“Whatever have you done, Mr Duckworth?” asked Lewis. “How long had you put that egg in for?”
“Well, I started boiling it just before bedtime last night,” said Duckworth. “But I fear I may have gone slightly awry with my calculations. Calculating the resources available – i.e. the egg – and the target – i.e. boiling the egg – I estimated that a rate of 95 degrees Celsius for 14 hours should do the trick nicely.”
“Just goes to show that if you watch England for long enough, eventually something good happens” – a laconic commenter on The Old Batsman’s blog.
“If there was one defining image of the match it was surely the cutaway to the bikini-clad dancer whose job it is to wiggle and shake in celebration of each boundary. She was sat on the boundary rope hugging her knees and staring out into the middle like a pensioner in the passenger seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier looking out over the Bournemouth sea front” – The Guardian’s Andy Bull reports from the Caribbean.
“In his final hours as the choreographer of India’s biggest sporting spectacle, Modi has become a synonym for the unholy alliance of cricket, politics and business in which everything-honour, morality and transparency-seems negotiable. Today, it is as if his sensational success, worth a few billions, provides the first draft of his obituary” – India Today recasts the toppling IPL impresario in the model of a Shakespearean tragic hero. Do read the whole thing – it will amply repay your time.
“Bird, Dickie: Indigenous to Yorkshire, the Dickie Bird is noted for being terrified of rain, flapping under cover at the slightest hint of precipitation” – Wisden has embarked upon the important project of compiling an Alternative Cricket Dictionary.
“‘Gentlemen, your attention please,’ said Frankie. ‘This is a dark day. County cricket faces the threat we feared most.’
‘Is it a very slight reduction in TV funding that could lead to the end of civilisation as we know it?’ asked the committee member.
‘Worse even than that,’ sobbed Frankie” – Alan Tyres gives Cricinfo readers the inside line on the Essex match-fixing allegations.
“Yes, after Daniel Vettori did him with a direct hit yesterday, Ricky Ponting is now Test cricket’s most run out batsman. Well done Punter!” – The Nurdler is sure that you’ll all want to join The Old Batsman in a toast.
So, thanks to the genius and vision of Lalit Modi (or something) we can all watch the IPL for free on YouTube or on an obscure ITV channel. And what is the verdict on what we have seen?
“Lalit Modi works an 80-hour week or summat like that. He’s never even managed to watch a whole IPL game – only fragments. This is his world. He doesn’t realise that most of the rest of us are lucky if we put in eight hours of actual work in an entire working week. A Test match, played during the daytime, is the best way of avoiding work that there is. That is the modern world, Lalit; a world that revolves around the internet and finding ways to slack off” – King Cricket sets Lalit Modi right, on this and a few other things.
“There are bats that sound like condom brands from the 1970s: the Choice Willow Black Prince; the Salix Pod Performance; the Fearnley Magnum Ultimate; the Gray-Nicolls Ignite Pro-Performance; the Adidas Libro Elite; The Bradbury M Players; the Surridge Duke… Best of all, there are the incomprehensible: the Puma Iridium; the Adidas Incurza; the Newbery Mjolinar; the Gray-Nicolls Xiphos” – The Old Batsman has received his first equipment catalogue of the season.