Jarrod Kimber's Blog, page 51

it’s not the two chucks

This is a show that we appeared on after walking out of the cricket club cafe late at night.

 

The Ray Price is not right

I love Ray Price.

As do you.

His face has got quite a special anger about it. Even through a tv he punches you in the face.

That’s special.

Here is a man who survives by being mean, it’s not about talent, just meanness.

I love him, have I said that already?

But he’s gone.

From this tournament, maybe from our lives forever. Maybe he’ll scratch around in some international matches we won’t watch.

And then he’ll be a bowling coach in some english county that doesn’t exist.

But it’s not the same.

I’m a bit sad.

Result: Ray Price is leaving Sri Lanka, and my heart. It’s over. Over. I’ll cry angry tears tonight.

minnows good enough to abuse now

When an Australian fielder leans in to talk, there is a good chance a batsman is getting some flak.  It could be professional advice, career counseling or questions about his family, but the batsman is getting chirped, sledged or mentally disintegrated.  Usually the word cunt is used, occasionally cock or mother fucker, and for those who play in the IPL, benchod.

Ireland were probably called some of those yesterday.  From the first ball Australian fielders were leaning in, sometimes in unison with an aggressive clap, and saying things that seemed to upset some of the Ireland players.

It wasn’t that many years ago that Australian players took to the field against a minnow with grins and little preparation.  Not anymore.

While the ICC limited overs rankings mean little to anyone ever in history of humanity, Australia wouldn’t want to be below Ireland on the rankings.  And so they played Ireland the way they play anyone, with aggression.

It’s also clear they had a fair bit of analysis on the strengths of the Ireland side, and shut them down.

It was in the 09 World T20 that New Zealand’s Iain O’Brien was smashed in the first over of the match against Scotland for 16 runs.  O’Brien had been given a plan on how to bowl to Watts, and he’d executed it, except he was actually bowling to Watson.

That is less likely now.  Many of the airlines that flew into the ground had the ICC road to the World T20 playing on their planes.  You could watch your opposition as you ate your complimentary nuts.   That’s not even including how much video is actually around on these players.

There is probably more video of Trent Johnston than there is on George Bailey.

The minnow teams of the past were often one man affairs.  Every successful team had a John Davison type player.

Now with Ireland and Afghanistan, it’s a team thing.  It seems like from 1-9 you could bat the Afghanis in any order and not lose much.  Ireland is the new New Zealand.  Everyone seems purpose built to fit into the team and make it just a little bit better.  And in the case of Ireland and Afghanistan, these are teams dominated by local players, not imports.

But what was also there was a belief that both teams belong.

Gary Wilson attacked David Warner verbally.  Wilson wanted Warner to know Ireland weren’t give up after an average first innings total.  Later on I think it was Naib bowling when Kohli came down the wicket and pushed the ball back before having it thrown by him it a fit of anger.

It wasn’t quite a Stuart Broad throw (no fingers were broken), but it showed intent, and got the full stare of menace from Kohli in return. It wasn’t that long ago Kohli and Warner were staring each other down in Perth, now minnow players are doing it.

It’s doubtful that minnow teams, even ones not at the level of Ireland and Afghanistan, will probably ever be taken as lightly as the great UAE side of the 96 World Cup.  The term minnow may not even be used in a few years.

Afghanistan and Ireland are a long way from being regular international winners, but if you can upset an Australian or an Indian, without even playing a shot, something has definitely changed in world cricket.

Perhaps that’s what Gary Wilson was telling young Mr Warner. Or, maybe he just called him a bellicose troglodyte.

Two chucks at World t20 day 3

We’ve got Shapoor. SHAPOOR.

how shapoor are India?

Hands are made for self love and putting together things you’ve bought at Ikea.

In cricket, they are also used to catch the cricket ball when the striking batsman has lofted it.  In the case of Afghanistan, hands are made for deflecting the ball oddly and then placing on your head to show your anguish.

On the flight on the way over I watched the Road to the World T20 thingy that the ICC made about the minnows trip to the big show.

This video showed about 1539 occasions of Afghani players clean bowling random batsmen with pace or swing.  It didn’t show many catches.  I thought this was because they didn’t need to catch the ball, but now I see it might just have been because they lacked the hand eye coordination and soft cupping technique to pouch them.

Had they taken any of the 73 or so they seemed to drop, India might have had some trouble in this match. Not trouble, trouble, but trouble nonetheless.

As it turned out it was a decent work out for India as the Afghanis were like that bloke at a party you can’t stand, they wouldn’t go away.

