So, it looks like England are going to win some burned sticks of wood because, essentially, it rained a lot. According to the hype in the media, this is about as exciting as cricket gets, which says it all really.
11 thoughts on “Thrilling”
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I wish you could read this story with the ignorant eyes of an American who knows nothing about cricket. It’s hilarious. It’s like I’m reading about quantum physics or something. Well, no, I understand quantum physics better than this. It’s wonderfully obscure, almost poetically so.
Oh, it gets better… I’m sitting here watching the closing presentations, and the man of the match award has gone to Kevin Pietersen, who’s South African.
You my friend are an idiot
Frankly Calum, if you didn’t enjoy that Ashes series, your loss – England won the series because they played exciting and confident cricket. Greatest sporting event of my lifetime.
And because Australia weren’t given a proper chance to win the last game because it rained.
@anon: My point exactly. I can’t deny that I’ve always found cricket pretty tedious anyway, but for the outcome of as important a match/series as today’s (or any other day’s) to ultimately depend on how much time the teams had to spend indoors waiting for the sun to come out just makes a total mockery of its claim to be a historic sporting occasion, IMHO… you’d think in this day and age they’d at least have some sort of system where deciding matches are allowed to run their course however long they might take.
Anyway, the media hype all smacks a bit of “maybe they’ll forget we have a crap football team now” backlash to me 🙂
England won the Ashes because they played excellently throughout the series and won more games than their opponents. It’s easy to bash anyone else’s favourite sport – come on, name yours, and I’ll do it – but it doesn’t do anyone any good. Grow up already.
To be honest, it’s more the unrestrained media hype around the merest flicker of English success that annoys the rest of us… yes, England won fair and square within the laws of the game (which are inherently unfair in these sort of situations, but it’s the same for everyone).
Every year , though, the supposedly-British media is saturated with how England or English players are going to win the World Cup, the Ashes, Wimbledon, the Open, you name it, even when it’s blindingly obvious to the rest of us that they haven’t got a snowball’s most of the time. (And if we’re lucky, the other countries in the UK get a wee mention at the end for being plucky little blighters.)
Hence the widespread indifference that an English win generates amongst everybody else… even if the players themselves are a decent bunch, as they usually are, the English media are just such bad winners that they’re pretty much insufferable most of the time. Most (non-English) folk I know would be happy to watch England playing in, say, the World Cup, were it not for Linker, Motson, Venables etc. mentioning 1966 every 5 minutes. So instead, if they watch them at all, it’s purely in the hope that England will lose (preferably in a Hand-of-God or two-goals-from-Zidane-in-the-last-minute sort of way) to see the expression wiped off the commentators’ smug little faces 🙂
[FWIW, my favourite sports are fitba’, skiing, motor racing and GAA, and I’m well capable of bashing those myself! But if you’d like to anyway, feel free… denying you the opportunity just wouldn’t be cricket…]
Not being funny, but is this just bitterness because even the Scottish media are not jingoistic enough to suggest that Scotland could ever win an international competition?
Seriously, I do find it irritating as well. But sample the media in any other country that has a vague chance of winning an international competition that is ‘big’, and you will see exactly the same thing.
Tbh, I would support abolishing all the home nations teams in favour of GB teams, just to see the Scots heads explode.
I don’t think so, really… Scotland and Scottish players have been known to win international competitions (five nations rugby, world championship snooker, commonwealth games gold medals etc.), we just enjoy it when it comes along because we’re realistic enough to know it probably won’t happen again for a while.
The Scottish media are also pretty wary of being jingoistic after being badly bitten by the World Cup back in 1978… Scotland probably did have an outside chance of winning that, but the media blew everyone’s expectations out of proportion, and our inevitable back-on-the-first-plane performance seemed like a national disaster as a result.
I have lived (and still do) in other countries, but can’t say I’ve ever experienced anything remotely as irritating as back home. As for the home nations– I doubt there would be much head exploding really 🙂 I’m pretty sure most Scots would happily watch if they thought they were getting fair representation, and go and watch something else instead if they didn’t. But I can’t really see the point if most of the players are going to be English anyway… might as well have England plus the three other teams as a single UK team that’s basically just England anyway. (And let’s be honest, the English would miss the chance to beat Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland just as much as the those countries would miss the chance to put one over on England!)
Oh Calum, let them have their celebration over a game that no-one really cares all that much about anyway, because haunting them in the back of their mind will be that we beat them in the football last week.
And yes, we’ll never let them live it down.