeners, everyone.
And pretty much everything that was awful about this test (the soul-destroying pitch, the stupid light rules, the poor over rates) is the fault of the administrators.
What makes it worse is that you can’t look at this match and think “hey, this proves that Test match cricket is no longer fit for the 21st century and is ultimately a failure as an entertainment medium” – I mean, even this was almost an AMAZING, thrilling, gripping match. The only kind of person who could watch this and honestly believe “yep, this definitively proves that Test match cricket is unfit for the 21st century and is should be laid to rest as a historic but failed entertainment medium” would be cricket administrators. Unfortunately.
in the event i had to go out before the end… when i saw what had happened i was glad i did. ah well, i enjoyed it for a while there 🙂