What have the current crop done that is so abhorrent to the ex-pros? Is it literally just that they're not bowing and scraping in their presence?
What have the current crop done that is so abhorrent to the ex-pros? Is it literally just that they're not bowing and scraping in their presence?
Not macho enough would be my guess.
The level of Australian cricket through the 90's and 00's was so high that you had to be a complete cunt to stay afloat. The current crop haven't really done anything untoward.Originally Posted by Ian
It's been turned into a culture war pissing contest by the former players (and the Murdoch media) due to their mate getting the sack. The thing is all these former players had their coach sacked or contract not renewed at some point, Tubby was famously involved with Bob Simpson not getting his contract renewed and the Golden Generation were toxic as fuck getting rid of Buck.
It feels like at least 50% of fans/rubes are treating this like it is the end of the world and that they proudly won't support this current team anymore. Something to do with being snowflakes or weak or entitled or whatever the Murdoch media tells them to believe.
Last edited by Queenslander; 13-02-2022 at 10:51 PM.
As far as I can tell, it got zero coverage outside the UK.
I think that was the point of it though, to push cricket domestically.
Foreign franchise cricket doesn't reach wider audiences. You can find it if you want to, but it's hyper-niche and gets absolutely no even halfway mainstream coverage.
Nonsense, I watched the Mzansi Super League on Freesports TV on Saturday afternoon, felt like the zeitgeist event.
I personally enjoyed a Brighto strait drive yesterday off a fast.tv ball, but like I said, pretty niche.
The seamless integration of untold advertisers is the major attraction of the PSL or whatever it is called.
How I yearn to do the Osaka run, whatever that is.
Fair enough. IPL manages gets decent coverage amongst the subcontinent migrant contingent here, and some mention in general news when NZ players are 'bought'.
The best story from the IPL auction is from KKR, who signed a completely unknown player called Ramesh Kumar. He has never played a professional game and also seems to go by the alias Narine Jalalabad. Obviously this raised a few eyebrows so people did some digging and it turns out they seem to have signed him on the back of this fever dream video ft. a clearly psychotic commentator, in which he is seen whacking some bloke called 'Babbu' around a park in tennis ball cricket. Now he lines up in the squad with Cummins, Rahane, Iyer, Billings et al.
Honestly don't think English or Australian cricket has anything to rival that sort of off-the-cuff insanity.
Chilly [who seems to have named the team after himself], erm, chilling at the non-striker's end.
He's stolen Shankar's dream. Clearly all the critic-answering-chin-music journalism was the wrong approach entirely. You just need some loon on a tannoy shouting incomprehensible madness as you flay some muppet around the ground. Love that a little 'tournament sixes' box pops up. Tournament?
With the IPL auction, does all the money just go into the players' back pocket? Is it spread over a number of tournaments [what's the Archer stuff about if not?] or is it a per year thing? I always find the massive disparities between what some players go for to be somewhat confusing.
As far as I understand it, it's basically a 'salary', so I guess that would be annual. So signing Archer makes sense in terms of the idea that he'll be their player if and when fit (I think these run for a few years or whatever now).
The disparities are all supply and demand based. Obviously you only have 4 overseas spots in the XI so you want to use them on weak areas, which in India's case appears to be all rounders. As such, Liam Livingstone's ended up getting over $1 million, whereas Jason Roy has to pleb it out for about $250,000 and Adil Rashid wasn't picked up at all, and nor was the No1 or whatever T20I batsman, Dawid Malan.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 14-02-2022 at 02:23 PM.
I assume Adrian Shankar was the talk of the draft, though?
More Liew: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/bl...ngland-cricket
And so in part Anderson and Broad’s brilliance derived from the purity of their vocation. They didn’t need to perfect a back-of-the-hand slower delivery. They weren’t being pressed to add a few clicks of pace. They weren’t being pulled in five directions by franchises and the next contract. They didn’t have to worry about relearning their natural length every time they switched from one format to another.
Will any England fast bowler ever enjoy that luxury again? Perhaps if they want to. Chris Woakes and Ollie Robinson could ultimately go down that path, even if Woakes is still part of the white-ball setup and Robinson has ambitions in that direction. But the rewards are diminishing and will diminish even further for the generation that follows them. An injured Jofra Archer will earn £783,000 for not playing in this year’s Indian Premier League, more than Anderson and Broad get for playing an entire year of red-ball cricket.
