Sorries

I’ve woken up with my apologetic head on this morning.

Firstly I’d like to issue a notice of regret to Chris Tremlett. When he signed for Surrey last spring, I laughed a knowing ha and sentenced him to a permanent residence in the Oval sick bay. I’ve made balsa wood aeroplanes that are more robust than Chris Tremlett I thought to myself. When he was “rested” for the first game of the season the ha grew louder. He probably got injured posing for the team photo I chortled. Ha.

Well now the ha is on me. Chris Tremlett is not only fit. He’s also good. Really good. But I was right about him not being available for Surrey. Sort of.

I’d also like to apologise to Rory McIlroy for the unkind thoughts I’m having about him and his attempts to win the US Open. I genuinely admire McIlroy and the relaxed ebullience he showed after the Masters debacle while everybody else was punching themselves in the face on his behalf. But there is nothing more entertaining in golf than a major blow-out and I can’t help hoping that Rory has something breathtaking in the golfbag to reject this apparent position of impregnability.

To become the first player in US Open history to reach -13 is extraordinary, but the fact he then promptly double-boogered his last hole yesterday suggests that we could be in for some weekend treats. He blew his chances in last year’s British Open with a second round 80, and then repeated the score in the final round of this year’s Masters. Why not mix it up Rorsy? Third round 80. The complete set.

But he's so little

Whoops

This is what I wrote on Wednesday night:

England need a hero tomorrow. It’s almost certainly not going to be James Tredwell.

This sentence encapsulates everything you need to know about why I am sitting here on a sofa with a laptop gently microwaving my balls and not over in Chennai or Bangalore or wherever bringing insightful and enlightened commentary live from the action. I’d like to justify it as an exercise in fate-temptation but it’s not true.

I hope I wasn’t the only one floored by the England’s team selection against the West Indies. I’d assumed that the management had forgotten who Tredwell was. I thought that Tredwell himself had forgotten who he was. Together with the inclusion of Luke Wright and Chris Tremlett it felt like the management had already banked on England’s exit from the tournament and were just giving some of the other boys a go. It’s a concept I’m very familiar with from my school days. In fact it turned out to be a provident choice, as Tredwell and Wright performed like players unfettered by the previous one-day tribulations.

England are going to win the World Cup. Oh hang on, England are almost certainly not going to win the World Cup.

 

 

 

Torso Of The Year

I thought I’d seen everything in cricket until I saw a photo of Stuart Broad emerging like a wet Bond girl from the ocean in the ‘Torso of the Week’ section of celebrity tatmag Heat. The dark poetry of which is that the beautiful Broad abdomen has since been torn asunder and denied him any further involvement in the series.

The England management consider Chris Tremlett to be a suitable bowling replacement but if Heat magazine have a void to fill on their pretty-boy centrefold then the Surrey man is adequately sculpted also, as this eye-popping and slightly frightening picture testifies:

There seems to be some grass on the wicket. Maybe he asked for a Perth.

One KP Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Sending Kevin Pietersen to Surrey is a bit like sending the naughty but misunderstood boy at school down to the remedial class. The England management are probably hoping that hanging out with the cricketing equivalents of the strange children who had to wear crash helmets in the playground might serve to inflate Pietersen’s withered confidence. A place where Kevin can express himself while his friends are eating crayons. Somewhere he can tweet whatever comes into his addled head about the coaching staff and they won’t mind. They’ll just hope some of his waning stocks of stardust will dust off onto their ailing squad.

One quarter into his four-game loan period, and Surrey have been walloped and Pietersen has delivered more relative failure. It may be that Pietersen’s impact on the Surrey dressing room has been more like that of Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. A twittering iconoclast hacking off the older lags with his swaggering ways, and inciting the junior members to rebellion against tyrannical Nurse Adams and his numerous black bow-tied assistants. We can only hope that this temporary incarceration in the lower reaches of the county game doesn’t have a labotomising effect on his cricket.

If we see Chris Tremlett lobbing the Lucozade dispenser through the pavilion window then England may have reason to worry.

KP and Tremlett: Still Close From Their Hampshire Days

RIP Fantastic Mr Fox

So Sir Alec Bedser is dead. Given his reactionary stance on most aspects of modern cricket it is highly probable that among his dying wishes was the installation of a rotisserie spit in his grave in order for him to spin in it at his leisure.

He would have been given an early opportunity to give the spit a test drive as his county Surrey kicked off their season by subsiding apologetically to a first defeat to Derbyshire at Oval since 1966. Bedser was probably moving through the gears as it was revealed that big money signing Chris Tremlett was being rested for the first game to “manage his workload”. To be fair to Tremlett, it’s been a long old season so far what with all the team photos and tracksuit fittings.

It didn’t get much better today down at Hove as another Tremlett-less side muddled their way to 199-7 against Sussex, reliant mainly on a heroically stolid performance from Arun Harinath who blazed his way to 62 off 290 balls.

In fairness to the Lions (they’ve reverted back from the Brown Caps to add “a bit of bite to the team” according to Chris Adams – crank it up Sir Alec) they faced up against a Sussex team with the bit between the proverbial. They welcomed back recent defectors from beyond the county line – coach Adams and new captain Rory Hamilton-Brown, poached from the Sharks in the winter.

I was hoping for at least one burning effigy of the Surrey skipper or maybe just a pig’s head lobbed onto the outfield, but perhaps the Sussex fans were pre-occupied mounting this zealous protest against the assassination of a local fox at the orders of Sussex chief executive Dave Brooks.

Down With This Sort Of Thing

I’m not sure what I find funniest about this story. Possibly the fact that the police were called on the night of the killing as gunshots were heard. Or that Brooks justified the murder by claiming that the fox was “behaving strangely” and could have led to the cancellation of matches. Or the one local resident who questioned the safety of Hove’s cat population amid all this gunfire. Or the other one who speculated on the plight of the widowed vixen.

Or maybe just the demonstration itself, so pleasingly emblematic of county cricket – poorly attended, half-hearted and probably smelling faintly of Scotch eggs.

Maybe this is all an ill-conceived publicity stunt to boost numbers – the Leicestershire Foxes are visiting Hove next week after all. In fact, is that Dave Brooks hiding behind the hastily-created banner? I hope he hasn’t shot himself in the foot.