The new games in heaven thread (Rugby and Cricket)

[Davros]

Gee Donut, I reckon your athletic self could catch better than that national cricket team of yours. Do you think they have a little wager supporting Gilchrest to be the first person to score centuries in every test of an ashes series . They are ceratinly seem to be doing there best to support this ambition LOL.

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[Memnoch]

Where's Donut? I miss talking to him!

I wanted to ask him about the target Australia had to chase in their second innings. I heard that England were batting really well! Butcher and Stewart were tearing the Aussie attack to shreds, they looked to be heading for a huge total. What was the total that Australia had to chase?



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[Davros]

Sort of spoils the enjoyment of winning when the games are so one sided doesn't it. I am kind of wishing to see a closer contest here or there (Davr is off to the bathroom to wash his mouth out ).

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[Memnoch]

Hmm, looks like it's just the two of us here, eh, Davros old son? It's going to get really lonely in the next few weeks I think.

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[Memnoch]

Here's an article about the cricket from England's Guardian newspaper, from renowned cricket writer Frank Keating:


Too meek, mild and bloody awful

Frank Keating
Monday July 23, 2001
The Guardian

As the short-changed throng moseyed away from Lord's yesterday, pork pies unwrapped and Chardonnay uncorked, to the credit of its collective civility the mumbled post-mortems seemed to suggest only a weary sympathy for the England players at being so catastrophically clobbered yet again by inevitability.

Whatever opinions the morning brings out, the national coach Duncan Fletcher's mes sianic properties, so trumpetingly acclaimed for the last couple of years, have now exploded into fragments. It is not a pretty sight. England's cricket is back to square one with nowhere else to go.

England's supporters are far too nice, which makes for a perfect match with their team which is far too meek. A soccer crowd would have been filing out long before the tragi-comic last rites yesterday morning - blowing, as it went, some coarse ripe raspberries and a din of jeers at the team and its coach. "What a load of rubbish" is, I think, the usual winter refrain.

Instead, in the short capitulation, their sad and sorry England had allowed the full house to see only a handful of desperate curtain-call snicks and swipes from White and Caddick for serenading with a fond applause - with only the remotest edge of bitterness or sarcasm attached. It was reminiscent of the wearily affectionate despair that Twickenham's middle-class bastion used to dredge up for its lilywhite national team at rugger as it ran up matching white flags for most seasons through the 70s and 80s.

Even three hours after this sad surrender, a few knots of stragglers had stayed on to munch their picnics and cast rheumy eyes across the famous old fields, emptied many hours before their time. Some wished they had stayed home to watch the golf, others inquired in gentlemanly manner about ticket refunds, still more ruminated on which English cricketers might now be picked to replace a few in this shot-through and ruined band of Mr Fletcher's - and as answer to that last question came there "None".

It is an impeaching charge that no fresh names spring to mind for Trent Bridge. What are the A tours for? Trescothick came in last year by fluke and accident; this summer, ditto in a way, a reinvented Butcher.

"Hick must surely come back now," muttered one late picnicker in a panama behind the pavilion. At least his pal in the matching MCC tie did not laugh out loud.

The two old buffers had probably joined in those ironic peels of sarcastic applause earlier as England's dying-swan flurry of fours at the end of the innings. It must have become more drainingly painful for them at once when Australia went in, just 14 to win as a derisory stroll, when a laughing Slater dismissively swatted Caddick to square leg. Were the Australians taking the mickey?

Surely Slater was extracting the literal Michael when he next and most pointedly gave Butcher that doddle of a slips catch as if he was a coach at a schoolboy fielding practice. As Butcher pouched it, the ironic cheers certainly did have a bitter collective dismissiveness about them.

Then Ponting's nonchalant first-ball all-run boundary to furthest long-on also seemed to be taking the mickey - his dismissal with the score at the 13 somehow even more so.

It is grim to note that Australia have won these first two Tests by an embarrassing country mile with Ponting contributing 11, 14 and four. In fact, this batsman of avenging grandeur has made only 46 runs in his last eight Test innings. He is ominously bound to put an atoning and mighty end to that sequence any day now.

Trent Bridge next week cries out for him to star downstage. England can only wince at the anticipation of it. His captain Steve Waugh said as much: "Ricky got a shooter at Edgbaston, a rare one which took off in this first innings and today he just let the emotion take over because, of course, he simply hadn't expected to bat. But, watch out, Ricky's hitting the ball as well as any of us."

Well, not as well surely as the ravishing Adam Gilchrist. What an utter pleasure he has been to watch both at the crease and behind it. Has all history ever seen a better wicketkeeper-batsman - or to be sure, has any Test batting order ever fielded a more dangerous No7?

Averaging 53 from - agreed, only - 19 Tests, Gilchrist threatens for starters to leave the modern stumper-bats far behind: the West Indian Dujon and England's true great Knott average 32, and Alec Stewart averages 33 when he wears the gloves.

I suppose England's Les Ames in the 1930s must be the last century's benchmark, averaging 40 in 72 Test innings - but he was only at No7 in less than half of those knocks. Gilchrist at No7 is the very driving wheel of any innings and until he has gone he can quite simply rechart the very tides and turmoils of any game.

One of Ames's eight Test cen turies was in the only Ashes match England have won at Lord's since the 19th century, in 1934. Will any Englishman manage a single century in this series? All the talk yesterday as the teatime queues evaporated in the drizzle around the tube station was whether Waugh's side was now shown to be better than Bradman's 1948 lot.

At least, against those invincibles, Denis Compton clocked up heroically defiant scores of 184 and 145. The very possibility of an Englishman doing that in 2001 seems as remote as Mars.

It makes you want to weep. That's the trouble with the English, they might want to weep but yesterday, as they moped away, there were only metaphorical tears cascading past those stiff upper lips.



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[Staralfur]

What sort idiot invented a game like cricket? It's a stupid game.

[Davros]

Welcome Staraflur - we were starting to think that the UK had been wiped out by a web eating virus or something. Glad to see some of you are still alive . Even I am starting to find the cricket a touch boring, and praying for a tougher contest sometime soon .

Thanks for the article Memmie. By the way, does anyone know what happened to my mate the Arch-Prat Austin Healey - did he get any slaps on the wrist, or did he weasel out of things.

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[This message has been edited by Davros (edited 07-24-2001).]

[Memnoch]

Anyone seen Donut lately?

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[Bhaal]

Well, first game of the Tri Nations is done and NZ one up. Got a feeling that if we play like we did against South Africa that you Aussies might just walk all over us. Don't like seeing Australia win but against South Africa, ummm, a draw would be nice... I won't start on cricket cause NZ sucks big time!!! Lost again tonight!

[Memnoch]

Hmm, sounds like the right time to talk about the cricket.

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