Funny Old Game Cricket

One of the great things about cricket - at least for the mathematically minded - is the ease with which an unending list of statistics can be generated. This Ashes match in Brisbane is certainly no exception. First an Australian bowler takes 6 for 54, including a hat-trick. Do you know how many bowlers have achieved a hat-trick in Ashes tests? No? In fact in modern times there have been only two; Shane Warne [inevitably] and Darren Gough [surprisingly - I didn't think he was that good - and I am not disparaging a Yorkshireman]. Before them you have go to back to 1904, when the Australian Hugh Trumble did the deed for the second time - he achieved a hat-trick in 1902 on the same Melbourne cricket ground. To this day, he remains the only player to have achieved two hat-tricks in Ashes tests.

Moving on to the batting, Hussey and Haddin hammered England to score 307 for the sixth wicket - the highest score for any wicket ever in Brisbane. This record survived for only 24 hours before Cook and Trott achieved 329 [undefeated] for the 2nd wicket. Before this Strauss and Cook moved to a joint partnership total of 3,415, which [incredibly] betters the 3,249 achieved by Hobbs & Sutcliffe - an opening pair who have near mythical status.

This all interesting stuff for any cricket anorak but the most important thing is still the spectacle of Australia only managing to take one wicket after nearly 2 days of play. That will be keeping Ricky Ponting awake at nights - and that, surely, cannot help his batting.

As I meandered through the pages of cricketing statistics I came across a remarkable bowling and batting performance. At the First Test between new Zealand and England in the winter 1932-33 series, Dennis Smith of New Zealand bowled Eddie Paynter of England for a duck with the first ball of the second over, reducing England to 4 for 2. England recovered to 568 for 8 with Wally Hammond scoring 227. Dennis Smith finished with 1 for 113, was dropped for the next test and never played for New Zealand ever again. So, he achieved the ridiculous record of taking a wicket with the first ball of his first over in test cricket and never took another. As Jimmy Greaves may have said, "Funny old game is cricket!"

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Big Numbers In The Ashes

Well, I was half wrong. I said in my last posting that I thought few people would have put much faith in the England cricket team doing well enough to make the Australians bat again in Brisbane. In fact the top three batsmen confounded all the Cassandras. They declared their second innings closed at 517 - 1. It turned the match into a fairly convincing draw and even though the Australians made 107 - 1 in their second innings, it will be England who go away from this match with the most encouragement. The Australian bowlers succeeded in taking just one wicket in the best part of two days as England posted their impressive total and how long is it since that happened? The pitch has to be considered the most dead pan of all dead-pan batting surfaces and getting a result here could take several weeks but the England batsmen must be given a lot of credit for destroying the heart on the Australian side. It is widely acknowledge that this Australian side is not the best ever but Aussies do not give in without a fight and this test series will be a struggle for both sides. Unless there is rather more life in the pitches at other grounds the series could be drawn.

Cook and Trott put on 329 for a still untaken second wicket exceeding the previous best on this ground of 307 set one day earlier. It was also the highest partnership by any England batsmen on Australian soil. Further, Cook's 235 NO was the sixth highest score by an England batsman in Ashes tests and exceeds the previous highest test score on this ground by any batsman - previously held by Don Bradman. And so on and on. How often have England scored over 500 runs for the loss of only one wicket? I don't know the answer but I am sure that a simple answer would be "Not very often!"

So now we look forward to the 2nd test with a rather more optimistic feeling. I hope it is not more misguided optimism. Let's just wish them luck.

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Winning the Ashes in Australia

I just knew that it was going to happen. If I had said as much a week or two back, I would have been considered a Casandra; a profit of gloom, doom and despondency. It's not the first time and as sure as eggs are eggs, it will happen again. It has actually happened at least six times this year alone. But still no one sounds the alarm. I am talking, of course, about expectations of sporting success. It is like politicians who ultimately come to believe that their own propaganda is the truth. We have so many ready to predict sporting success that the whole population comes to accept its inevitability. it seems inevitable - until we actually take to the field. We thought that the England football team would win the World Cup - it was almost a certainty. In practice, the team performance was abysmal and these over-paid prima-donas were out in the early stages. Then it was suggested that Andy Murray would be the first British winner at Wimbledon since 1936 - or was it 1836. Of course, he failed. We will gloss over the rugby team[s]. In the search for the player of the year not a single one of those on the shortlist plays for a team from the Northern Hemisphere!! All the candidates play for South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Why?

