The Official Cricket Thread

[alles ist gut]

Fucking weather

[Mudface]

Typical, I didn't even know there was a Test until this morning.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

Ironic to say the least. Mind you, the weather for the other 4 days is quite good and I doubt we'll need more than 3 and a half days to beat this Windies side. 

[Captain Howdy]

Holder bowling beautifully here

[Jairzinho]

Should have been six.

[Captain Howdy]

Be nice to see the West Indies as a threat again after so many years of utter tripe

[Stickman]

Be nice to say four down for less than a hundred is due to the England batsmen not having spent time in the middle these past few months but it’s happened that many times these past few years that you’d never know .

[Jairzinho]

2 hours ago, Captain Howdy said:

Holder bowling beautifully here

Bowling like a slightly latter day Courtney Walsh.

[Jairzinho]

 

Must have modelled his action on him. 

[Jairzinho]

Bess playing this bowling exclusively with his balls.

[Stickman]

Holder showing why he’s the number one rated Test all rounder in the world  with five wickets now...

[Edward.]

Used to live next door to Courtney when he played for my local club. He was a demon in the nets, his spinners used to scare the living daylights out of people. 

[Jairzinho]

10 minutes ago, Edward. said:

Used to live next door to Courtney when he played for my local club. He was a demon in the nets, his spinners used to scare the living daylights out of people. 

 

Where was that? In Bristol?

[Edward.]

Hexham when he played for Tynedale in Northumberland I think it was about 1983, then Ian Bishop. Mark Wood is a current player who was also at the club. 

[Jairzinho]

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2020/jul/08/michael-holdings-eloquence-skys-unflinching-masterpiece-on-race

 

West Indies were flying a Black Lives Matter flag from their balcony. It was one of the first things you saw as the cameras panned across the empty ground on the opening morning of the opening match of this strange and delayed cricket season.

 

Later, when they came out on to the ground, you could see their players were wearing one black glove each. Both teams took the knee before the start of play and as they did it West Indies raised their gloved fists in salute, a clear, conscious echo of the protests made by the sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith as they stood on the podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico.

 

You can’t understand the history of cricket without understanding the history of empire. You can’t appreciate the rivalries between these, and other, teams, without appreciating the relationship between our countries, what’s been given, and what’s been taken.

 

You can’t understand the hostility of Michael Holding’s bowling without understanding what made him so angry, you can’t appreciate Frank Worrell’s grace as a captain without knowing something of the prejudice he faced, you can’t value the violence of Viv Richards’ batting without a sense of what he was fighting against.

 

You can’t separate sport from politics, or have the cricket without the cause. But plenty of people would like to. Sky, to their credit, didn’t let them.

 

Midway through the very first over, their live footage was stuck on a slow-mo of Kemar Roach walking back to his mark, and they were unable to cut away in time to capture his fourth or fifth deliveries. In between his ad-libs describing what we were missing, Holding explained they were having “technical hitches”. Their cameras were down. Imagine the flap. You could almost hear the engineers swearing. They shouldn’t worry because their broadcast won’t be remembered for the little things they got wrong but the big things they got right.

 

During the first of many rain delays, they delivered a brilliant half-hour of sports broadcasting. It opened with a quote from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” and followed up by making good on the promise of those words.

 

They did it by focusing on the experiences of Holding and Ebony Rainford-Brent. The latter spoke about “the constant drip, drip” of racism she had put up with during her career in English cricket, all the loaded remarks about her hair, her body and her food, “day in, day out”, the way a coach always referred to “your lot” in conversations with her.

 

Rainford-Brent, the first black woman to play for England, is known as one of the warmest people on the cricket circuit. She broke down as she explained how her jovial personality had been shaped by her reluctance to push back against those prejudices.

 

The film included footage of Mike Gatting, the former MCC president and current ECB ambassador, being heckled by anti-racism campaigners for taking “blood money” on the rebel tour to apartheid South Africa. And if the point wasn’t clear enough, Rainford-Brent pressed it by pointing out the structural racism in the England and Wales Cricket Board, and at all levels of the game in England. She bluntly pointed out there are no black members of the ECB board, no black directors of cricket, no black chief executives, and no black captains among the 18 counties and that black participation in grassroots cricket is tiny.

 

Holding continued, live on air, with an extraordinary monologue that took in everything from the recent video of Amy Cooper threatening to call the police on a black man in Central Park who asked her to put her dog on a lead, to the historic representation of Christ as a white man, to the erasure of Lewis Howard Latimer (the black man who perfected the lightbulb) at the expense of Thomas Edison. Holding spoke about research at Yale that revealed the extent of unconscious bias among pre-school teachers and he spoke about research by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that showed how white policemen invariably overestimate the age of black children.

 

It was eloquent, intelligent, and confrontational broadcasting, fiercely uncompromising stuff for an audience who were tuning in because they wanted the comfort and relief of live cricket, of cakes and sunshine and sixes.

