cricket with balls

There is something wonderfully insane about KP.

Sure you can pick on the old hairstyle, stupid tattoo, celebrity lady, mincing or what ever it is you’ve decided is the thing that pisses you off.

Most of us just assume he isn’t quite human.

He doesn’t quite feel right.

So today, once Shafiul Islam had bowled himself into the ground, KP looked around and realised that he was facing three spinners who he played like they weren’t spinning the balls, and Shahadat Hossain who was struggling to do anything.

He could have taken the Ian Bell route. Nudged the ball around. Scored at will with a field set back. Eased the crowd in a gentle but deep sleep. Made sure he kept his head. Milked the poor bowling.

People do this in life. It isn’t bad, it’s work. They know their bosses are watching and that a steady consistent performance will give them results, no matter how boring the job is.

KP seems almost unable to bat when he is bored.

Instead of pushing it around, he lifted the ball over the off and on side for fun, even with fielders out. He made 64 off 81 while the rest of the team batted line prozac users.

After lunch he charged, hoiked and slogged the spinners.

He scored 48 off 42 balls from them.

For most of those 42 balls he looked very bored.

Occasionally he would start to come down the wicket before the ball was bowled, there was unnecessary shots across the line, and hitting balls in the air for fun.

The fact that, yet again, he went out to a left arm bowler seems to be less the story than how bored he looked in the middle.

His dismissal came from him charging down the wicket, getting out played by Shakib, and then KP standing mid pitch with only one hand on the bat as he was stumped.

But here is the rub, in almost every way KP is some sort of alien insect being. Most of us would never think of KP as someone like us.

Yet, how many of us have done a shit job at work because of boredom. How many times have you played it fast and loose with some tedious job only to fuck it up? Is it possible that you believed a task was beneath you, and you yawned your way towards doing it badly?

I always get bored, I fuck up all menial jobs, and my whole working life was doing shit at work. I am sure I am not alone.

If you haven’t done any of these, you are probably related to Mike Hussey.

For the rest of us, this is a sick realization, because if you think about it, there is more than a little bit of KP in you.

Somehow it was easier to just think he was alien.

It had to happen. Someone had to be an idiot and say it. Within hours of England winning the T20 World Cup, someone had to say that it wasn’t a proper English team, because a third of the party were not born in England.

The surprise is that the idiot in question was Jonathan ‘Aggers’ Agnew, the BBC’s own cricket correspondent who was, largely, basing his comments upon a conversation with Craig White, during which the latter opined that if you were not born English you never felt truly English.

That’s Jonathan Agnew, the cricket correspondent for the nation’s broadcaster.

That’s Jonathan Agnew, who in his heady six match international career, played alongside the likes of the South Africa born Allan Lamb, the Jamaican Norman Cowans and the Rhodesian Phil Edmonds.

And that’s Craig White, who played 81 international matches for a country he apparently didn’t feel a part of, despite the fact that he was born in Yorkshire.

Which, in turn, knocks a hole the size of Mark Cosgrove through Agnew’s argument, because White just proves that it is not where you were born that matters, it is where you feel you belong that counts. White even made his debut in a side which contained four players born outside of the UK.

Suggesting that the England team is anything less for having the likes of Lumb, Kieswetter, Pietersen and Morgan in it is such a steaming pile of hypocritical horseshit that it barely merits consideration. But if it does, then we’ll have the credit for every Aussie victory that included Andrew Symonds, OK?

One of the great things about cricket is the fact that it is so unpredictable. Every day, the fan is faced with intriguing possibilities. What new way will the ICC find to screw up a tournament? How many inches will Stuart Broad have grown overnight? And whose turn is it to be captain of Pakistan this week?

Today’s surprise? Well, it wasn’t England’s mauling of Sri Lanka. Watching England at the moment is a bit like watching a drunk walking along a bridge parapet in the small hours of a Sunday morning – you know it is all going to end in a nasty squishy mess, but predicting the point at which the fall will come is somewhat trickier. And because so many people predicted that they would drop off the edge, they somehow clung on.

No, the surprising thing was how they did it, and particularly how one particular player did it. Today was the day that Kevin Pietersen turned into one of the elder statesmen of cricket (at least for the afternoon).

It started with the frowning and disgusted shake of the head as Tim Bresnan attempted to gift Sri Lanka a whole over of wides.

Then he came into bat right after Lasith Malinga had cleaned up Craig Kieswetter with a trademark yorker. The old KP would’ve swiped at the first ball, desperate to get off the mark. The new version calmly blocked another, less well directed, yorker and then bunted the next ball to mid-on for that duck-breaking single.

And so it continued. No rash shots, no hand-switching sweeps. In fact the Sri Lankans appeared perplexed by his habit of wandering down the pitch and nudging the ball for a single, rather than trying to batter it out of the ground over mid-wicket. And he certainly didn’t regard being a dozen runs from victory as an excuse to charge down the wicket and twat the ball straight up in the air, as his captain did.

