17th March 2007. St Patrick's Day: when David arose to upset Goliath not once, but twice.
Ireland beat Pakistan and sent the 4th ranked team in ODI standings going home prematurely.
Bangladesh pulled off a famous upset to beat their more well established neighbours India.
The scores do not matter. Nobody expected the minnows to upset the apple-cart.
PS: Andre, do you know of this Irish bowler called Andre Botha? He took 2 wickets against Pakistan!
Yes, I know him, he's South African actually, but playing cricket in Ireland. Just rushed in quickly, won't have access to the internet for most of the time for the next two weeks, but following the World Cup, and will chat again when I'm back! _________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
Shame, Andre. South Africa failed to match Australia's rpo.
I feel very sorry for all the bowlers of yesterday's clash between the Proteas and Australia. Especially Shaun Pollock who is made to look like an amateur instead of the top one-day bowler he actually is. In the end, his economy rate resembles that of a schoolboy cricketer playing in a school league match. _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
Yes... dammit!! Makes our road to the final a lot more difficult. _________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
Australia are a ruthless outfit. Allow them to bat first and they'd impose themselves mercilessly on you. True, South Africa managed to successfully change the highest number of runs set by Oz in ODIs last year, but all it took was bad luck (read: Graeme Smith's cramps) as well as a lose of concentration (read: AB De Villiers) before the wickets start tumbling down.
Currently, West Indies are replying to the imposing 300 odd runs set by Australia yesterday. They are now 42 for 3. They need a run rate of 8.6 per over to overcome Australia. It is looking ominous for those amongst us who are praying for a credible side to throw Australia off their high horse. _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
I haven't the slightest clue about the sport of cricket, but godspeed to the English and or Spanish speaking countries, and all others be damned! _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
Since cricket is essentially a sport played between English-speaking countries, you are wishing all the participant nations good luck, Porthos!
Maybe the ICC needs to organise a cricket tour in the USA in order to spread the gospel to the heathen masses. Perhaps we can ask David Beckham to show you his cover drives as well once he has established himself in LA Galaxy. But then again, Beckham did once mention in an interview that he did not play much cricket in school. _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
England beaten by nine wickets, Kevin Pietersen out for a measly three runs!! Well done South Africa!!!!!
And enjoy watching the semi final on TV, Kevin, and remember, you could've been there..... _________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
I tried to watch bits and pieces of the match, cognisant of the fact that I am in the midst of a heavy exam schedule and also fully aware that yesterday's match represented England's one and only last chance to sneak into the semi-finals.
Alas, it was not to be.
The first few overs went for maidens. Shaun Pollock's metronomic bowling was simply amazing. Watching Michael Vaughan desist from giving the ball a good whack was like having my teeth pulled. For crying out loud, if the England captain doesn't have the balls to hit that goddamned ball, he should resign immediately.
And he shuffled his feet like a geriatric as the runs accumulated at a snail's pace. After 10 overs, England were still at less than 50 runs with two wickets already down. I switched off the telly at that juncture.
I noticed that Ntini was dropped from yesterday's match. Wouldn't it be a rather unpopular decision, considerating the landscape of post-apartheid Africa where it is better for both politics and for the health of the game to have a bit of racial diversity? True, there were still some Coloured players on the field yesterday, but an otherwise all-white South African side is a bit of anomaly in this day and age.
Speaking of Kevin Pietersen, I am immensely disappointed with him. But I suppose we cannot blame him too much as he is probably still furious with himself for being caught so cheaply - by his archnemesis Graeme Smith, no less.
So the remaining matches are purely academic now. The following sides are through to the semi-finals: Australia, NZ, Sri Lanka and South Africa.
In the beginning of the tournament, I confidently predicted an Antipodean final with Australia versus New Zealand.
But I have since changed my mind. It'd be an Australia-Sri Lanka final. This time round, Sri Lanka would have Lasith Malinga, Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas raring to go. I can't wait.
PS: I don't think South Africa can make it to the final. This has been a strange World Cup, what with England beating Bangladesh which beat South Africa which beat Sri Lanka which beat Bangladesh. And what this about the dubious possibility of England going home having beaten only one Test playing nation? Come on, even Ireland had beaten two! _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
I noticed that Ntini was dropped from yesterday's match. Wouldn't it be a rather unpopular decision, considerating the landscape of post-apartheid Africa where it is better for both politics and for the health of the game to have a bit of racial diversity? True, there were still some Coloured players on the field yesterday, but an otherwise all-white South African side is a bit of anomaly in this day and age.
