Are you completely numb to the ridiculousness of cricket terminology?

1. Splendid insight into life on the playing fields of Slough Grammar. “. . . Your neck won’t get broken so easily that way. . . ” This suggests that it’s bound to happen at some time or other.

   1. [insert your own “dead in a ditch” joke here]

2. googly reminds me:

   apparently australians used to refer donkey drops as googly but when the english appropriated the term to describe the leg spinner’s wrong one, the australians, in order to avoid confusion with moonballs, decided not to use googly but instead refer to it as the wrong’un instead

   and even though an english bowler invented the ‘googly’, he was more unpredictable than Adil Rashid. as a consequence there were more ‘googly’ bowlers in south africa than England before the aussie wrist spinners took over

   1. If only Googly was a cricket search engine

3. Has chinaman gone the way of the Dodo? Haven’t heard it for a while.

   1. Elf and safety gone mad, innit

   2. This time last year when England played against Sri Lanka, Lakshan Sandakan bowled well in the final test of the series – he’s basically a chinaman bowler:

      https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/18602/scorecard/1140387/sri-lanka-vs-england-3rd-test-eng-in-sl-2018-19

      Escamillo Escapillo can bowl the chinaman, but frankly, once you are familiar with his bowling it is well signalled and thus more fun for the batman than the bowler in the nets. He claims to have taken several wickets with it in matches, though, when bowling to the uninitiated in match pressure situations.

   3. Yes, there’s been a move towards saying left-arm wrist spin now, Edwardian.

   4. Sandakan’s Cricinfo card refers to him specifically as a chinaman bowler, as does his Wikipedia entry.

      Kuldeep Yadav, on the other hand (or rather, also with the left hand), is referred to as a chinaman bowler on his Cricinfo card but as an unorthodox left arm bowler in his Wikipedia entry:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuldeep_Yadav

      May we live in interesting times.

   5. There’s a novel about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman:_The_Legend_of_Pradeep_Mathew

   6. An elderly friend of mine sometimes has a half-lager, half-bitter combo. Every time I go to the bar, I mutter to myself to order a pint of Golden rather than Chinese. Another reminder that I’m from the pre-Woke era.

      1. I am only now learning that half-lager, half-bitter is a ‘thing’. It sounds absolutely horrendous.

      2. I met an old pal today. We haven’t seen each other for 22 years. He reminded me that we used to drink Abbot Ale with a Gold Label top. The thought of that now.

4. Jersey had a quite impressive showing at the ICC World T20 Qualies, winning 3 of their 6 games – including Oman, who were among the pre-event favourites, and hosts UAE. They also reduced Hong Kong to 81/6 but didn’t finish the job off. Unfortunately, in a seven-team group, three teams finished with three wins and Jersey had the worst NRR of the three, so came 6th. Had they finished Hong Kong off, they would have joined table-topping Ireland, Oman and the UAE on four wins so would have finished at least within the top four. They wouldn’t have been able to catch up with Ireland’s NRR to top the group (the only way to automatically qualify) but they would certainly have gone on to the play-off rounds.

   Scotland also won 3 of their 6 games but in their group they were the only team to do so, and came 4th in it behind PNG (group winners and automatic qualifiers), Netherlands and Namibia. That position gives you one shot at qualifying in the knock-out rounds whereas 2nd and 3rd places get two bites at the cherry, with the second attempt if necessary against one of the 4th-placers (though 4th placed teams have the slight advantage of playing a team that’s recovering from an important loss). The Dutch reward for coming 2nd was that their first play-off was against the 3rd team from the other group – UAE – whom they roundly thrashed. UAE’s benefit from coming 3rd in their group was that they lived to fight another day with a final play-off against one of the 4th-placed teams, but Scotland beat them to secure their qualification.

   The equivalent match on the other side of the draw was Oman (as 2nd-placers on their “second life”, having lost their first play-off against 3rd-placed Namibia from the other group) vs Hong Kong (with one shot as 4th-placers). Oman beat HK, just as they did in the group stage. Had Jersey pipped HK to 4th spot, they’d have come into this play-off match knowing that they’d beaten Oman in the group stage. All ifs and maybes, but Jersey really were not far away at all from reaching the World Cup. Quite extraordinary, though having looked it up I see their population of 107,000 is a fair bit higher than Bermuda’s 65,000, so perhaps the achievment of Leverock et al were more impressive.

