cricket with balls

So, the international season in Australia has come to an end, and I’m drinking to it. Not because of the unbeaten Aussie summer. Thrashing two mediocre teams is hardly cause for celebration. No, because it means the end of the most annoying experiment in cricket viewing since, well, ever.

Bloody heart rate monitors.

What, I mean what, is the point of this idiocy? The whole point of introducing any sort of technology into a sport is to make it in some way better for the spectator. HawkEye, HotSpot, slo-mo cameras, they all serve this purpose. But what is the freaking point of a heart rate monitor?

It is not as if most of us are incapable of noticing that your heart rate goes up when you are running and it is no great logical feat to suss out that it might go up a bit more if you run and then hurl a small projectile 22 yards.

And it’s not even as if they put them on the interesting players, fer chrissakes. What is the use of putting a heart rate monitor on Mitchell Johnson, unless it is to give his mother heart failure of her own? How about sticking one on Chris Gayle, so that we can tell if he is really that laid back, or just clinically dead? Or on Shane Watson, to see if he actually is 98% straw? Hell, if we are being really interesting, strap it to Steve Smith and see if he’s yet mature enough to walk past a woman on the boundary without all of the blood rushing to his groin?

No, the only conceivable use for this technology is to fix it to the commentators. Watch Mark Nicholas’ bpm rise every time he passes a mirror. Measure Warne’s excitement as a tray of pies goes by. Do what the heck you like with it, just get it off my tv screen.

The Allan Border Medal is pretty new. Australia have been pretty handy since 2000 the list of players who have won the award is tasty.

McGrath, Waugh, Hayden, Gilchrist, and Ponting.

There is a name missing, SK Warne.

Warne probably would have won one had he played one-day cricket between 03 and 07. In 06 he was Australia’s best test cricketer and won an award that said that, but not the AB. Because the point system is allocated for all international games for the Allan Border medal, Ricky Ponting won was the winner that year.

I don’t agree with the system, the best test player should win the major award, even if that is Collin Miller.

This year the best test player was Simon the Krab Katich.

He was Australia’s most consistent player in the voting period. By last summer he had turned from an embarrassing eyesore to Australia’s best batting eyesore, and he kept that up for the year.

The fact that he won the award does tell the story of Australian cricket in 09. A recycled player well into his cricket twilight averaged 48 with the bat and was Australia’s best test player.

Australia’s best player in all forms of the game was Shane Watson. In one day cricket he was destructive with the bat and ok with the ball. In test cricket he was savage with the bat and handy with the ball.

Other than his occasional moments of monumental stupidity, which we all have (I once shaved my head but left my fringe), he has been a force.

It hasn’t always been pretty, during the year he has traded metrosexual insults with Jimmy Anderson, made missing a test hundred an artform, abused Gayle like a 3 year old would, and stalked Phil Hughes spot like a CIA assassin.

But the big bastard is the best-performed Australian cricketer in all 3 formats of the game (had he played in more tests he probably would have won the test award too).

They give you the medal for that sort of hi-jinx.

He deserves it, doesn’t mean the whole world will suddenly warm to him.

Ofcourse the real winner of the night was Haley Rich Bracken (whose name I had to look up when writing this) for wearing a mermaid costume that should help her singing career.

Buy the book, get a t-shirt, or donate to the whisky fund.

Like Ganguly doesn’t have an employee to wash his face.

The stunt double pretending to be Warne is doing a great job.

Has anyone ever read the paper with more intensity.

The IPL is back in India.

The IPL is back, so are the weird ass ads.

I wasn’t going to write anything this evening. I wasn’t even going to turn a computer on. I have more important things to worry about, such as:

My wife is out with a girl she has already described as ‘cute’, and I have an overactive imagination;

I’m supposed to be co-writing something with a workaholic, I’ve written jack shit for the last 5 days and I’m worried he might come for me with a sharpened pencil;

My t-shirt drawer needs rearranging, because I’m not sure if my ‘SuperFred’ shirt is still wearable or not.

But then I made the mistake of turning on ESPN Classic and watching ‘Cricinfo’s Top Ten Most Hated Australians’, and it made my blood boil.

I hasten to add that this is not because it featured Cricinfo’s own Andrew Milller, who I feel sorry for because ESPN always contrive to make him seem like he just got off the special bus (I know he hasn’t, because the aforementioned cute girl is one of his friends).

It’s not even because of the presenter, who is one of those instantly dislikable people that you feel obliged to punch at least once per syllable. (I’m not naming him. I object to him having the oxygen of oxygen, let alone that of publicity).

It’s because the entire show was so fucking wrongheaded it wasn’t true. Haydos at number one? Come on! In the imaginations of one or two hacks, maybe, but most England fans couldn’t give a toss about the bible-bashing, barbeque-basting big guy. He was just one more Aussie to get rid of, a little bit obnoxious maybe, but nothing more.

Ditto Merv at number two. Only the truly brain dead saw him as anything other than a comedy villan. He was a decent bowler who had the odd good day, but ultimately was known more for his tache and ability to swear than as a cricketer.

Steve Waugh bored the pants off us, both on and off the pitch. Warne we feared, not hated – we may not have approved of his private life, but we all wanted to see him bowl. And Greg Chappell was lucky to even be in there, given that you seemed to need to have been seen on colour tv to be considered at all.

The real howler, though – the mistake that devalued the entire show – was having Border down at number 9. We hated AB in England, hated him with a passion Warne could only dream off. He was arrogant, obnoxious, a man who frequently seemed to go against the spirit of cricket. You won’t find anyone who laughed harder than I did when he was bowled by Richard Ellison on that glorious August evening in 1985. And yet he could bat you out of a game with ease, even when playing in one of the most talentless Aussie sides in history. God, he was annoying.

The show also lacked some of the other real hate figures from the past. Where was Chappelli? Bradman? Boon, even? If this was supposed to be the ten we hated, I dread to think who they think we might have liked.

When Shane Warne was a teenager he was rubbish, at everything.

Couldn’t play footy, shit at school and he was terrible at cricket.

Then he started getting laid, and the power of the vagina lifted him beyond a mere mortal.

The more women he slept with, the better he got.

It was if all vaginas had morphed into one powerful vagina, and they had chosen Shane as their hero, and every time he entered one, he grew.

Eventually the vaginas grew tired of Shane’s attitude to women.

So they found ways to bring him down, but he still had the talent, and their attempts might have kept him down in the official world, but in the eyes of the fans he was already a legend.

Eventually the mage vagina grew to love Shane, even with his flaws, and they live happily ever after.