attention to the cricket World Cup.
Don’t know why not, though the thought of watching a load of pasty faced individuals dancing around in the sun while there’s been snow and 90 mile an hour winds here didn’t help.
Those crowd shots piss me off, someone hits a decent shot so we have to see some muppet in the stands waving at the camera, that is of course if the cameraman managed to film the shot in the first place, a lot of the camera work I’ve seen has been woeful and that along with the stupid great big graphic along the bottom of the screen, it’s almost as bad as flashing ad boards at football and rugby games, has made it easy for me not to watch.
But I suppose the main reason is I figured England would do sod all, yeah they won the recent one day series against New Zealand and Australia but they did bugger all before that and what chance had those victories over the Aussies given them delusions of grandeur?
So they meekly lost the first game to NZ and a dull victory by just 51 runs over the mighty Canadians.
And PedaloGate certainly hasn’t helped. Fans are mighty sick of being ripped of for thousands to go on these trips, Ashes & World Cup, to see the players being paid quite well to be useless in the field then go out and get rat arsed not long before the next game.
Ah it’s all been blown out of proportion says Botham – and you sir are no Garfield Sobers, no we didn’t complain when Fred stumbled out of the hotel after the Ashes celebration. Why? Well he had performed on the field, he’d actually done something and he didn’t have a game in a few hours, he had a good few weeks off. And we thought he’d turned himself round from the over weight failure of previous years to a sensible sportsman. We didn’t know during his leadership of the worst Ashes tour in living memory he was up to this kind of thing on a regular basis.
So England management stood strong and dropped him for the Canada game, one wonders what would have happened if it wasn’t one of the “minnows” we were playing yesterday?
Now his chances of captaincy are gone, good thing to my mind, maybe this will concentrate him to knuckle down and figure out how to bat again, Monty is told he’s not the number one spinner because he “can’t bat” yet our number one all rounder hasn’t done much better.
Up until that the best thing had been the Irish beating Pakistan and thus sending them back home after two games. Something that cheered most fans round the world and a kick in the nuts to those that didn’t want the little teams there – step forward messrs Atherton, Ponting & Holding.
But that was totally overshadowed by the death yesterday of the Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer, who’ll now probably join Old Big ‘Ead as the best coach England never had.
Funnily after the Irish defeat I say a shot of him and said “Well is that his chance of the England job gone?”
I didn’t want Warwickshire to win all those trophies in the early 90s, being a Yorkshireman and not just cause Dermot Reeve was an annoying gobby little shite though my opinion of him is clouded by his Channel 4 stint, but had to admit they were the best team around, who won with a bit of flare in those Lord’s finals and that he was a very big part of that.
It can’t have been easy to coach the Pakistan team, what with their constant cheating on and off the field along with all the external interference but he generally came out of it well though he should have been there with England instead of Fletcher.