a late night ramble about nothing in particular

SPEAKING of Australian cricket, I've been looking for an excuse to shoehorn in a little nugget of sporting randomness for the last couple of days. There is a large discrepancy with me when it comes to cricket, for although as a rule I loathe the English on all international sporting platforms, be that with ball or on track, I was brought up to make exception for those knights who wield the bat along the chain, waiting for a small leather clad object to come hurtling towards then at up to 150 kph. It was probably just because the Irish were, and still usually are, so duff, but also because the only thing that the English media coverage seems to be not just impartial of, but fun about, is cricket. Perhaps it's mostly because of the type of correspondent who would cover cricket, excluding the Johnny-come-lately-and-rather-sloshed sort that gets drafted in for the ICC World Cup and so on... again, i refer you to the lovely Test Match Special gentlemen.

Of course, as an honourary Pom I am therefore traditionally in hatred of the Aussie side. In truth I quite like them. And thus, a few nights ago I stumbled upon this sporting oddity.

There is always a lot of on-pitch verbals and humour in cricket (let's face it, there's a load of guys standing around a field for most of a day, there's going to be) and one particular item of note came upon me the other day when I was reading up on Chappell's famously disgraceful piece of underarm bowling from 1981. I refer you to wikipedia for more, but basically, it only happened once and it was bloody disgraceful, as far as this correspondent is concerned. Look, there it is, to the right of this very text. Bloody disgraceful. (I'm going to see how much of this I can remember without looking at the wiki cause it'll be funny - for me. Let's face it, I'm the only person still reading this post.)

ANYWAY, the episode goes that with the final ball of the final over of the third ODI between the Aussies and New Zealand in early 1981, New Zealand found themselves needing six runs to tie the match. Now, getting a six in cricket is pretty difficult, as anyone who's ever tried will tell you. (My one effort in school, I distinctly recall, involved a huge swing, a short nip off the end of my bat (which I could bearly lift anyway) and it plopping straight at the feet of someone at near silly point, probably about twenty feet away.) Not only that, but it was definitely a tail ender at the batting end, as I think New Zealand had already lost most of their wickets. But, apparently the captain, one T. Chappell, felt threatened. (Now, HE'S interesting because he was mistakenly given not out in his own innings after the umpire didn't see a catch at deep extra cover or something, where the fielder literally scraped his hands on the ground in order to get low enough to get it - the days before big screen replays.) Anyway, T. Chappell instructed his brother G. Chappell, who was in to bowl, to do something so dastardly, so disgusting, that even the commentator, Mr Richie Benaud (himself, of course, the captain of a very boring Aussie side in the '50's) called it... yes, bloody "disgraceful"!

So he did, he rolled the ball along the ground, an a not-technically-illegal-because-no-one-would-ever-be-a-big-enough-cad-to-do-it act of... well, caddishness. And the rest is history. The sporting world was outraged. Ironically, a New Zealander who threw down his bat and walked off in disgust was the only one censured by the ICC, but there you go.

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The point, however, is that this leads us to the images below. In the first ever Twenty20 game between the two sides in 2005, Glenn McGrath started his final over bowling by feigning an underarm, for which extrovert umpire Billy Bowden (once accused of trying to be a bigger celebrity that the players) whipped out a football-style red card and 'sent him off' - the only time a player has been treated in this style by an umpire upon the field of cricket. Underarm bowling is now banned from limited overs cricket, though I believe still

Despite my rambling story, I thought the pictures were pretty interesting, if only for their randomness.




I can sleep easy now.

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