New Zealand / Sri Lanka

New Zealand are better than Sri Lanka

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< 1 minute read

But not by a huge amount. Chasing 139 to win, you’d hope to get there without losing nine wickets. Then again, they didn’t lose ten, so what’s the problem?

A really bad run chase is a wonderful thing. A big run chase is faintly absorbing, but for real tension you need the looming spectre of a right royal balls-up. We’re not sure as to the exact visual appearance of such a spectre, but we’re pretty sure it would make a spooky noise and exude a bad smell.

When the top scorer for the winning team was batting at number eight, you know it was a good match. Furthermore, New Zealand scored eight in leg byes while Sri Lanka scored one. The significance of that should also be considered a badge of quality.

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Similar deliveries:

Default ThumbnailNew Zealand surrender almost all of their advantage

16 comments

  1. From the cricinfo commentary:

    33.2 Malinga to Southee, FOUR, now a pacy yorker and another loud appeal for lbw, but the ball heads to the third-man boundary bethwart a roaring keeper and a befuddled slip.. Was it bat, was it the boot first? It was the boot, and it would have been out.. Lucky escape for New Zealand.

    1. Did Sangakkara emit a bestial roar, perchance. Is he Laurence Elderbrook in disguise?

      Bethwart is a very KC word, too. What’s going on?

    2. ” ‘Bethwart’ is going to grow up to be something someday.” – King Cricket, March 2011

      In only two and a bit years his word has gone viral, assuming (as I think is fair) that a single use in a cricket commentary that might have been written by one of his mates constitutes viral. Extrapolating, this means that by 13 February next year there will be no other prepositions in the whole English language.

    3. We don’t really know what’s going on here, because the Cricinfo commentary doesn’t say that. Deep Cower, have you delivered a weird lie or have Cricinfo edited their commentary to hide their shame at stealing our words?

    5. He’s doing the Indian thing of dropping the determiner. He means: “KC has a few mates.”

    6. It can’t be a lie, because the internet has systems built in to prevent lies. That’s why you can always trust anything you find on the internet 100%. And in case you doubt this, just consider that this comment is itself on the internet and is therefore true by virtue of what it says.

    7. It cannot be a lie, because Deep Cower simply wouldn’t lie.

      Not on a matter of such import as this.

    9. 33.2
      Malinga to Southee, FOUR, now a pacy yorker and another loud appeal for lbw, but the ball heads to the third-man boundary.. Was it bat, was it the boot first? It was the boot, and it would have been out.. Lucky escape for New Zealand

      (Copied and pasted directly from the offending website.)

      At first glance there appear to be two ellipses, suggesting a pause maybe, or more interestingly, a removal of something. But a closer examination reveals only TWO FULL STOPS in each one. What is going on? No Cricinfo writer would make such a mistake. Besides, the ellipsis is not the right punctuation to use in either case, and the capital letter afterwards suggests strongly that a single full stop would be more apropriate.

      So what are the extra full stops? A closer look is required. It’s not easy, but if you stare intently at the first extra full stop with your eye about 4mm from the screen, holding your eyelid open with tweezers to prevent blinking, after 45 minutes or so you start to experience some strange things. So far I have listed purple dragons, lots and lots of multicoloured dots, the SS Queen Mary, and an intense stabbing pain in my eye. Crucially for Deep Cower’s case, there is no sign of the missing text.

      Makes you think, eh.

  2. “A really bad run chase is a wonderful thing.”

    Absolutely. Though SL c***ed up right at the top, and there was always a sense of inevitability that NZ will somehow get through the line.
    And with all the commentary about the similarity of this team to the 1996 vintage, we need to remember, that team had Mahanama at 7 — not slog-Thisara and slog-Thirimanne.

    1. Mahanama de doo de doo dah.
      Mahanama de doo de doo.
      Mahanama de doo de doo dah, de doo dah, de doo dah, de doo dah doo dah doo dah doo dah doo.

      Mahanama.

    2. Haven’t seen Mahanama’s name mentioned for a while, nor have I seen, perhaps for that reason, a reference to the Mah Nà Mah Nà song.

      Classics both: Mahanama and Mah Nà Mah Nà.

    3. Are those things to denote emphasis?

      I’ve never come across them before.

      I’m not sure how to feel.

      Meh.

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