Posted by The thing about hiccups is that they almost always come as a plural. You might cough once, you can get away with a single sneeze, but hiccups arrive en masse. As such, Darren Lehmann’s description of the Cardiff Test as ‘a minor hiccup’ seems entirely fitting.
Far from being symptomatic of woefully unjustified arrogance, Lehmann was actually being very careful with his choice of words. He might equally have described the result as a ‘blip,’ referring to the sound repeatedly produced by a hospital’s heart-rate monitor, all things being well.
Hiccup, hiccup, hiccup. Blip, blip, blip.
But yet if that great seer of our times, Boof Lehmann, foresaw what was to come, it was fairly unexpected for many of us. The biggest surprise of all was English cricket’s apparent willingness to sacrifice days of cricket in favour of improved chances of victory.
Test cricket is typically played on pitches as flat as a steamrollered pancake. This year, England apparently thought: ‘Sod it. Let’s play on English pitches for once, see how that goes.’
It didn’t last long.
It does make you wonder whether they might have produced similar pitches a bit more often in the preceding decades. You know, at any point between Terry Alderman and now really.
Improved drainage, covered pitches, mah moom, stick o’ rooooobarb etc.
Whenever the Baggy Greens roll round I reckon the ECB should get their in-house psychic to ask the ghost of Old Trafford’s 1956 pitch doctor what to do. I don’t even think England would win that often but it would be worth it just to see if you could make an Aussie coach’s head explode.
I walked into a pharmacy and asked the bloke behind the till if he had anything for Hiccups, so he turned round and threw a glass of water over me, I said “what the fuck do you think you’re doing” he replied “you haven’t got Hiccups now have you?”
I replied “no, but the wife has and she’s sat in the taxi outside”
What kind of decadent excess is this, getting taxis to the pharmacy? Is this a southern thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnGPgCVJUsI
Gently amusing and particularly apposite re the pharmacy KC, but it is ironic to hear a jock defending the erosion of the English language with an accent thick enough to fry a mars bar in.
Boom boom