cricket with balls

Today a pointless one dayer had a moment of pure cricket goodness.

Johan Botha got a leading edge into his face.

This leading edge had enough force on it to wedge itself between three hard places, the grill, the lid of the helmet and the Robotic Kevin Bacon face of Johan Botha.

Just the ball getting wedged in the grill is a great scene, but for him then to take off the helmet, with ball still wedged, and reveal his now bloody face, that is just awesomeness wrapped in just more awesomeness.

This was the proof I didn’t want, that Johan Botha is human.

Blood on the face of a batsmen is about my favourite place for blood to be.

And this was oozing out of his eye at a decent rate.

Usually the best part would be the blood on the pitch, but Botha took it to new extremes.  The dude got blood on the ball.

I’m sure it has happened before, but generally that would be on a red ball, one day cricket finally made sense to me when that ball just had a dollop of red stuff on it.

Botha retired hurt, and the ball was replaced.

The story doesn’t end though as Botha’s face was kept together with sticky tape and chewing gum and he was sent back out.

But here is where the script writers fucked up, the ball didn’t come back.

If I was Botha I would have walked back out and demanded that the bloody ball be re-introduced.

Even if it was just for one ball.

Imagine the story, dude gets smacked in the face, loses blood on the ball, comes back without any bandages only a few overs left and the fast bowler is using the ball that is soaked in his blood.

That is my kind of cricket.