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Another one bites the dust: McMillan retires

By black caps, Cricket, Sport

Craig McMillanLet me take a moment to salute one of the great enter­tain­ers of the mod­ern game, Craig McMillan who has announced his retire­ment from all cricket.

McMillan launched him­self on the inter­na­tion­al scene in 1997 by hit­ting Shane Warne back over his head in the first over of his first test innings and nev­er took a back­ward step again dur­ing an inter­na­tion­al career that saw him score nearly 8,000 runs and take 77 wickets.

McMillan has cited health reas­ons as the primary cause of his retire­ment and he has always struggled with the debil­it­at­ing effects of dia­betes, often leav­ing the field for treat­ment and suf­fer­ing cramps and strains. Keeping a con­stant blood sug­ar level in the tough envir­on­ment of inter­na­tion­al crick­et (incess­ant tour­ing, hot weath­er, etc) must have been a chal­lenge and his struggle to con­trol his weight in recent years is test­amant to those difficulties.

I think, also, that McMillan’s prob­lems with con­cen­tra­tion (the “rush of blood to the head”) that pre­ven­ted him from achiev­ing all that his tal­ent and con­fid­ence allows can pos­sibly be blamed on his med­ic­al condition.

In any case, his enthu­si­asm will be missed; his com­mit­ment to the cause no mat­ter what state the game; and his genu­ine enjoy­ment at being out on the park. Tonight I’ll raise a cup of tea to McMillanus – bowl­er of boun­cers and hit­ter of sixes.

Yet another World Cup

By black caps, Cricket, Sport

Chris GayleWhile most of New Zealand’s atten­tion is on France I will also be keep­ing an eye on South Africa and the first World Twenty20 (or is that 20Twenty?) Championship.

It’s been a long time between inter­na­tion­als for the Black Caps – long enough to almost for­get the heart­break of Kingston in April. Actually I may nev­er get over this par­tic­u­lar piece of insanity:

McCullum c Silva b Muralitharan 0(1)

Anyway, we’re on the telly again at often ridicu­lous hours of the day and play­ing a fairly ridicu­lous game. As I like to tell people: if Test Cricket is Shakespeare and One Day Cricket is Chekhov then Twenty20 is “Everybody Loves Raymond” but I’ll be watch­ing all the same.

And Fleming has announced his retire­ment from the One Day game and accep­ted his demo­tion as Captain of the Test side. I have mixed feel­ings about this (and the Bracewell-factor gen­er­ally) but I feel con­fid­ent that Vettori will do well con­sid­er­ing the example that Fleming has set for him.

Murder, match-fixing and heartbreak

By black caps, Cricket

Behind you! Bob Woolmer calls a time-out in the nets at Lord's, September 1, 2006© Getty Images . Michael Vaughan, at a press con­fer­ence ahead of England’s final pool match against Kenya (today’s Guardian):

Do I think the prob­lem per­sists? That is a hard question,“ he said, ”and if I’m hon­est I have to say yes, maybe it does go on. I have nev­er exper­i­enced it with­in any of my teams or with any play­er I’ve played with or against but my gut feel­ing is that there is still some­thing going on in the game. Nothing spe­cif­ic but just bad things that I’ve seen with cer­tain pas­sages of play or games that look slightly unusu­al. My gut feel­ing, and this is a huge state­ment I know, is that it is very hard to clear the whole world of crick­et of it.

Mike Selvey comments:

…for me there still lurks doubt that all is not well in every case – noth­ing to put your fin­ger on, but as with Vaughan just a nag­ging notion that all is not entirely well for no bet­ter reas­on than the pess­im­ist­ic one that it can­’t be – and I just won­der now how much that impacts on spec­tat­ors and fol­low­ers of the game now. Here is an ana­logy. There was once no finer sight in sport than an Olympic 100metres final. I’ve nev­er seen one live but my fath­er went to Rome in 1960 and told me of how the German sprint­er Armin Hary out­stripped the favoured Americans to take the title. Today, is there any­one who watches the event without regard­ing it as hav­ing about as much prob­ity as World Federation Wrestling? It is a nov­elty show, which of course does a total dis­ser­vice to those ath­letes who are determ­ined to play the sport clean.

Cynics sus­pect mal­prac­tice every­where, so even excel­lence through genu­ine endeav­our alone, par­tic­u­larly if it involves improve­ment bey­ond the norm, is regarded with sus­pi­cion. But the con­sensus sur­round­ing ath­letes and drugs seems to be that improved test­ing pro­ced­ures have not erad­ic­ated the prob­lem but merely has led to more soph­ist­ic­ated mask­ing tech­niques. Our “gut instinc­t” tells us no longer to believe the evid­ence of our eyes.

And so it is with crick­et and match fix­ing. The ACSU can scru­tin­ise their matches all they like and mon­it­or bet­ting pat­terns on the sub­con­tin­ent. These are skilled people with strong forensic back­grounds. But they are not crick­eters. it takes a Vaughan, with what he calls his “gut instinc­t” but which in real­ity is accu­mu­lated intel­li­gence, to spot the coun­ter­feit coin amongst the stack of change.

