Posted by Next Monday sees a proper Test series – Pakistan v South Africa. Well, we say ‘proper Test series’ but it’s actually just two Tests, so not a proper Test series at all really.
The background
Pakistan recently managed to lose a Test against Zimbabwe. For any other nation, this would be indicative of a serious problem; cause for some sort of grandly-titled review at the very least. Pakistan have just sort of looked sheepish and said: “Ooh, that was a bit embarrassing. Where are we playing next?”
They know it was bad, but it won’t remotely have an impact on their belief that they can beat the best Test team in the world. Their batting is still bad. Their bowling is still good. They’re still equally capable of winning or losing regardless of the opposition.
Saeed Ajmal v Dav Whatmore
Saeed Ajmal has been in the news for apparently saying that new Pakistan coach, Dav Whatmore, was pretty much pointless. Personally, we read his quoted words as being a bad translation and that he was just saying that having a foreign coach wasn’t necessarily better than having a Pakistani one – a statement which was compounded by his subsequent observation that Dav don’t speak da language.
If people really wanted to create a media frenzy over the ambiguity of Ajmal’s words, they should have made more of this sentence from his apology afterwards:
“I enjoy very good relations with Dav.”
Now that’s news. Then again, we already knew that Ajmal’s thoughts struggle to make it into English.
South Africa are also playing
Everything’s much the same with them. The most exciting news is that Graeme Smith’s back, which means that the most exciting news is that everything’s back to normal.
My Italian friend who speaks pretty good English once told me that he had never actually formally learned the language and had picked it up during travel etc. (and while in America). The interesting thing is that he actually thinks in Italian and has to translate his thoughts and then speak, which explained why he spoke rather slowly. This greatly impressed me, because, as an Indian, I grew up bilingual and never had to do the translation process as I think in English. (Doing science, that’s kind of necessary).
I am guessing everyone on youtube making fun of Ajmal either do not appreciate the effort it takes because they can only speak one language, or like me, grew up bilingual. Learning languages can be a fascinating experience.
Hope you don’t think we were making fun of Ajmal by linking to that video. That said, we do feel it’s possible to respect the effort while also finding the end result pretty funny.
That’s not what I was thinking at all. It saddens me to look at the comments section of a typical internet forum, that’s all. That and I was in a rather sombre mood this morning.