From deviantArt.com.

Parallels are hard to draw between sports, but imagine an NBA game where both sides suddenly score 200 points, or a mile race where two runners sprint to the finish line in 3:40, or an NFL game where running backs on both teams rack up 300 yards.

Something like that happened this weekend. I don’t know what it says about this site, but I’m getting a ton of mail about it.

So I finally got around to watching the TiVo of what several emailers told me was possibly the greatest one-day cricket match ever. It didn’t disappoint.

There’s a psychological phenomenon we all know about, and it’s a huge, cool thing to embrace. I’d butcher any detailed discussion — I am an expert in nothing whatsoever — but we’ve all heard quotes about how once a mind has expanded to embrace a new idea, it can never snap back to its old size. And we’ve all sometimes surprised ourselves occasionally by coming through at work or in school or in a crisis against what look like impossible odds. In all of sport, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a greater demonstration than what just happened.

Three decades since the One Day International was introduced, no team had ever once scored 400 runs in a match; the figure had been approached only a few times, with maybe the same frequency as an American baseball players flirt with the .400 batting mark.

This last weekend, Oz played South Africa in Johannesburg. And Australia, batting first, went out and blasted 434 runs, obliterating the existing record. It was breathtaking. Even the South African fans had to applaud. But as this was 100-plus runs more than any team in he history of the game had ever successfully chased, the match was obviously over.

Except it wasn’t. The South Africans, with nothing to lose, batted like they had nothing to lose. An hour later, they were actually far ahead of the Australians’ pace. So they kept at it, banging away with an aggression they’d never before even tried. Pretty soon, the record that looked like it might stand for many years… lasted just a little less than four hours. South Africa scored 438, and 32,000 fans at the New Wanderers Stadium went bananas.

Naturally, my TiVo stopped recording during the second-to-last ball. AAAAAAAAAUUUUUGH! So I had to read about the ending online. But still. Cool as hell.

Incidentally, you might wonder if the bowling was all just crap that day or if this was in the world’s puniest park or maybe the fielding was all rubbish, but nope. The stadium is a bit smallish, but cricket matches have been held there (from what I read — I’m new to this passion) since the 1950s, and nobody ever got near these numbers before. And as to the bowling, yes, Mick Lewis actually put up the worst numbers in history — I really do think John Howard himself couldn’t have been much worse — but Nathan Bracken had the best day of his career. And while Bracks did drop one ball in the field quite badly — does he know that he has fingers, and he’s allowed to use them? — both sides made a number of remarkable catches all day, diving for balls, one-handing line drives, yanking down flies at the boundary, and pulling in sinkers just inches from the turf.

Nope, the batting really was that amazing. And so sports sections in newspapers in not just Oz, but South Africa and India and Kenya and England and Trinidad and New Zealand and the rest of the cricket-playing world are already discussing how the game might henceforth be played with an entirely new set of expectations.

Granted, cricket may not be your thing. But surprising yourself by doing something mind-blowing and cool probably is. Setting impossible goals and then reaching them is a thing people do somewhere on Earth every day.

So, you may ask: how does this apply to politics, hunger, war, global warming, etc.?

Simple: however you imagine it does.

UPDATE: In the 5-day test which followed this post, Australia crushed South Africa handily.  The South African batsmen batted lazily, their footwork perhaps adversely affected by their ODI experience.  Their concentration in the field was positively dreadful as well.  They blamed some of this on the different ground conditions in Cape Town, but that had nothing to do with their footwork or ability to catch balls batted directly into their hands.  I’m not sure what this means, but it looked more like a group psychological problem as much as anything else.  Fascinating.

I turn my back for a few days to get my book through copyediting, and what happens?

Republicans with evil twins.

Self-healing mine fields.

Hell in a handbasket.

This latter is actually a really cool book. But still I swear…

More posts as I get this desk cleaned of scratch paper, reference books, and blue pencil shavings…

Only light coatings of bloggity goodness for about five more days.  Busy.  Also, there are days I almost can’t look.

Glanced at Google News this morning, and for some reason, the sheer horror of where we are right now really hit me.  Here’s one random day’s news, all of which has now become oddly routine (most of the following, including the first link in every entry, comes straight from the Google News front page):

Iraq: further descent into madness.  Mass hangings by the government.  Even the U.S. State Department admits to death squads in the Iraqi police your tax dollars are helping support.  Saddam’s old torture hole Abu Ghraib is still open, years after it should have been shut down.  But Bagram, the old Soviet machine shop in Afghanistan where U.S.-held prisoners detained without trial have been tortured with mock executions, will stay open.

Next stop: Iran.  With whose army, I have no idea.

Meanwhile, wire reports claim that the Dubai company is bailing on the deal to hand over security at 21 key U.S. ports.  Bush’s bizarre insistence has been weird enough, but the inability of the media to notice that the deal was not for six ports, as you keep seeing — the deal was for twenty-one — is nothing short of amazing.   Any reporter who can’t get that basic fact right two weeks into the story doesn’t deserve a job.  Collect ’em all…

The GOP-controlled Congress is ravaging food health and safety labeling.  And ethics reform?  Are you serious?

In business, the U.S. trade deficit sets yet another new record.

In health, bird flu is about to reach the U.S.  Incidentally, despite that fact that scientists have tracked the virus for years and it has the potential to kill many millions of people, the U.S. government has done little to prepare until very recently.  A massive Katrina may await us.

In the national pastime, the game’s greatest home run hitter has been gorked to the gills on go-juice, something everyone with eyeballs has understood for years.  He’ll just keep on playing, his teammates will close ranks, and nothing will probably happen.  Which is a perfect emblem for the times.

Was it always like this?  Was it really?

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:

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.