Being quite excessively excited about:

1 First game of the season on Saturday
2 Glamorgan sitting at top of their division of the County Championship ( after 1 game...and probably not any more as I type this)
3 Going bat shopping with my daughter after her posh new Kookaburra cracked


In no particular order

I am tempted to add a reference to the start of the IPL here. I don't really mind it . In fact when I am away with work, turn on the TV in some mediocre provincial hotel when I've got a spare hour or so, and find the middle of the second innings on, it is a perfectly diverting way of spending an hour or so. I've often thought all the criticism of T20 and the IPL is basically the same as used to be said about 40 over (indeed all limited over) cricket and the old Sunday League , which latter seems to be turned into a treasure of the game by the most reactionary of pundits - the same people who were bemoaning it as the ruin of the game 30 years ago. Maybe more on that another time.

Clerihew corner- the Du Plessis edition

Faf
Is a laugh
But his sense of humour is nothing like as silly as,
That of....


Nah, got nothing....

Clerihew corner

Ravi Jadeja
Is not one for a wager.
When he needs cash,
He charges for photos of him twirling his moustache.

Clerihew corner

Virat Kohli,
Scores quickly,not slowly,
And he is certainly regarded as a monumental pain,
By Dale Steyn.

Watching Sarah Taylor

I don't think I have seen a cricketer so far ahead if everyone else on the pitch. Athletically she makes A B De Villiers look like Eddie Hemmings  (alright slight exaggeration) and she generally comes across  in her play like the good bigger kid forced to play the house match at school.

Actually now I think of it the Taylor/De Villiers comparison isn't such a bad one.

AB did risk undermining my life long dislike of keen South African cricketers (let's be honest that sentence probably works without the word "keen" in it)  when he bowled an over in a test match against India last year. The Übermensch trotted in and sent down the rankest , round arm middle aged village dobbers I've seen on a first class pitch. I've never warmed so quickly to a sportsman.

Adding to the list

My birthday last week. Really miserable time in work led to the Mrs allowing me to spend my birthday money on a new bat. Used  it without being knocked in once in the nets- very pleased! Bit naughty I know but still...

In case you are wondering it's an Adidas (you didn't see that coming did you bat snobs?) badged for the Little Master. Light as a feather but bigger edges than the Mjolnir and with a mess o ' grains. What brought it on was using the old 1990s Gn in the nets the week before for a change and realising (a) how much nicer noise the ball makes when I hit it with that than the Newberry and (b) how much too heavy for me the GN is and was. That got my eye roving, as did the range of new kit my fellow tight middle aged cynics like me have started to turn up to nets with, and here I am shacked up with something new. At least I didn't have to smuggle it in past the wife and children, keep our liaisons secret etc.

Alan Ross

“Walking into the small cramped offices of the magazine was a revelation for me. Books everywhere, of course, but there were two dogs sprawled under his desk, and big vivid modern art on the walls. Alan was an unchangingly youthful, tanned, dark-haired figure even though he must have been in his mid-50s then. He took me to an Italian restaurant and we drank powerful cocktails. It was impossible not to be smitten. There was a sophisticated raffishness and glamour about him as well – nothing seedy or earnest. He owned racehorses. He loved women and travel. He had known Evelyn Waugh and Dylan Thomas and Ian Fleming. He was a poet and a brilliant writer on cricket.” 

This is my fellow Jesubite William Boyd's description of meeting Alan Ross.  I have long had a suspicion that Ross would turn out to be one of those writers who would got better the longer one went without reading him. Not strictly true as I had read "watching Benaud bowl" in some forgotten anthology , but I had not read any of the prose. I have just splashed out on "Australia 55" for the Kindle- partly after chancing on Gideon Haigh's piece on  the book on cricinfo.  I've not actually started it yet but will post my review when I've read it. 

I was going to say that the quote from Boyd doesn't really add anything of meaning to this piece. In fact it was the overwhelming aroma of the world and works of Simon Raven that it evoked that persuaded me to buy the Ross book when I chanced on it- even more than the piece from St Gideon I mentioned above.