Not a bit of controversy over his being left out (although some politician desperate for attention might raise concerns later...)
Quote:
Speaking of Kevin Pietersen, I am immensely disappointed with him. But I suppose we cannot blame him too much as he is probably still furious with himself for being caught so cheaply - by his archnemesis Graeme Smith, no less.
Oh, I don't know... we rather enjoyed his performance....
Quote:
PS: I don't think South Africa can make it to the final. This has been a strange World Cup, what with England beating Bangladesh which beat South Africa which beat Sri Lanka which beat Bangladesh. And what this about the dubious possibility of England going home having beaten only one Test playing nation? Come on, even Ireland had beaten two!
If they play like they played England, they'll take the cup. If they play like in most of the tournament, they can start packing.
And speaking of Ireland - hats off to them!! They deserve a special trophy of some kind!! They showed us what sport is really about! I found myself cheering for them in every match (except against SA, of course). Of course, they wrre trained by a South African.... and had a South African in their team as well...
And if you'll permit me, I'd just like to say again....
GOODBYE, KEVIN PIETERSEN!!!!!! ENJOY TOUR TRIP "HOME"!
_________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
Johannesburg - South African skipper Graeme Smith and his "merry men" have been toasted by the South African media on Wednesday after a blitz on the England team saw them burst into the CWC semi-finals.
A day after being lambasted for partying into the wee hours of the morning following a woeful loss to New Zealand on Saturday, South Africa's press said the Proteas deserved a few drinks after their emphatic nine-wicket victory.
"Proteas drunk with success. Smith's merry men make it to semis as last round is called," read the front page headline of the Star newspaper.
The Beeld newspaper quipped that Smith had served the English team their final drink.
"If this is how the South Africans play cricket after partying, they can do so after every match," Beeld said.
While reports of a drinking binge by the Proteas - who have had a few wobbly performances in the world tournament - had triggered heavy criticism, forgiveness was quick as a World Cup win came back into the team's sights.
A "sobering" thought indeed, said the Star.
"There would have been scores of supporters lining up to buy the South African team a drink last night," read the newspaper.
"After all the criticism they've endured, they would have surely raised a glass or three to their victory over England in Barbados yesterday - and who would deny them that?"
The English team faced an unstoppable onslaught at Kensington Oval on Tuesday, as fast bowler Andrew Hall took what the Citizen newspaper termed a "Five-wicket Hall", and South Africa surpassed England's paltry 154 total with more than 30 overs to spare.
As one South African commentator quipped during the match, the only thing England won was the toss.
Their decision to go in and bat first on the lively Caribbean pitch, which Hall said was very similar to South African conditions, was said to have backfired horribly.
The South African media, which had played up rivalry between skipper Smith and England's South Africa-born batsman Kevin Pietersen did not let Smith's small victory - catching Pietersen on three runs - go unmentioned.
"For a change, Smith won the war of words as well," said the Beeld newspaper.
Smith was unabashed about his team's achievements, saying: "Our skills were superb, and we made our own luck."
The captain himself put on a superb performance, hammering 89 runs off 58 balls, including 13 fours.
Having qualified for the fourth place in the semi-finals, all predictions are that South Africa will play Australia in Wednesday's match in St Lucia.
Beeld said the time had come for the Proteas to settle the score with Australia who had an easy victory over them during the first round in St Kitts.
_________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
Kevin Pietersen acts as a barometer of England's performance in general: when he plays well, he galvanises the entire batting order. When he plays badly, England are reduced to a toothless outfit.
I am very disappointed with Andrew Flintoff's form with the bat. He is in fact no longer an all-rounder if you pause to consider his batting average. He still remains a world-class seamer though.
Currently, the Windies are playing Bangladesh. The Windies are 16 for 2. Not very promising for the longevity of Carribean cricket. _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
Ireland's performance has been a bit of a revelation. They have a few world class batsmen: Boyd Rankin has shown himself to be a Richard Hadlee in the making. The O'Brien brothers werre mercurial and occasionally brilliant. William Portersfield is a poor man's alternative to Matthew Hayden but hey, he's much better than the geriatric Michael Vaughan whose batting average of 16 and a strike rate of god knows what suggests that he is more of a tail-ender instead of the opening batsman he is.
