With the kind permission of our readers, we’d like to take a bit of a liberty and mention Kevin Pietersen.
“Eoin Morgan and Kevin Pietersen shared England’s best-ever stand in Twenty20 cricket to down world champions Pakistan by seven wickets in Dubai” – the perfect start to the weekend.
“The decision about whether to play in the IPL, which starts in Mumbai on March 12, will rest with individual players” – England’s eight IPL players will be using a report from the Professional Cricketers’ Association due early next week to gauge whether they face insurmountable security risks.
“[Sunday's play] ended a dreadful series for Pietersen – though Strauss, Jonathan Trott and Matt Prior have fared equally poorly with the bat” – BBC match report. Hmmm. And what do those four have in common?
The Nurdler was rather amused to see a website full of spoofs of Conservative leader David Cameron’s recent airbrushed advertising billboard – and even more interested to see there was a downloadable template so we could make our own. So here it is.
How did we get in this mess for a third time? Was it KP’s fault? Trott’s? Broad’s? Actually, we think that probably the South Africans are to blame for simply being too damn good at cricket.
“People seem to have got themselves into all sorts of a tangle about this, and have ended up talking the kind of baloney you might hear on a late-night local radio phone-in show. One national daily was even asked ‘Can Jonathan Trott be English if he’s never read Viz?’, which, even by the standards of the UK citizenship test, is a mind-boggling way to go about judging national affiliation” – Andy Bull writes in The Guardian in defence of Jonathan Trott and England’s other imports.
“I put into writing all my suggestions, as I was asked to, and [Andrew] Strauss has got the benefit of all that. I’ve just had to watch it unfold this summer, which has been extremely hard for me, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise for me to be injured and away from everything so I could try to get my hunger back, because it certainly was dwindling” – KP on the ups and downs of his international career.
“I think everybody needs to realise that something that was right seven years ago – before IPL, before the 2005 Ashes, which has sort of changed the face of cricket, or cricketers, especially in this country, well cricket around the world really, because of how much interest that created, for kids and everything – it doesn’t necessarily mean that what was right then is right now in terms of central contracts” – KP, that top-rated IPL player, gets stuck in to the central contracts debate.
“I saw a couple of surgeons during the week but it’s slow at the moment. I’ve got an open wound in my leg. But I’m really hoping to be back for the South Africa tour at the moment” – and KP is not the only one hoping that.
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