Memo To Cricketing Widows
Following on from the Shane Warne tribute...
Right. Over the next month all New Zealand non-cricket watching heathens will be subjected to what is called the “tri-series” aka The World Series Cup (then a collection of nauseous commercial names) from Australia. Most famously on February 1st 1981, the vehicle for the great "underarm" incident.
Traditionally the tri-series is where modern day Australia kindly invite two other cricketing nations to play with each other a few times and then once they are confident enough, proceed to get walloped all over the park at frequent intervals by the home team. Cricketing widows should take note not to expect much action from their husbands while matches are on, other than the well worn path between couch, fridge and dunny. Mood swings as New Zealand play are to be expected. I will explain this behaviour here now so you can prepare to go out while matches are on and respect the experience of the New Zealand cricket supporting male.
In terms of the tri-series, New Zealand has its turn and historically we put up a good showing, make the final, believe we can actually win the bloody thing and then get smashed by Australia. The last time we played in the tournament Australia obviously bet against themselves and did not make the final. NZ played South Africa and had the best chance of winning for a long time. Only to get….you guessed it….whopped in the finals. Compare it with the disappointment you experience based on promises of enhanced sexual performance when your husband takes a viagra, only to find he was so tight he purchased it off the internet and it was a placebo from China.
Being a Black Caps supporter is one of the most testing activities available in NZ. We are frequently derided by the general public who then of course try to jump on the bandwagon the moment the Caps start winning. At times the team can be brilliant, their fielding breath taking, individuals can be world-class and exciting and a bowler can shine as the “next Hadlee” or batsman as the “next Crowe”. Then just as we start to feel smug the bastards usually get injured and their form declines back to the average. Shane Bond is a prime example or more tragically, Hogan Crowe when his knee gave out in the semi-final of the World Cup against Pakistan where NZ grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory thanks to a lack of on-field leadership. I won't even start on the pain we had to endure in the late 90's under the most ordinary player to ever Captain the Black Caps, Lee Germon. Chosen ironically to be his "boy" by one of the New Zealand's best ever players, Glenn Turner. Forget viagra, Black Cap supporters needed a morphine drip during Germon's reign.
New Zealand come into this series in terrible form really. The top order are batting like girls blouses, the middle order has weak knees and the tail enders are scoring all the bloody runs. Mr Extras is sometimes the leading scorer. The bowlers are as green as wet Coromandel grass and Stephen Fleming, the superglue that holds the old shoe together, returned from his period of “rotation” to score a handsome duck. John Bracewell, surely one of the most left brained coaches in NZ sport today even recently comparing Tasmania to New Zealand, has a cricketing mind of his own and a selection policy so obscene that Craig McMillan (aka “lid”) is now BACK in the side after such a poor run of form in his career that he contemplated a switch to professional poker. No I am not making this up.
McMillan is a diabetic but has been diagnosed by Black Cap supporters with everything from a mild intellectual handicap to terminal blindness. He lived up to these expectations by appearing one day wearing glasses. Confirming what we all knew, that up until then he could not see the bloody ball. The last confirmation of such a spectacle was one Geoffrey Howarth, the most brilliant alcoholic ever to strap on a Black Cap. We all suspected Howarth could not see the ball after being kept in the side for many years in his position as specialist captain, in other words, he was the one that shined the ball and gave it to Hadlee. This was deduced by the fact Howarth could not bat, could not bowl and his fielding was shite. He must have been deemed to be a superb captain, or as later proved in several player biographies, he was really there to drink the sponsor’s piss and chase skirt.