 

And it was capped by Nasser Hussain. “People will be tuning in and saying: ‘Not this again,’” Hussain said. “All I’ll say to those people who say ‘not again’ is that a few weeks ago I watched a black man being killed in front of my eyes on Channel 4 news, and my natural reaction was to look away. Next time that footage came on, I forced myself to watch because I felt something inside of myself say: ‘You’ve been looking away too long.’”

 

[Captain Howdy]

Love Holding he just reeks of class

[Stickman]

 

[Jairzinho]

Thought the 100 was a fucking shit idea?

 

Welcome to games with three teams. Hopefully postponement becomes "get in the fucking sea".

 

https://www.essentiallysports.com/cricket-news-cricket-south-africa-postpones-the-experimental-3t-format-the-solidarity-cup-indefinitely/

[Mudface]

9 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

Thought the 100 was a fucking shit idea?

 

Welcome to games with three teams. Hopefully postponement becomes "get in the fucking sea".

 

https://www.essentiallysports.com/cricket-news-cricket-south-africa-postpones-the-experimental-3t-format-the-solidarity-cup-indefinitely/

Christ, that sounds utter rubbish. I wish they'd piss off with these gimmicks, it's a niche sport with limited commercial appeal, stop trying to make it into something it isn't and ruin it in the process.

[Jairzinho]

Just now, Mudface said:

Christ, that sounds utter rubbish. I wish they'd piss off with these gimmicks, it's a niche sport with limited commercial appeal, stop trying to make it into something it isn't and ruin it in the process.

I understand the 20 over stuff. It's a game in three hours. You can fit full games in after work if they're day nighters. Etc, etc. It has no doubt attracted new fans, and that's a good thing. It's not for me, but whatever.

 

But why the fuck is there a need to further fuck about though?

 

The three formats of the game work well.

[Mudface]

3 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

I understand the 20 over stuff. It's a game in three hours. You can fit full games in after work if they're day nighters. Etc, etc. It has no doubt attracted new fans, and that's a good thing. It's not for me, but whatever.

 

But why the fuck is there a need to further fuck about though?

 

The three formats of the game work well.

I was playing 20 over a side cricket in an evening league over 30 years ago, it fits in well with people working. i wonder if participation in that sort of thing has increased since the explosion in T20 though.

[Jairzinho]

5 minutes ago, Mudface said:

I was playing 20 over a side cricket in an evening league over 30 years ago, it fits in well with people working. i wonder if participation in that sort of thing has increased since the explosion in T20 though.

No idea, to be honest.

 

The natural progression was always from 20 over Sat/Sun morning (or the occasional evening) youth games to 40/50 over adult games that would obviously take most of a day. I don't know if that pattern has changed.

 

I've only ever played one 20 over game as an adult. 112 not out. Didn't seem to make sense to play another after that.

[Mudface]

1 minute ago, Jairzinho said:

No idea, to be honest.

 

The natural progression was always from 20 over Sat/Sun morning (or the occasional evening) youth games to 40/50 over adult games that would obviously take most of a day. I don't know if that pattern has changed.

 

I've only ever played one 20 over game as an adult. 112 not out. Didn't seem to make sense to play another after that.

I was (and still am) shit at batting. I did take 30-odd wickets at under 10 a piece the season I played though. I don't recall ever playing a 50 over game, they were all 20 overs a side, even at weekend games. Presumably that would have been a level or two above what I was playing.

[Jairzinho]

9 minutes ago, Mudface said:

I was (and still am) shit at batting. I did take 30-odd wickets at under 10 a piece the season I played though. I don't recall ever playing a 50 over game, they were all 20 overs a side, even at weekend games. Presumably that would have been a level or two above what I was playing.

I peaked when I was about 14, sadly. At the time I probably had a small chance of just about carving out a career as a county cricketer if I had worked really hard on my game. Which I didn't. 

 

I was an off spinner, not helped by the club's first team probably being the best in the county at the time and undoubtedly with the best spinner in the division. So a mixture of not seeing a path to the first team (the seconds were still playing at a high level, mind), and just not caring enough, meant I lost focus for a couple of years. By 17/18 it was too late probably. Anyway, moved clubs when I was 19/20 and to be honest enjoyed my cricket a lot more. Became more of a batsman, took a fairly prominent role in coaching etc. It was a really nice crowd.

 

I really miss playing cricket. I actually stopped playing five or six years before moving here. I had been playing three times a week, nets another day, coaching another, and it was too all-encompassing. I'd have entire summers without a day at the beach etc. So fucked it off and I suppose have only felt the regret since moving here. I guess with the knowledge that I can't simply restart the next season if I want to.

[Jairzinho]

Could have had a big lead here The Windies, but a few of them have just chucked their wickets away.