Sorry people…. not in the mood today as a bit of a headache and other things going on…
Here’s the game thread for tonight’s match-up.
I am Theresa Gorman and I claim my five pounds….
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Being Outside Cricket 
Nah. I’m Teresa Gorman and I’m going to stuff a sock in my mouth as I talk crap 24/7 but I claim my fiver anyway!!! Take care of yourself me Lord. Can’t have you feeling crook. Hope you feel much better very soon.
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Bangladesh chose to bowl first. Scotland having a real go, and are 175/3 after 33 overs.
Coetzer has just gotten Scotland’s highest individual score for Scotland. Anamul Haque seems to have seriously injured himself while fielding, so he may not even bat (shoulder injury). If he does bat, he is very likely to be severely restricted in his movements.
It is too early to call, but a surprise result is certainly a possibility here. And if it does happen, a washout against BD may suffice for England to qualify for the quarters.
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Coetzer gets to three figures as well, so first Scottish centurion in World Cup games. 212/3 after 39 overs. And 2 fours to start the 40th over.
It is a flat wicket, but certainly a decent batting performance so far. And the World Cup (and England) could certainly do with an upset here …
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A few wickets fell at the end, including Coetzer for 156.
Scotland eventually finish on 318/8, with the BD pacers bowling all over the place.
I’d dare say, the “upset” is the favorite here.
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You jinxed it . . .
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Sorry. Did not mean to. I would have liked Scotland to win.
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BIG BATS KLAXON!
Scyld Berry’s been at the sherry trifle. Again. Telegraph column headed “Warner, de Villiers and Gayle need to be reined in”.
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“something must be done”
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Jon Hotten hitting the nail on the head about stats more than Andy Bull managed:
“The rug has been yanked out from under all analysis of more than six months old. That’s how quickly the game is changing. Previous highest scores on a ground? Forget them. Average runs off the last ten overs? Useless. Double the score at 30 overs – yeah right. An earthquake has hit the empirical stats base”.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/blogs/content/story/843155.html
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Ten team WC? There are still some believers:
http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/843001.html
Nice comparison of associates to six-year olds in there – not at all condescending. There is a good point that associates need more ODIs between WCs (Tamim and Coetzer made their debuts in the same year – Tamim has 150+ caps and Coetzer 23) but this needs to be as well as WC expansion, not instead of it.
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Correction – Tamim has 137 caps.
Kyle Coetzer just eleven short of the highest ODI score by a British batsman. The Judge still rules!
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Is this the high quality affair Aakash is talking about?
“Well, more often than not, two teams of the same standard are likely to produce good contests.”
Number of exciting games between Full Members? 1
Number of seemingly close games between Full Members? 1, though anyone who watched, never thought that a one-legged Chigumbura batting with #10 had a realistic chance of getting the required runs.
One sided hammerings? 10 (50+ runs, or a boatload of wickets and / or balls left).
Highlight between Full Members other than the exciting game? BD getting a point against Australia on rain rules.
Number of Full Member teams with the same standard in the competition? Maybe 2, maximum 5, though that may be too generous to Sri Lanka (not to bash them, we can only judge this when they play Australia), but realistically speaking 4. Which seem to be possibly evenly spread over the groups, so number of games between teams with the same standard in the group stages? 2
Number of teams with the same standard in the quarter finals? Maybe 1, the quarter final final which will be either SA – Sri Lanka, or SA – Australia.
If this is exciting, than the pharmaceutical industry has stiff competition from the ICC in the category sleeping medicine.
“Firstly, the World Cup, in my opinion, does not need 14 unevenly matched teams to compete over a month, dishing out some lacklustre cricket in the process.”
Pity the likes of Zimbabwe, Pakistan, England, West Indies are there by default then. Especially the latter three have embarrassed themselves against quality opposition (8 wicket loss, 9 wicket loss, 111 run loss, 257 run loss) and not so quality opposition (150 run loss against WI for Pakistan).
Why stick at ten teams, if you could have just as easily stuck to 4 or 6 teams? It may be too soon to make calls on Bangladesh (were hammered in the one game they played against a Full Member) and Sri Lanka (I am sure, that given the preference for the format below, the ICC can come up with a good reason why they should not be included).
Dave Richardson: “Imagine, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India, in a 4-team World Cup. If they play 8 games against each opposition, that will mean 24 games for the ICC to sell with India in it. And to add extra excitement, we could use the group stages there to determine who plays whom in the semis.”
Unsaid words by Dave Richardson: “51 games, with a guaranteed 25 for India. What is not to like? Never mind that the name ‘World Cup’ becomes a bit of a misnomer, but that is what we have the PR-department for, right Giles?”
Giles: “If this does not fill you with absolute excitement, we can also look in ways to make it a tri-series between Australia, India and England. That would at least be the meritocratic way of doing things – after all England would have been the best side in the world when the game was invented”, and finishing his thought mumbling, “no scorecards survive to prove otherwise.”
As for the call to let Associates play more ODIs, the ICC have been blabbering about that for what, a decade? Ireland’s schedule in itself proves that talking is easy, scheduling the games, is something the Full Members mostly refuse to do. Why? Money talks, and the actual game is becoming more and more of a side-show to the ICC.
Aakash’s calls will only end up giving legitimacy to the awful idiocy at the ICC.
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I hope you’ve seen Andrew Nixon’s paragraph-by-paragraph, tweet-by-tweet demolition of this article. It’s very good indeed.
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this is all becoming like the USA ‘World Series’ that only involves teams from USA – and only USA teams win – What does the word WORLD remind you of???
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Thanks for the pointer Arron.
Based on the results thus far, a mere 83.3% – 91.7% of the games between Full Members (depending on how you qualify Zimbabwe – Pakistan) have been one-sided.
The Associates have received some drubbings, but the games between Full Members – Associates have not been as one-sided.
Wonder what the comparative figure is for the World Cup in 2007, in the group stages. Can’t have been worse.
How exciting would it be, to have 4 to 8 exciting games in all of the 45 “qualifiers” in the next World Cup …, and statistically there is a good chance that some of these exciting games are completely meaningless (like England – Zim at the end of the tourney, if the results were similar to this tourney). Even a game that has meaning now (England – BD) would most likely be meaningless in the 10-team World Cup.
This is just poor stuff from Aakash. He is a former player, and not a journalist (in the sense of following what the administration is up to), and he may simply never have heard of all the lies the ICC have told to Associates in the past decade or so.
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Tbf, if its all about the money, I can’t understand why the final couldn’t be a best out of three affair.
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Gideon Haigh lecture on Victor Trumper now on Youtube:
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/cutsandglances/index.php/theaustralian/comments/when_he_came_he_opened_the_windows_of_the_mind/
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I see Lancashire have signed Peter Siddle for the early part of the new season – hoping to get a good start aiming for promotion. It is with grateful thanks to Peter Moores, that great coach, that Lancashire are having to seek promotion from Div 2 for the second time in three years – he must be some coach to do that hey?
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Beautiful timing to reference Teresa Gorman given who she replaced as MP for Billericay…
I spent a day with her once, I was hosting her for my then airline at a dinner. Have to say (entirely unexpectedly) I really liked her. She has one of those thoroughly engaging, fascinating people you come across all too rarely.
Um. I may have gone off track here…
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