Yeah, it still makes no sense to me.
FOMO gone mad. Could they not just bid on him in the next auction, where he might be available to play? What if he is injured for the next however many IPLs? Does he just keep getting paid that contract regardless of actually playing? A strange world beyond reason or regulation.
There was obviously a bidding war between different teams to get him to that lofty price, so it was very much FOMO.
Similarly 18 year old Dewald Brevis commanded 3 crore (like, $400k) in pure future proofing, while Jason Roy got 2 crore and Aaron Finch unsold.
The U19 Saffa?
Has moneyball not hit the IPL then? Just seems there is a lot of talent which goes unexploited in favour of biffing Liam Livingstone a career's worth of central contract earnings in 1 go [fair play to him, quite why anyone who can doesn't just do the franchise circuit is a bit beyond me]. I guess the foreign player restrictions somewhat limit a pure moneyball approach.
I think they think they are doing moneyball, but the supply/demand issues are very idiosyncratic, namely:
- Limit of 4 overseas players in an XI / 8 in a squad means that good/useful Indian players get overpaid relative to their talent, especially in sparse talent areas (seam bowlers)
- There is a surfeit of good/decent Indian spinners and middle order bats, less so openers and seamers
- Each team has its own 'biases', e.g. Stephen Fleming is the CSK coach and always signs Kiwis
- All rounders are at a premium, since in T20 they allow you to load up on specialists elsewhere in the team
- The various nationalities each come with their own baggage. For example, English players tend to have very split loyalties as they will be on at worst a county wage and have other playing opportunities at that time of year, so will tend to want a good payday to even bother with the IPL. West Indians, on the other hand, are paid shit at home, are free for the whole tournament, and largely exist to play IPL, with West Indies duty being a nice bonus if they have time. Hence you see 17 of them signed up in this auction, and people like Romario Shepherd commanding $1 million for reasons which are not quite clear to me.
- Analytics is getting bigger and bigger in T20, and analytics tells you it's basically all about hitting sixes - so a Livingstone is going to be worth his weight in gold, especially with the added spin bowling.
Having watched a lot of the auction I think the teams act fairly rationally on their own terms, it's just that those terms are nothing you would recognise from any kind of normal sporting league or tournament.
I've obviously not been following it that closely, but looking at this T20 between Australia and Sri Lanka, are the Aussies just taking the piss by having A Agar open the batting or is that a thing now?
James Faulkner v Pakistan Cricket Board is mental what a fucking loser that bloke is.
It’s mental
PCB official statement:
In December 2021, Mr James Faulkner’s agent confirmed the United Kingdom bank details to which his fee payments should be transferred. This was noted for action.
In January 2022, for reasons best known to Mr Faulkner, his agent sent revised banking details of his onshore account in Australia. However, the contracted 70 per cent of Mr Faulkner’s fee payment was transferred to his offshore UK bank account.
The receipt of this payment was acknowledged by Mr Faulkner.
Accordingly, his payments as per his contract are fully up to date.
The remaining 30 per cent of his contractual payment only becomes due 40 days after the completion of the HBL Pakistan Super League 2022, which now remains a matter to be reviewed in line with his contract.
In spite of the money being transferred and received in his account, Mr Faulkner continued to insist that a second duplicate payment of the same amount be made to his account in Australia. This meant Mr Faulkner would have been paid twice.
He further threatened and refused to participate in his side’s match against Multan Sultans on Friday afternoon until his money demands were met.
The PCB, as a responsible organisation, engaged with Mr Faulkner early Friday afternoon in an attempt to reason with him. Despite his reprehensible and insulting behavior during the conversation, Mr Faulkner was assured that all his grievances would be addressed. He refused to reconsider his decision to take the field in a crucial match for his side, let his team down and demanded that his travel arrangements be immediately made.
During this time, the PCB was also in constant contact with his agent, who was regretful and apologetic.
Prior to his departure on Saturday morning, Mr Faulkner caused deliberate damage to the hotel property and as a result had to pay damages to the hotel management. The PCB later received reports and complaints from the immigration authorities that Mr Faulkner had acted inappropriately and abusively at the airport.
“In wake of the above, and taking serious note of Mr James Faulkner’s gross misconduct that was an attempt to bring the PCB, Pakistan cricket and the HBL Pakistan Super League into disrepute, it has been unanimously agreed by the PCB and the franchises that Mr James Faulkner will not be drafted in future HBL Pakistan Super League events.”
