Hiding behind the sofa

Yep.

In the tradition started by Daleks*, I'm considering hiding behind the sofa while watching the delayed coverage of the cricket.

*(incidentally, this post has made my car the top result for a non-box shaped vehicle on google searches for "tardis blue", although it has slipped down the page a little)

I've really enjoyed having the chance to chill out over the last couple of days. Definitely needed it. But cricket can be a far more tense game to watch than most people appreciate.

In football or rugby if the other team scores, it's not something irrevocable. Your side can march up the other side of the pitch and even it out. Not so in cricket, with every ball something can happen. And if it's your side that's lost a wicket, that's not something that can be got back in the game. If it's your star player, that's it for him.

Even at a target of under 100 and a decent batting side, it's not a dead cert that England will win. (They may have got the result by now but I'm 3 hours behind live). England have been rediscovering that talent for clutching defeat from the jaws of victory. Hell, I've been solely responsible for smashing through a tail and turning results around inside one over so I've seen it happen on a few occasions. Not any more though because my shoulder is too weak.

Or is it ... A little bit of shadow bowling, turning my arm over at about 60%, suggested that the mechanical hitch that destroyed my bowling action may have gone away ... Promising. But I need to bowl with a cricket ball to see what I might have available. I had lots of options with my bowling :

Long run or short run - I preferred bowling off the long run as it was less strain on the shoulder (and this was before I bust it). But the long run meant I had too much momentum to control more than just a couple of variations.

Short run - I could bowl every variation of finger spin (badly!) and even a bit of wristspin. Wrist spin is supposed to be legspin but mine always came in to the right hander instead of going away like they were supposed to. But yeah, if I bowled spin in a match I had huge variation to choose from, every ball in the over could be different and not just spin variation. I even had a doosra that was the only thing I could bowl for a while, never a carom ball though. But I had to put so much effort in I couldn't sustain it for long.

Long run - your momentum supplies the effort
Short run - your arm is sole source of the effort

And the longer run was far more effective anyway. Can't argue with figures like 10 overs for 9 runs (1 wicket but it was sooo tight I remember it), 9.4 overs for 6 wickets to win a game by 6 runs taking 3 wickets in my last over or what I did in my first game for the men's team : 4 overs 9 runs 4 wickets to win a game.

Good times. Definitely good times. I won the bowling trophy that year, getting more wickets than anyone else even though I played just 3 quarters of the season and hurt my back with several games to go. And my efforts helped push us towards runners up spot in the league that year. Batting is my strength now but I've never won a game with my own efforts with the bat. Saved them yeah (highlight being the second game I got hit on the head) but not been the star.

Yes - I've substituted "laptop and blogging" for "sofa" for my thing to hide behind. Cook and Trott are batting well at the moment but Strauss let it slip about 1 ball before I started writing this post.

What else ?

Mirror Mirror is a seriously cool film. By the power of late text messages, I ended up rapidly getting ready to sprint to the Mall on Thursday evening to meet up with Craziequeen, where I had my second pizza in 2 days (don't look at me like that ! The scales still say I'm SlinkyPete :-) ) before going on to watch a bit of magic. Let's just say there will be 2 copies of Mirror Mirror being bought by the Crazies who went to see this one. It's not the best film out there but it's huge fun and entertaining. Hopefully Hunger Games is as good, although that'll be an entirely different film.

Meh - Trott's gone, which has evaporated a bit of superstition from the other day.

And with that, it's about time to properly retreat behind that sofa before the cricket gets reaaaally tense.

But not before wishing my neighbour Cyberkitten a happy birthday :-)