Amusing little stoush hotting up between Cricket Australia and the Murdoch Media Monolith over intellectual property rights to Test highlights.
The Murdochariat are showing three minutes of video highlights each day on the Fox Sports website, despite Cricket Australia issuing a fatwa saying they are only allowed thirty seconds. Murdochistas at News Ltd assert that they are making "fair use" of the footage for reportage of a news event.
"We think ambush marketing is fairly un-Australian,"
- Geoff Donohue, corporate affairs spokesperson for Fosters Brewing, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald of 11.10.06
Allan Border's second stint as a national selector of the Australian team ended on Monday after just four months.
"...my various commitments are far heavier than I had expected back in mid-year and I don’t think it is appropriate to do what is a really important job if I am not able to give it the full attention it deserves."
It's not exactly in the same league as selling mail order Via*gra, X[a]nax or p3nis enlargements, but the Zimbabwe Cricket Union's unsolicited email to the eighteen first-class English counties on Monday will go down as one of the daftest acts by a cricket administration in recent times.
The Zimbabwe Cricket Union, stretched for funds in a deteriorating economy and suffering on the field from a drain of most of its best players, is desperate for every scheduled international tour to its country to proceed. And with October's tour by England in serious danger of cancellation, ZCU chairman Peter Chingoka and chief executive Vince Hogg were desperate enough to decide to bypass the ECB and appeal directly to the county administrations.