So far in their development that Afghanis haven’t mastered batting, but hitting, oh hitting they do.  They all seem obsessed with Dhoni, and that’s no bad thing.  It’s 11 excitable tailenders, like if we cloned Staurt MacGill and Murali and let them bat together over and over again.

India should have shut them down a bit more efficiently, and those nervous about the bowlers will be nervous about the bowlers.

Except for Yuvraj who tricked the Afghanis with his club cricket bowling.  That’s their fatal flaw, not enough club cricket.

India work their way well into tournaments, so maybe that was this.  Or perhaps they were all trying to work out at once how the IPL would be blamed for all of this.

Of all three major sides so far, India were the least impressive, or Afghanistan the most impressive of the minnows.  It means India is the only team that had a good run out and went through all their options.  That’s a good thing, unless their options turn out to be rubbish.

It’s also quite clear to me now that there is no way England can beat Afghanistan.  They’ll walk right into that Afghani helicopter.

Result: Shapoor is an impressive slab of man with Shoaib’s Hair and cold dead eyes.  And thanks to Yuvraj we now know that shitty left arm spin is not affected by chemo.

two chucks at the world t20 – day 2

We have Kevin O’Brien and some haphazard shit that we filmed at a practice match, enjoy.

ireland are coy

Limited Overs rankings mean even less than the difference between egg white and off white.

They are less important than choosing the right public toilet or which seat you pick in a café playing 80s tunes.

For Ireland, they have also fucked them up.

Usually the Ireland team would come in as the happy barely talked about underdog.  Especially with Afghanistan taking all the feel good stories away from them.

This time, they came in ranked above Australia.

It means sweet fuck all as suggested earlier, unless you are the tiny little minnow who is peering down at Australia.  For Ireland it meant constant mentions in the press, added pressure and perhaps for the first time an expectation that they won’t be shit.

Today they were.

I saw them in the team hotel before hand, they looked like they were about to shit themselves, or were in fact doing it in front of me.

It’s a big stage, and for once, the light was on them, they didn’t just crawl up from the orchestral pit.

You can talk about their plucky fight with their tail, or how they got through to the Australian middle order, but really, they were shit.

Ireland have spent heaps of time preparing for this series, their last with a decent fast bowler, and to end up being punched in the face repeatedly by Warner and Watson must have been a pain.

There will be other games, or game, for them to redeem themselves.

Australia did what they had to do in this game, but they’ll know it means nothing.

Their middle order wasn’t tested, which is probably what they needed more than anything else.  Beating up Trent Johnston is not telling us much.

Their bowlers could have delivered vanilla cupcakes and got wickets with the plethora of fecal shots from the Ireland batsmen.

Result: Ireland do considerable dishonour to the ICC rankings, but Gary Wilson abuses David Warner.  So it’s a tie.

Zimbabwe v Mendis

I stayed in Colombo for the first game because Hambantota is fucken miles from anywhere, and why would you travel for 12 hours to see Sri Lanka play a bye? You wouldn’t, especially if you’ve ever been to Hambantota before like I have. I preferred to stay in the smoky confines of the cricket club cafe etching a plate of “Gooch’s fish and chips”.

Zimbabwe fielded like a team who had never noticed how hard a cricket ball was before. What was going on, it looked like a team trying to give the themselves a few more to chase in a practice match. Even Kamran Akmal would have mocked them.

Their bowling was missing a Ray Price or three. Zimbabwe is a team your local cricket side could play against, and upon seeing them warm up, you’d think there was nothing to worry about.

Then they played A Mendis, and it seemed unfair to refer to this as a match.

I still stand by my assertion that Mendis a genius if you haven’t played him, and a shit version of Chris Harris if you have and worked him out.

Zimbabwe looked like they were a 90 year old grandfather who had been told to operate dos through his MacBook pro.

And even the other Mendis, the very part time leggie, was unplayable. Ervine and Cremer played the J Mendis wrong’un like he’d never even heard of the concept, and he bowls them himself. It was gornography, it wasn’t a spin master class, it was like dipping a goat in a tub of lye.

Jeevan M, won’t be much of the factor with the ball later in the tournament. And I doubt Ajantha M will even pay if it’s a semi or final against a team that has worked him out, which is most of them.

Zimbabwe looked as bad as Elton’s balls down the legside, The firm of Mendis and Mendis made their stats look good, but Sri Lanka could have phoned this in and still won easy.

The biggest story was KP. His studio work is shockingly good. He’s likeable, says interesting stuff, and makes Wasim Akram look like a desi George Clooney.

Result: KP and Mendis’s bowling figures win easily. This was a banana skin game, after all.

