A Quick Bowler

I think the below clip answers a lot of questions asked by most cricket fans that have a passing interest in athletics. Whenever I watch Usain Bolt  break another world record I can’t help wonder what would happen if he had a ball in his hand and he was heading very rapidly towards Asad Rauf. I have the same thoughts about most people from the Caribbean. I reckon Rihanna might be a rangy opening batsman.

And now I’ve got confirmation about Bolt’s cricketing prowess. He’s awesome. Obviously. Perhaps my favourite part of this footage is the sight of Bolt and Gayle walking off smiling like the two West Indian legends that they are. With a small man holding a polysterene cup.

The £125,000 Heptathlete

A friend of a friend of mine said (that’s how all journalistic articles should start) that he put £50 on Jenson Button to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award this year. He put it on in January before the F1 season started and thus was offered the slightly unlikely odds of 2500-1. Which means he stands to win £125,000. Not bad.

I assume that the wager was placed on a hunch and that he wasn’t so calculated as to smuggle in a mole to file clandestine reports from the Brawn testing track over the winter. I also have to speculate as to the thought processes of the bookmaker who thought that the chances of Button winning were so microscopically small. Button is after all not only a personality, but also one involved in a sport and there are relatively few of those about, particularly competing near the higher level of one of the nation’s favourites.

I have always found the title of Sports Personality of the Year profounding troubling. It suggests that some distinction should be made from Sportsperson of the Year, that aspects of the entrant’s character should be factored into the qualifying criteria. But if you should glance down at the roll of honour, it’s pockmarked with the names of virtual charisma vacuums all the way down.

If Button does win this weekend in Brazil, or in Abu Dhabi in a few weeks, then he is by no means a certainty to drive off with the small silver olden-days television camera (that is what it is – isn’t it?). Lewis Hamiton didn’t when he won. It’s quite difficult to endear yourself to the sporting public by spending a couple of hours with your face masked by a helmet and then finish it off by liberally spraying expensive beverages in the faces of your rivals at the end of it.

Jessica Ennis is probably a better bet. Polite and humble and above all, with a face that you can see. Maybe the bookmaker knew something after all.

Something Other Than Cricket

So the dust begins to settle on the Ashes. Which not only creates an awful powdery mess but also gives the opportunity to reflect elsewhere in sporting globe. This summer I have treated cricket like the favoured child of the family, ruffling its hair and generally showering it with attention. But other stuff has happened too.

The World Athletics Championship in Berlin seemed like a jolly lark. I only caught about 30 seconds of it but that was time enough to watch Usain Bolt sprint off with a couple of world titles and crack both his records in the process. He may have gone even faster had he not been watching Andrew Flintoff at mid-on while he was on his starting blocks. The massive talking point of the meet was Caster Semenya. It won the ladies’ 800m final at a Jonathon Trott but then found itself at the centre of an as yet unresolved gender controversy. I feel sympathy for it. Maria Mutola competed at the top level for over a decade without so much as a suspicious glance at the upper lip, despite the fact she could quite easily have been Devon Malcolm’s more rugged younger brother.

Something tells me I haven’t got over the cricket yet. Pesky kid.