Zimbabwe Cricket's announcement last Wednesday that they were withdrawing from Test cricket for the rest of 2006 was greeted variously with sighs of relief, pats on the back, and gales of laughter. I belonged to that last category.
Let's just recap a sequence of events involving the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) over the past year or so:
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.
Australia 318 for 5. Sri Lanka 202 for 7. Murali 10-0-67-0. Brett Lee didn't kill anyone. The Telstra Dome looked great with the roof open. Game II at the Gabba on Sunday. Can South Africa come within 95 runs of the Aussies in a Fifty50 game?
And at the end of the fourth over, South Africa are nine for two. Yes folks, Twenty20 cricket explodes onto the Gabba!
To take the words of Bill Woodfull seriously out of context, there were two teams out on the field on Monday night, and only one of them was playing Twenty20 cricket. Australia, having lost their last Twenty20 international by a margin of 100 runs (in England last June), beat South Africa by 95 runs in front of the largest crowd to pack into the Brisbane Cricket Ground in modern times. And here's one big advantage 20-20 has over ODIs - you don't have to hang around for ages waiting for a badly-trailing side batting second to lose the game.
