Sports Mashup

A few things occurred to me over the weekend about the game last week that were quite amusing but didn't make it into my quickly scribbled match report. So as I'm "between" meetings, I thought I'd have a go at capturing them here.

Paul Cooper did that thing that you occasionally see on a cricketing field that rarely works well, but on this occasion did: introducing football skills into the equation.

You are categorically taught to not use your feet to deal with a cricket ball. When you bat it introduces LBW and pain into the equation. When you field it introduces pain and embarrassment into the equation.

There are a number of different ways in which this goes terribly wrong. 

There's the football slide, where you try and stop a boundary, but instead kick it over the boundary with significantly more force somehow than it had retained on its way to the boundary. Everyone laugh/sighs at the same time.

There's the one where you put your foot out, the ball hits it hard, you yelp like a wounded dog, and the ball ricochets away from every close fielder and normally provides an opportunity for additional runs to the opposition that were never there before. Everyone wince/sighs at the same time.

Then these is the holy grail, using your foot to parry the ball upwards, catch it and then throw it. This normally results in you yelping and directing the ball towards your own face, then hopefully getting your shiny mug out of the way. Then everyone grimace/sighs and somehow the ball ends up briefly lost (often between your own legs).

Normally any one of these is greeted by someone on your own team, at least once an innings making a 'football-is-not-cricket' related joke. "Who do you think you are, David Beckham", "Football season isn't for another couple of months" etc etc. You've both failed at cricket and at football. The team have derived no benefit other than having legitimate grounds to laugh at a teammate. In short, don't do it, it never works and everyone loses.

However, once in a while it sort of does. Paul Cooper managed to perform the flick up and juggle this week, with all the dexterity of a Lioness (well done, ladies!). His right foot angled at a perfect 45 degrees stopped one just outside the ring, he flicked up it up towards his hands via his knee, and he then in one motion threw it straight at the stumps with an unnerving degree of accuracy. There was no run out, the batsman had to hustle to get in, but it was all, strikingly perhaps even shockingly, deliberate, purposeful and competent.

Now, I know that the main reason Paul did this was to avoid bending over, as once you clear 40 this is not something you want to do ever again - but he did it with such an exhibition of confidence and competence, that it briefly made me wonder why we didn't all routinely do it. The I remembered the 200 other times I had seen it happen on a cricket field, and realised that this was in fact the outlier....

If the ball was this big, I would probably hit it more.

Another small postscript to match from when I was batting, I was determined to be friendly with the opposition as I often am. I like things to be positive, and upbeat, even in competitive situations. I was at the non-strikers end with one of their bowlers and politely enquired as to whether the scorers had his name. "Adam" he shouted at the assembled bench. I then shouted, "Penson" to the scorers. A thumbs up of acknowledgement came from the bench. 

The bowler asked, "how did you know?!". I immediately replied, "it's on the back of your shirt, matey". Cue hilarity - he was still laughing when his next ball was the terrible head height no ball at Freddie's noggin.

There are many different ways to influence the game...