Pietersen the Responsible. Who’d have thought it. Honestly, anyone would think he’d become a parent or something.

Today England have to let go KP so he can rush home to watch his popette wife can deliver his spawn.

I’ve written before and International cricketers’ WAGs needing to fit their gestation into the Future Tours Program.

Sadly, they have not listened and Mrs KP is now going to produce her little KP during a ICC tournament.

Instead of making a big deal about it, the ECB are handling it with properness and decorum.

This is obviously the wrong way to handle it.

For one, KP is being allowed to go home.

KP is box office.  People love to see him fail and make runs.  People love the drama he brings with every slightly nerdy red bull run. He is England’s franchise player.

By allowing him to go home they are robbing themselves of him for at least one game, which might not seem like much, but during a tournament as jam packed as this one, it needs as much KP as you can squeeze in.

This is how I believe Lalit would handle the situation.

KP would never be allowed to go home.

Instead Mrs KP would be flown out, on a private plane, to barbados.  The camera crews would be tipped off as to when she was traveling over, so that there were heaps of shots of her and her team of medical professionals (good looking Indian Doctor and team of 6 blonde nurses).  For the next few hours news stations would be showing these clips on a loop.

Then Mrs KP and the team arrive and are hidden away amongst much secrecy.  Hopefully by this time the private jet, sexy medic team, shots at the airport in London have whipped the media into a frenzy.  I could imagine Sky Sports Tim Abraham outside the team hotel saying, “We’ve been informed that Mrs KP is fine, but there is still plenty of Mystery around as to why Mrs KP has been flown over. Some of the more out there conspiracy theories is that the team are to eat the placenta in a team bonding exercise.”

On twitter Lalit could have laughed off that.

Instead what Lalit does is organise a tent to be out on the ground, a medically sound tent, so before England’s next match Mrs KP can be cesarianed on the ground, for decency and medical reasons it will be not be shown to the crowd.

After she has given birth, the baby will be suitably cleaned and attired.

Then KP shall exit the tent, him wearing his English kit, the baby in a teeny tiny replica shirt (with Pietersen on the back).

KP shall then lift the child into the air, Lion King style.

At this stage the only people on the ground, who aren’t in the tent, should be KP, baby KP, and the cameraman and crane operator who are shooting the momentus occasion with the Michael Bay shot of tracking around KP and baby.

If the ICC tried to stage manage this event Mrs KP would give birth in a community hospital to a intern on her first day on the job.

Happy Jesus on a stick day. A day that is all about honouring someone who died so that we can all be perverts and animals, but you can’t eat steak, in case some is made of him.

In honour of Jesus dying I’ve compiled an XI of players who died, and were then reborn, or you know, other Christian type shit. Jesus, as we all know, was a wicket keeper.

S Katich – Found himself in a cricket career cave due to some horrific test form, but then his God, Bob Simpson, helped him, and thankfully we now have Katich shuttling around the crease for days on end.

M Sinclair – Impossible as it is to enjoy the way he plays, Sinclair is the one cricketer most likely to survive Sodom and Gomorrah. When the Kiwis are having a selectorial apocalypse, it is Sinclair they turn to. He will always live with us.

I Bell – If Bell truly was the son of God, Christianity would have died out by now. Instead Bell seems ordained by some higher power, perhaps Murdoch, to play the number 3 position for England. He coveted it while he had to wait out Pestilence (Shah), War (Bopara) and Famine (Trott) but he found his way back to number three.

M Hussey – Has never left heavenly earth, but what exactly was he doing between the age of 12 and 30.

K Pietersen – An outcast with his old religion he became the father, son and holy bail of a new one. It still hasn’t been smooth sailing, but he no longer has to bowl off spin, so that is good.

K Akmal – Crucified on the pitch for one of the most heretical displays of wicket keeping ever written about. But he will be back, you can’t keep a Pakistani cricketer away for too long. Even if he comes back as a kolpak.

A Flintoff – as was written.

N Hauritz – Outbowled by M Clarke and then shunned by his country, his state, and his knew state. One day four wise men decided to pick him up from the gutter he found himself in, and bugger me if he hasn’t stayed around since then.

S Bond – Needed to go on a spiritual adventure to India so that one day he could come back to New Zealand and tell them he was available for white ball games and then continued his spiritual adventure in India.

A Mendis – The man is full of mystery, but once you work it out, it is all kind of simple and you don’t really care anymore.

A Nehra – From a world cup final to the great abyss, but thanks to Lalit K, Nehra has been brought back so that we can all pray at his long limbs and permanent angry face.

J Patel (12th) – Is so good at being 12th man I couldn’t see why he wouldn’t do it for Jesus.