Breaking News, by the way. Duncan Fletcher would step down after England's last match against the West Indies on Sunday.
His shelf life has expired. Vive la Revolution! _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
England World Cup campaign shambolic and feeble
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April 18, 2007 - 9:59AM
South Africa's captain Graeme Smith celebrates his team's win as England's captain Michael Vaughan walks forward to congratulate him after their World Cup cricket Super Eights match in Bridgetown.
Photo: Andy Clark
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AdvertisementEngland's World Cup performance was branded shambolic and feeble by the country's press after a crushing nine-wicket defeat by South Africa knocked them out of the tournament on Tuesday.
Coach Duncan Fletcher's days in the job are numbered, papers said, after his side struggled throughout their stay in the Caribbean, with Bangladesh the only Test team they beat.
"If pride does not make him fall on his sword after a 5-0 Ashes whitewash and a miserable World Cup, he should be sacked by the ECB," wrote The Sun, on a page taken up largely by the headlines "Sunken Duncan" and "World Cup shambles".
The Times wrote that Michael Vaughan's career as one-day captain was likely to go the same way as Fletcher's after England's "feeble performance".
"The truth was simply confirmed: that their World Cup hopes have never been realistic," the newspaper wrote in its Wednesday edition. "England looked dazed, defenceless and defeated."
Vaughan said after today's match that England had deserved to be booed off and that the team had to hold up their hands and accept all the criticism that came their way.
REUTERS
(Yes, I'm enjoying this...
- especially picturing KP packing for home... ) _________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
West Indies won Bangladesh by 99 runs but this belies the fact that the Windies opening order struggled and failed dismally once again to rise up to the challenge and it was only with the appearance of Sarwan at the crease that the run rate started to pick up. His crucial partnership with fellow Indo-Guyanese Chanderpaul and skipper Lara helped to lift the target to a defendable 230 runs.
Speaking of Brian Charles Lara, a great sporting icon is hanging up his boots after his last international outing against England on Saturday. The world will mourn the loss of a genius.
Brian Charles Lara has become bulkier over the years but his form with the bat is still remarkably consistent. Here is a young Lara hitting his best innings of 501 (10 sixes and 62 fours) for Warwickshire against Durham back in 1994:
It is a travesty that he has never won a world cup. _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
And so it's Sri Lanka through to the final! Now for the other semi final, South Africa vs Australia. _________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
Sorry about that, Andre. Well, South Africa can still look forward to the rugby world cup for a spot of sporting glory this year. All is not lost.
But there is a reasonable possibility of Australia completing a 'Double' this year by winning both the cricket and rugby world cups. Barring the in-form Kiwis and the Gallic hosts, of course.
I watched the South African innings and it was disappointing. Admittedly, I didn't harbour any sort of expectations whatsoever. Logic dictates that the Australians have no chinks in their armour; they have a very long and deep batting line-up; their fielding is capital; their bowling, while maybe inferior to the Sri Lankans, are still rated highly in the tournament.
But still, to have the Proteas bundled out for 149 all out is a bit of a body blow. The Aussies are good. It's Glenn McGrath's world cup swansong and the entire team seemed energised to do their best to give him a mighty send-off.
But I made the correct prediction when I foresaw the eventual clash between Australia and Sri Lanka. Southern Hemisphere v Northern Hemisphere. People of European extraction versus Asians. Old Commonwealth v New. The list of possible dichotomies is endless, but I'd leave it to the inventive media to come out with more.
I am rooting for a Lankan victory, of course. The only reservation I have about Sri Lanka is their batting order. Mahela Jayawardene have shown us a superb innings that left me purring with pleasure towards the end. But I am grimly aware that their batting line-up is not very deep and that the bowlers basically start after Dilshan or Russel Arnold are gone. It is vital that the top and middle order grind out out for the full 50 overs for Sri Lanka to stand a decent chance of knocking the Aussies off their pedestral.
As for the bowling, I am counting on the unorthodox slingy action of Lasith Malinga and the doosra of Muralitharan to bamboozle the Aussie batsmen. Throw in Chaminda Vaas who is pretty good with the new ball and potential match winners in Fernando and Dilshan and Sri Lanka are off to their second world cup!
