England

How many times will England become airborne?

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< 1 minute read

We only ask because they’re hitting the ground running with alarming frequency.

After Ben Hilfenhaus looked forward to a sprint landing last week, some of you questioned our assertion that cricketers no longer know what ‘hit the ground running’ means.

Well, consider this new evidence. England’s captain’s had a go now. Apparently England hit the ground running on the third day of their recent three-day match against Western Australia.

“At the start of play it was looking a tough ask to force a result. We could have gone through the motions, but we came in and hit the ground running.”

So England are on terra firma now, are they? No. Strauss continues:

“We’ve learned a few lessons here at the WACA, and I think we all hope we’ll take that into Adelaide and hit the ground running there as well.”

Having clambered into our DeLorean, we can reveal that this time next year professional cricketers will be using the phrase ‘hit the ground running’ when they simply mean ‘play well’.

“We hit the ground running in about the 38th over after an early collapse” – Andrew Strauss, December 2011

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Default ThumbnailEngland hit the ground, not running, but with exceptional conservation of energy Default ThumbnailAndrew Strauss fighting England’s selectors Default ThumbnailHit the Ground Running Watch Default ThumbnailAndrew Strauss, England captain

18 comments

  5. From a bolt of lightning.

    Unfortunately, you never know when or where it’s ever going to strike.

  6. What about a potential first test victory? Will they be planing on going airbourne again? Will the England team be talking about ‘keeping their feet on the ground?’

    Can the King’s DeLorean tell us this?

  7. Oh no. You’re not going to get us that easily. You know full well what happens when someone finds out the sporting results of the future.

    We don’t want to be safe and sound back on the good old 27th floor.

    (Are these references getting too obscure?)

  8. Not obscure, just meaningless to me.

    I never ‘got’ Back to the Future. I always thought it was a bit ‘wet’. Like E.T. and Willow.

  10. What happens if we step up to the plate, come to the party AND hit the ground running?

    Six months or so, I should imagine. (But that’s only 2 or 3 months with time off for good behaviour).

  11. Why are cricketers so obsessed with hitting the ground running (mathematically equivalent to having momentum, I should add)? Hitting the ground running is confusing, with all of its various interpretations. Imagine you are Alistair Cook, short of form, and all you hear from every corner is that you need to be Hitting the Ground Running. This isn’t helping you. You should be concentrating on batting, not on how high you need to be in the air before you hit the ground running.

    Australia didn’t do any of that. They maintained a decade of dominance over world cricket by consistently Hitting Their Straps.The beauty of this is that no-one ever knew what Hitting Your Straps actually meant. What straps? Whose straps? What do you hit them with? Your hand? A stick? Other straps? Because of this, it was impossible for the Aussie players to enter a state of metaphor confusion before a match, and the results are there for us all to see.

    In fact, the result of this lack of sense was that the phrase acquired its own meaning, viz. beating your opponent at cricket. So the sentence, “To win this series we really need to be hitting our straps” has precisely the same meaning as “To win this series we really need to be beating our opponent at cricket.” As tactics go this was a good one, and nobody ever got distracted by questions of altitude.

  13. I can only hope you’re joking, Bert, but in case you’re not – you must never hit a strap with another strap. You might get away with it a couple of times, but a feedback loop can easily become established, and if it does the results will be disastrous.
    A hand or a stick are fine, as is a paddle.

  15. How can they hit the ground running? In the future, there’s presumably no need to be on the ground at all?

    Where they’re going, they don’t need roads.

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