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Last updated on March 5th, 2018 at 01:44 pm
Not only has Norm Geras recently encountered the Wogblogger, but he’s since met Australian cricket genius Gideon Haigh:
Gideon knows more about the history of the game than anyone else I’ve ever met. I mean, in minute detail. Cricket people are quite used to the business of chewing over the games they’ve seen years ago, in childhood even, and incidents from them that have stuck in their minds: that time Eldine Baptiste ran out Geoff Miller at Lord’s with a direct hit from the furthest corner of the ground; when Gatting caught Allan Border but failed to control the ball; the stand between Sobers and Holford; Graeme Pollock’s innings at Trent Bridge; Hugh Tayfield taking 9 wickets at the Wanderers in 1957 – and 13 in the match – to beat Peter May’s England; and so forth. The thing about Gideon is he can do this about games he hasn’t seen, games that took place before he was born.
Gideon is pure cricket wisdom. He’d have to be, to out-know Norm; here’s a shot (via the Wogblogger) of Norm in his cricket-only library:
I asked her to steal at least 20 books, but apparently she was only able to grab four Wisdens. Damn her tiny fashionable handbag. Speaking of the Wog, she’s currently in Edinburgh, where her bizarre choice of vehicle has caused problems:
Mucho laughter with the concierge guys who were refusing to go get the car for me. Only the Spaniard (I think), Mandy, was prepared to go. The rest of them declared the car too hard to drive, and far too claustrophobic with its little cabin and tight footpedal zone.
One guy the night before had apparently tried to move the car and got so crazy inside it that he had a fit and was screaming to be let out.
Morgans will do that. Here’s a pressure-relieving game for frustrated UK car movers. Bash the Aussie!
Clueless in America asks: Are there any good non-calypso cricket songs? (Lord Kitchener’s “Cricket Lovely Cricket” and Sparrow’s “Packer” are the cricket songs I know; the Kinks tried one, but it was one of Ray’s no balls.) An “Up There Cazaly” or “Van Lingle Mungo” must be out there somewhere…
Posted by chinesearithmetic on 2005 08 18 at 03:28 PM • permalink
JayC, try playing as “The Convicts”. Funny.
Posted by David Crawford on 2005 08 18 at 05:44 PM • permalink
The Wogblog UK travelogue is a gem!
Go and “read the whole thing” as they say on the Intramanet thingy.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2005 08 19 at 01:43 AM • permalink
Funny game cricket, in addition to the central function of gambling in the rise of the game, the first international tour was planned for France, the first internationals were played between Canada and the US, the first English tour was to Canada and the first Australian team to visit England was all Aboriginal.
On my way home, I remembered “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease,” by Roy Harper, featuring the Grimethrope Colliery Band. Brief references to Geoff Boycott an John Snow in this haunting song.
Posted by chinesearithmetic on 2005 08 19 at 09:17 AM • permalink
- Geoff Boycott is remembered as a batsman who had cobwebs under his armpits because he never lifted his bat off the ground, and John Snow is best remembered as a the pommy oaf who flattened tailender Terry Jenner with a bouncer at the SCG in 1971.
The genteel Sydney crowd displayed their disapproval of Snow by lobbing beer cans at him (some even half full) and the English captain led his team from the field and later claimed he didn’t, and we won’t forfeit, so there.Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2005 08 19 at 11:21 AM • permalink
I guess Harper didn’t have a verse for Jardine. Best to stick with John Fogerty then; put me in, coach!
Posted by chinesearithmetic on 2005 08 19 at 12:02 PM • permalink
I recently saw a movie called “Once Upon A Time in India”, which was the story of a cricket match between Indian villagers and British soldiers in the time of the Raj. In between the singing and dancing, the dramatic weepings and great anguish and despair, they showed what happens in a cricket game. I still don’t understand.
John Snow was that strange kind of pommy oaf, a son of a vicar and a published poet. From the 1973 Wisden (one of those yellow books on the far bottom left):
At the England team’s Harrogate hotel during the fourth Test at Leeds last July, Basil d’Oliveira in an animated dinner table conversation said to him “The ultimate thing in life is to play for England.” Snow replied quietly “The ultimate thing in life is death.”
Whoops, my mistake. A literate pommy oaf, then.
Anybody claiming that death was more important than playing cricket wouldn’t have a spot in the Aussie team during Ian Chappell’s time.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2005 08 20 at 02:41 AM • permalink
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Leaving notes in the margins (eg., !!! is good, or ?1943 ) is good counterplay.