Kusal Mendis has played an innings

1. Was half-expecting this to be ignored in favour of a piece on TGNW bouncing out what I presume (but I haven’t looked at the match closely) is a Zimbabwe club side.

   Very glad it wasn’t though. This is the sort of game where runs matter. In fact it put me in mind of The Best Sehwag Innings Ever. Not with regards to speed, but with regards to defying everyone and everything.

2. What an effort. I hope this isn’t overshadowed by the heroic exploits of The Great Neil Wagner in Bulawayo – should all those wickets count?

   1. Great minds, Mike. Great minds.

      1. Indeed! We know The Great One’s Mind only too well…
         Looking at the scorecard on BBC, I see the clickbait ‘Could you beat Bolt?’, reassuring me therefore that the recent reverse Betteridge madness has been put to bed.

         Let’s see…

         “5 live invited some members of the public to take to the 2012 Olympic track at the Anniversary Games in front of a full crowd and see if they could beat Usain Bolt’s 100m time.”

         That’ll be a No, then.

   2. TBFs for TGNW today as well. 6/41.

      He really really banged it in.

3. I have been facting, and at the time of writing this it turns out is the highest score ever in a match where no one else has made a fifty.

   http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?class=1;filter=advanced;groupby=match;orderby=high_score;qualmax1=1;qualval1=fifty_plus;template=results;type=batting

   Facts!

   1. Top facting – but wait until those who have recently complaining about facts on this website catch wind of this.

   2. That one’s alright, because it’s a POINTLESS FACT. Nothing wrong with pointless facts, it’s only pointful ones you have to be wary of. We won our pub quiz the other day, and we didn’t do that by being generally dismissive of pointless facts. No, we did it by knowing which US state name contains the only P found in any of them, and what the most common bird in the world is (it’s not Katie Price, by the way). In years to come, we might be asked who made the highest score in a test in which nobody else scored a fifty. It’s unlikely, I must admit, but it is not as unlikely as being asked what Moeen Ali’s test average is.

      1. which US state name contains the only P found in any of them

         I fear I may have misunderstood the nature of this question, but Mississippi has ‘Pi’ in it, which is a P word; Pennsylvania has ‘Pen’ in it, which is a P word.

         I would apologise for the needless pedantry, but I don’t usually and I don’t want to start a precedent.

      2. I clearly HAVE misunderstood the question, haven’t I?

      3. Do you mean the most common wild bird or the most common domestic bird, Bert?

         The most common wild bird is believed to be the red-billed quelea, numbering some 1.5 billion. But if you are allowing domestic birds, then the domestic chicken is surely the most common, about eight times the size of the human population, i.e. some 50 billion.

         I’m starting to realise why you are so fact-averse, Bert.

      4. Also, having watched a bit of the test today, I wouldn’t be shocked/amazed if there were a few fifties in Australia’s next innings. The pitch seems to have calmed down a little bit.

      5. It’s the chicken.

         Also, I think I’ll have to research that P question a bit more. Clearly I didn’t get it right. See, even pointless facts can get you in to trouble.

      6. It’s the only only one with a P at the start, you need me on the pub team.

         Ot is it its

      7. I remember. It was which THREE US states have a P in their name. Anyway, here’s the question:

         Which three US states have a P in their name?

         I bet you can’t guess.

      8. There was something very Hitchhiker’s Guide about how we provided the answer first.

4. New Hampshire?

   1. I have been wondering on-and-off for several hours today whatever this might have to do with Kusal Mendis. The closest I could get is maybe that it’s related to issues with BT and Eurosport 2, though I couldn’t pin it down.

      Now it has dawned on me that New Hampshire has a lone P, so it’s place in this thread is entirely logical!

      1. its!!!

      2. You really are the P-it’s, BailOut.

   2. Puerto Rico

      1. Puerto Rico, whilst part of the United States, is not one of the United States, so that would be an understandable exclusion from the list.

         Maybe instead of a crossword, the next’KC is going on holiday, distract yourselves with this post’ could be a pub quiz entirely themed around the letter P and the United States of America? There’s clearly a demand for it.

      2. Philadelphia is the only US State with a capital P. Perhaps that is the trick/essence of the question. Each of the others is a lower case p.

      3. Philadelphia is a city (5th biggest in the US or something similarly surprisingly scaled). But it is in Pennsylvania which coincidentally answers the “starts with a P” question.

      4. Pennslyvannia (and Philadelphia in particular) also has a cricketing connection of sorts – the Philadelphia Cricket Club (which these days is actually mainly a golf club, unlike the Philadelphia Cricket and Community Club, which still appears to play cricket as its main purpose) is the oldest country club in the United States.

      5. Bizarre. My local community tennis club is right next door to a similarly-named lawn bowls and tennis club which has no tennis courts and exists purely as a bowls club, but I think in ancient history did use our courts. Other teams turning up for matches invariably go to the bowls club first, with mildly amusing and slightly inconvenient consequences.
         Is KC on holiday now then? Will we get the usual lean diet of scheduled filler posts in the interim?

      6. No, we’re here. You’re therefore more likely to get no post at all because we haven’t planned ahead.

      7. Schoolboy error on my part, of course I meant Pennsylvania.

         That probably means I win second prize, two weeks in Philadelphia, rather than the first prize of one week in Philadelphia. That joke (c) W C Fields.

      8. Ged, the original joke appears to have been about Dallas not Philly. And not by W C Fields either!

         http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/second_prize_two_weeks_in_philadelphia_chicago_los_angeles_texas_joke/

      9. Although Fields did joke about Philly, it wasn’t that joke. It was his suggested epitaph:

         HERE LIES

         W. C. Fields

         I WOULD RATHER BE LIVING IN

         PHILADELPHIA

         Also misattributed to Fields is the “I spent a week in Philadelphia one day” joke.

         http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/26/week-in-philly/

5. Thank you for pointing us to the Eurosport coverage – it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to look there.

   Rather sweet, amateurish coverage, reminiscent of test match coverage of my childhood…apart from the presence of adverts and the absence of great commentators such as Richie.

   The only commentator whose voice I recognise is Russel Arnold – I like him. Two fairly humourless Aussies, one named Alan and a Brit whose voice I don’t recognise. Sounds a bit like Chris “bland” Cowdrey but I’m pretty sure it’s not him.

   I got to see Kumal Mendis hit a couple of lovely shots this morning before he nicked off.

   Lots of rain delays. Dry season in Sri Lanka, eh?

   1. They should know better than to schedule Sri Lanka-Australia tests in Manchester this time of year.

Comments are closed.