The most honest individual NZ cricket player I have ever met was wicketkeeper turned opener Mr X. Mr X was in a bar and I spotted him. Naturally showing off to the girls who had no idea who he was I bet them $100 that within a minute I could chat the guy up at the bar and have him order me a drink. So I went up, said hello and asked him the blondest, dimmest question you can ever ask an opening batsman “The ball travels so fast, can you actually see it?”. He laughed, ordered me a drink and then proceeded to admit in the next hour that he could not see the bloody thing at all. Most women would have found it extremely boring, yet I was reveling in the insightfulness of it all. One of our leading batsmen for years could not actually see the ball. I met him several years later outside The George Bar waiting for a cab. Excited by then that anyone from the general public could recall who he was, I was invited to share the only Corporate Cab around. I jumped in, dropped him off at Metropolis and was invited in for a drink. Which I declined, wished him good night not to worry about the fare as I would sort it and went back to my apartment. Shagging a blind former opening Black Cap was not on my “To Do” list.
The best player in the New Zealand side currently is Mr F.Ielding. We are pretty good at that, chasing the ball over the field. Over the years we have had to be to defend notoriously low totals set by our wimp, limp batsmen backed up by our wayward erratic bowlers.
The most cruel torment of supporters of the Black Caps is the use of failed experimental bowlers such as Heath Davis, who as a specialty Maori had the trick that he could bowl fast, just not anywhere near the wickets. It was though he missed on purpose. We had our own Murali, chucker and full toss at the death specialist Kyle Mills. Then the next Shane Warne remember, a “spin” bowler Brooke Walker who for the life of me I never once witnessed turn the ball at all. Add in Matthew Hart who blew smoke into obscurity and Mark Haslam whose most monumental achievement in my book was shagging a girl I knew who had DD breasts.
Who could ever forget one Richard Webb? Richard Hadlee’s replacement in the finals when The Great One broke all our collective hearts and got injured. By the end of the finals, supporters were questioning the selection of Webb, rumoured to have been chosen at random from a crowd of people hanging outside McDonald’s on a Friday night having accurately thrown a coffee cup at a street bum while pissed. Webb's international career lasted 3 matches and just 10 days.
Darryl Tuffey showed promise but then showed a lot more form on a video cellphone with some UK supporters. Chris Pringle was a thick awkward looking lad who too was more interested in getting pissed and chasing skirt than filling his task at hand on the field. He was chosen for the side initially because he turned up to an international match looking for a free ticket to get into the ground in the UK and the team were short of players. No again I am not making this up. His best bowling figures were achieved at his own admittance because of ball tampering on the grounds that "he thought Pakistan were doing it too". Murphy Su’a was a player of reasonable promise, a large Samoan who suffered from PMT and pissed off his senior players enough for him to be dumped. Shane Thomson thought he was god’s gift to everything, yet retired at age 28 after living the life of a superstar in the large fish bowl of Hamilton. Yes as a Black Caps modern day supporter we have endured a fair bit of these prima donnas.
The problem with NZ cricket of course is the lack of available players, which therein makes “rotating” them even more pointless. We have a pretty low class domestic competition and basically any player who scores a century is touted as a possible inclusion into the squad. Any bowler who takes five wickets is equally talked up. This leads to one thing, the players start to believe they are actually good.
My experience with NZ first class cricket players goes back to a hotel in Christchurch where the Northern Districts 1st XI women’s team was staying for their national tournament. For two nights we had the pleasure of the Central Districts then the Otago men’s teams staying at the premises. Sensing obvious easy scoring, both men’s teams requested the pleasure of our company. As the night wore on it was easy to see that these guys took cricket as seriously as their marriages and one by one disgraced themselves in a display of alcoholic induced madness by attempting to pick up members of my predominantly “women who preferred the company of other women” cricket team. It was very funny to watch but of course, at 1am it made you wonder why so called professional sportsmen were up drinking when they should be tucked in bed for the next day’s work.
While not wishing to slate all of the individuals involved, it was then county professional Roger Twose and a non-alcoholic Jeff Wilson (unfortunately the only two players that I would consider hot) who broke the respective parties up including ridding our room of the more violent and aggressive drunk ones. They were more aggressive of course when one was telling me how he should be in the Black Caps and I loudly pronounced that he was shit and was lucky to be in the Otago side and if I was as bad at my job as he was at his, which is a semi-professional cricket player, then I would expect to be sacked. Several players on the verge of being selected for the Black Caps disgraced themselves further by walking into the door on their way out and being generally arseholes.