   I do wonder what Germany might have done – reinforced with professional players from South Africa, the UK and Afghanistan, they now have a strong squad if they can play at full strength and almost beat Jersey to the European qualifying slot, losing out only by a decimal place of NRR.

5. Returning to the themes of bizarre sporting terms and political correctness, this thread has reminded me of a term used in Rugby Fives, which was my best sport as a young schoolboy.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_Fives

   Fives is a court sport which, in simple terms, looks like squash, but played two-handed with gloves, rather than with a racket.

   The serve has to be delivered bouncing off a side wall and then the front wall to be a fully legitimate serve. If the serve is delivered front wall only, it is known as a blackguard (pronounced “blaggard”) which the receiver can choose to take if desired by shouting “yes” before striking the ball. If the receiver declines the blaggard the server gets another chance or two to serve a legitimate ball before faulting a point.

   Definitions of the words “blackguard” and “blaggard” uniformly refer to dark-heartedness as the origin, but I find it hard to believe that this term could, in the modern era, find its way into the vernacular without (in my view, justifiable) criticism.

   1. One of my few glory days at fives is described here:

      http://ianlouisharris.com/1975/06/09/an-uneventful-day-playing-fives/

      Enjoy.

      1. Why is it called Fives, if it is not five players a side ?

6. One of the reasons that Association Football became the dominant version of the game is that the rules are relatively simple. In particular, they don’t change during the match. In Rugby Union they do change, which makes the game almost entirely indecipherable to the casual viewer. I notice that this is true for the Eton Field Game as well.

   Handy Guide for Tomorrow Morning

   Open Play
   – No offside
   – Ball can be handled
   – Ball can be kicked
   – Ball cannot go forward off a hand
   – Players can approach the play from any angle
   – Players can go to ground
   – Players can take the ball to ground

   Ruck
   – Offside line at the back foot
   – Ball cannot be handled
   – Ball can be kicked
   – Ball cannot go forward off a hand
   – Players cannot approach the play from the side
   – Players must be on their feet
   – Players can take the ball to ground

   Maul
   – Offside line at the back foot
   – Ball can be handled
   – Ball cannot be kicked
   – Ball can go forward off a hand (as long as the players are part of the maul)
   – Players can approach the play from the back or the side
   – Players must be on their feet
   – Players cannot take the ball to ground

   None of this is any more logical or intuitive than a ball becoming rougeable when it bounces off an opponent and crosses a line. By contrast, football’s rules are incredibly straightforward – no handling, kick any which way, offside line at the last defender – for the entirety of the match.

   Except for throw-ins, which are different.

7. None of it still as good as:

   “That footsweep was first class, right before he fringed his ring too, extraordinary.”

   “And they’re going for the threesome.”

   “Two wide, three Synge”

   “A two, a one, Traffrold”

   1. For the uninitiated, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_6d3JBBo4s

      1. Thank you Bail-Out. Brilliant.

      2. I consider it a public service Edwardian. I sometimes wonder if new readers to this site might need an occasional link to a Yorkshireman unable to spake. Or a Kentishman on a novel beast of burden. Or indeed, an unfeasibly anatomical version of snooker. Otherwise they must think we’re all mad…

   2. What’s the Kentish man on a novel. . . . ?

      1. I’m pretty sure the use of a capybara as a beast of burden is novel, it may even be illegal…

         http://kingcricket.blogspot.com/2007/05/rob-key-covered-in-glory.html

      2. FLIPPING HECK THAT URL SAYS 2007!?! Where has my life gone?!? And I still think of this as KC’s “new” site….

      3. The best Rob Key On A Capybara was in 2009 but it needs (and received) a suitable introduction and build-up.

         https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/this-is-how-you-share-a-rob-key-picture-with-the-world-you-bloody-idiots/2016/04/18/

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