cricket with balls
just another bullshit cricket blog
Filed under general balls …
cricket pop culture references: teenage mutant ninja turtles (original live action feature film)
Everyone knows that Raphael is the best teenage mutant ninja turtle.
But the makers of the first teenage mutant ninja turtles film tried to ruin that in many ways.
One of which was to make Raphael and whiny loner.
Another was to make him hate cricket.
It all starts when after leaving the other turtles, Raphael (who’s cool but crude) finds himself in a fight with a guy and baseball bats.
The guy is the oddly cast Elias Koteas (who in this film never wants to have sex with anyone involved in an auto vehicular accident) who says “A new game, roundhead (pause, followed by bat twirl), cricket”.
The twirl is by far the most interesting part of this cricket pop culture reference as Elias, an obvious stanislavski disciple, had clearly watched some cricket before playing this role.
This film was released in 1990, the same year that Alec Stewart played his first Test.
It’s clearly not a coincidence that Elias Koteas, or Casey Jones as his character is known, twirls the bat in the exact same way.
Raphael, not perturbed by the uncanny bat twirl, says, “Cricket? Nobody understands cricket. You got to understand what a crumpet is to understand cricket” as Elias taps his bat on his back foot while standing in a fairly common ready to face the ball kind of way.
Any cricket fan hearing someone, even a mutant (not alien) turtle, say something that fucken stupid about the sport they love would be pissed, and Elias certainly is.
Elias then gets down over the bat in a correct way, and uses his feet to come down the wicket (something that Stewart should have tried against Warne) and smashes Raphael in the face who flies through the air and lands in a rubbish bin.
Elias then says, “Ha, six runs”.
While it’s nice that he got the twirl, stance, bat tap and footwork pretty right, perhaps “he’s out caught”, or even just “caught/out” would have been better with Raphael in the bin. Although, we shouldn’t nit pick at such a decent attempt to use cricket in what was a fairly seminal children’s film in the 90s.
It’s also a little known fact that Elias Koteas learnt to love cricket so much because of this scene that he is now trying to write, direct and star in a biopic of Hansie Cronje with a working title of “that damned Hansie”. Elias still hates crumpets.
cricket pop culture references: the big bang theory “The Transporter Malfunction”
In what is sure to be a short lived new segment on cwb (I mean what the fuck ever happened to player profiles?) here is a new one, where I discuss pop culture cricket references.
I like to watch bad American sit coms while I eat.
For whatever reason good american sit coms don’t help me digest as well, so instead of watching Seinfeld or Arrested development, I watch how I met your mother, friends and the big bang theory.
It should also be pointed out that I don’t watch them ironically. Sure, some of the laughs are ironic, but I hate it when people say they watch shit tv just for the irony, no, you do it for the same reason as everyone else, shit tv can be comforting and it requires very little of you other than functioning eyeballs, reasonable hearing and steady breathing. And I’ve always been obsessed with American sit coms, I’ve even seen several episodes of the turkish version of the nanny.
The other day I was watching the big bang theory and it was an episode where Raj, the nerdy Indian one, was talking to his parents about a potential arranged marriage.
During their conversation the father asks, “why did you call us during the cricket semi finals” straight after a hilarious ‘we thought you were gay’ routine.
Now, I get it, Raj is Indian, his parents are Indian, so a cricket reference here makes sense.
But the phrasing “the cricket semi finals”, seems odd. Raj’s father would have said “why did you call during the India England semi final”, and would never have used the word cricket, as it’s India, and everyone knows what sport he is referring to. To make it more Hollywood, he could have said “why did you call when the cricket’s on, India are playing Sri Lanka in the semi final, and Agit Agarkar has bowled a maiden over”.
That’s not what they went for, instead we get an ordinary line of dialogue that doesn’t truly respect cricket or human speak, and thusly cannot help the game of cricket grow. Look at what the big bang theory has done for flash t shirt sales and weep at what it could have done for cricket.
The actor playing Raj’s Dad is also far better known (to me) as Babu from Seinfeld, the Pakistani restaurateur with fingers as mesmerising as that of Ajantha Mendis.
Perhaps his casting was simply hollywood’s way of bring India and Pakistan together, or suggesting they can’t tell them apart in the first place.
Strangely, this episode is far more known for the fact that it is Leonard Nimoy’s last acting role (at the moment). Few know this about Nimoy, but he was a wily club left arm finger spinner for his local side. And once bowled unchanged for a whole limited overs match before bowling limits filtered into club cricket.
County Banter with Alan Richardson (@alricho21)
I’ve started a new vodcast for cricinfo where I talk balls with grizzled county journeymen about their careers and stuff.
First one is with the salt of the earth Staffordshire sex symbol Alan Richardson.
