Ok ok ok. I know I said I’d try harder. So here it is. Me trying harder.

Before the year runs out and I haven’t posted anything at all, I thought I’d better get my thoughts and expectations for the sporting year ahead. Sadly I’ve already missed the boat on the Australian Open, but if I had had chance to blog about it before the event I would have written about my hopes that Andy Murray would do well. You can imagine my delight that he did very well indeed. It is a shame that Roger Federer still exists! I did manage to catch Murray live in his second round match against Marc Giquel and I was stuck by how much more aggressive he looked on court. I had high hopes. I guess the only disappointment was that Murray couldn’t take that final set against Federer. I guess we all knew The Fed would prevail, but I had hoped Murray would take a set or two off him. Still, I have hopes for Andy. I have no doubt he will win a major one day, I just don’t think it will be Wimbledon. He seems far more at home on the hard courts of Australia and the USA.
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Andrew Flintoff gets five-for

It is with a sense of Titanic relief that I am writing about an England win.

I woke up at 4am on Monday (Australian time, about 7pm the night before in Blighty) and hurriedly checked the Day 4 score. I then tossed and turned for hours after I learned of Clarke and Haddin’s mammoth stand. My Inner-Australian was getting a bit lairy and hurling empty tinnies against the inside of my skull (I don’t know where he came from, he just turned up one day with his mates and an esky full of VB). Surely England couldn’t throw this away. Surely!? I kept running all the possibilities through my head. “If Haddin and Clarke add another 100….”

This fear comes from a very deep place in my psyche. It is born of 27 years supporting Manchester City and watching the England Cricket Team. If you’ve never been an England fan, or even a sports fan, you’ll never understand. But as the day’s play drew nearer, I sought reassurance from my fellow sufferers in England. They failed to provide any, so, thinking positive and before heading out the door to go to the pub, I declared to no one in particular that England would have it won by lunch. Positive thoughts.
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The Windies beat England via the D/L Method

First off a few apologies for my tardiness, I haven’t managed to write in a week or so, and as a result, I seem to have missed out on a few developments in the sporting world. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to give my thoughts on a few of them.

Cricket: T20 World Cup

The world’s fascination with cricket’s most explosive format has been underway in England for about a week now and has certainly thrown up some surprises. I was less than amused to be awoken last Saturday morning by a friend of mine (who is really Australian, but likes to be Dutch when it suits) who tried to goad me about the fact that England lost a World Cup game to Holland. Naturally, I assumed he was talking about football, and found myself correcting him, England didn’t play till Saturday night, and we were playing Kazakhstan.

Oh but yeah….the cricket. That embarrassing result aside, I thought England did well to go on and beat Pakistan and qualify for the Super-8’s. A fact that seemed to escape a few of my other Australian colleagues who tried to remind me that England lost to Holland.

Hang on! Did Australia qualify for the Super 8?

Shut up then.
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Bopara and Cook rack up the runs

So England continue their build up to the Ashes series with an excellent start against a very lackluster West Indies. It is encouraging that we are scoring runs again, and although the Windies are among the weaker sides in Test Cricket these days, you can only beat the opposition put in front of you.

It appears England have finally found a solution to the problematic number 3 batting position. I’ve blogged before about the options available at number 3, but I must admit I got this one wrong. I never saw Bopara as a potential number 3, more an alternative Collingwood if anything, but you can’t argue with 3 successive hundreds in that position. True, he doesn’t have the air of a world class number 3, but he certainly has the potential to grow into one. His future in that role will no doubt be decided by his performance in this year’s Ashes series. With his place now cemented, he will be keen to test himself against the best. Read More

Sir Clive Woodward

Sir Clive Woodward, the former England rugby union coach and manager, and now working with the British Olympic Association, is famed for taking ideas from the business world and seeking to apply them to sport. Some of them seem utterly counterintuitive at first, such as his assertion that after a loss the team should go out and get drunk, but after a win, the team should have an 8am meeting. But after a pause for thought, maybe they’re not so mad after all. What is worth analysing more: why something worked, or why it didn’t? A scientist may say both, but I know I would enjoy reviewing tape of a win more than tape of a loss, and I concentrate better when I’m having fun. So maybe Sir Clive’s not such a mad hatter after all.

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Close, but no cigar.

The anger of Sky’s commentary team following the drawn fifth test at Port-of-Spain was something to behold. Andrew Strauss, who, like every England cricket and rugby captain of the last five years (or so it seems), managed to talk about “taking the positives” from an abject failure, was the target of much of their ire; his ill-timed declarations in Antigua and Trinidad apparently his most heinous crimes.

There is no doubt that the test series in the West Indies has been an enormous disappointment from England’s point of view. Knowledgable cricket afficionados around the world confidently predicted a comfortable series win for England, dismissing the horror of the Stanford 20/20 as an ill-judged freak show. A 2-0 or 3-0 win would have been nothing more than “job done”.

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Rob Key, Ian Bell, Michael Vaughan

It really annoys me when England lose a test match, and indeed a test series, when they should have won it. You could argue that we should have won that series 2-1. I don’t lay much blame on Andrew Strauss though. I think he will mature into a fine captain, and is the right man to lead us going forward (I was never a fan of KP). I agree that maybe he should have declared before lunch on the final day in Trinidad, but cricket is always full of ifs and maybes. I think Strauss has been too afraid to make a mistake on this tour, but I think his captaincy will improve as he learns what risks he can and can’t take. Still, it’s not all doom and gloom and we must start to look forward to the Ashes.

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