Canada

Well there is certainly more to come re the cricket reports. Worms, Manhattans pictures of Burt Reynolds, you name it. But, that will have to wait until this evening. First is the announcement that, rather than construct a site called
www.timinlethbridge.blogspot.com

I have opted to add on the Canada travels to this account. Here is something I prepared at the airport hotel:

Before leaving Heathrow I bought some ‘noise cancelling earphones’, which somehow bend the laws of physics to their every whim. There is also some room for battery insertion, presumeably if I want to cancel more noise than I need and actually effect an X-men type silence over my fellow travellers. Unfortunately I had traded in the last of my pounds and was unable to play the role of Silencio.

I had the privilege of sitting near a female Sherlock Holmes of a flight attendant on the trip over. She would roam around, not unlike Clive Lloyd in the covers, and with narrow, Clint Eastwood-esque eyes, ask “Any rubbish?” I replied that I had none to which her eyes narrowed even further. Looking to my right she asked “Is that not rubbish?” Touche salesman. The blokes at immigration stapled in an A4 sheet into my passport. Now my passport wallet is as thick as a bankers (do we still hate bankers? What’s the story with that?) and may well be the cause of a mugging in Downtown Lethbridge. I hear that Canada is without the crime-centric AK Cities of this world, but forewarned is forearmed, literally.



Knackered, I nabbed my luggage and walked down to my hotel. Eleven dollars for internet in the room cannot compete with zero dollars down in the lobby: my flat cap and 7-euro jacket must have bought me some street-cred with the porters as they extended the ‘5 minute usage’ up to the full half hour. I thought it might be pushing the Commonwealth relations a little too far if I actually wrote and compiled this entry while there – indeed the searches for pictures of Micheal Keaton (see below) might have aroused suspicions. I caught up on Netherlands vs Slovakia on the TV before heading down for dinner. The menu was star studded with beef: apparently more than half of the beef consumed in Canada is supplied by Alberta. Bang. There were tenderloins, striploins (which sounds surely too raunchy for inclusion in a family restaurant), and plenty of other cuts getting around. I thought that I would save my first steak experience for a time when I was actually awake: I opted for the nachos, under the ‘lite bites’ menu. It was anything but the former. If I had pulled a Michael Keaton


I might have got through three-quarters of it. As it was I ordered a ‘glass’ of beer – I don’t think pints have made there way here, least not in the airport. I let the inhouse pool go through to the keeper, while also getting the Blues leave out on the in-room movies. For some reason I thought that watching Anthony Hopkins in the succinctly titled film “The Wolfman” would be a good way to pass a transatlantic flight. Error. Time to wait at the coffee shop to be whisked away to Lethbridge. Classic times. More soon.

A good day to score runs

And so it came to pass that Balliol took on the close rivals over the past few years: Keble. Entries

Sunday, May 25, 2008

First win of the season (Part 2/2)

and

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Career Best

for a prologue.

Keble batted first on a two-paced track and, after a slow start, powered their way to 185 for 9. This was the fourth year in which Simon Quinn opened for Keble, wearing his wide-brimmed Greg Chappell special, saw off the opening bowlers, and looked set for a big'un. But the potentiality was revoked with some Clive Lloyd esque fielding at cover by the Sourgen which showed that 5/4 of a stump is all you really need in order to take aim. Clarkey finished, as always, with parsimonious figures, and an important early wicket. Gav nabbed, four --- count them four --- maidens in his stint, which meant that, despite taking some tap towards the end when there was more swinging than in a 1970s Burt Reynolds movie


he finished with figures of 2-27 from his 8 overs. Vidhu bowled the classic off-spinner's game. Runs and wickets, lad --- runs and wickets. A couple of catches and a stumping at pretty good prices: 15 runs apiece. There is always the Jason Krejza figures of 8 for 215 on debut, which comes to just under 27 for each wicket --- and of course the world-beating figures of Bryce "You've done it again" McGain who netted 0 for 149 off his 18 overs. My desktop calculator imploded when trying to calculate the bargain prices with which his wickets were scalped.

The stumping was a comic affair. With the ball cantering in at the 40 mph mark, the batsman played every which way but loose. I waited like a man with 59 minutes to spare before catching his next bus, and pushed at it hard with the gloves, knocking it onto the stumps, breaking the bails. Out - sure, but it looked ugly, and there have been plenty of those not given. With the batsman still out of his ground, but turning to come back in, I gathered the ball and wrenched off stump out of the ground with my gloves (ball included) --- perfectly sound. I looked to the umpire with a bit of a sheepish on my face... but he gave it out on the first attempt 'for the poor shot, if nothing else' --- classic umpiring.

With half a dozen overs or so to go, Keble began to hit out, and it looked as though 200 might be on the cards. Roscoe came back into the attack and bowled with the fire of a sunbaked Western Cape to keep the onslaught to a minimum. Nine down for 185, which would take some chasing on a wicket with the vintage Jowett mixture of herbs and spices.