Stuart Broad makes people laugh at World T20 tournaments

As already alluded to in the previous post, Stuart Broad does funny shit at World T20s.

Broad was the man who justified Yuvraj Singh’s ego. And I do mean justify it, it was already there, it just gave Yuvi, and it, more reason to glow.

Then there was the 17 fielding errors in one over to lose a match against a minnow.  It’s probably not the last youtube video I’d watch before an apocalypse, but the memories of Broad flailing around like he was trying to grab oiled up otters was one of the greatest cricket moments I’ve ever seen live.

This year, Broad the improvisor has started well, who knows what he will do on the field. but off the field, boy can he answer a fucking phone.

 

And I should say, that having had this happen to me, and other people (One guy seemed to have a wailing goat ringtone), Broad handled it better than he did the ball against the Dutch.

Ofcourse, before the apocalypse I would watch this.

Previously at the World T20

Previously at the World T20

People like the World T20, it’s short, no one cares much, they’ll be another one soon and Afghanistan plays in it.  It’s also the only tournament Australia has not won, which helps.

It’s been two years since the last ICC World T20, and in short attention spans of T20 fans, that’s like forever.  So to recap…

Season 1 – The Pilot: Or how India learned to stop the moaning and love the T20

Someone people laughed at the fact the word ‘cup’ had been left off the title.

Teams headed to South Africa, Australia turned up late and disinterested, India sent a second XI and England put all their hopes on things called Snape and Schofield.

Chris Gayle opened the tournament with many sixes, and in much the same style he plays in all forms of cricket.  Umar Gul and Stuart Clark (yes, the tournament was that long ago) took heaps of wickets. Paul Collingwood gets in trouble for playing the lap, off the field.

No one knew enough about Stuart Broad to hate him or not, but they all still laughed at him when Yuvraj Singh tossed him out the ground six times in an over.

India and Pakistan meet in the final, where right in front of our eyes Misbah Ul Haq invents the IPL with one foul scoop.  Shoaib Malik thanked every single Muslim in the world, even the Indian ones.  MS Dhoni says nothing that interesting, he just produces on the field.

India, superpower.

Season 2 – The Lord Afridi

The World T20 is still not a cup, and makes its way to England.

Zimbabwe pulled out of the tournament after Robert Mugabe refused to admit that T20 was also a gentlemen’s game.

England delight pretty much everyone by losing the opening game to a dutch team inspired by the might of Dirk Nannes’ beard, and Stuart Broad’s “fielding”.

Australia was the next team to bring everyone joy by kicking out Andrew Symonds and then getting kicked out themselves.  Ireland made the second round, Bangladesh did not.  Graeme Napier got a tracksuit.

Angelo Mathews defeated the West Indies in one over.  Umar Gul hit the stumps more than the guy with the rubber mallets who puts them in the ground. No one had any idea what Ajantha Mendis was doing.

Tilikeratne Dilshan’s dilscoop played Shahid Afridi in the final, and Shahid Afridi won.

Shahid Afridi posed, posed, moved his head like an excitable puppy, and then posed some more.  This was Shahid Afridi’s time.  People around the world raced to eBay to buy bootleg Pakistani shorts to replace their 92 World Cup ones.

Season 3 – England win something

Shahid Afridi’s time didn’t last long, the next tournament was within months, not years, of the previous one.  The ICC milked violently at the World T20’s teat as no one at all gave a shit about the Champion’s Trophy that had been cancelled.

The West Indies were the venue, this time with a soundtrack.

The feel good hit of the summer was Afghanistan playing in the tournament.  Hamid Hassan was one of the quickest bowlers in the tournament and boy did he wear that headband.

For the first time Australia took the T20s seriously.  They sent Dirk Nannes who lead all comers in wickets and cool manly beards.  Dirk was the face of T20 cricket, unkempt, masculine and sexually alluring in one over spells.

The Mendis bubble burst when even the Australian batsman could work him out.  India players were trapped in a nightmare of never ending T20 tournaments, somehow managing to fit four of them into about 12 months.  Stuart Broad’s tournament was mostly ok.  Mike Hussey broke the hearts of all Pakistanis and snapped the spine of Saeed Ajmal with an innings of pure thievery.

The ghosts of cricket’s past met in the final, England V Australia.  KP played a fine team innings to completely demolish a limp Australian team who kept waiting for Mike Hussey to save them.  2010 was the year of the Yardy.

After many years of inventing tournaments and staging them every second week, the ICC had done what its original purpose was, to create a tournament that England could win.  Although, because of naming issues, England has still never won a world cup.

Womens World T20

Season 1

New Zealand were the runners up.

Season 2

New Zealand were the runners up.