cricket with balls

For the next few days there will be no posts on cricket with balls.

Without wanting to get into details, Mrs cricket with balls has some issues that I need to help with.

Sure she could get through it on her own, instead I have decided to take some time off work to help her.

This makes me a great husband, even if it means that I will not be doing my job for the next few days.

Some of you might think I’m putting my personal life above my job, but this is not an easy decision.

During this time I would appreciate it if you don’t speculate what the personal reason is, and just give us our privacy.

Thank you.

Is Scott Styris the angriest man ever to play international cricket?

Well, maybe not ‘angriest’, but ‘angriest-looking’, because either I always choose to look at him at the wrong moment, or he permanently has a face like a pissed-off garden gnome.

Batting, bowling or fielding, you get the feeling that he plays the game with a scowl on his face and thunder in his heart.

Even as he was steering the Black Caps to victory yesterday, there was a black cloud hanging over his head, demonstrating his fury at only getting to play because Vettori was hurt, anger at the teammates whose profligate batting had threatened to take the game away from New Zealand, and of course pure rage at Mitchell Johnson for barging him – a barge which cost Johnson 60% of his match fee* and Styris 15% of his for retaliation.

Just look at the photos of him walking off after the game. Have you ever seen such a thunderous look on the face of someone acknowledging the crowd?

The man is clearly a seething cauldron of malcontent, even when life is going well for him. I’d hate to see him properly upset.

*You just know that Mitchell is going to get a telling off from mummy for this. He’ll be straight onto the naughty step when he gets home and no mistake

Andrew Flintoff just gave an interview to BBC Radio, in which he admitted that he was planning for the possibility that he might not be able to come back from his current knee problem.

This is, quite possibly, the most interesting thing that Flintoff has ever said in an interview – certainly in an interview given whilst sober. Previously, he’s always been hugely bullish about his prospects of coming back from any operation. It seems that the op he had the day after the Oval Test failing and having to have a second, more major, one has knocked his confidence, even in himself.

It is also clear that either he doesn’t contemplate coming back as a batsman only, or that the knee is so bad that, if it can’t be fixed, it is pretty well going to prevent him doing anything.

The next interesting thing that he said was that whatever he does, it won’t be commentary. Which is good news for everyone as (a) his time as England captain revealed that he wasn’t one of the game’s greatest thinkers or tacticians and (b) we won’t have to listen to his dull northern monotone clogging up our airwaves.

32 is hellishly early to have to end your career, though – especially in this day and age. Strange to think, too, that both he and Brett Lee, the couple who provided one of crickets iconic moments of the last decade, could be going out of the game together, too.

Until today, I didn’t realise that I had been present at the end of a legend’s career – or at least his Test career.

I was kind of there for the start of it, too. I can’t think that I have done that for too many others, if any.

The legend is the one and only Jeffrey Robert Thomson. I may have picked up commentary on some of his debut, but I doubt it. I do know that I listened to his third Test, in Perth in 1974, because I remember playing with the tuning knob on my radio – which for some reason was shaped like a monkey’s head – and hearing Test Match Special crackling over the airwaves. And wondering why they were playing cricket in Scotland in the dead of winter. Well, geography wasn’t my strong point when I was 6.

What I didn’t know was that, after Australia’s thumping defeat at Edgbaston in 1985, Thommo never played Test cricket again. Which means that I didn’t see his last wicket – that happened the night before – but I did see his last catch, a flying, tumbling effort to dismiss Ian Botham on the square leg boundary, after Both had flayed 18 off 7 balls as England sought a declaration.

By that stage, he was bowling first change and clearly past his best. But I never realised that I was witnessing his swansong. Much as I enjoyed the demolition of Border’s side in that game, Thommo, the man who made his name wreaking similar havoc upon the English, deserved a better send off.