Obviously I am not against having a good time but this sort of larrikin behaviour is standard for a touring cricket team during the domestic NZ competition. They don’t take the whole thing seriously. The players think because they have scored a hundred in some piss arse domestic competition that they are now good enough to play international cricket.
This lack of professionalism filters through to the Black Caps as there literally is no pressure on players in the current squad to perform as there is no one to replace them. Players such as Astle, McMillan and Marshall have been cruising in Black Cap mode for years now. A guy like Matthew Sinclair should be a world class batsman, he’s not. And where the hell is Lou Vincent?
The situation is the reverse in Australia. Guys sit in State competitions for years and score thousands of runs and are still not good enough to break into the Australian side who game after game produces consistent form. Australian players have their share of off field incidents, Shane Warne and Andrew Symonds being the main offenders. The difference between Australian cricketers and New Zealand cricketers is that they seem to perform better on the field than they do off it.
So as to the tri-series, with a line up of Ponting, Gilchrist, Hayden, Hussey, Lee, McGrath and Symonds, you can’t see Australia losing at all. The Poms are all talk and no action but the battle for second finalist will be interesting. It will come down to Vaughan, Bell, Strauss and Flintoff versus Fleming, Astle, Bond and Vettori. Unless Shane Bond can play every game and find the form that ripped up Australia last tri-series, New Zealand will struggle, although the loss first up of Pietersen is a huge one. He was the Pom's mongrel.
So the outlook is not good for the cricket widow. Late nights, mood swings, sleep deprivation, agitation and despair. Then there is his sexual performance…..
Postscript:
Outlook for Sunday night - heavy rain on the supporter front after the 100+ pasting from Australia. Bond got a hat trick, when you don't really need one - in the last over. Taylor scored some runs but the rest of the team........terrible.
Forecast for Tuesday - this is where we get to gauge how bad the season is going to be when we play the Pieterseness England team.
Remember just 3 months to the World Cup.......
Right. Over the next month all New Zealand non-cricket watching heathens will be subjected to what is called the “tri-series” aka The World Series Cup (then a collection of nauseous commercial names) from Australia. Most famously on February 1st 1981, the vehicle for the great "underarm" incident.
Traditionally the tri-series is where modern day Australia kindly invite two other cricketing nations to play with each other a few times and then once they are confident enough, proceed to get walloped all over the park at frequent intervals by the home team. Cricketing widows should take note not to expect much action from their husbands while matches are on, other than the well worn path between couch, fridge and dunny. Mood swings as New Zealand play are to be expected. I will explain this behaviour here now so you can prepare to go out while matches are on and respect the experience of the New Zealand cricket supporting male.
In terms of the tri-series, New Zealand has its turn and historically we put up a good showing, make the final, believe we can actually win the bloody thing and then get smashed by Australia. The last time we played in the tournament Australia obviously bet against themselves and did not make the final. NZ played South Africa and had the best chance of winning for a long time. Only to get….you guessed it….whopped in the finals. Compare it with the disappointment you experience based on promises of enhanced sexual performance when your husband takes a viagra, only to find he was so tight he purchased it off the internet and it was a placebo from China.
Being a Black Caps supporter is one of the most testing activities available in NZ. We are frequently derided by the general public who then of course try to jump on the bandwagon the moment the Caps start winning. At times the team can be brilliant, their fielding breath taking, individuals can be world-class and exciting and a bowler can shine as the “next Hadlee” or batsman as the “next Crowe”. Then just as we start to feel smug the bastards usually get injured and their form declines back to the average. Shane Bond is a prime example or more tragically, Hogan Crowe when his knee gave out in the semi-final of the World Cup against Pakistan where NZ grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory thanks to a lack of on-field leadership. I won't even start on the pain we had to endure in the late 90's under the most ordinary player to ever Captain the Black Caps, Lee Germon. Chosen ironically to be his "boy" by one of the New Zealand's best ever players, Glenn Turner. Forget viagra, Black Cap supporters needed a morphine drip during Germon's reign.
