Posted by Is better than it’s been in a while. Apparently. You may not know much about Tim Gruijters. In fact, you may not know much about Tim Gruijters at all.
Gruijters plays for the Netherlands. Or at least he would do if he hadn’t been sent home from the World T20 with a bad back. He has been replaced by a conspicuously superior player, Tom Cooper, who just happens to have become available with South Australia not making it to the Sheffield Shield final in Australia.
Gruijters says he isn’t really injured and feels wronged enough about what’s happened to have put a video up on YouTube about it. It’s worth a watch, if only because he sounds so immensely and pleasingly Dutch. You can sympathise, but at the same time we’re talking about the Netherlands here for whom good players aren’t exactly ten a euro cent. This is Tom Cooper’s record and now try and work out whether Gruijters is a batsman or a bowler.
He’s only 22 and this is a somewhat self-defeating thing to do at that age, but perhaps the scarcity of Dutch players will work in his favour one day. They should give him a second chance, because his hurt is understandable. He wanted to play in the World Cup. Remember when your fragile dreams met the oncoming train of real life pragmatism for the first time?
I think this isn’t where we should talk about. The important thing around this story isn’t Gruijters or Cooper. And yes his story is one the should be told and heard. For a sportsmen a WC is something you want to achieve and then being dropped out of the team is hard. But the way how the KNCB is covering up this way of getting Cooper on the team, is worth a penalty. Even Cooper is not the black horse in this story, he doesn;t bend the rules. The KNCB is doing this. And to make it even better, the want to sue Gruijters for bringing up this story! It looks like a kind of Blatter show, but not with the fifa…
Tim Gruijters’s back…
…NOT as in ‘returned’, as in ‘that bit of him that isn’t his front’. Even so, he hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything.
I like the Associate sides, not least for that unknown-quantity factor. In the case of Dwayne Leverock from Bermuda,for example, that quantity was sizeable.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/page2/content/story/568060.html
I especially like the unusual names. For example, I celebrate the fact that one of the Nepalese players is named Pun. It should be possible to think of many decent plays on that name, but anything I think of is merely a bad pun. Please help me out, someone.
Speak for yourself. All my fragile dreams have come true. ALL OF THEM.
In other news – if you can’t beat the Dutch, wear their colours….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/cricket/article-2582584/England-Dutch-orange-kit-World-T20-outlook-bright-skipper-Stuart-Broad.html
Why does Ian Bell look like someone’s just shown him footage of a ill kitten?
Ravi’s got the best facial hair of them all.
I imagine the Dutch will be feeling quietly pleased with their skullduggery after today’s result.
Can they get Nannes back?
I hope more players take to Youtube when they feel that mgt has done the dirty on them. Get in there.
Apparently Gruijters is a ‘top order batsman’. The fact that this has to be written into his profile so you can be sure says much.
Sooner or later CA will take care of Cooper the way they did with Nannes – select him for a meaningless game against an associate in an act of cock blocking so he can’t hurt them in one of the world cups. This will open the way for Gruijters to return.