Posted by Not to get all Meatloaf about this, but England would do anything to save a run. But they won’t do that. No, they won’t do that.
If you haven’t already seen, England are due to play in Dharamasala tomorrow. It’s possibly the most beautiful ground in the world if you look up. However, if you look down then the outfield’s a bit on the sandy side.
Jos Buttler has been looking down.
“I think any time you’re sort of talking about being careful diving, or maybe being careful when you’re fielding, it sort of goes against everything you want to be as a team,” he told Cricinfo. “You want to dive through a row of houses to save a run. That’s obviously not ideal, the way the surface is, the outfield.”
So to sum that up, Jos Buttler WOULD dive through not just one house, but a whole row of houses to save a run, but he WOULD NOT dive on a sandy outfield to achieve the same thing.
Let’s see if we can get any more clarity on that position.
“You want to put your body on the line and be trying to save every single run and have confidence in the field,” Buttler continued. “It’s not as good as it could be, or should be.”
He then concluded that his players would have to be careful and hold themselves back when fielding.
So the position is: Jos Buttler WANTS to put his body on the line, with the small proviso that he DOES NOT WANT to put his body on the line.
We’d say it’s absolutely fair enough to want a good, safe surface on which to play international cricket. We also feel that you should maybe rein in the running-through-brick-walls, stop-at-nothing rhetoric when it’s very clearly not applicable.
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I’m struggling a little with this one.
It might help if you were able to make Jos’s points numerically rather than rhetorically.
Is his default “run through walls” mode the equivalent of giving 110%, say, or 120%, or possibly even more than that? Is the need to reign it in due to a sandy surface a reduction to, for example, giving it 95% or is it as little as 80%? Frankly I cannot tell from the rhetoric.
Moreover, there is, as you point out, an element of “holding two contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time” to Jos’s conundrum, so I am wondering whether we need simultaneous equations to solve the puzzle numerically. Where are Bert and The Scientician when we need them?
It seems that in the continual quest to innovate in ODI cricket, England are now looking to employ quantum tunnelling in a bid for further marginal gains.
Bert’s view on the merits of this approach would also be greatly appreciated, if indeed he does do requests.
You’d think more teams would be jumping on the quantum tunnelling bandwagon.
If we rearrange the letters of TOWHID HRIDOY we get WHO DID ROY HIT.
I knew there was something bigger behind his omission.
Disconcerting pairing of consonants in Hridoy, made yet more disconcerting by the fact that the fella’s full name is Md Towhid Hridoy.
Accustomed as I am to the brace-of-consonants-name Ng in South-East Asia, I must say that Md is a new one on me – not even vague clue as to how I’m supposed to pronounce it.
Anyway, it seems I put the kybosh on the lad while I was typing this.
Smacks of ‘can’t be bothered typing out ‘Mohammad’ for the millionth time’ but a good two seconds of googling can’t prove this.
Maybe he’s named after Doogie Howser.
Hmm…
…which stands for “His Majestic Majesty”, KC, obviously. I just couldn’t be bothered to type the regal mode of address in full.
Intriguingly, Towhid Hridoy’s short forename is shown as Md on Wikipedia and Cricinfo, the two sources I would normally trust to show names precisely & in full.
Yet you are probably right.
In other news, I did suggest Sybrand Englebrecht as one to watch.
Crazy name, crazy guy, crazy stumping…or not:
https://wisden.com/series-stories/cricket-world-cup-2023/just-crazy-tv-umpire-controversially-reverses-stumping-decision-in-nz-ned-game-due-to-wicketkeeper-position