Please do not make fun of my deep square leg

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The weekend begins, and while I seem never to stop working, the TV turns only to sport…

Am trying not to blog excessively re cricket, since I don’t want you to hurt your forehead when it bangs into your keyboard as you suddenly drop into deep slumber.

But holiest of holy crap, South Africa had an amazing One Day International against Oz today. I saw the whole deal via DirecTV, TiVo, and lots of fast-forwarding, and it was a heck of a show:

  • The best performance by any bowler in South African ODI history (Makhaya Ntini, 6 for 22).
  • The biggest victory over Australia in South African ODI history (196 runs).
  • The 4th-worst defeat in Oz’ ODI history, and the worst in almost 20 years.

Granted, Oz was missing three of their (I almost wrote "our" — still) best players, and the Newlands in Cape Town is apparently always hard on the team batting second. But wow. I’ve seen autopsies that were a fairer fight.

I’m working late tonight, so for company I’ve got NZ against the Windies from Eden Park right now. (My big Friday night!) This has the makings of another strange match: the Windies, chasing 234 runs, seem to be attempting not to win, but to lose just slightly less horribly as Australia did. So far, they’ve scored seven runs in the first nine overs. This isn’t just care with the new ball; a few more overs of this, and it’s surrender. At this rate, they’ll lose by… (doing a little math) only 195 runs.

So there. That’s exactly one run better than Oz got killed by.

UPDATE: The West Indies roared back delightfully, beginning about two seconds after I finished this post, and finally won the match with two balls left, something all men aspire to, despite the trouser-dropping (literally) fielding efforts of New Zealand’s Lou Vincent, who lost his pants while skidding along the turf after successfully diving to stop a ball from reaching the boundary. After seeing Vincent hop up and throw the ball back in with his knickers around his ankles, all while keeping a straight face, the Kiwi crowd gave him a long standing ovation. Well deserved, I say.

And somehow, people can think cricket is boring.

PS — incidentally, cricket is hugely important to the subcontinent where Bush is now photo-opping his way out of embarrassing headlines at home. Imagine all U.S. sports sort of rolled into one, and that seems to be what the sport means to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as far as I can tell.

Naturally, Imran Khan, former captain of the Pakistan cricket squad (and about as famous there as Michael Jordan is here), has been placed under house arrest for the duration of Bush’s visit. Khan is now a highly-visible member of parliament and opposition leader who says things like this:

The problem is that we have a parasitical ruling elite. Their whole object of coming into power is not to help the people. The whole object is to actually grab power and pander to certain interests… The transfer of resources is actually going from the poor to the rich and hence the gap between the poor and the rich is increasing by the day. You have Musharraf talking about 6% growth rates, but actually poverty is increasing…

Sound like a familiar complaint? Khan’s not perfect by any stretch, but (like hundreds of millions of others) he certainly espouses a brand of Islam that leads you to build hospitals, fight for equality, and work for peace.

So, yes, like clockwork, Bush and Musharraf must again display their true commitment to freedom, and consistent with Bush’s vision of how "democratic" governments behave, of course they lock the man up. He’s a grave threat, obviously.

This will make us so many new friends.