But, the latest is the cricket team. This was the team that would win the Ashes in Australia for the first time since Mike Gatting was in charge. It started off well. Andrew Strauss was out to the third ball of the first over of the series. After that things went downhill. The Aussie bowler, Siddle, achieved his best ever bowling figures in first class cricket when he took six wickets - including a hat-trick. In the modern game, only Shane Warne and Darren Gough have achieved that. Previous to those two requires a search back to 1904. At the end of Day 2 the Australians were on 220 for 5 and the match evenly balanced. But most of Day 3 was to elapse before England took another wicket. Hussey and Haddin put on 307 for the 6th wicket. This was a record for the ground. It was well below the world record for a 6th wicket partnership; that was George Headley and Clarence Passailaigue at Kingston, Jamaica in 1931-32. But all this does not augur well for England's chances. It looks like they will lose this test unless there is a superhuman effort to [a] score some runs and [b] take some wickets very quickly. First of all they have to score 221 to make Australia bat again and that is not something anyone would put a lot of money on at this stage.

Still, I will wish them luck. They are going to need it.

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Bolton Wanderers in Champions League?

Yesterday was a cool and grey day with the weather struggling to drop some more rain on our sodden island. In Edinburgh Scotland's rugby union team managed to defeat World Champions South Africa while Ireland again failed to beat the NZ All Blacks in Dublin - a game mared by heavy rain which made the ball difficult to hold onto. But at the Reebock Stadium, Bolton Wanderers were hard at work thrashing Newcastle united 5 - 1. If they carry on like this, not only could they gain a place playing in the Champions League but they could build a creditable goal difference. Today they stand in 4th place in the Premier League. If Manchester City win today at Fulham - something which should be expected were it not for the fact that they have failed to score in their last two Premier League games - then they will move above Bolton. But lets us not ignore the achievements of Bolton in rising so high. The three teams above them are three of the established top four in the English league - the fourth, Liverpool, are languishing in ninth spot having clawed their way up from the relegation zone - and all of them awash with money compared with Bolton Wanderers - one of the poor relations in this league. Bolton now has debts of £93 million - after suffering a loss of £35 million last year - but that could disappear if Bolton did actually end the season in the top four - and hence would play in the hugely lucrative Champions League next season. Bolton Chairman Phil Gartside has said this month that they may have to sell two of their best players in order to balance the books. That would be a pity. They have the advantage that most of the debt is owed to the owner Eddie Davies. I hope he will tolerate the debt for a bit longer to see how the team progresses.

Let's wish them the very best of luck; not just because they are Bolton Wanderers but because they will have done it without spending trillions of pounds on buying players. They have big debts but it is impossible to be solvent in the present Premier League. Manchester United and Liverpool have huge debts and Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City rely on having owners with limitless supplies of money. Things will get worse before they get better now that Wayne Rooney has been allowed to raise the bar for wages to £200,000 per week [or more].

It's a funny old game is football.

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A Royal Wedding

So we are to have another Royal Wedding? Who cares? I certainly don't. I wish the couple well and that as far as I am concerned is an end of it. Eventually William will be king but he may have to wait another 30 or 40 years, like his father has had to. By that time many things will have changed and the monarchy may be on the way out. One group of crystal ball gazers have suggested that by then immigrants will have changed the face of Britain so much - they will already be in a majority - that the country will no longer be the country that I and millions of others grew up in. There will still be people in industry and commerce telling the nation that they need yet more immigrants to fill the job vacancies that cannot be satisfied from within. It will be rubbish then just as it is rubbish now but they will get their way. There must always be a supply of cheap labour. The new society will be some kind of homogeneous monstrosity which oozes political correctness but is characterless, ignorant - in the sense of ill informed - and divided by ethnicity even more than it is now. It is not a place where I will want to live but without the divisions there will be no peace.

