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A latent cricket fan, or an ignoramus about Indian culture (and, indeed, of non-American cinema)? You be the judge.

From the transcript of Bush 43’s round table interview with Indian journalists in the White House last Wednesday:

Q Between a cricket match and a Bollywood movie, what would a —

THE PRESIDENT: Cricket match and a —

Q You like watching?

THE PRESIDENT: What was the second?

Q It’s between a Bollywood movie and a cricket match.
THE PRESIDENT: I’m a cricket match person. (Laughter.) I appreciate it. As I understand it, I may have a little chance to learn something about cricket. It’s a great pastime. (Laughter.)

One wonders if Bush has ever met Gladstone Dainty, or even heard of him. I bet he knows Allen Stanford…

For one reason or another, this is the first chance I have had to write up my thoughts on the VB Series finals. I’ll turn this into a memory test, and not refer to any source material:

Australia won. Sri Lanka had the series in their grasp until Jayawardene grasped a half-volley off Ponting in Game Two.

The Aussies scored 130 in the last 10 overs of that game. (I have been trying to find any instances of a team scoring more than 260 in a Twenty20 game. Complied records are fabulous for individuals, less so for teams.)
Andrew Symonds scored, what, 160-something? It was the second highest score by a (male) Australian in an ODI since Mark Waugh scored 173 on a seriously minituarised MCG a few years back.

After flogging Sri Lanka in game two, the Aussies did it again in game three. I can’t remember scores from either game. From memory I thiink the Aussies batted second in game three (which was at the Gabba in front of a less-than-packed house) and Adam Gilchrist scored the fastest ODI ton by an Australian in terms of balls faced (if, of course, you disregard John Davison and Karen Rolton).

I have no idea who man of the series was. Brett Dorey? Johan van der Wath? Phil Jaques perhaps? Don’t remember, sorry.

Of course, we’ve all moved on since then. The Australian team all went to KFBP’s taxpayer-funded farewell bash at the SOO, then choofed off to South Africa where the sledging-by-media match between Ricky Ponting and Graeme Smith resumed. And then this morning, South Africa beat Australia by two runs in a twenty20 bash at The Wanderers.

Sri Lanka, meanwhile has gone on to lose an ODI to Bangladesh.

I was saddened to read the other day of the passing of Irving Rosenwater on January 30 at the age of 73.

Rosenwater was a noted statistician and historian on our game, and one of a handful to have become a recognisable name to the wider cricketing community. He was the scorer for BBC Television’s cricket telecasts in the 1970s until he succumbed in 1977 to the twin temptations of Australian sunshine and the Packer dollar, becoming the official scorer for Channel 9’s World Series Cricket coverage. He stayed with Nine into the 1980s as I recall.

His 1978 biography of Sir Donald Bradman was widely acclaimed, though I must confess that I have never read the book, which has long been out of print. Among other works, he was assistant editor to EW Swanton on the massive encyclopedia The World of Cricket (1966) and edited the crosswords in The Cricketer magazine at one time.

I’ve only seen the one obituary for Rosenwater published to date, in The Times on February 9 and republished in The Australian the following day.

It’s just about time to embark on the post-mortems for the 27th annual Australian ODI triseries. With this in mind, I thought it might be worthwhile to delve deep into the bowels of CricInfo archives and look at an exercise I conducted at the end of the 2000-01 tournament (the Carlton Series as it was called that year).

As editor of the CricInfo365 email service, I asked readers for their opinions on the series that year, in which Australia beat a declining West Indies side 2-0 in the final, with Zimbabwe the third team. In more recent times we have things such as blogs and comment forms on which to conduct such discussions, but you can see a selection of the responses that I received, published in the February 13, 2001 edition of CricInfo365.

How much has changed in five years???

We’re one game away from what would be the best thing to happen to Australian cricket in years. A cleansweep drubbing by Sri Lanka in the ODI triseries final.

Of course, we can probably expect Australia to win game two at the SCG and then have an acrimonious game three at the Telstra Dome Gabba on Tuesday. But a two-zip to Sri Lanka would put a big smile on my face, and on many others no doubt.