I might link to them all here, or I may forget.
sri lanka’s bad pitch
A cricket match starts at 5pm. Every one learns of this by word of mouth and the players are ready to play a match next to Galle fort. The game starts with XI players on each side, two umpires and a scorer. They use a tape ball, marking out the pitch by drawing lines and using someone’s sandals. If a ball is hit out of the ground, it’s replaced in less than two seconds. The umpire is strict with no balls and wides, maybe too strict. The batting team stands at point while the game goes on so that when a batsman is dismissed the next batsman will face within 30 seconds. It’s fast and hectic, there are no crowd sponsors nor media interest. It’s a high-quality amateur game played by cricket lovers.
I’ve only seen one of these games up close, but from this one game I’d say that the quality of cricket in Sri Lanka is high, and when people who love the game and have no agendas are running it, it can be administrated well.
Unfortunately at the top end of the game Sri Lankan cricket couldn’t be run much worse. Of late the Sri Lankan players have been thrown into two largely useless and forgettable tournaments, the tri-series in Australia and the Asia Cup. This is how they prepared for a Test series against the number one Test team. With no first-class warm ups and seemingly endless weeks of ODIs. But what is way worse is that they did some of this unpaid. It’s partly because of the US$20 million SLC lost (they also lost the disk auditing why they lost the $20 million) while hosting what the ICC describes as “the most successful world cup ever”. Or the fact the board is roughly $45 million in debt. It’s hard to see success when a small cricket board loses $20 million on what should have been a money-making event.
One way Sri Lanka Cricket went about making some cash was with sponsors, one of which is a health product that helps cure penile dysfunction in men. Did the SLC think it was a good idea to get their heroes to endorse it?
Another way the board thought it could make money was by starting its own Twenty20 Premier League. But even though the SLC has signed away the tournament for 25 years to Somerset Entertainment Ventures, which seems to be a shell company that deals with Hotmail accounts based in Singapore, the tournament remains an idea. Many blame the BCCI for withdrawing its players and making it less appealing for the TV markets. While that may be the case, the Twenty20 leagues in Australia, New Zealand, England, Bangladesh, West Indies and even Zimbabwe seem to work without Indian players. As it stands they are losing money by just not having it at all.
Luckily they can find other ways to make some money. During the Tests against England they tried to cover even more of their debt by upping the ticket price from 300 Sri Lankan rupees – which it was not six months ago – to LKR 5000. That was a staggering grab at cash.
In England the prices are consistently too high, and quite often rule out families at the cricket. But they didn’t go from five quid to 75 quid in six months. You can see why English fans who assumed they were getting their tickets at the old rates were complaining about the new prices. It was made worse by some fans being sent away before the ground was sold out. Most local fans at Galle were in a segregated standing zone having paid far less. Originally members of the Galle Cricket Club were even told they could not sit in their own stand to cater to the English fans.
Mind you, the organisation at the ground was so bad that many English and Sri Lankan fans just walked in. As long as you weren’t trying to see the first few overs of the day, you could easily find one gate that no one was attending to and just walk straight through. It doesn’t really matter how much you charge for tickets if you don’t check people for tickets as they enter. It also doesn’t say much for security.
Not that I saw that much security. Yes, there were armed men all around the ground but no one was checked for any kind of weapons on their way in. Had any fan, drunken idiot or fundamentalist nutbag wanted to go out to the middle he could have done so with ease. Fans even helped put the covers on at the end of the day’s play. And any ground with open gates is not exactly putting security at the forefront. Nothing happened, and from what I could tell nothing close to happening happened, but something only has to happen once for you to look bad forever.
Not that the SLC is terribly worried about how it looks. Nishantha Ranatunga is the secretary of the SLC. Nishantha Ranatunga is the CEO of Carlton Sports Network. This network sprung up overnight and won the right to show cricket in Sri Lanka while it was still bolting in satellites.
Of all the conflicts of interest in cricket none seems so blatantly obvious. In many parts of the world cricket and TV are just a bit too close. In Australia, Mark Taylor commentates and is also on the board for Cricket Australia. In India N Srinivasan runs the BCCI and owns shares in an IPL team. But compared to a CEO of the TV company with the rights being on the SLC, Taylor and Srinivasan seem like minor offenders. Ranatunga’s position brings up any number of issues, the first being quite obviously if this is a cricket board in financial crisis, and cricket makes so much of its income from TV, is the SLC getting the most out of its home TV deal?
Before this tour by England I’d only had one bad encounter with the SLC – when they decided not to have a press conference without telling any of the media. Considering press conferences mean more work for me, I wasn’t too sad to see one not exist. This time it all started so well. Brian Thomas, SLC’s media manager, went out of his way to help us with filming the Two Chucks show inside the ground after the day’s play. My press pass was the coolest one I’d received from any board. And on the last day at Galle we were invited into SLC president Upali Dharmadasa’s room because of our Sri Lankan ODI-coloured suits.
