Grab the hard hats ...

... It's Twenty20 season again :-)

After watching England batter the West Indies over the weekend, I'm moving into seeing my Going Home Times from work get dominated by the Twenty20 cup. Tonight's game is between Somerset and Warwickshire and we're already seeing the Howitzers make life dangerous for the crowd. They're playing at Taunton which is actually not too far away. Surprised they've got a game on cos it's been quite damp here.

Don't know if I'll actually get to see a game this year, as the Yorkshire games aren't on at convenient times for the family to go see one. I'm not too far from the Gloucestershire ground but for various reasons I won't be going to a game there. (Let's just say I get irritated when ignored and the Gloucestershire people completely ignored the works cricket club when we tried to organise a second season of pre-season nets there)

So :
Tonight - Somerset v Warwickshire, got my fingers crossed for Somerset as the local team, although I do keep an eye on Warwickshire cos I was born there.
Tomorrow - 7pm start, so I raid Sainsburys before the game starts.
Friday - Yorkshire v Lancashire - go Yorkshire !

And then we have two ICC World Twenty20 competitions, one for the men and another for the ladies. Looking forward to it, although the recorder in my cable TV box may end up screaming for mercy :-)

Curious how I'm looking forward to watching as much of the English and World Twenty20 games as I can but had almost total lack of interest in the IPL games I could have seen. I guess it's how "connected" you feel with the teams on show. I've followed the English leagues for a couple of decades now but know nearly nothing about the artificially set up IPL teams.

Got an interesting combination on show at the moment. The bowler's a fella called Max Waller who bowls legspin, with a livewire keeper called Craig Kieswetter. Legspin is a bowling discipline that is incredibly difficult to pull off. Whereas normal offspin gives just two options - turn in and no turn - legspin opens up incredible variation. The standard delivery will move in a bit in the air before turning away but with not much change in the bowling action you can do one that goes in (googly) and one that stays straight. Even more dangerous is the topspinner, which doesn't just go straight, it speeds up after bouncing. Very nasty. I caught out my village team skipper with one while messing around at the end of practice. I was practicing my spinners, he was looking to whack 'em. Out comes the topspinner, skipper goes for a Big Whack, ball rolls ... Old cliche is "You Miss, I Hit" and the stumps rattle.

I used to be able to bowl the basic legspin action but couldn't get it to do much more than turn in (googlies). So my offspin was a far better thing to develop as I could get that to turn in with accuracy and also had a vicious topspinner (it had a tendency to roll :-). I also had a couple of other weapons with my spin bowling. Never really used that in a game though cos my medium pace swing bowling was far more effective.

Those are days long gone now though, as my long term shoulder injury means bowling is not a good idea now. I can move through the action but there's a blockage in there that means :
a) it hurts ! (which means more damage is being done)
b) no accuracy whatsoever
It started out with my shoulder dislocation but I reckon it got finished off by me doing a Typical Bloke by not asking for help when installing my 28" CRT telly a few years ago. Yep - not particularly strong or big person attempting to drag a big telly out of it box and put it on a stand. (I'm also blonde and occasionally do Dumb Blonde things)

The other fella is the keeper, who's pulled off a couple of excellent stumpings in this game. With the indoor matches (see Blog Part 1 for some match reports :-) I used to do the wicket keeper's job as well as doing the captain thing and a little bowling. Keepers are always in the game and it's a fun job. Their role is to stand behind the stumps and catch anything that gets past the batsmen. They look to take catches but if the batsman isn't careful, they'll stump them. Fast reactions essential (or you miss things and it hurts less to catch cricket balls than drop them).

I used to be good enough in the indoor games to turn game results around with more than my fair share of stumpings, although I rarely did that job in outdoor games. I preferred to terrorize batsmen with speedy fielding from reasonably close. I'm a big too fat though nowadays to do much of that.

Hey ! I'm missing the game and it's almost half time ... One advantage of cricket watching is that it doesn't demand your full attention all of the time as you wait for something to happen. Instead, you can tap away at a keyboard for a while and look up as the bowler is running in. It's similar with baseball, look up when the pitcher throws, look away when a new hitter is coming out. So even though the game has inspired this post, I've not missed any of it :-)