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Ranjan Madugalle's verdicts in the Inzamam ul-Haq hearing last week were no surprise to me. I expected the ball-tampering charge to be chucked out, and likewise I expected Inzi to be found guilty on the disrepute charge of not returning to the field. The four match suspension seems reasonable enough. The full text of the judgment can be found on the ICC website.

Madugalle dismissed the charge, saying:

Life is full of ironies. An AFL grand final without a Melbourne team, and an NRL grand final without a Sydney team. In a year when I have become more and more apathetic about rugby league, today I am going to my first-ever Sydney rugby league grand final.

I should say, however, that it's really the Premier League fixture, the second curtain-raiser of the day at Telstra Stadium, that is my main attraction. Newtown (who, to be fair, is a glorified Sydney Roosters Reserve Grade this year) take on Parramatta. A remarkable comeback for a club that was kicked out of the NSWRL comp in 1983, went broke, re-emerged through minor competitions and became something of a cause celebre for the anti-Super League true believers.

Wordpress has been (and continues to be) very good to me. However, after two and a bit years, I am deprecating the now.rickeyre.com brand and freezing its blog. There's a lot of great reading there, but from October 1 my blog address will be www.rickeyre.com/blog.

I'm now using Drupal, which offers a more comprehensive range of features than Wordpress, which is a great program if you only want to blog. Drupal is also the CMS I use for the two church websites that I have worked on recently.

Bear with me as I work out the new navigation and theme.

Revenge by one point!

Today, Friday May 26, is National Sorry Day in Australia. Instituted in 1997, it is the annual commemoration of the tens of thousands of indigenous Australian children who were forcibly removed from their homes as children.

It's not a holiday, but it is certainly a day when all Australians should stop to reflect on the destruction of indigenous society and culture over the past two and a quarter centuries, and which is still happening, not just in the Northern Territory but all across the country.

More information about National Sorry Day can be found on the NSD Committee's website.

[This article originally appeared on the now defunct website Cricketwoman. - RE]

[This article was originally written for the now defunct website, Cricketwoman. - RE]

Australian vice-captain Karen Rolton's unbeaten 107 in Sunday's Women's Cricket World Cup Final against India at Centurion was both the highest individual score and the first century scored in such a game.Australia's team total of 215 for 4 is the highest team total in a Women's World Cup Final, while Rolton's fourth-wicket partnership with Lisa Sthalekar is the largest partnership in a WCWC Final.

I could count the number of conservative politicians in Australia whom I respect on about two fingers. Tim Fischer is one. Malcolm Fraser is the other.

"The Life and Times of Malcolm Fraser" is another superb documentary from the SBS Independent stable screening in the Thursday night "Storyline Australia" collection. It paints a personal picture of the septuagenarian former PM, with the backdrop of his political career and home movies from his childhood.

In 1973, the women were first with a cricket world cup, and in 2004 they will be first with a Twenty20 cricket international.

The Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), which governs the men's game in the world's most populous cricketing nation, has rejected an application from the women's governing body for an amalgamation.

A brief announcement of the rejection of the request by the Women's Cricket Association of India (WCAI) was made at the conclusion of the BCCI's AGM, which was conducted at Eden Gardens, Calcutta on September 27-29.