It was a fairly odd moment. Suddenly we were in the inner sanctum, having beers, chatting about the cricket and wearing these suits. During the chat we mentioned that we were making a film on the future of Test cricket called Death of a Gentleman, and we’d love to have the president interviewed for it. He was more than happy to oblige.
Earlier in the Test we’d even chatted to Kumar Sangakkara about appearing in the film. He’d said he love to, but that he would need permission from the SLC as they had banned him from speaking to the press. We were told that all the Sri Lankan players had been banned from talking to the press, except at press conferences. Sangakkara is probably the most eloquent and thoughtful current speaker in world cricket. As well as being a lawyer he’s also the only current player on the ICC Cricket Committee – why would he need to get permission to speak to the media?
A recent SLC press release states: “Kumar is a role model to be emulated by all young hopefuls.”
The SLC told us he was banned for speaking for his own good because, as it was put to us, “players at his stage of his career need to be protected from themselves”. And that it was “dangerous” for him to talk to us about anything controversial. Or, as we read it, it was dangerous for him to repeat what he had said at the Cowdrey lecture. Even with all this danger that he may actually admit there were problems with cricket in the country he had previously proudly captained, we were allowed to speak to him. Just not about administration or politics.
Strategically, we then made a mistake by interviewing Dharmadasa before we had a chance with Sangakkara. After not allowing us to film him at P Sara Oval because there wasn’t enough shade and the ground didn’t show Sri Lankan Cricket in the best possible light (rusted metal was a big concern), we were taken to his timber factory’s board room. We thought our interview, where we questioned him about the future of cricket in Sri Lanka, cricket administration and cricket politics, went quite well. Dharmadasa was polite, answered all our questions and even organised a car to take us back to the cricket.
Later that afternoon we were told that the Kumar Sangakkara interview had been cancelled. It felt like suspicious timing, so we asked Dharmadasa directly what the reason was for the cancellation. He told us honestly, and in a surprisingly friendly way, that it was cancelled because of our interview with him.
Our questions for him were less extreme than the many vitriolic editorials written in the Sri Lankan press, and weren’t anywhere as damaging as the Sri Lankan Sports Minister calling the SLC corrupt. Was it because it was going to be aired abroad?
Cricket in Sri Lanka is not in a great state. Bad management, an over-reliance on India and political interference are all major factors. Sri Lanka is a place that all cricket fans should try and travel to, as it’s a great place to watch cricket. When you have a situation where players are picked for political reasons, conflicts of interest are blatant, players aren’t paid, officials mute people and no one is checking tickets at the gate, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future of the game.
There are reasons why Sri Lanka may not be as important to the world of cricket as the bigger countries. But what it lacks in financial clout it more than makes up for in cricket innovation. It was Sri Lanka who changed one-day cricket by sending out batsmen without fear to get the game started. With Murali they have given Test cricket one of its most controversial and successful players. Aravinda De Silva was cricket’s first minnow hero. Arjuna Ranatunga was an ideal pantomime villain. Ajantha Mendis has changed finger spin forever. Lasith Malinga showed us a new way to bowl fast. And Tillakaratne Dilshan invented a shot you needed to be suicidal to try.
The tape ballgame by Galle Fort was seen by about 12 spectators. One player was a phenom. He bowled like Mitchell Johnson trying to imitate Lasith Malinga and cartwheeled the stumps of at least six batsmen. When he batted it was with a stance copied from Shivnarine Chanderpaul and he put two balls onto the road.
I didn’t need to see this tape ball match to know how special cricket in Sri Lanka could be. I just wish like that, all cricket was run because of the love of the sport and not as a political or financial tool by those who should know better.
Field of Monocotyledon dreams
Cricket is one of the few sports on earth that relies heavily on a non-humanoid living organism to shape the outcome of the game. The main playing area is actually alive. Every Test match is dictated to by a plant life form that bleeds. Cricket is part sci-fi and part gramnivore.
This is something that should never be forgotten, especially when you’re in some drunken conversation where someone calls cricket boring. “Oh, is your favourite sporting endeavour played on a Monocotyledon surface that evolves independently as the game progresses?”
When the pitch is like this it makes captains use weird field placements. Using three slips and a gully as a form of attack is largely useless on pitches like this. Both captains have had to improvise. Ever since Andrew Strauss had two short midwickets I’ve been waiting for either captain to use three, or even four. The ultimate Graham Gooch field. It’s not happened, but other odd fields have.
Sri Lanka had three slips and a gully at one stage, but they were spread out so far from each other they couldn’t hold a polite conversation. It was about as close to regulation as they tried.
The most mental fielding position had to be the short silly backward point off the Sri Lanka spinners. It’s the position you put the guy in the team everyone hates, and then just sit back and wait for the spinner to drop marginally short so the fielder could be pinned.
