skip to main |
skip to sidebar
No surprise really. I only watched part of the game, so I can't really comment too much, but there's a couple of things worth mentioning:
- India should push for 5-ball overs in all international cricket. I'm sure I'm not the only Indian fan who tenses up when our bowlers have to deliver that dreaded sixth delivery, and I'm certainly not alone in sighing exasperatedly when it is duly dispatched to the boundary.
- Sachin Tendulkar - give up! For those who have known me or read my blog for a while, you will know that one of my biggest pet peeves is SRT's ability to never hit the stumps with a shy, and yet look completely stunned when he misses, as if to say "this has never happened to me before, there must have been a seismic shift at the planetary core that impacted the earth's rotation momentarily"
Wow. A 1-0 loss to Arsenal, and the doom and gloom merchants are out in full force. It's astonishing to read that Ronaldo is a wasted talent, and that the five wins to open the season were a fluke.
First things first, we weren't good enough on the day. Arsenal played well, though not as 'delightfully' as the media would have you believe, and we were a shambles. Our best passes were often directly to a player in yellow.
Cristiano Ronaldo has been pilloried in the press, to nobody's surprise, for his role in the Arsenal goal, but most seem to have forgotten that he was probably our best player on the day, and the only one who really tested Lehmann. And who didn't enjoy the Arsenal goalie getting smacked upside the face by a pile driver?
Rooney may as well not have been on the pitch, and I'm not sure that Louis Saha did much on the day either. Perhaps the only player to really enhance his reputation in my eyes was Darren Fletcher, who managed to produce a series of top quality passes in the first half an hour. Just maybe there's more to him than I previously thought.
So we lost a game. There's not much I hate more than losing to Arsenal, but we're still in second place, ahead of Chelsea, and with a long way to go. We're right in the race, and we're certainly good enough to beat the poorer teams, so we will never quite be out of it. Perhaps the pessimists should just wait a little before they start the bleating.
Someone left this book behind at my place for me to read a couple of months ago. Last week, I finally got around to it. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it said, so I went into it with the expectation that it would be a halfway decent read.
It wasn't, at least, not in my estimation. Granted, the fact that it's a bit of a depressing and somewhat allegorical tale doesn't help matters, but the idea that "the times, they are a-changin'" is hardly a novel one. Nothing particularly bad about the book - quite simply it just failed to capture my imagination or engross me on any level. Didn't work as a whodunit, and didn't quite work as a cautionary tale of cultural demise either.
Next on my list is "The Essence of the Thing" by Madeleine St John and the epic "Out of My Comfort Zone" by one Stephen Rodger Waugh. Something tells me I'll have better luck with both of those.
Now this is seriously cool. Live commentary on your mobile phone/device, and also on Yahoo Messenger! You can get it at http://plusmo.com/getcy
I've got the IM version installed, and I have it running on my Motorola V551 and my Blackberry as well. Free, no adverts, and I can now follow games without the pain of trying to watch streaming video at work, or dealing with the frustrations of not-quite-auto-refreshing scorecards. It's especially neat for the games that I have a less than completely vested interest in!
An intriguing headline showed up on CricInfo this morning. "India captain slams 'foul-mouthed' England" it says, with a sub-heading of "Claims England skipper was 'scared'"
I have no doubt that countless readers were stunned to think that Rahul Dravid had spoken out against Andrew Flintoff (or is that Andrew Strauss, or Michael Vaughan, or....).
Imagine their surprise then, when after clicking through with fervent anticipation, adrenaline coarsing through their veins, they discovered that the story in fact was nothing more than a tame claim of sledging made by the Indian Women's Cricket Captain, Mithali Raj.
The Sun, The Daily Mirror, and papers of that ilk would have been proud of such chicanery. I truly wonder how many extra impressions, and therefore advertising dollars, CI was able to rustle up.
Not impressive at all.