But coming back to this Royal Wedding, we are already being subjected to a tsunami of mush, of sickly meringue covered pronouncements, of boring platitudinous trivia of no interest, surely, to either man or woman in this nation of ours? The Daily Mail on Wednesday had 30 pages of vomit inducing guff that surely was a waste of paper and printing ink. And it will go on and on until the wedding finally takes place some time next May [perhaps]. There will be souvenir mugs and tea towels and shirts and scarfs and socks and rock and etc. etc. All that stuff will have to be made - in China.

Why do we have to have all this stuff? Do they think that a Royal Wedding of two extremely rich individuals cut off from ordinary life will somehow make up for the mess that is our economy and persuade us not to question the incompetence of government nor the exploitation of the poor? It seems that the parents of Kate Middleton tried to engineer a meeting of the prince and their daughter by sending her via public school to St Andrew's. It seems that the couple did meet almost by accident at the University up in Fife and they have had some sort of relationship for about seven years. Neither has done anything particularly scandalous during that time and no doubt Prince Charles and HM Queen will be hoping for an uncontroversial partnership.

It does seem to be the case that in spite of comprehensive schools designed to give equal education to all, more and more of our institutions and government is in the hands of millionaires with public school educations. At least back in the days of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher the people in charge were more likely to have come from the middle classes via the grammar schools. But grammar schools are a bad thing because they are selective. At least they selected on the basis of academic potential and not just on the basis of wealth!

Right, that's it I have nothing more to say. Good luck to the two of them.

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Irish Debts

I used to be a frequent visitor to the Irish Republic but I have not been there in the three years since I retired. It was always a pleasure to go there - particularly to the area around Cork which I came to know very well. I was there when Ireland was experiencing the most prosperous days in its history, when wages were high, the economy was booming, people were buying splendid houses and with high inward investment - particularly in pharmaceuticals - it looked as though the good times could never end. But it was an illusion. They built an economy on debt and an unsustainable growth in house prices. The banks lent too much and investors were guaranteed the safety of their assets up to 100% by the Irish government.

In spite of more cut-backs, reductions in government spending, lower wages and increases in taxation, the government is seeing the economy shrinking more and more. Yet the bank debts still loom. It now looks as though they will be bailed out by the EU - whether they like it or not. This bail out has more to do with the potential up-coming disasters of Portugal, Spain and Italy. We can forget Greece. Greece will go bust.

Ireland has been invaded, exploited, wrecked, subjected to mass murder and ignored at various points by the English and later, the British. Above everything, of course, stands the Great Famine from 1845 to 1850, when half the population died or emigrated - never to return. It was a catastrophe of the first order, which need not have happened and should not have happened. The generally poor and indigenous Irish population lived almost entirely on potatoes and when potato blight destroyed the crop, partly or totally during every year of that five year period, they had nothing to eat. Yet throughout the period Ireland remained a net exporter of food. Had they been ordered to cut exports by 25% there could have been enough food to feed the whole population. But no! This was the era of unrestrained laissez faire capitalism. The markets must decide. And one million Irish men, women and children died.

Now with unemployment rising and graduates unable to find jobs, homes left on building sites unfinished and empty houses unsaleable, the young people are starting to leave again. They are doing what the Irish have always done. They are leaving to get jobs in England and America.

The bankers will be OK, of course. They will take the bail out money and stoke it into their bonuses as reward for doing that which they do best. Steal , spend and squander other people's money and wreck the economies of the world. Not just Irish banks but any banks.

I wish Ireland and the Irish well. I don't doubt that they will survive this disaster like they have survived all other disasters. And like most other disasters, this one should never have been allowed to happen — but it did!

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Are We Defended?

