Posted by We’ve been away. We’re not really up to speed. Thanks to Roscoe H Spellgood, we know that speed equals distance over time, so we suppose that we’ll just sit around for a while and hope that we recover the ground.
Doubtless you can help us out by providing a few nuggets in the comments because we only really caught three pieces of news.
We saw that Eoin Morgan was probably going to moan about an umpiring decision and then we later saw a headline saying that he’d done precisely that. We didn’t read the article because moaning about umpiring decisions is the lowest form of the already low art of the post-match interview.
Ben Duckett sort of paid a visit to the trope about teams getting more out of players by encouraging them to play how they normally play (rather than encouraging them to develop any sort of adaptability whatsoever).
“Cookie spoke to us – ‘we’re going to try to bat all day here, whether it’s 20 runs off 160 balls’. That isn’t my game. I did try to do what we were asked. On another day, my way of batting for the draw is actually trying to get 120 off 160. It’s tough just trying to prod back.”
Duckett is presumably aware that there was no guarantee that he’d have survived 160 balls had he played his own way because earlier in the interview he admitted that he didn’t have much confidence he’d have made any runs in his that Test no matter how he’d approached things.
It strikes us that this is a close cousin of the ‘natural game’ myth.
The third piece of cricket news to make it past our eyes and into our head was Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s return to Lancashire. There’s no real need to say anything about how we feel about this.
Fantastic stuff from the Aussies in Auckland. With only six needed off 19 balls and the guy on strike 146 not out and on fire, how better to end the match than by having the non-striker run out without facing a ball for the longest diamond duck in the history of all cricket (reportedly)?
In other news…
…while you were away, I was finishing off retro-Ogblogging 2015.
For some reason, I didn’t try to turn my sojourn to Headingley into a King Cricket piece or three.
With the usual caveats (it’s not in a KC-stylee), here’s a link for anyone who cares/dares to read it:
http://ianlouisharris.com/2015/06/10/a-visit-to-leeds-for-yorkshire-v-middlesex-headingley-8-to-10-june-2015/
I’ve got some mildly amusing second-hand anecdotes about Colin de Grandhomme but I think I’ll save these for another time.
A lad from Bermuda playing for England U-19s reportedly hit a six that cleared the second tier at the Wankhede en route to scoring 107*. He also took a couple wickets in the chase.
Move over, ABDV!
Sri Lanka in letter-B denial shock with the selection of de Silvas C & D, following in the legendary footsteps of de Silva, A.