It's one thing for us armchair nincompoops to take the piss whenever a bowler concedes his hundred runs for the innings. For the bowlers themselves to make light of the occasion with the full complicity of the captain, as we saw at the Gerddi Soffia on Saturday, was ridiculous.
Two days left, Australia will not lose at the Gerddi Soffia. They might win. I'm backing the Welsh weather gods (if they have any).
It was a day that saw Simon Katich become the first player to score a Test hundred in Cymru. Ricky Ponting notched his 38th Test hundred, and inflatable kangaroos were held aloft everywhere when he passed 11,000 Test career runs. (Except, of course, that exactly 100 of those runs were scored against the ICC World XI in that ghastly Super Series aberration of October 2005.)
Your team is 241 for 4, twenty overs till stumps on the first day. You are one of the senior players in your team. You are 69 not out. The opposition bowler pitches a slow ball short and about two metres wide of off stump. Do you:
The rickeyre.com Ashes BoG (Best on Ground) award returns for 2009, as I give votes on a 3-2-1 basis to the best players in each day's play of the England v Australia Test series.
It's about to start. The cricketing rivalry that matters more than any other. Do we call the First Test England versus Australia or Australia versus England? How can the Poms claim a match staged in the neighbouring country of Cymru as a home game?
Michael Jackson is dead, long live the Ashes! With eight hours till the start of the first-ever England v Australia Test to be played on neutral soil, allow me to be pessimistic as well as distasteful:
Breaking news from watoday.com.au
SWINE FLU FEARS FOR CRICKETING GREAT
He is the shock selection in England's First Test squad to face the West Indies next week. Durham quickie Graham Onions has been named in the twelve, and is almost certain to make his England debut after a false start on the 2006 ODI tour of Pakistan. Today's Newcastle Herald (New South Wales, not Northumberland) is right on the ball in giving credit where it's due for Onions' success.