I’m sit­ting here with tears in my eyes, and it’s not just because of the rot­ten cold that has con­fined me to quar­ters for the dur­a­tion. This year New Zealand look like genu­ine con­tenders and the upsets have removed a few of our usu­al stum­bling blocks (Pakistan have turfed us out twice in the last four tour­na­ments). As I said to Jeremy Anderson yes­ter­day, we look increas­ingly like pos­sible win­ners this time around but the shad­ow cast by Woolmer’s murder means it will prob­ably be a hol­low vic­tory and that’s a cry­ing shame.

The Return of the Spelling Police (Wellington Division)

By Cinema, Cricket, Food & Drink, Wellington

Over the last couple of weeks both the Penthouse and the Paramount have upgraded their web­sites – the Penthouse scores marks for hav­ing their ses­sion grid avail­able only a click away from the front page and the Paramount scores bonus marks for hav­ing the ses­sion grid right there on the front page – no extra clicking.

Paramount loses ser­i­ous marks because the film titles aren’t click­able! You have to go to anoth­er menu to read about the films. Counter-intuitive, dudes.

My favour­ite aspect (in a schaden­freude-y sort of way) of the Paramount’s new design is the lack of atten­tion to detail, as dis­played in the fol­low­ing image (snapped today, may have been fixed by the time you get there but it has been like that for more than three weeks):

paz_spelling.txt

Notice how they man­age to mis-spell the title of the film and all the mem­bers of the cast. Re-spect to Altman, though, as they got him right.

To prove that I’m not pick­ing on them, here are a couple of choice Wellington chalk-typos. The first from a couple of weeks ago out­side <for­get the name, on the corner of Cuba and Vivian>:

Duck Brest
(click to enlarge)

And my favour­ite, from out­side The Caledonian last Summer (the black­boards and fences have since been taken down by the new management):

Big Screen Cricet
(click to enlarge)

The Spin handicaps the Cricket World Cup

By black caps, Cricket, Sport

From The Spin, The Guardian’s occa­sion­al crick­et e‑mail:

New Zealand

Suddenly, you quite fancy them. A lower-middle order of Jacob Oram and Brendon McCullum means they are nev­er out of the game; Shane Bond – assum­ing he does­n’t break down – could be the fast­est man in the com­pet­i­tion; and Stephen Fleming has regained the repu­ta­tion he lost in England in 2004 as the smartest cap­tain in the game. Lack of bowl­ing depth and the occa­sion­al tend­ency of the top order to go awol are both con­cerns, but the off-spinner Jeetan Patel could be one of the com­pet­i­tion’s unsung her­oes. And they will field like Lou Vincents. Very back­able dark horses.

One-day record since last World Cup: P88 W44 L39 T0 NR5
Last 10 matches: W5 L5

Brendan McCullumThe stats are very inter­est­ing. I’ve always said that in One Day crick­et the best NZ can ever really expect is to win as many as we lose and we are just ahead of that over the last four years.

“All I ask for is a little con­sist­ency” say the pun­dits. Well, you can only be con­sist­ently win­ning or con­sist­ently los­ing and the first one isn’t real­ist­ic so I’ll take the glor­i­ous incon­sist­ency thanks.

But then again, all we need is sev­en wins in a row from March 17 and we are home free.

And the TAB has us at $7.00 with Australia at $2.75; South Africa $5.00 and India $8.50. I might get a piece of those odds come pay day.

Luck-Lack

By black caps, Cricket, Football, Hammers, Sport

Mitchell Johnson dismisses Peter Fulton and New Zeaoland lose their second wicket, Australia v New Zealand, CB Series, 8th match, Perth, January 28, 2007“You make your own luck” in sport they say. Gary Player once said, “The harder I prac­tice the luck­i­er I get” as if things were really that simple.

No team deserves to win a game drop­ping Hayden twice before he’d scored 4 or chas­ing 334 but Lady Luck did not shine her torch on the Black Caps at Perth tonight. Falling 7 runs short with 5 wick­ets in hand is an out­stand­ing per­form­ance in any­one’s book, and more evid­ence that the sum­mer has been turned around since that awful shel­lack­ing by Sri Lanka in December.

But … but … We could have done without Rauf fir­ing Vincent out when he was look­ing in great touch and don’t get me star­ted on the rain inter­rup­tion! It’s hard enough being com­pet­it­ive in Australia when everything from the travel sched­ule to hav­ing to play the best team in the world is stacked against you. For the last sev­en or eight years this Black Cap side has backed itself to score 11+ an over in the final ten if they have wick­ets in hand (and they bat accord­ingly). Duckworth-Lewis does­n’t take that into account (and prob­ably should­n’t even try) but it was the rain break that killed the run chase – and it nev­er seems to hap­pen to Australia IN AUSTRALIA.

[And on the sub­ject of luck: how about los­ing your best striker for sev­en months to a mun­ted ankle in his first ever England train­ing ses­sion. And your new star sign­ing doing his ankle lig­a­ments 20 minutes into his first game for the club – out for sev­en weeks min­im­um. I’d like to see Gary Player explain away that rub­bish.]

Still, we scored 335 against Australia and Oram’s 100 was the fast­est ever by a New Zealander in ODIs. Our luck will have to change soon.