At the end of Ashes day two of a scheduled twenty-five, England are losing by five hundred and forty-nine runs, and are batting for a draw. Half of their recognised (or at least recognisable) batsmen are sitting in the dressing sheds trying to come up with a better excuse for going home than old mate Marcus managed to come up with.
Normal service has been resumed.
In fact, fuck it, we'll just play with the NSW guys and stop counting the others.
New South Wales 1st Innings 2/146 dec
M Clarke c Strauss b Anderson 56 (94)
A Gilchrist lbw b Hoggard for blot but we're not counting him cos he's a Waca
B Lee not out 43 (61)
S Clark b Flintoff 39 (23, yes 23)
G McGrath not out 8 (17)
England 1st Innings 3/53
A Strauss c Hussey b McGrath 12 (26)
A Cook c Warne b McGrath 11 (24)
I Bell not out 13 (59)
P Collingwood c Gilchrist b Clark 5 (29)
K Pietersen not out 6 (28) and being outscored by Extras
And the Logie for 'Most Random Use Of Superfluous Technology' goes to...
After a promising start, Channel Nine's whizz-bang new thermal camera, ingeniously called 'Hot Spot', has faded disappointingly in the keenly contested race to be the most pointless piece of technobullshit employed by the gadget-obsessed broadcast team. Hot Spot, despite being as informative and relevant as A Current Affair, particularly during Ricky Ponting's innings of 196 (a double hundred with Swedish rounding) - as the SMH observed, there's only so often you can get ratings mileage out of showing a neat white spot right in the middle of someone's bat - while obviously stupid, can never quite get near the astonishing pointlessness of Nine's 3 Mobile-sponsored ball tracker, ingeniously named '3 Tracker', on the basis that if you think really hard you might actually come up with a potential point to Hot Spot's existence. 3 Tracker is not only without any justification for its existence, but looks totally wank on screen. By comparison with these two, Snicko (which definitively proves that various things can make noise when in contact with each other) and Hawkeye (on which basis we can clearly and obviously make all umpires redundant in favour of a demountable full of fat IT nerds with bumfluff stubble and debilitating addictions to Jolt and internet porn) are more essential for an Australian cricket broadcast than Richie in a cream jacket. Sorry, a cream, bone, white, off-white, ivory or beige jacket.
Dad's Army 1 Barmy Army 0
Are the Barmy Army the only travelling sports fans anywhere in the world, in any sport, who in times when their team are struggling and need a lift (to wit, for the English cricket team any time other than 2004 and 2005), choose not to shout messages of support or reassurance but instead start chanting THEIR OWN NAME in an astonishing orgy of masterbatory narcissism?
One between-overs camera sweep around the Barmy Army will turn up more red crosses than a refugee camp. England fans bring the flag of their nation, the St George Cross (and they are, for being associated with such a shit country) along to cricket games and string them up in the hope that it will inspire their countrymen (and the couple of Saffers they traditionally pick as well) into great deeds. Unfortunately, rather than inspiring England to victory, aforesaid large red crosses usually end up being used as batting targets by people like Stuart Clark.
One of the most puzzling features of the ubiquitous Barmy Army England flag is the equally ubiquitous English football sides stencilled or sewn across the flag. The most puzzling feature of these flags is that the teams with their names or initials so emblazoned are always completely, utterly, hideously shithouse. Just in ten seconds of crowd-shot montage late on day 2 there were flags for Sunderland, Derby County, Reading, Swindon Town, and most embarrassing of all, Newcastle United.
So The Weak's Question Of The Day is directed toward the Barmy Army:
Is there anyone here who supports a football team that isn't fucking terrible at football?
Or is that why you're down here in the middle of football season?
The Doctor is OUT.
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