Posted by Many things happened in the third one-dayer between England and Australia. James Taylor made a hundred. Alex Hales put a fake walrus head on. Good shots were hit, good balls were bowled. There may even have been a six at one point. We don’t know. Sixes are passé. We don’t even look up from what we’re reading for them any more.
But all of these things pale into insignificance when compared to one stellar moment. In years to come, this match will be remembered for one thing and one thing alone. That thing was Steven Finn leaping like a crested salmon to catch Steve Smith.
At a conservative estimate, the ball was travelling at one billion miles per hour and was set to pass Finn by upwards of 36 metres. There was only one way in which it could be stopped. Finn closed his eyes, paused the world, summoned the spirit of Dwayne Leverock and then leapt like a crested salmon.
As he soared through the air majestically, it was immediately clear that nothing could go wrong. The timing, power and trajectory of the leap were perfect. Finn’s hand homed in on the ball and Smith was on his way. What a way for a batsman to go. It was like being stabbed in the neck by an angel.
Apparently Roy’s catch was better.
Cat, meet pigeons. Pigeons, cat.
Not the crested salmon, cat, you leave that alone. I SAID LEAVE IT ALONE.
Was Roy’s catch completed by first-rate ganglatron Steven Finn?
We rest our case.
Or, as Morgan described Finn’s catch. “He’s like a leaping salmon at midwicket.”
I prefer “crested salmon” although I have no idea what it means.
Roy’s catch reminded me of a King penguin attempting to fly and them falling backwards on the ice.
Catch of the summer. Better than Stokes’ at Trent Bridge. Except for one thing – ODIs don’t matter. I’ve already forgotten the result of this one.
It’s worth one point in the ‘Ashes Compound Scoring Methodology’. The test matches are worth one million points, mind you.
If you watch carefully, you’ll see that his right foot gets about four inches off the ground. That’s not a leap. It’s a topple. I will concede that it is quite an athletic topple, but a topple it remains. You could have tied his foot to the floor with only four inches of slack in the rope, and he’d still have caught it.
Steven Finn toppled over like a mill chimney after a visit from Fred Dibnah to catch Steve Smith.
Can we compromise with ‘toppled over like a crested salmon after a visit from Fred Dibnah’?
His right foot also went 3″ sideways so he would have need 5″ of rope, simple maths.
Nice work with Pythagoras’ Theorem there.
Yeah but that’s not including the amount needed to a) tie round his ankle and b) tether to the ground somehow.
If you use a regular bowline knot at each end, I estimate (based on some experiments with some polyprolene twine found in a drawer at my work) that you would need an extra 3 ft off rope.
Based on those calculations, you would need 8 ft in total to keep Steve Finn in place while allowing him to dive for a catch to dismiss Steve Smith. Or you could post him at short mid-off on the Trent Bridge Principle that he will soon drill it straight into your hands.
And it was fun to see a dual spin attack.
Ball turning, batsmen struggling to figure out the turn or lack of it.
There’s no such thing as a crested salmon.
There’s a salmon-crested cockatoo, but I son’t think they go in much for leaping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon-crested_cockatoo
I was going to point out the exact same for eternal glory, but my tardiness means I only get the crumbs under the table. Google suggests crusted salmon, which is far less appealing.
The power of Finn-esque flight would leave a salmon-crested cockatoo rather nonplussed, I feel.
We knew someone would take issue with the fact that there’s no such thing as a crested salmon.
It’s almost as if you’ve never heard the phrase ‘leap like a crested salmon’ before.
I’ve not, but I have heard the phrase ‘those weeping Aussies smell like crusted salmon’.
I wonder if KC meant that a long Finn looks like a crest?
Of course there’s such a thing as a crested salmon. They’re a bit bigger than the uncrested salmon, and have a different coloration. Typically, they’re two to three hundred feet in length, and generally a sort of reddish-brown colour. They live mostly on land, anchoring themselves into the ground and standing vertically. They eat coal, and excrete by belching carbon dioxide from their upper orifice. They have few natural predators today, but were predated almost to the point of extinction by the lesser spotted Dibnah.
County Championship Round-up
Yorkshire are going to be champions – boldly calling this now.
If anyone hasn’t seen the crested salmon yet, here he is:
https://twitter.com/TheCricketGeek/status/641571427666280448
Also, among the current dramatic events which include a first-class record-equalling seven catches for Luke Ronchi, Brad Haddin’s retired! As in, he’s quit international cricket – nothing to do with putting a new protective ring-shaped rubber component on the rim of a wheel!
He bows out with this line:
“What was meant to happen was Rod said we’d share the keeping in that match and I said ‘Rod, I’ve been around for 15 years, if you want me to go out and give you the energy, the perfect keeping game, I’ll go and do that but if you know what’s going to happen cut the bullshit and tell us – don’t play one off against the other because you know after 15 years what I can do’.”
Yes, the perfect keeping game. Never more evident than when he perfectly dropped Joe Root on 0 at Cardiff.