The fact that the PCB were moved to call him 'reprehensible', and the fact that he chucked his bat and helmet onto a chandelier, tells me that he's the dickhead of the piece.
I always thought he was a fucking weapon so I'm pleased to have that confirmed.
This trend that the IPL started of sponsoring every fucking thing is brutal.
Babar just smeared Irfan through the covers with a Brighto Stainfree Drive.
Stainfree, that's what I was reaching for upthread. I find it the most appealing aspect of franchise cricket.
Gower's commentary on top of all the Pakistani madness is such a great juxtaposition. Like your posh uncle reading out the lyrics to gangsta rap.
Caught a bit of Gower the other day. What on earth were SKY thinking of when the binned him off. He’s a really good commentator.
Been there a while so probably too expensive as they chase the fabled 'younger viewership' who can't afford Sky Sports.
England can't even do a draft correctly. Whereas the IPL auction was its usual chaos, all the Hundred teams have retained pretty much everyone. So the auction at the end of March will be a bidding war for de Kock, Warner and Finch, then after that it'll be a case of filling out the squad with 2nd XI sloggers.
That same Australian attack that embarrassed us time and again for six weeks is getting pezzled all around Rawalpindi.
Imam-ul-Haq peels off an imperious 130* while our openers made about that combined in a five Test series.
I know the Gatting Ball will be the one clip that gets played to death over the next few days with Warne's passing but honestly it doesn't get any less mad with repeat viewings.
The Gatting Ball is pure perfection, not only in how good the ball was, but the fact that it was Fat Gat on the receiving end and his body language and look of utter bemusement.
Any batsman looking utterly baffled by what a good spin delivery has just done to them is always good but Gatting, understandably enough, looks like something impossible had just happened.
Recency bias but I'm not sure much, in terms of the batsman's reaction, will top Kohli looking like he was considering reviewing being clean bowled by Mo.
The cut to Dicky Bird, completely impassive, is almost as good as the ball.
Dickie Bird looks like he's freezing to death in the clip. I met Dickie Bird once, he called me a little shit. Not quite as good as when John McCririck told me to fuck off though.
Dickie Bird having outlived Shane Warne is a joke. In fact, Mike Gatting having outlived Shane Warne is a bit of a joke in itself.
Just went onto Dickie's Wiki to check his current age and found this anecdote, which must surely be the least likely of all sporting anecdotes to have actually happened:
Sorry Dickie, but nope.Bird was an umpire in the final of the inaugural Cricket World Cup in 1975. A pitch invasion followed the West Indies' 17-run victory, and number of players and umpires had items of their playing outfits "souvenired" by the crowd. A year later, Bird was a passenger on a bus in South London, when he noticed the conductor was wearing a white hat very similar to the one he favoured, and asked the conductor where he obtained it from.
"Man, haven't you heard of Mr Dickie Bird," he replied. "This is one of his hats. I took it off his head at the World Cup final... we all ran onto the field and I won the race."
The latter is like a badge of honour.
What better tribute to the great man than to have Marnus Labuschagne 'operating' with his leg spin as Pakistan cruise past 400 just two down.
I can hear him pleading for a declaration hours ago to advance the game.
This one has really rocked me tbh, didn’t think it would. Legend. Gonna re-read the Gideon Haigh book on him now.
I think it's because he was always so alive, whether on the field, or talking shite off it, always absolutely engaged and on it. Big loss for the sport, he just got involved in everything.
Ollie Robinson out of the first test. What a relief we have two 500+ wicket men to rely on, eh?
Get Darren Stevens on the plane.
He seems to be regularly picking up these "unable to bowl more than 10 overs a day" injuries recently. Maybe he's just not cut out for this much cricket.
I've gone from Premier League opening bowler to Division 3 bowler only when needed by age 30. I can sympathise.
I did see somebody, can't remember who, during the Ashes saying whether his body's just not up to it or it's a conditioning issue there's definitely something there to suggest he's not going to be an every-match test bowler.
All the more reason to bin off Anderson and Broad then.
I still don't understand the Anderson/Broad thing. If we were actually trialling the future of English bowling then it would be stupid and disrespectful to West Indies, but at least would have some logic behind it. What we're actually doing is playing Woakes and Overton.
RED BALL RESET, Jimmy.
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