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You can find a link to it at the bottom of our Campaign to Get Paul Collingwood Into England’s Ashes Squad page.
We’ve mostly just created it because campaigns always have to have petitions nowadays. It’s not like we get a million signatories and then something happens. It’s not a means to an end in any meaningful sense. The ultimate aim here is really just to get a lot of signatories and then we can all sort of sit there agreeing with each other.
At the same time, the more we’ve thought about it, the more it’s occurred to us that The Campaign to Get Paul Collingwood Into England’s Ashes Squad maybe has a little bit more to it than what we initially realised. To some extent it’s also symbolic of our feelings about the nature of modern professional cricket.
Once upon a time – not even that long ago, really – there was a very real chance that a professional cricketer or ex-professional cricketer could legitimately harbour hopes of an out-of-the-blue call-up purely on the basis of their physical proximity to the squad.
A bout of illness, a rash of injuries and the national side would be left making a few calls and knocking on a few doors in a frantic bid to make up the numbers. There’s no chance of that nowadays. Performance or Lions squads lurk nearby. Every eventuality is covered.
Is that what we want from international cricket? Of course we want our national side to be good and effective and to do what it can to win, but we can’t help but feel that something has been lost – something shambolic and amateur, sure, but a certain warmth too.
No-expense spared professionalism leaves us a bit cold and we’d like it if there were still just the remotest possibility that an ageing pro serving as part of the coaching stuff might just get another Test match in an emergency.
So again, here’s the campaign and an invitation to be second on the petition via the link at the bottom.
“You’re one of 2 people to sign this petition. Now help find 98 more people to reach the goal.”
I am proud to be the second signatory. Not quite headline grabbing stuff of a public protest, e.g. a symbolic anti-cuts demo…
http://ianlouisharris.com/1982/01/
…but it’s something.
Congrats.
I always liked that Tony Pigott got a Test appearance like this.
“No-expense spared professionalism leaves us a bit cold”
This, this and also this. Also to be filed under this category – players that can’t field, 10s and 11s that can’t bat.
We have a 2,3 and 5 who can’t bat – isn’t that enough?
This is why Sri Lanka is currently my favorite Test team. Players getting dropped and recalled for no apparent reason, an opener who makes international cricket look incredibly difficult, awful fielding, and at least two players in every XI who average less than 12.
I am one of 13 people to sign this petition. Since l got 151 people (or rather 150 plus me) to vote for me at the last General Election, we must be able to do better than that.
Are you Lord Buckethead, Smudge?
I am not. Although I know a man who is. I am the man to Buckethead’s right on the podium when the results were announced. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/09/lord-buckethead/
The readers of this website never fail to surprise us.
“I am the man to Buckethead’s right on the podium when the results were announced.”
(Unless I’ve got this wrong), you’re Teresa May!?!?!
Good on you, Smudge.
Top notch manifesto:
https://grantsmithformp.org/
But I have to ask this question of you, Sam…
..were you aware of this connection/potential conflict of interest when you so deftly stuck the boot in to Theresa May towards the end of the election campaign?
Anyway, I am proud to know both of you, even if only virtually.
Just beautiful, Bert
The integral tee squared dee tee
From one to the cube root of three
Times the cosine
Of three pi over nine
Is the log of the cube root of e.
Thank you for your kind words Ged, and (I think) Bert. Ne, I am not Theresa May, but as she purports to be a cricket supporter, she may well be lurking on the site under an alias. I’m not naming names, but I have my suspicions.
I would have voted for you, because you are an engineer. The world needs more engineers. That way more things would work, and all the things that were working would work better.
And nobody would ever doubt you, because being an engineer, you would be overwhelmingly correct. You’d go on the Today Programme and John Humphries would ask some snarky question and you’d say, “OK, let me work on that”, and you’d come back three days later and give him the complete answer with all the calculations and diagrams. And he wouldn’t look at them, he would just be angry at your correctness and send you away. And then he’d talk to an accountant or lawyer or other form of sociopath for whom truth is different on Wednesdays to what it is on Tuesdays.
And you would change the motto of the UK from dieu et mon droit, which is a) French and b) wrong, to e^iπ -1 =0, which is a) true and b) gorgeous.
And things would be better, just better.
“which is a) true”… *ahem*
What’s the cosine of a half-turn, Bert?
I think I know what you’ve done though… Torn between the direct way of writing what e to the i times pi actually equals, and that slightly clumsy-looking (to me at least) rearrangement that lots of people prefer because “it’s got all five important numbers in it”, you have accidentally mixed them up.
I’m a phi-man myself. Gotta love that golden ratio. I’d be changing the proportions of the national flag and everything. I’d also change the flag design to a fractal, thus creating infinite work opportunities for flag-makers everywhere.
Yes, e^iπ + 1 = 0, which is what I wrote. Anything else is just fake news.
But I do like the idea of a fractal flag. And another thing, I would make the National Anthem a setting to music of the following limerick:
∫ t^2 dt [from 1 to ∛3] x (cos(3π⁄9)) = ln∛e
Just beautiful, Bert
https://i.stack.imgur.com/qjYII.png
I think I signed it, not sure. In any case Welcome to Collin(g)wood.
I remember when having an opinion on an English batsman was frowned upon in these parts, now it’s petitions and everything.
With reference to previous comments/posts, I’m just going to casually leave this link to a free download of Civilisation 3 (well, free if you download it in the next 34 hours or so) here, note that I don’t take any responsibility for any negative consquences on employment, relationships or sleep patterns.