cricket with balls

Richard over at sportreview has taken a go at explaining Tyler Durden like sporting relationships.

If you haven’t seen fight club, you have problems, and this post might ruin it for you.

“5. Matthew Hayden is a figment of Justin Langer’s imagination.

Matthew Hayden scared the shit out of world Cricket by standing two metres outside his crease, flogging attacks with his swagger, self-righteous Christianity based verbal abuse, and those brutal forearms that could take an eye out. If you were an opposing bowler, seeing that maniacal light in his eyes was far, far scarier than seeing the headlight of an approaching freight train while trying to get your stalled car off the track. Langer got lots of runs, too, but no-one ever noticed.”

Go here for the rest of the post.

Sportreview have a next gimmick, club, web thingy you can be part of.

Stalkipedia.

Have you got a story about you and a sporting star, Sportreview want to know all about it.

Here is mine.

Many a year ago I was working in a call centre.

At 2am in the morning I received a call, I went into robot mode and answered.

At the other end of the line I heard.

“Hi I’m Damien Martyn”.

“How can I help you Mr Martyn?”

“Yeah Damien Martyn, the cricketer”.

“Ok Mr Martyn, how can I help you?”

“Oh I just wanna change my flight”.

“Do you have any of your flight details?”

“I don’t know, um Melbourne to Sydney tomorrow arvo”.

“What time?”

“I don’t know mate, can’t you find it?”

“I just need more details Mr Martyn”.

“Oh shit, look, I’ll call back”.

Two minutes later I get a call from a Cricket Australia official.

“Hi there, (yawn) just calling up to change a flight for Damien Martyn, Melbourne to Sydney at 1430 this afternoon”.

Get your story over to Sportreview, bonus marks for pictures.

As a newbie blogger you start off at the ass end of the world.

But over time you get links, hits and comments, and you become more of a presence on the interwebby.

About this time you start to get people contacting you for a varying amount of products.

They are from all sorts of different people, PR companies, new websites, Ad agencies, and they are trying to get you to put their product up, for free.

No one wants to pay you for it, they try and make out they are helping you, or your readers, but most of them are just blatant advertising.

I even had Cricket Australia try and get a free plug once.

Recently I wrote about the Local to Lords competition. I put it on the site, because i thought some of you buggers may want to enter, but I took the piss because they did not offer me any payment for the plug.

That was my way of keeping the balance.

Well Richard from Sportreveiw has shit all over my attempt at pissing off a free plugger.

L&P a soft drink manufactured by coke, that is “world famous in New Zealand” emailed him asking for a free plug, they’d never put it that way, about some cricket game they are doing.

Here are parts of his reposne:

“I got a press release from L&P’s PR agency today on their upcoming BYC cricket tournament. PR’s easy, it works like this:

1. Get list of ’sport blogger’ email addresses. For god’s sake don’t bother reading their site to see if they a) do this kind of thing thing or b) hate you
2. Send out a mass emailed press release
3. Bloggers do your job for you and send that shit ‘viral’ on the ‘internet’”

And then later on he explains how the plug will work on his site.

“This is how it’s going to go on my site:

1. Blogger receives mass emailed press release from L&P (disclosure: blogger already thinks L&P should eat bag of dicks)
2. Blogger responds with snarky mcsnark snark blog post”

Get over there and read the whole post.

The funny thing is next year, he will probably get the same email.

Oh and that Cricket Australia email i got, they sent it to Beige Brigade as well, because what would a bunch of kiwi fans want more than to be a publicity mule for Cricket Australia.