Cricket
Another baffling selectorial Cook-up
So for reasons best known to the ICC, a 30 man provisional squad for the World Twenty20 Championships has to be submitted this week, and England have announced theirs. Amongst the thirty names there is no space for the stand-in ODI and Test captain Alastair Cook.
Geoff Miller, doing an interview in relation to the announcement, said [...]
Weak exclusives: Football team want to buy IPL team
The Sun go big with a cricket story this morning, though Sun readers needn’t worry - it’s fine - it’s got a football angle. Exclusive, they bellow:
City in cricket IPL team bid
Yes, admittedly that’s barely a sentence, so we’ll rephrase. Manchester City are the team apparently behind a bid for a cricket team in the IPL.
MANCHESTER CITY are [...]
Sports thoughts from the weekend
The best is still to come
One round of Six Nations matches down, and the tournament has failed to live up to the waxy poetry afforded it by Morgan Freeman and the BBC. The Irish were described by Brian O’Driscoll as “mediocre” against the Italians, the English beat a misfiring Welsh side by virtue of a moment’s [...]
Sports thoughts from the weekend
Haven’t we been here before?
It’s the second week of a Grand Slam tennis tournament, and we have a Briton playing well facing a big quarter-final. Since the mid-nineties, this has been the point at which we begin to hope almost relentlessly for victory, a burden which had been carried by Rusdeski and Henman, and has now [...]
Sports thoughts from the weekend
Snooker loopy
The people who say that snooker is a dying sport have already closed their minds to it, and their opinions will not be changed. The evidence to the contrary, however, was there for all who want to see it with a magnificent final which saw Mark Selby claim the Masters title at Wembley for the [...]
Of Tugay, Sparky, and imagined jobs
Mark Hughes may be out of a job for now, but his record in the three jobs he has done to date is sufficiently good that it won’t be long until he finds another role. Not that Hughes has a phobia of going abroad given his years at Barcelona, but it still seems remote that [...]
Sports thoughts from the weekend
English Cricket… Bloody Hell
There’s a scene in the film Law Abiding Citizen when it becomes apparent that a warehouse near the prison where Gerard Butler’s character is being kept has a tunnel which runs directly into his cell. “What kind of man would tunnel their way into prison?” the characters muse.
They need look no further than the [...]
The round-up
Some intriguing words today in the papers. We’ll begin with the Sun, who were reporting on the mood of euphoria following Tottenham’s 3-0 home victory over Manchester City last night. Inspired by that performance, Harry Redknapp said this:
“Anything is possible this year.
“The champions will come from Manchester United or Chelsea. But after that [...]
No way, Owais: The mistimed rant that will get him nowhere
Owais Shah has made a spectacularly ill-timed assault on England’s selectorial policy this week, pointing out that he feels extremely aggrieved to have been dropped from the England ODI side by Flower and Strauss. The choice is poor, of course, because England, without Shah’s help, have just beaten a major opponent in South Africa away [...]
Sports thoughts from the weekend
Khan do - the comeback kid
It felt as if things had come full circle since September 7th 2008 - at least, they have come round as far as they possibly ever will. That night Amir Khan fought Breidis Prescott, and had his chin exposed in less than a minute of boxing. The performance verged on catastrophic [...]