Gotta get down on Sunday

1. Take a train to tiny speck of a station.
2. Trek through the Sussex country-side on roads without sidewalks.
3. Step back into the late 18th/early 19th century of railways.
4. Hop aboard a choo-choo train.
5. Stare at guy in dirty overalls shovelling coal into the firebox of ancient steam locomotive.
6. Inhale coal gas fumes in moving train.
7. Gawk at adverts for companies, brands and products long since extinct.
8. Take shortcut across a meadow that turns out to be grazing lands.
9. Watch woolly and shorn sheep gambol.
10. Marvel that gambolling doesn't just happen in books.
11. Wade through a slushy path to a delightful little patch of green.
12. Curse at rain for threatening to deprive a day of its cricket.
    
13. Rejoice at the senior citizen players deciding to play anyway.
    
14. Rejoice even more at the clouds relenting and deciding to let the sun through.
    
15. Get picture taken with one of the finest commentators of all time.
    
16. Laze through a cricket match with a pint of bright Sussex ale.
17. Laugh at random commentator who keeps quietly asking spectators and players the names of the batsmen and bowlers.
18. Shoot the breeze about cricket obscuridae with genuine lovers of the game.
19. Run back through aforementioned meadow to catch taxi and train back home.
20. Feel like a character out of a chilled out Enid Blyton novel.
21. Crash.

Best. Sunday. Ever.

Lalit Modi's colourfully dopey past

Conspiracy to traffic cocaine: Charged [screenshot], and indicted [screenshot].

How many Lalit Kumar Modis from New Delhi would have gone to Duke University in the mid-80s?

Oh the irony, having the misdemeanours of your youth exposed by the same company you've - a quarter of a century later - struck a hojillion-dollar with.

Cricinfo FAIL

Edit: A little clarity for the ???? crowd - where is the 'smiling Ricky Ponting'?

Reflection on the Mumbai Indians vs KKR whitewash

It wasn't a Twenty20 match, it was a Twenty match.

Badum-tish!

Not cricket? Think again!

All too often, one is left stranded for words when Captain Jojo brandishes his cricket-purist tendencies in one's face. The combination of a lack of suitable eloquence, and laziness in bothering to string together a coherent argument meant one would always come out second-best in such discussions. The hunt for a reasonable argument in favour of Twenty20 games of cricket was well afoot. Okay, not WELL afoot, but it was chugging along (again, that laziness..)

Until now.

Peter Roebuck's article, and a very nice clutch of comments following it, do the job very nicely.

No version of cricket featuring fearless tacticians, shrewd selections, daring strokeplayers, fast bowlers, legspinners, swift running and athletic fielding deserves to be scorned.

As I see it, all that is stiff-upper-lip talk for:

In your face, purists!

Update: As bolsters, a couple of earlier articles, one again by Peter Roebuck, and one by Lawrence Booth.

Short open letter

Dear IPL commentators,

Stop ruining the sixes that are hit - nobody gives a rodent's posterior about the DLF Maximum Sixes.

Kindly STFU about it.

kthxbye.

London

The actions of a government reveals its proclivities.

So, for instance, when Nandigram chaps are fired at, you know the West Bengal government means business. When a state government concerns itself with regulating attire at cricket matches, you know where its priorities lie.

But what happens when government entities show an rather disturbing tendency to make decisions that tend towards the pelvic region?

In early-to-mid 2007, the Beeb asked its users to come up with their own attempts at designing a logo for the 2012 Olympics. And ended up selecting as one of its 12 best attempts, a most sneaky, yet hilarious design.


And now, the UK's Office of Government Commerce finalized this logo, in their re-branding efforts.


which, on a simple 90-degree clockwise rotation, becomes this:
That guy certainly looks happy, eh?

Hmm... does this mean the UK's relations with The Netherlands and the Down-Under nations will see an upswing? Only time will tell.

In the meanwhile, some ponderables remain - what conclusion can be drawn from this? Is all this intentional, an honest mistake, or a damning psychological indictment of the government's true tendencies?

Simple cricketing hypothesis

Hmmm...