Let's just recap a sequence of events involving the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) over the past year or so:
A grain of truth
Marian Wilkinson's excellent, but necessarily long, summary of this week's astonishing revelations at the Cole Inquiry into bribes allegedly paid by Australian companies as part of the UN oil-for-food scandal.
A big, big story is unfolding this week at a Royal Commission being conducted in Sydney by Justice Terence Cole into "Certain Australian Companies in Relation to the UN Oil-For-Food Programme". Australia's biggest agribusiness company appears to be up to its neck in it, and so too the Howard Government.
Just a thought to mull over as I head off to bed.
Does a minimum number of overs have to be bowled before Sunny Gavaskar does his daily podcast in this series? Podcasts for days two and four of the Lahore Test are now out, following from his debut on Day One, but it seems the fifteen overs of play produced on Monday was insufficient.
These have been happening for a couple of months now, and I feel remiss for not mentioning it earlier, but the ABC's digital TV channel ABC2 has been reviving old cricket footage in their late evening timeslot.
"Late Night Legends", which begins around 10.45pm each night, features footage of old, allegedly classic, sporting telecasts from the ABC archives, which date back to 1957. In addition to cricket they have shown rugby union and motor racing (though the nostalgic value in watching again a touring car championship race from Oran Park in the late 1970s is beyond me).
Farcical scenes in the ING Cup game at the Adelaide Oval on Saturday. South Australia scored 5/160 in 35 overs in a rain-interrupted innings. Tasmania were told they needed 201 to win under Duckworth-Lewis. Five overs into the Tasmanian innings, a mistake was discovered, and Tasmania's target was announced as 172. They finished with 8/171 and the game was a tie.
The first edition of Sunil Gavaskar's podcast "My Own Pitch" is up on Yahoo! India. It's a fairly dry summary of the first day's play of the Lahore Test. The podcast's web page is here if you want to download or subscribe. (If you're a Juice or Ipodder user, then this link should handle the subscription for you.)
The first edition runs for 2 minutes 43 seconds, but beware, it contains a loud background hum and seems to end abruptly.