But in both Tests I’ve enjoyed Sri Lanka’s 7-2 field for the spinners. Watching Trott refuse to take any risk other than a reverse sweep against Randiv at Galle was probably my highlight of that Test. It wasn’t pretty, but it was hard, and both sides had to hold their nerves.
7-2 and 8-1 fields cop a bit of flack as a defensive tactic, and they can be. They are also what is best about Test Cricket. A captain who will improvise, a bowler who is bowling to an absurd plan and a batsmen who is trying not to do something stupid. It’s proper sport. All of this while short leg, dual short midwickets and a leg slip wait for a mistake and three sweepers dance to the music of the band.
These kinds of fields force batsmen to improvise, take chances, be bold, or hold their breath until it’s over.
KP decided to dust off the switch hit. This angered Dilshan.
There are some who think the switch hit is against the spirit of the game. There are others who believe 7-2 fields are against the spirit of the game. If you look hard enough, someone probably thinks the toss is against the spirit of the game.
I’m not so worried about the spirit of the game, or whether it exists at all. I just like it when cricket bends itself to adapt to different situations.
Cricket is not like a banana; it has not been perfectly created to fit into your hand. Due to the tactics, surface and structure of the game it’s in continual evolution. It can’t be stopped by players or officials. Cricket just changes. Some of these changes are bad, some good and some odd. This Test will not be like the next Test, nor the one after, nor the IPL. Even with switch hits.
Most sports don’t mutate as fast or often as cricket. Most sports aren’t played on a constantly mutating living surface.
podding about doag
Dean Jones, Ravi Shastri, Ellyse Perry and a large furry lion
Yes this is about my film, because we need fucken cash, so give us some.
Before I squealed like a pig
We had a real identity crisis in Australia. Fun-time-happy-internet-vodcasters (or as one journalist called it, five minute piss-artists) one minute. Serious-film-makers-trying-to-get-to-the-truth the next.
Some odd stuff happened to us, which included Sam asking Jason Donavan for parking advice, but the Dean Jones / Ravi Shastri cross over was certainly up there.
Inevitably it was all India’s fault. For some reason the Indian TV channel NDTV befriended us in Australia; Jaideep and Amitoj were their two main dudes on tour, and when they weren’t putting Dean Jones in a silly costume, they were hanging around with us. So it was always a natural fit for Hansie, our Two Chuck mascot (who is fighting for a writer’s credit for the film) to appear on NDTV with Professor Deano. We were happy to do it, because Sam and I are natural media whores and we love it when Hansie gets on TV.
The problem was we only had half an hour before we had to do a key interview for the film with Ravi Shastri.
The ever-bullish “Professor Deano”, as he made everyone call him when he was dressed up, didn’t see this as the problem it quickly became when Australian women’s all rounder Ellyse Perry was spotted nearby. Before she knew what was happening she was added to the casting and it was Professor Deano, Ellyse Perry and Hansie. Just when things couldn’t get any weirder, we were all kicked out of the ground to shoot outside.
Now we were running around the outside of the SCG looking for a background that looked like the outback. I’m not sure why. I was trying not to think too much about it, in my mind I was preparing for Shastri. But I couldn’t do that, as I had to hold Professor Deano’s Cricket Australia ID instead.
The small segment consisted of Professor Deano interviewing Hansie and Ellyse before forcing the two of them to play a weird game of cricket which ended with a piece of wood flying around dangerously as Professor Deano screeched into a microphone. It made little sense to anyone watching it, but I am sure NDTV edited it into something special.
Free at last, Sam, Hansie and I ran off into the ground, Sam to the press box to fetch Shastri, and me to got ready with the crew before going to face to face with Shastri again.
A few months earlier we had interviewed him for a podcast on Cricinfo, and it wasn’t always pleasant. This time he was standing in front of me. And when Shastri stands in front of you, he really stands over you. The man is just big, with a voice like a foghorn, making you feel like you’re standing in front of an impatient transformer.
Even his soundcheck was loud and bombastic.
Halfway through the interview I think Shastri remembered he didn’t like me. Suddenly he was so close it felt like he was suddenly on top of me. “Do you have a problem with that?”. As I squealed nervously I looked around for support. Anthony (Aka AK, TK, A-Kor, Manthony, TK-Maxx) our cinematographer, isn’t stupid – he’d taken several steps back.
Perhaps it was just to fit the imposing figure in the frame, or perhaps it was because when Shastri says what he means, you need serious space between you and him.
It’s a shame he hadn’t been on our NDTV shoot, I think he would have really enjoyed that.
Another Death of a Gentleman trailer
Yes, we’ve made another one.
We may make more.
Until people give us money, and then we’ll shut up.
Maybe.
