Jarrod Kimber's Blog, page 68

chucking with ravi shastri

Shastribot, check.

Jealousy, check.

Tracer bullet, check.

We delve deep into the Ravi Shastri psyche, and let me tell you, when he stares into your eyes, he's got you just where he wants you.

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the two chucks yell a bit at trent bridge

And we interviewed Ayaz Memon about controversies moments before we had a new one.

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why wouldn't you use vaseline, or cat vomit, to make more runs?

No, not like that.

And now it looks like VVS Laxman didn't use vaseline on his bat.

But, why wouldn't he?

If the players have known now for a few years that hotspot can be tricked with vaseline, special stickers and with random fluids, you'd think they are exploiting it.

It's not against the laws of cricket or any ICC playing conditions that I can find.

It's just using whatever advantage you can to stay out there, which is your job.

I mean this didn't just happen, there have been whispers for years that you can trick hotspot. And these are the same batsmen who pretend that they aren't out by shuffling their pads outside the line and not walking, if it's as simple as vaseline on the edges before going out to bat, why not. Vaseline is not that hard to find, in most hotels if you ring down for it the concierge sends it up no questions asked.

If I was an international batsman and someone told me that it was within the laws and regulations to use cat vomit up the side of my bat, even if it only gave me a 0.001% chance of not being given out, I'd pay some crazy cat lady to follow me on tour and then every morning I would squeeze fresh vomit from a cat.

I might even do it if it was against the laws, but I figure the cat sick might be easy to smell and would stain the bat.

One thing I wouldn't do is miss any chance I could to make myself more runs.

We spend so much time in cricket complaining about things we find morally wrong even if they don't break any laws, VVS isn't the first batsman that may have edged behind only for hotspot not too work.

Hotspot doesn't even always need to be cheated, sometimes it doesn't work because of angles, and sometimes it just doesn't work. It's a TV gimmick, not an infallible detection method. And sometimes that noise isn't the bat on ball.

That said, if we could bring in a playing condition to ban vaseline from the edges of bats, it would be cool to see umpires sniffing the bat of the new batsman as he comes out.

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two chucks at trent bridge day 2

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the two chucks chat to tuffers

That's right, the left arm finger spinner/BBC tent pole, Phil Tufnell sat down with us and talked shit.

It starts with me asking him to look at a mole on my arm, and mostly gets better from there.

Listen here and wait for the moment where I try to get him to bag Paul Harris and fail miserably.

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two chucks go to trent bridge and talk to sharma about his hair

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Dravid reinvents batting

Rahul Dravid is revolutionizing batsmanship

There was a time when Rahul Dravid's batting was so technically correct that old men wept tears of blood into their wisdens as he played a forward defence of such straightness that Christian fundamentalists couldn't question it.

All of his shots seemed epicly correct.

He left the ball like it was meant to be left.

A cover drive looked like he was posing for an artist.

His pull shot was tight, contained and morally acceptable.

And his clip off the pads easy, and relaxed, like he was thinking of something else and could play it blindfolded.

Now he's changed.

Dravid now plays every innings like he's trying to survive an alien attack.

He seems to play almost every ball through third man, often unintentionally, and he looks hurried and worried most of the time.

But it's the humble block, Dravid's best friend, where it's changed the most.

Dravid now blocks the ball like his shoes just caught fire. His hands just drop straight down in a panic just as the ball turns up.

They probably turn the stump mic down as it happens so we don't get the excitable scream as he realises that yet again he has barely got away with keeping his wicket.

It's not pretty, but it is stoic and egoless, like you would expect from Dravid.

Dravid is basically rebuilding his batting the way a newly limbless man would teach themselves how to swim.

And if you can't respect that, well that's fair enough, but I think it's pretty cool.

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Get some hot SPIN download action

OK, so I edit a cricket magazine.

You can subscribe here if you are in the UK. Or buy a copy in WH Smiths if you meet them at the crossroads at midnight.

Previously, that is all you could do.

The rest of the world was cut off, but I say no.

Let me give these people the magazine, let them SPIN, oh why can't they SPIN.

So now, you can SPIN.

Everyone can SPIN, you know, if you pay to download it and have the basic skills required to download a file. Which you can, right here.

This is SPIN this month.

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Go, SPIN, love.

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a song of the first test

One of my many plans of cricket media domination has been to sing songs based on test matches.

Due to time constraints and not wanting to put you through that, it's never quite happened.

Luckily, like test match sofa and the cricket couch podcasts, someone else has stepped into the void.

The blog Deep Backward Point is here to sing you a test in a song, it would be rude not to listen.

This may be one of the first songs ever written about Sehwagology.

One day this song will be referenced in a history show about how Sehwagology started.

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Stuart Broad uses magic

There is some sort of new cool live magician dude who does tricks for the rich and famous at parties, and someone has filmed it.

You know the sort of magician I'm talking about, he looks less soap opera villain than the magicians of the past, dresses like a normal dude not a effeminate superhero and does his tricks at parties where the guest list is managed by a woman called paprika.

In one of these promos Stuart Broad is in the background looking like a rather striking androgynous model that has been placed there for the symmetry of the shot.

I didn't think anything of it.

I mean, he's an English celebrity, he's at a wanky party drinking an over priced drink he didn't pay for, and the camera has him in shot.

That's all fine.

But now I get it.

We think we've just seen a test where Broad has taken 7 wickets and made 70 runs.

All of us who had written him off as a privileged lucky bastard with a rightfully earned test average of 36 who had convinced himself that he was in any way tough enough to be an enforcer as he went from test ground to test ground bowling terribly easy to play short of a length balls were shocked when he pitched the ball up and took wickets.

In a press conference afterwards he said that he knew his best length was pitching it up, he'd always known this. That everyone had always known this.

He didn't, oddly, explain that if he knew that why had he spent 2 years ignoring it and being largely useless.

Then his batting, which even at the best of times looks just a bit too lucky to be real, came off.

When England needed someone to stay at the other end to Prior and tell him just how great his square drive was, there was Broad, cheering on like an office worker who is trying to show his bosses how good his partner's PowerPoint display is and occasionally chiming in with, this is so 2.0, we've got to streamline our objectives hardcore, and this is purple sky and yellow ocean thinking.

It didn't make much sense, as there was more than a chance that Broad was going to get dropped either before or after this series.

Now he's not.

You could say that the pressure of Tim Bresnan's form made him improve.

That Andy Flower beat him up until the only word he could mumble was "full".

Or that he just realised that the good will of the media had finally rubbed off and that if he was dropped now he'd be known of as the guy who went for six sixes and over and was a stroppy little prick who never met an umpire he didn't moan too.

I don't believe any of that is true.

I think it was cool celebrity live magic.

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