Alas, Keble pulled a Luddite movement on us and didn't have a bar of SJ's 21st century scoring system. The only stats are therefore from the Balliol innings, with the scorecard below,


along with the worm.


Ah yes! But before the report on our innings, the drama mid innings. There were one too many plonkers in the Keble side for my liking - during our innings I heard one say to one of our umpires "If the bowler's heel is on the line [popping crease] then it is not a no-ball." I'm not sure of the universe in which that is a Law, but there you go. The classic, bouncer over head height called No-ball (correctly) was disputed again. That old chestnut. But the best was the mid-innings fiasco when Captain Kohnny requested Jim to roll the pitch.

The Laws are perfectly clear that, in a match of one day, the captain batting second (and NOT the captain batting first) can request --- indeed, demand --- the pitch to be rolled for a maximum of 7 minutes between the innings. The only time the captain batting first can request that the pitch be rolled is if he has won the toss, decided to bat, there has been no play because of, say rain, and the pitch is a mess when they are about to start after the interruption. But one can't expect plonkers to know that, so some bright spark trooped out to the pitch at tea-time to give Jim a piece of his mind. Jim used a cunning mixture of actual deafness, noise of the roller, and ambivalence to dickheads to ignore any such protestations.

Anyway - to the innings.

Keble started with 'The Don' Gordon bowling fast and furious, which made for fun times. The Head edged one through to the keeper which brought me to the crease, for an ex-captain conference with Wino. Plenty of chat about the speed of the ball and the lack of a helmet, and all manner of other attempts at banter. The really short balls were not that effective as they slowed down markedly, but it was the balls on a length, which made one come forward, only to whiz the head out of the way at the 11th hour, which were the good'uns.

I survived a caught behind shout when the ball flicked the pad strap --- although how it didn't remove my off stump I'll never know. Wino was turning balls off his hip for runs while I took a fair share on the hip, but fortunately my natural padding came to the rescue. If Di had had her way and there were 'exercises' done every morning, then I think I'd still be carrying a Reader's logo on my left flank.

Digging in, SR Waugh style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZnx5oBBMuI

we saw the openers off and finally managed a few shots. I doubt whether many of mine were controlled along the ground, but that is what Wino is for. We nabbed a 96 run stand, until a long-hop by the legspinner was pulled, but not quite high enough, and caught and midwicket - OGW departed with a cracking 51.

The Sourgen rolled out to join me at the crease and said 'you just keep doing whatever it is that you do'. I still wasn't sure what that was exactly, but I started to head after the spinners. Two classic memories: the first was pulling out the punt pole to hit one of the off-spinners through cow corner for four. A deep-midwicket and a long on go back. The keeper asks "Ought we to have a long-off" to which the reply is "No, he is not good enough to go inside-out." Well, with the fire of a thousand suns I was determined to make all those years of hitting Albert Alla

out of the nets come to fruition. I skipped down and, with room a plenty, hit him over cover for four. No verbal reply needed. The other came from their leg-spinning, roller-objecting firebrand who was bowling from the OUCCCCC end. I hit a full toss for four past long on, and the next ball, slightly shorter, pitched and rose sharply enough to hit the side of my head as I tried to take evasive action. A fun pitch, to be sure. We ran a couple of leg-byes. The next ball was fullish and I went for a sweep and mistimed it completely. The ball spun enough to pass harmlessly outside off to which the leggie said, huffing and puffing "How about some f'ing respect?!" What a trooper.

I broke the cardinal rule of running on a misfield to get run out, at probably the right time. Kohnny and Sourgen played the spinners mercilessly with some cracking sweeps and hoicks, adding 40 from 37 balls. When Gav departed for a blistering 34 from 32, SJ Thwaite and the skip cooled the heads right down to see the match done and dusted with a few resources still in the shed. There was a little madness in the 'we are running for everything' gambit, but we got there with 8 balls to spare.

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Oh, well, I suppose I'll include it here.

We went down in the semi-final of cuppers against Univ. Gutting. Here are the scorecards:

We thought we had made enough runs --- maybe some more between the last few wickets could have helped, but certainly enough to defend. The pitch was rolled (we thought of sending some text messages to Keble to get their thoughts) and it did play a little better for Univ batting second. But, as The Head says year in and year out, you never know what a good score is on college grounds until the end of the match. It turns out that 185 was a good 30 runs short of par.

Our batting highlights include Wino racking up another half-century with his solid 57, ably supported by Kohnny (36 from 57) and Thwaiters (29 from 31).

Bowling, well...


I dropped two catches from Gav's bowling: indeed this was Baskerville, twice. He went on to score 75 in quick time, so I was feeling Liliputian at best. Great spells from the opening fast bowlers, but we just couldn't nab enough early wickets. Below is the worm which shows the classic 'wickets in hand' trump card.

Well done to Univ --- last gasp for me at cuppers, but I'm sure that 2011, a World Cup year will inspire another Balliol appearance in the Parks.