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.
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.
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).
I must confess that I haven't watched much of the current Australia-West Indies Test series to date. For the most part, I've had the alibi of Other Committments, but it's also true that I haven't found it very motivating to follow. It's a shame, because I have always enjoyed following Aus-WI contests over the last three decades or so.
The launch in September of The Surfer, CricInfo's first genuine incursion into modern blogging technology, caused quite a buzz in our part of the blogosphere. That was followed in October by Wicket to Wicket, touted as a platform for CricInfo's columnists to discuss topical matters. All very promising, even though they were yet to open the floodgates to public comments.
As the Trescothick Era of English Cricket dawns in Multan today, it's worth noting that the Guardian have published a book of their infamous OBO (over-by-over) logs of the 2
I should have mentioned this one sooner, but the October 7 edition of ABC Radio National's The Sports Factor included an excellent 15-minute feature on the black-arm protest by Andy Flower and Henry Olonga before the start of Zimbabwe's first game in the 2003 World Cup.
The program, by former Zimbabwean journalist Robert Scott who now works for the ABC in Western Australia, includes interviews with the pair and is an excellent account of the episode from their point of view.
In addition to Steve Waugh's two radio interviews that I highlighted here recently, I am aware of at least two others that are available online.
On October 31, Waugh was interviewed on ABC Queensland's "Conversations" by former Doug Anthony All Star Richard Fidler. This interview is available in MP3 and realaudio format.