I have written little this month. I am not quite sure why. There has been much to talk about. Some of the time I have been too stunned to write anything. The new coalition government is definitely drifting off course at the moment. Maybe they are just giving themselves too much to do and are becoming punch-drunk. I still can't get to grips with our defence plans. To add to the nonsense - that still will cost £45 billion per year - Call Me Dave has told the bankers gathered in The Guildhall for the annual do, that he does not intend to let Britain get involved in fighting several wars at the same time. With our current defence arrangements it would be best if he avoided fighting wars all together. Yesterday, I was told by my friend Harold at the gym - he is an expert on military vehicles and knows about these things - that the MOD has decided to scrap 250 armoured vehicles having just spent £100,000 on each of them to improve the protection and armour plating. So we spend £25 million and then just chuck it away. The intention is to sell them for scrap at about £11,000 each - a net loss of over £22 million. Is is surprising that we need to cut government spending when money flows down the drain like this? At the same time we are scrapping Ark Royal - a perfectly adequate working aircraft carrier - with aeroplanes on it - and building two new aircraft carriers - bigger than any we have ever had before - at a cost of £5 billion. Yet these ships will be unique in the world of aircraft carriers in that they will have no aeroplanes at all. This will render them useless. Perhaps we can borrow one from France - after all, they will never need it - complete with aeroplanes now that we have a special relationship with them?

As all this goes on and our troops in Afghanistan are starved on many essentials, we carry on with the nuclear deterrent. If anything should be abandoned, it is this. David Cameron is concerned that we do not get involved in more than one war at any time but feels the need to retain the ability to wage nuclear war against God knows whom. Of course, it's politics. He doesn't want to upset the sabre rattling wing of his party. He wants to face the future while living in the past. The nuclear deterrent is madness and should be scrapped. Then, possibly, we could afford to put some aeroplanes on the aircraft carriers.

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FC United of Manchester

It was Jimmy Greaves who used to tell us over and over that football was a funny old game. I think in the years that have passed since his playing days, football has become a game that is no longer funny but is crackers. Players get ever greater wages and all the top clubs are owned by foreign billionaires looking for something to do with their vast wealth that might conceivably relieve the boredom of owning yachts, palaces and huge piles of money. But occasionally there are some bright spots. Blackpool are promoted to the Premier League at the end of a season when it was expected that they would struggle to stay were they were and avoid relegation. Clubs are resurrected from bankruptcy and allowed to live again. And sometimes there is a player that plays for the love of the game and not for the riches and the extra Ferrari. But one of the really bright spots has been the creation of FC United of Manchester, a club envisioned by a small group of "angry dreamers" in a haze of beer fumes and curry in a Manchester restaurant. In 2005, they sought to create a new team run by and for the fans in contrast to the Glazers' control of their old club of Manchester United which was now saddled with vast debts. The new club was set up with money donated by fans and well-wishers and is run as a fans co-operative. It has been playing non-league football ever since, getting better and better all the time and gathering a weekly crowd of 2,000+ supporters. As a result of their efforts they have qualified for Round One of the 2010 FA Cup. On Friday 5th November, as the fireworks went off around them, they played Rochdale Town in Rochdale and with a crowd of 7,000 they pulled off the surprise of the night by winning 3 - 2. There were shouts and cheers; much waving of green & gold scarves; inspired singing and a general enjoyment of football. By all accounts it was a great game and at the end 4,000 fans came to celebrate the unbelievable. FC United had beaten a team four divisions higher than them in the league and only two steps down from the Premier.

The team has become involved in many community projects and they have been much supported by Manchester City Council in their efforts. At present they play their home games at Bury's ground, Gigg Lane but they have applied for planning permission to build a new stadium in Thornton Heath, where Manchester United started life at the end of the 19th century. The club's involvement in Round One of the FA Cup was shown live on TV and will bring them in an extra £67,000, which will be put towards the stadium fund. Many of the club officials work for nothing and their star player gets paid £80 per week. Their accounts look better than many a Premier League side.

Brighton & Hove Albion - leaders of League One - played in the FA Cup First Round yesterday and were held to a draw at home to non-league Woking. Whoever wins the replay will have the pleasure of playing FC United at home. May FC United's cup run continue. They will get some more money from the Round 2 match which will further help the stadium project. This is all real Roy of the Rovers stuff. Good luck to them.

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