cricket.rickeyre.com

A special cheerio to those of you who are visiting this website via Patrick Kidd’s cricket blog at The Times, “Line and Length“. Patrick picked up on my item on Anthony Albanese’s cricketing analogy to fighting global warming. (And no, I don’t go trawling Hansard every night for quotes, I happened to see Albo on the tele giving the speech in question.)

But on to the real purpose of this post. I am centralising my personal blogging into one location now, which I have given the cryptic URL of www.rickeyre.com/blog . The reason for this is that much of my writing on cricket these days crosses over into other subjects (as, for example, with my post on Albanese’s climate change speech). My other blog, now.rickeyre.com, is also being superseded in this change.

Fear not, however, as cricket items will continue to appear here, cross-posted from the central blog.

Never mind the Inzamam story in the screengrab (below) from the BBC Online cricket homepage this morning (and I’ll have more to say about that once I’ve read the full judgment). I want you to take a look at the first item in the line that begins “Key Information”:

If it’s in The Bladder it must be true!

Those policemen failed to demonstrate any understanding of the journalists’ job. The latter have to keep pace with events and, as such, cannot afford to lose time. The job is demanding and it is always expected that those in charge of security will cooperate with the newsmen. But what we observed in Chittagong was the complete abandoning of the age-old practice of controlling a situation with courtesy and tactful persuasion; mind you, journalists were not armed, the police were, calling for sobriety on the part of the latter.
- from the Editorial, The Daily Star, 18.4.06

Plenty of coverage in Bangladesh’s leading English-language newspaper today of the aftermath to Sunday’s extraordinary clash between police and journalists at the Chittagong Divisional Stadium on the first day of the Second Test against Australia.

In Dhaka there were sit-down protests by members of the various press associations, with a four-hour stoppage planned for Wednesday unless policemen involved in Sunday’s altercation are arrested and dismissed. Journalists all round the country took part in protest demonstrations on Monday - here is a roundup.

Meanwhile, the local media’s boycott of the Test match continued yesterday, although there was little play to report because of the weather. Late Monday night the journalists decided to continue their boycott into the third day’s play on Tuesday. Bangladesh Cricket Board officials and the venue co-ordinator met with the journalists yesterday and agreed to compensate for medical expenses and destroyed cameras.

The BCB delegation did not include Board president Ali Asghar. Rather than be in attendance at a home Test match against the world’s number-one side, Asghar is in Abu Dhabi to watch the India v Pakistan series! Priorities, eh?

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/cricket/story/0,,1728691,00.html

Freedom of expression came at a high price for a teenager sent home from school for styling his hair like his cricketing hero Kevin Pietersen. Although Pietersen has now shaved off his trademark hairdo, its punk spirit lives on in 15-year-old Carl Ferris, right, who refused to go back to class after being ordered by teachers to get rid of his “extreme” style.

continued at The Guardian

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/cricket/story/0,,1720845,00.html

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.

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.

Peace and joy at the crease after a life dented by war and tragedy - Cricket

(Peter Roebuck/Sydney Morning Herald, 3.2.06)

I’m not normally a huge Peter Roebuck fan - I find his attempts at impersonating Neville Cardus in his match reports to be rather irritating - but he can do some pretty remarkable stuff when he gets away from the actual field of play. It’s the story of a Somalian refugee who lost a leg during the civil war in his home country who now plays cricket on weekends in western Sydney.