New Zealand come into this series in terrible form really. The top order are batting like girls blouses, the middle order has weak knees and the tail enders are scoring all the bloody runs. Mr Extras is sometimes the leading scorer. The bowlers are as green as wet Coromandel grass and Stephen Fleming, the superglue that holds the old shoe together, returned from his period of “rotation” to score a handsome duck. John Bracewell, surely one of the most left brained coaches in NZ sport today even recently comparing Tasmania to New Zealand, has a cricketing mind of his own and a selection policy so obscene that Craig McMillan (aka “lid”) is now BACK in the side after such a poor run of form in his career that he contemplated a switch to professional poker. No I am not making this up.
McMillan is a diabetic but has been diagnosed by Black Cap supporters with everything from a mild intellectual handicap to terminal blindness. He lived up to these expectations by appearing one day wearing glasses. Confirming what we all knew, that up until then he could not see the bloody ball. The last confirmation of such a spectacle was one Geoffrey Howarth, the most brilliant alcoholic ever to strap on a Black Cap. We all suspected Howarth could not see the ball after being kept in the side for many years in his position as specialist captain, in other words, he was the one that shined the ball and gave it to Hadlee. This was deduced by the fact Howarth could not bat, could not bowl and his fielding was shite. He must have been deemed to be a superb captain, or as later proved in several player biographies, he was really there to drink the sponsor’s piss and chase skirt.
The most honest individual NZ cricket player I have ever met was wicketkeeper turned opener Mr X. Mr X was in a bar and I spotted him. Naturally showing off to the girls who had no idea who he was I bet them $100 that within a minute I could chat the guy up at the bar and have him order me a drink. So I went up, said hello and asked him the blondest, dimmest question you can ever ask an opening batsman “The ball travels so fast, can you actually see it?”. He laughed, ordered me a drink and then proceeded to admit in the next hour that he could not see the bloody thing at all. Most women would have found it extremely boring, yet I was reveling in the insightfulness of it all. One of our leading batsmen for years could not actually see the ball. I met him several years later outside The George Bar waiting for a cab. Excited by then that anyone from the general public could recall who he was, I was invited to share the only Corporate Cab around. I jumped in, dropped him off at Metropolis and was invited in for a drink. Which I declined, wished him good night not to worry about the fare as I would sort it and went back to my apartment. Shagging a blind former opening Black Cap was not on my “To Do” list.
The best player in the New Zealand side currently is Mr F.Ielding. We are pretty good at that, chasing the ball over the field. Over the years we have had to be to defend notoriously low totals set by our wimp, limp batsmen backed up by our wayward erratic bowlers.
The most cruel torment of supporters of the Black Caps is the use of failed experimental bowlers such as Heath Davis, who as a specialty Maori had the trick that he could bowl fast, just not anywhere near the wickets. It was though he missed on purpose. We had our own Murali, chucker and full toss at the death specialist Kyle Mills. Then the next Shane Warne remember, a “spin” bowler Brooke Walker who for the life of me I never once witnessed turn the ball at all. Add in Matthew Hart who blew smoke into obscurity and Mark Haslam whose most monumental achievement in my book was shagging a girl I knew who had DD breasts.
Who could ever forget one Richard Webb? Richard Hadlee’s replacement in the finals when The Great One broke all our collective hearts and got injured. By the end of the finals, supporters were questioning the selection of Webb, rumoured to have been chosen at random from a crowd of people hanging outside McDonald’s on a Friday night having accurately thrown a coffee cup at a street bum while pissed. Webb's international career lasted 3 matches and just 10 days.
