Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s take on specific training

1. So much Shiv.

2. Anyone get the impression that he only batted for 6 hours because after that the machine gave up in despair at ever hitting his stumps?

3. I’m having as many problems getting onto the site today as the bowling machine did getting Shiv out. Errors 500 and 503 all over the place.

   1. It’s been faily-er than usual here also. It’s the pressure Shiv puts you under – you’d make plenty of errors through sheer exasperation after bowling to him for an entire day.

   2. Our web hosts had a power cut yesterday and all the servers were off for a few hours. We presume today’s disruption is related to that. Hopefully it’s just a short-term thing. They’ve generally been okay.

4. I head Jonathan Trott put in a 6 hour shift against a bowling machine once. Faced a whole 10 overs.

   (For the purposes of this joke, imagine that Trott had a way of remotely turning the machine off while he retook his guard).

   1. Good addendum.

5. All out to ten catches is rarely a good sign in a team.

   Do teams who bat first in ODIs and are all-out due to ten catches, win a significantly lower proportion of games than teams that bat first and are all-out with nine or less catches? Or perhaps, to exaggerate the difference, six or less catches?

   1. Fewer catches

      1. Mike – I hereby hand over my mantle to you.

      2. Because I’m a pratt, I deliberately use “less” with count nouns in order to get pedants to correct me, so that I can out-pedant them back by pointing out that it’s a mere hypercorrection, based on the personal opinion of some geezer back in 1770 as to which construction was more “elegant” – not a historically attested prescriptive rule.

         If “less” was good enough for the Latin translations of Alfred The Great, it’ll do for posting comments on cricketish blogs.

      3. You mean ‘prat,’ no?

      4. P.S. We couldn’t care less/fewer. Please don’t anyone be deterred from commenting.

      5. You might think I’ve fallen for Muphry’s law, yer maj, but in fact pratt is a variant spelling of “prat”. I’ve always felt the “one t” spelling looked a bit odd and have given it the “double t” since I was a young lad. I’m not sure why – the most likely culprit would be some book or another I read at an impressionable age – but I’ll note that the Old English cognate is “prætt”, which sports even better-looking orthography than “pratt” does, and makes “prat” look bare by comparison.

         Not that I’d have been aware of the Old English form at the age of 8, mind.

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