Least you could do in the circumstances really.

Beyond disappointed, KC.

If I can bring myself to trudge along to Lord’s on my tod that evening and if I can then be arsed to report on a match that I’ll have witnessed in such solitary circumstances…

…then maybe, just maybe, I’ll feel motivated to pen a string of invective against you, the like of which would, without a shadow of a doubt, make you wish that you had never been born.

After all, that’s what friends are for.

That would indeed be interesting.

It’s a bit like our old gripe about how some media outlets treat all county cricket as being of equivalent standard, even though there’s a divisional structure. Not all international cricket is equal and we should probably make more effort to highlight that.

Thanks. Corrected.

Thank you for your kind implicit offer. Having been a huge [googles] Grey-and-Blacks fan since day one, we are of course keen to go to every single game, except, maybe, some of the ones on Monday nights in cities at the other end of the country during the school holidays. Also some of the ones at this end of the country on other days of the week.

Can we however please request that some sort of insult at our expense be included in any resulting match report as a consequence of the position we have taken on this matter?

Here’s an interesting one for you. When Cricket Ireland makes a funding bid, they have to include their calendar for the year ahead. That’s got some fairly routine, administratively necessary stuff in it for working out how much it’s going to cost: where are they travelling to, how big a playing squad are they taking etc.

But they also have to say WHAT’S A REALISTIC AMBITION IN EACH SERIES (some rather over-ambitious, some more modest – though even reaching the T20 super 12s turned out to be over-ambitious!) as well as HOW MUCH DO YOU ACTUALLY CARE. A series of 3 ODIs and 3 T20Is away to Zimbabwe in March/April? That’s merely a “preparation event”, since it didn’t come under the WCSL or affect world cup qualification. Whereas the reverse fixture in August did, so that one was marked “targeted (WCQ)”.

Would be very interesting to see England’s equivalent planning. Though to be fair you can mostly work out how seriously they are taking an event from their squad announcements, and what target they thought was reasonable in the targeted events might be gauged – if and when they fail to meet it – by how many people get sacked afterwards…

New Zealand are playing a 3 match series??????

I ask only because I have just received an e-mail informing me that my members’ priority booking opens tomorrow morning and it is first come, first served for the guest tickets.

Other than that, yours seems a perfectly sensible prioritised list to me.

There was some warm-up or qualifier or other, I believe. This is the real deal and qualification is well underway. Ireland have had to start from the very bottom but they are almost there – one match away. Philippines were dismissed for 36 by Oman today, remarkably with no-one making a duck. Oman reached their target off just 17 balls, Nawaz with 33* (12) the only batter to truly get to grips with conditions.