Darryl Tuffey showed promise but then showed a lot more form on a video cellphone with some UK supporters. Chris Pringle was a thick awkward looking lad who too was more interested in getting pissed and chasing skirt than filling his task at hand on the field. He was chosen for the side initially because he turned up to an international match looking for a free ticket to get into the ground in the UK and the team were short of players. No again I am not making this up. His best bowling figures were achieved at his own admittance because of ball tampering on the grounds that "he thought Pakistan were doing it too". Murphy Su’a was a player of reasonable promise, a large Samoan who suffered from PMT and pissed off his senior players enough for him to be dumped. Shane Thomson thought he was god’s gift to everything, yet retired at age 28 after living the life of a superstar in the large fish bowl of Hamilton. Yes as a Black Caps modern day supporter we have endured a fair bit of these prima donnas.
The problem with NZ cricket of course is the lack of available players, which therein makes “rotating” them even more pointless. We have a pretty low class domestic competition and basically any player who scores a century is touted as a possible inclusion into the squad. Any bowler who takes five wickets is equally talked up. This leads to one thing, the players start to believe they are actually good.
My experience with NZ first class cricket players goes back to a hotel in Christchurch where the Northern Districts 1st XI women’s team was staying for their national tournament. For two nights we had the pleasure of the Central Districts then the Otago men’s teams staying at the premises. Sensing obvious easy scoring, both men’s teams requested the pleasure of our company. As the night wore on it was easy to see that these guys took cricket as seriously as their marriages and one by one disgraced themselves in a display of alcoholic induced madness by attempting to pick up members of my predominantly “women who preferred the company of other women” cricket team. It was very funny to watch but of course, at 1am it made you wonder why so called professional sportsmen were up drinking when they should be tucked in bed for the next day’s work.
While not wishing to slate all of the individuals involved, it was then county professional Roger Twose and a non-alcoholic Jeff Wilson (unfortunately the only two players that I would consider hot) who broke the respective parties up including ridding our room of the more violent and aggressive drunk ones. They were more aggressive of course when one was telling me how he should be in the Black Caps and I loudly pronounced that he was shit and was lucky to be in the Otago side and if I was as bad at my job as he was at his, which is a semi-professional cricket player, then I would expect to be sacked. Several players on the verge of being selected for the Black Caps disgraced themselves further by walking into the door on their way out and being generally arseholes.
Obviously I am not against having a good time but this sort of larrikin behaviour is standard for a touring cricket team during the domestic NZ competition. They don’t take the whole thing seriously. The players think because they have scored a hundred in some piss arse domestic competition that they are now good enough to play international cricket.
This lack of professionalism filters through to the Black Caps as there literally is no pressure on players in the current squad to perform as there is no one to replace them. Players such as Astle, McMillan and Marshall have been cruising in Black Cap mode for years now. A guy like Matthew Sinclair should be a world class batsman, he’s not. And where the hell is Lou Vincent?
The situation is the reverse in Australia. Guys sit in State competitions for years and score thousands of runs and are still not good enough to break into the Australian side who game after game produces consistent form. Australian players have their share of off field incidents, Shane Warne and Andrew Symonds being the main offenders. The difference between Australian cricketers and New Zealand cricketers is that they seem to perform better on the field than they do off it.
So as to the tri-series, with a line up of Ponting, Gilchrist, Hayden, Hussey, Lee, McGrath and Symonds, you can’t see Australia losing at all. The Poms are all talk and no action but the battle for second finalist will be interesting. It will come down to Vaughan, Bell, Strauss and Flintoff versus Fleming, Astle, Bond and Vettori. Unless Shane Bond can play every game and find the form that ripped up Australia last tri-series, New Zealand will struggle, although the loss first up of Pietersen is a huge one. He was the Pom's mongrel.
So the outlook is not good for the cricket widow. Late nights, mood swings, sleep deprivation, agitation and despair. Then there is his sexual performance…..
