How rude...

The rudeness of non-cricket folk

If I rang a non-cricket person, during, say, their mother’s funeral or their daughter’s wedding, I would say ‘sorry to interrupt, can you talk…’ before blurting out what I needed to say.

So how does anyone feel it acceptable to ring between 11:00 and 19:00 during an Ashes Test Match without abjectly apologising and excusing the interruption, or at least confining their trivia to before the start of play, and the lunch and tea intervals?

After the reverence shown to the Olympics, where the centrepiece, mainstream events are, actually, the already minority athletics sports, with the outer zone two, three and four jobs becoming ever more minority (because all the Olympic drum-beaters regularly follow and take part in pistol shooting, synchronised swimming, and leotard ribbon-waving, don’t they?) where’s the respect the proper national sports demand?

I can name award-winning films without any Googling: Fire in Babylon (cricket); Fever Pitch (football); Invictus, Living with Lions (rugby), that are enthralling and magnificent. There’s any number of baseball and American Football films, too.

Don’t, please don’t, quote Chariots of Fire. Cool Runnings, maybe.

There’s loads of good golf films too.

None that I recall about dressage, modern pentathlon, or clay pigeon catapult shooting (I made that up, but wait a few years and see).

So. It’s all publicly available info. Five days for a test match, starts on day one, finishes before, or at the latest, at the end of day five. 11:00 kick off (unless her majesty Mrs Kebab horse-fancier delays things with her baloney), 13:00 lunch, 40 minutes availability. 13:40 to 15:40, afternoon session. Then twenty minutes available during tea. Back on at 16:00 to 18:00, or 18:30, depending on over-rate and other factors.

All these are subject to adjustment according to the state of play, so you need to keep abreast of what’s going on.

If you’re not keeping abreast of what’s going in the test match, why on earth would I want to talk to you in any case?

No stomach for sugar

The Guardian had pieces about how rubbish Alan Sugar is, suggesting that he is now a full-time pretend business bod specialising in dispensing advice on what he’s no longer any good at. He should, they said, go on The Dragon’s Den.

I’ve never seen as much as a microsecond of the Apprentice, or of the Dragon’s Den, and I’d rather, and this is the only way I have of describing my antipathy to such trash, squirt lemon juice into my eyeballs. [Or something like that].

When my revolution comes, anyone who says ‘Strictly’ as if I should know what the hell they’re on about, along with the participants, producers, viewers, everyone in any way linked with or fans of the apprentice or dragons den will be lined up and shot.

Starting with that sawn-off Tottenham tosspot Sugar.