Yesterday was Tillekeratne Dilshan’s day in the sun - or should that be night under the lights - with four run outs and a catch. Reports from Malcolm Conn, Andrew Ramsay, Peter English, Chloe Saltau, and Elmo Rodrigopulle.

Interesting report in yesterday’s Australian about a discussion paper on wireless internet options released by the Australian Communications and Media Authority this week.

One of the options being considered by the ACMA in increasing wireless internet availability is to reallocate the bandwidth spectrum used by television networks for transmitting some outside broadcast data back to base. Among the many items that would be affected are remote control cameras such as the stump vision used by channel 9 at the cricket.

The press release on the ACMA website gives more details, including a link to the full discussion paper. Submissions to the ACMA are being accepted up to April 3.

Collis King would be best remembered for being the batsman at the other end as Viv Richards blazed away in the 1979 World Cup Final at Lord’s. It’s more than a quarter of a century since he last played for the West Indies, and he’s now in his fifties, but last weekend he turned up in central Queensland for a seven-a-side cricket competition.

ABC Local Radio in Wide Bay has a story on their website about the 22nd annual seven-a-side cricket carnival at Mundubbera. King was captain of a team called the Nixon Nuffies.

He can be heard on the audio report which accompanies the ABC story.

That annual ritual of playing twelve games to eliminate one team from a three-team competition is over for another year. Graeme “The Mouth” Smith takes the South Africans home after Sri Lanka took the bonus points that mattered. Australia hasn’t lost a BH/CUB/VB finals series since 1993. Fingers crossed for the Moody one.

Game XXVII/XI was a tale of failure for Australia. They failed by 56 runs to reach 400. Adam “I thought about getting a double hundred” Gilchrist fell just 112 short of his goal. And with 344 runs to defend, Australia couldn’t even extract a bonus point from the game!

And if you want evidence that Cricket Australia values the AB Medal Night more than the VB Series, look no further than the scheduling of the final round-robin game. The day after the medal presentation, between the two visiting teams, at the smallest of the six capital city arenas. Pity that it just happened to decide the identity of the second finalist. A small Hobart crowd for a 10am start on Tuesday, presumably just as the last stragglers at the Crown Casino in Melbourne were getting to bed. What a way to butcher the climax of a round-robin competition, Cricket Australia.

I’ll leave it to Elmo to preview today’s first final in Adelaide. Go Sri Lanka! (Or at least, take the series to three games.)

“Supersub strikes again!”

- Gerald Sinstadt, ITV commentator, after David Fairclough scored the winning goal for Liverpool against St Etienne, 16 March 1977 (sources: Wikipedia and Bobpaisley.com)

I have absolutely no problem with the 12th man playing an active role in a game of cricket, and I believe that there should be situation in which he/she can bat or bowl in a game, so long as there are always eleven versus eleven at any given moment.

I do think, however, that the rules currently on trial in ODI cricket (Standard One Day International Match Playing Conditions 2.2) need a bit of refining, but not scrapping. This is what I’d like to see:

1. Captains permitted to name a squad of twelve players before the toss.
2. The twelfth man nominated after the toss is made.
3. Substitution be allowed only at the half-way point of the game (ie, at the conclusion of the innings of the team batting first).

I think that’s pretty fair and simple. Thoughts?

power play
n.

1. Sports.
   
   1. An offensive maneuver in a team game, especially in football, in which a massive concentration of players is applied in a certain area.
   2. A situation in ice hockey in which one team has a temporary numerical advantage because the other team has one or more players in the penalty box.

   (Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition via Dictionary.com)

Looking at the annotated scorecards from the current VB Series, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the three captains (actually five including Gilly and Chaminda) were staging an organised boycott of the ICC’s trial playing condition known officially as the Fielding Restriction Overs.

In nearly every game the captains have used all their powerplays (which from now on I shall call FROs) as quickly as possible, ie, by the end of the 20th over. Could it be that our poor overworked captains, even those who go on a rest break mid-series, simply have too much on their plates to be burdened with the nuances of Standard One Day International Match Playing Conditions 41.2.5-41.2.13 ?

Or could it just be a stupid rule that nobody really wanted anyway?

How many captains will have the courage to keep their third set of FROs up their sleeve till overs 46-50, and then win a game because they did? At least, between now and the time this trial is scrapped?