After a brief hiatus over the New Zealand summer, the BLACKCAPSLOCK resumed normal service in the recent Test series against England by being completely shitful at batting. This is Standard Operating Procedure for the BLACKCAPSLOCK and has been for generations. Yet if you put pretty much the same gents into black-and-questionably-blue-doodled clothing and give them 50 overs, they actually look like a cricket team,
as per last night. Which raises the question as to whatever the actual fuck is wrong with these people's heads. Why can't they bat in whites? Is it the glare? Are they snowblind? Or is just because of that peculiarly ironic NZ disposition that sees them strive to be world's best practice at the world's least popular form of the game?
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| Ronchi: not shonky |
This is particularly puzzling as under current ODI rules, one-day cricket is more akin to test cricket than at any point in its history - aside from the very beginnings of the ODI era, from whence the recently reanimated
new-ball-from-each-end regs date. Like a Cliff Notes version of a first-day test innings, your modern ODI inns invariably sees an awkward early period of swing and pace where the batsmen need to knuckle down or perish, a stretch of rebuilding and consolidation, and happy go fun times at the back end when the pitch is flat, the ball is old and the scoring is plentiful. The two-new-ball regs have copped a lot of flak, but they've made ODI cricket interesting again - because it's given one-dayers an identity, made them something other than just a 250% scale model of yet another slap-happy and forgettable T20 match. Ball has a chance against bat. Batsmen have to apply themselves, fight for their wickets. Bowlers don't just trundle in and hope to bowl wide yorker dot balls. Both sides have to ACTUALLY PLAY SOME CRICKET.
Of course, the best reason to celebrate the new-old new-ball regs is that they annoy Nasser Hussain. Nasser, like the other bitter, miserable, whinging failures (sorry, decorated former England captains) in the Sky UK combox is an insufferable bleating prick at the best of times, but he was particularly insufferable and bleatsome last night over the complexity and confusion he felt at 'all the new rules'. Go back to one ball, he demanded. Granted, this is Nasser we are talking about,
a man who once put Australia in at the Gabba on a pitch laid by the Queensland Department of Transport, so dealing with the complexities and confusions of having TWO new balls rather than one could be enough to grenade his tiny straining mind forever.
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| Win the toss and bowl, eh Nass? |
Twice the opportunity for Steve Harmison to bowl one to second slip, of course.
The Doctor is OUT.
