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JANE HUTCHEON [ABC radio]: Am I correct in saying that Friday, is that the Prime Minister's Cricket 11 match that's going to go ahead?

JOHN HOWARD: Yes, the game against the West Indies, yes.

JANE HUTCHEON: And that's on Friday…

JOHN HOWARD: Yes, yes.

JANE HUTCHEON: …the same day that Van Nguyen is going to be executed…

JOHN HOWARD: Yes.

JANE HUTCHEON: Do you think it would be sensitive to see you attending that cricket match?

A fabulous innings from Brian Lara is at an end. It's almost certainly his last Test match in Australia, which makes it a pity for Melbourne and Sydney's sake.

Lara now has 11,146 runs in Test matches for the West Indies. Let's hope he can score at least 29 in the second innings to pass Allan Border's total in Test matches for Australia, and put the world record beyond dispute.

McGrath bowls around the wicket to Lara. A short ball, waist-high, angled across the left-handed batsman, Lara exposes his leg stump as he pulls to deep backward square for a single. He is 214 not out. The crowd rises to give Lara a standing ovation. Lara waves his bat in the air, the Australian players come over to congratulate him. He has passed Allan Border to become the highest run-scorer in Test cricket.

Supposedly.

More site updates:

1. I've transferred more items from my old blog to the present one. Currently, there's about forty more articles, written between January 2004 and April 2005, to be transferred across, and for now these are reachable from the "Old blog" link on the left.

That was a fantastic innings by Brian Lara at the Adelaide Oval yesterday. Overnight, he is 202 not out in a West Indian total of 352 for 7. This morning, the papers are reporting that he needs twelve more runs to overhaul Allan Border's career aggregate of 11174. But thanks to the ICC, there will be some nagging doubt over the moment when he becomes the leading Test run-scorer of all time.

I've remixed and reloaded issue 5 of The Net Sessions to improve the clarity of the opening couple of minutes of the podcast which I published yesterday.

I've also boosted the encoding quality of the Ogg version by an increment. The updated versions, which are no different in content or running time to the original, can be downloaded from The Net Sessions homepage. Yesterday's publication announcement will now download the new files for those who haven't done so yet.

It's late but it's here at last. The fifth edition of my cricket podcast, The Net Sessions, is now online.

The latest edition, seventeen minutes in length, is devoted to last month's ICC Awards ceremony in Sydney. I was in the press gallery at the Four Seasons Hotel that evening and recorded some audio from the awards dinner (which was telecast but, amazingly, not shown live anywhere in the world), as well as the press conferences with the winners. Some of the audio quality is a bit lesser than I would have liked, but I only have myself to blame for that.

The latest nomination for cricket headline of the year goes to the Independent on Sunday for:

Vaughan Stands Firm On Knee

Read Stephen Brenkley's article here (until it goes into the subscription archive).