God knows how they need it to unite their divided homeland. _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
An investigation for the BBC Panorama programme, to be screened tonight, suggests that the Pakistan cricket coach objected to strict Muslim team mates who seemed "more interested in praying not playing" at the World Cup in Jamiaca.
Jamaican police said the details of that poison have not been revealed because they offer a "significant lead" to finding the identity of the killer.
Mr Woolmer, 58, was murdered on March 18 shortly after Pakistan were eliminated from the World Cup following a shock defeat by Ireland.
He was found unconscious in his hotel room.
The programme will broadcast the last image of Mr Woolmer, captured on CCTV cameras, before he died.
They show him as he entered a lift at the Pegasus Hotel on his way back to his room on the 12th floor.
The Pakistan team's former media manager, PJ Mir, revealed there were clashes over the Pakistan team's priorities.
Several senior members of the squad had become members of the strict Muslim movement Tablighi Jamaat.
Mr Mir claimed: "Bob had his reservations that the boys, rather than focusing on the religious aspect they ought to be focusing more on cricket.
"He wasn't pleased when players were going out to say their prayers in the middle of the game... and a substitute was coming in. This continued. He was totally against it."
When Mr Mir blamed the team's poor performance on them focusing too much on religion he said his comments were greeted with anger. He claimed that a fatwah was issued against him, forcing him to flee the country.
The body of 58-year-old Mr Woolmer, a former England batsman, was returned at the weekend to his family home in Cape Town South Africa, where private funeral arrangements have been made.
Gill Woolmer, his wife, said she hoped the inquiry would uncover "who, what and when and why".
"That would put my mind at rest," she said.
_________________ "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." ---- Groucho Marx
Oh, no, no, no, that's old news. Here's the latest.
Quote:
'No evidence Woolmer was strangled'
05/05/2007 19:13 - (SA)
Islamabad - Pakistani investigators on Saturday submitted a report to the government on the death in March of cricket coach Bob Woolmer, concluding that there was no evidence that he was strangled as Jamaican police maintain, news reports said.
Two Pakistani officers sent to Jamaica also rejected claims that the coach was murdered during the Cricket World Cup because of his knowledge of crime syndicate involvement in cricketing fixtures.
"Nothing suggests that there has been any match fixing," an unnamed official at the Interior Ministry in Islamabad told Aaj television.
Tissue samples from Woolmer's body were sent to Britain for analysis, the official added. Jamaican police recently said his death may have resulted from a combination of poisoning and violence.
The Pakistani investigators arrived in Jamaica on April 10 and in collaboration with Scotland Yard and Jamaican police investigated the case for two weeks up to April 26.
Pakistan and the cricket world were shaken when police in Jamaica announced that Woolmer was murdered in his hotel room in Kingston, hours after the Pakistani team was knocked out of the World Cup by the Irish on March 17.
It was speculated that the 58-year-old coach was about to blow the whistle on match-fixing intrigues after a period of turbulence at the head of the team.
Players and managers came home from the West Indies days later than scheduled after members were required to undergo fingerprinting, DNA swabs and questioning by police.
Pakistani officials stressed that members of the squad were under no particular suspicion of involvement in the murder of Woolmer.
The Briton became the Pakistani coach in 2004 after a distinguished playing career in test match and one-day internationals for England. - Sapa-dpa
_________________ Toe ek jonk was, het ek al die antwoorde geken. Nou verstaan ek nie eens die vrae nie.
I am very disillusioned over the mishandling of the cricket world cup. That was why I had resolutely avoided all references to the fiasco in the newspapers and that explains why the recent revelations regarding the late Bob Woolmer is news to me.
It would not be wholly inaccurate to say that the first cricket World cup to be held in the Carribean began in tragedy and ended in farce. Hosting the World Cup for many West Indian countries was an onerous economic burden and many of their governments are now saddled with public debt that would surely rocket above 100%.
Nonetheless, there were a few tangible memories to be taken from the world cup. Lasith Malinga's four wickets in four consecutive balls; Matthew Hayden's 62 balls to reach a century; Gilly taking the wind out of Sri Lankan sails in the final; Ireland upsetting Pakistan and indirectly provoking the demise of Bob Woolmer; Bangladesh knocking India out and later causing an upset over the Proteas.
But the bad outweigh the good. Even on the pitch, Brian Lara's last international outing ended in a farce as he was inexplicably run out by a Marlon Samuel's miscall.
_________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
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Makes our road to the final a lot more difficult. 
But here it is: