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They may be the pariahs of world cricket, but apparently they can still play.  It’s hard not to laugh…  No…  Let me correct myself.  It’s hard to try not to laugh…

Absolutely fantastic match.  I’ve got no nails left.

Just wish we‘d won. (and slightly glad I wasn’t there with Kent man Rich as I’d hoped to be.  I have a feeling he wouldn’t have let me hear the last of it)

Andre Nel calls his on pitch personality “Gunther”? Christ on a bike. Apparently he and Sreesanth don’t get on:

(linky for those without embedding)

Wind your memory back three years… Paul Collingwod? England Captain? You’ve got to be effing joking!

Yet. Today it seems like the right choice.

Apparently. Um.  When I first heard I couldn’t believe that he had, but once I was convinced I got all melodramatic.  If it’s true I’m very glad, but what a god awful mess.

I’d be guessing here, but I think if you went to a big poetry prize night, there would be a real shortage of these kind of blondes.”

…drubbing. It ain’t getting any better. Australia will thrash SA tomorrow, and will spank the Sri Lankans at the weekend. And the whole 7 week farce will have been for nothing (except a whole lot of media sun tans and a murder).

England got booed off the pitch after their abysmal defeat to South Africa.

So predictable. So dull. It sums up the whole competition really. Only 3 or 4 exciting matches so far (South Africa v Sri Lanka, England v Sri Lanka, Ireland v Bangladesh, any more?). Teams looking bored, pointless matches, predicatable results. The only excitement has come off the pitch.

What’s really annoyed me is that whenever I’ve turned the TV on I’ve been able to identify the winner of almost every match within 10 minutes - it’s been so uncompetitive. I said some time ago it looked like New Zealand v Australia for the final, and there’s nothing that’s happened since then that makes me change my mind.

England’s appalling performance is just the sludgy icing on a very muddy cake.

Here’s an idle thought…. Spot Fixing is alledgedly prevalent in Pakistani cricket.

How’s this for a theory?

Darrel Hair knew about a particularly large bet (and a related fix) on a specific period of the now infamous 4th Test between England and Pakistan (the Ovalgate test), and deliberately blew the bet by adding the 5 penalty runs for ball tampering; the only way he could stop the fix going ahead, and explaining the huge overreaction from the Pakistani team.

Like I said, just a thought