The reverse block, a favourite

Back on Indian time...

...and a real shock at 04:00. Cook's won a toss. Sky commentary during the last test, and after suggesting how tempting it must be, I was laughing when David Lloyd caved in and came out with the useless tosser line. Anyway, he won his first toss in living memory, elected to bat, and was out (wrongly given out by the umpire) for one run from twenty eight balls. This isn't a calypso cricket pitch. Boycott will be licking his lips. He'd love a surface that allowed him to show off his full range of shots:

• the block
• the reverse block
• the paddle block
• the slog block
• the straight block
• and the check block.

Boycott did make me laugh describing a bowler's 'mystery' ball: it's a mystery all right, confuses the batter who don't know whether to hit it for four or six.

Sport and principles

I copped a pasting on the Arsenal forums. Those guys seem to think you can afford to have principles when playing sport. I think winners leave their principle on the changing room peg, along with their shirt and jeans. For a number of reasons.

Don't tell me having no scruples on the pitch make you less of a good person. Anyone playing decent rugby would be mortified if they so much as bumped into an old lady, yet would happily run through opponents to get to the ball on a Saturday afternoon, and if that leaves them unable to continue / bandaged on the touchline / off to casualty, then so be it.

Let the referee or the umpire decide. I've seen one of our ex-players signalling four runs when our fielder has dived to stop the ball and just maybe come in contact with the rope in doing so. Would he do the same when the benefit would go to us? Probably not. Would an opponent, in diving to stop the ball, notice that he'd touched the rope? If he did notice would he say so? Magnificent effort, let the umpires decide. You get some let-offs, and you get some stinkers. Noise? Catch? Ask the question. Some batters are affronted. “I hit the ground”. Get over yourself boy. Noise + catch = appeal.

Principles are expensive on the field. After you Claude leads to losing out in the personal battles and that leads to losing the game. Arsenal are paying the price for the manager's lofty principles in how he thinks the game should be played, and for the people running the club insisting that the financial side of things is in order.

Golf cards deal in numbers. Play the perfect hole or scramble a par, both cards say four shots, both players are in the same position. The scorebook says you got a fifty, not that it was streaky, that you were dropped twice or that half the runs came off the edge. Dive, convert the penalty, the records show you won one-nil.

Sport is for pragmatists, do whatever it takes, play the referee, play at the edge of what's allowed. Never been booked or sent off? I don't want you playing alongside me. Bad tempered? Nasty? Foul mouthed? Aggressive? Not ideal, but welcome to the team.