The Sunday Times profiles the Somerset cricket team of 1981, which brought together Ian Botham, Viv Richards, and Joel Garner into the most spectacular one day team of its time.
“We were a wonderfully varied group of players, with university graduates, salt-of-the-earth players from Somerset and some superstars,” recalls allrounder Vic Marks. “Temperamentally we were better suited to one-day cricket because we had players who could turn it on rather than grind it out day-in, day-out, which is what you have to do to win a championship.”
Each member of the team, which won five one-day trophies in as many years, is profiled. Including the mighty Dennis Breakwell, who taught me to bowl when I was nine.
In Russia they hold sex-doll rafting races. No, really, they do. Anyway, this year’s event, however, has not been without scandal - one of the competitors apparently getting a little over friendly with his raft:
Over 400 “sportsmen” took part in the Bubble Baba Challenge tournament. “It’s fun and difficult to swim 1200 meters in stormy river with an exotic apparatus, as inflatable ladies slip out of hands”, tournament organizer Dmitriy Bulaviniv said.
At a juries’ command participants jumped into the water. Strong wind and flow snatched out resilient dolls from strong men’s hands, and only Osipov,40, resolutely approached to the finish.
“I was shocked, I think it was an expression of his great desire to win,” Osipov’s friend said. The jury then noticed Osipov’s strange position and told him to moor. When he came out of the water, gazers saw signs of recent sexual activity on the swimmer’s doll.
At least they didn’t ask him to dock.
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This would be an interesting question to put to the England and Pakistan captains:
Why didn’t both teams announce that- no matter what the umpires said- they wanted to finish the game and carry on playing? they could have either got volunteers from the crowd to umpire or next man in or relied entirely on TV for coverage and just gone on with the match.
OK. Enought about the cricket.
The Guardian, in it’s Leader comment, implies that disputed sporting decisions make terrorists:
[The decision to abandon the England vs Pakistan cricket match] turned an incident that could have been resolved into a childish and destructive stand-off. The dispute was not between England and Pakistan, which may allow the forthcoming one day series to continue. But it can only fuel the alienation felt by some British Muslims at a time of great strain.
I don’t know what they were smoking at Guardian HQ, but I want some.
As the Test match between England and Pakistan is abandoned amid acrimony, Guardian sports columnist Mike Selvey displays some spectacularly poor judgement as he raises the finger of blame straight at the two umpires:
That an international match of such profile can be terminated simply because two officials have had their integrity questioned - for that is what we are talking about here - is a disgrace to the game.
The reaching of such a sorry state of affairs is the fault neither of England nor Pakistan.
I don’t know if Darrell Hair and Billy Doctrove were correct when the awarded a 5 run penalty against Pakistan for ball tampering. But, if Pakistan really felt hard done by, they should have appealed the 5-run penalty to the match referee. It’s a relatively trivial amount of runs in the context of the game, and the decision could have comfortably been overturned at the end of the days play, had it been judged that the umpires’ decision was incorrect. This incident did, after all, only take place on the fourth day of five.
(To my American readers - yes, cricket games really do go on that long. And, yes, they are often drawn at the end of those five days).
But I am certain that they did the right thing in awarding the game to England when the Pakistan team refused to come out of their dressing room to resume the game.
Simply refusing to play the game is not the way to address any dispute. Imgaine if, in the World Cup final, France had refused to continue playing after Zidane was sent off. The press would have - rightly - had a field day, and France would have been thrown out of the tournament.
The ICC must back the umpires and their decision to the hilt. Anything less would damage the integrity of the game, by sending a message that Umpires decisions are not final, and that throwing temper tantrums is the only way to get ahead in the byzantine world of international cricket.
Update: Woohoo! I’ve been quoted by the BBC!
If you’ve come from the Test Match Special site, welcome. Feel free to take a look around. A good place to start is the homepage, or you could check out my two other posts on the forfeited match - For the love of the game and Cricket umpires make terrorists.
After missing the no-ball which allowed Leicestershire to snatch victory in the 20-20 cup final at the weekend, Umpire Allan Jones is rightly contrite:
“I looked at it on TV when I got back and it was a no-ball. It was a marginal one but it was a no-ball. I must say that I was concentrating on the four men inside the circle and keeping the water out of my eyes at the time, because it was raining very hard. And I had the lights in my eyes.”
Tough job, this umpiring.
When was the last time you saw four Eastern European clubs make it to the last eight of a European football tournament?
- Sevilla v Zenit St Petersburg
- Basle v Middlesbrough
- Rapid Bucuresti v Steaua Bucuresti
- Levski Sofia v Schalke 04
And what about the Bucharest derby? That’s going to be a serious grudge match, no?
Tim Newman points me to the news report of what must rank as the most exciting game of one day cricket ever played.
Australia scored 434-4, to smash the previous ODI record score by more than 30 runs.
So South Africa, never a team to shirk a challenge, went onto the field and hammered out a new world record of 438-9.
Wow. How come I never get to actually see these games?
Laura Bush did her bit for international diplomacy on Saturday after her Secret Service protection team forced the Latvian ice hockey team to wait in their training arena in full gear for 40 minutes. All because she was watching the US women’s hockey team play Switzerland in the next arena:
“That’s not normal,” Latvian forward Aleksandrs Semjonovs told the newspaper Diena. “The third period is only half way done and she was not yet ready to leave. Why couldn’t we leave the arena?”
Commenters at All About Latvia are incensed:
And who the hell do they think they are putting people to inconvinience in a foreign (not USA) country! Our presient should make am official protest.
But, let’s look on the bright side - the Latvian hockey team got 40 minutes of extra practice time. Think how well prepared they’ll be for their next match.
Chelsea chief exec says that the club’s record losses - a staggering £180 million, the highest ever recorded in British, and probably European football history - are because of “a series of exceptional one off rises.”
”These figures reflect the continuing restructuring of the business which we began in 2003-4,” Chelsea chief Peter Kenyon told the club website.
“The rise is down to some exceptional items that were necessary to help us in our aim to break-even by 2009-10.”
The termination of a deal with Umbro, which cost £25.5m, plus a total loss of £22.8m over the transfers of Adrian Mutu and Juan Sebastien Veron and the £5m for Academy recruitment were picked out as the “exceptional items”.
Hang on. £25.5m plus £22.8m plus £5m only adds up to a little over £50 million. Even taking these figures into account, Chelsea lost almost £130 million last year, which would still be a record loss.
Thank god for the largesse of the Russian people, eh?