Postscript:
Outlook for Sunday night - heavy rain on the supporter front after the 100+ pasting from Australia. Bond got a hat trick, when you don't really need one - in the last over. Taylor scored some runs but the rest of the team........terrible.
Forecast for Tuesday - this is where we get to gauge how bad the season is going to be when we play the Pieterseness England team.
Remember just 3 months to the World Cup.......
posted by Cactus Kate at 8:21 PM
15 Comments:
Hell, there's some names in here I'd long forgotten including Shane Thompson.
Tuffey's probably the real disappointment since he clearly had the talent to be a long-term member of the team and part of a new ball attack. Bond is key, I completely agree, however at the moment the top order aren't doing enough to get NZ into competitive positions.
It's NZ or England for the second spot in the finals. Australia are playing some of the best cricket, in both forms, for 10 years and I can't see them losing a game to be frank (they dominated England but for Pietersen's knock although it was good to see Freddy doing well back down the order).
Pietersen must be pissed off he didn't leave RSA for Australia!
I have new found respect for Mark Haslam, still got that girls phone number Kate?
For her 21st she got a breast reduction, if you believe it!
Great nostalgia post Cactus. You sure know your Crickety boo.
Geoff Howarth was as you point out an enigma of the times. His reign as coach must be surely one of the most humourous in NZ sport.
She got a WHAT???
When I am PM that will be the first thing i will make illegal
I can't understand why Australia didn't run with the 2nd XI concept in these World Series one-day competitions.
After showing that their 1st and 2nd XIs could whip the opposition, or at least be competitive, they should have increased the number of teams each year until they fielded a team that actually looked inferior to the rest. One more team could have been added each year, perhaps. This would probably have gone on until, say, the Australian 8th XI. Australians are rightly, and in proper measure, arrogant about their sporting abilities. But fielding an 8th-best team in a World Series would be some serious piss-taking out of the whole thing.
But, probably, some people just wouldn't get the joke.
I think the world cup would be a lot more interesting if the Australian states competed. It would increase the number of competative teams by at least five (NSW, Vic, QLD, SA, WA).
The final would probably be NSW v Victoria: South Africa and West Indies would make the semis and we, like England, on current form would lose in the quarter finals.
After the dismal performance this evening the cricket widows have a much bigger problem. namely any male between the age of 15 and 90 should immediately fly to OZ with their bat, because nthe current shower of shit are in danger of imploding.
With a couple of noteable exceptions (taylor and fulton) this must rank as the worst NZ cricket team since the day before time began.
Watch for flem or astle to sneeze on the new boys by season end and infect them as well.
Bracewells emergency selection phone number for those wishing to put their hat in the ring.
0800 WEDONTHAVEACLUE
Roger fucking Twose?!?!
This is a brilliant synopsis, - there is a role at NZ Cricket as CEO available- you should consider it!!fantastic
Unusually, I'm a fairly optimistic NZ fan, and think we can do Australia in at least one match (ducks rubbish being thrown) and should get the better of England. Therefore, we'll do our usual trick of making the finals, and getting a hiding once we're there.
I get the feeling our batsmen would rather play in Australia, where the pitches are much more consistent than here...
And yes, playing cricket and drinking yourself stupid have always gone hand in hand like Craig MacMillian and deep, deep disappointment. I put it down to those long hours feilding in the sun that makes liquor go straight to your head.
Sorry Kate,
My reaction can be explained by that I was thinking you were lusting over Rod Latham instead of Twosey. Carry on...
Is Mr X Bryan Young?
Since England have been playing NZ I have 'discovered' Shane Bond - absolutely gorgeous.
Can I have more info ...... single? married? gay?
Definately helps when watching the worse cricket team ever placed on the planet (they must have come from another world where they don't play cricket)
Shane Bond is married and according to good sources not homosexual.
Neither unfortunate circumstance (if you are a straight woman or gay man) however should stop you from lusting after him from a distance.
Don't get too attached however as he waddles off injured with a bad back/knee/groin frequently.
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