Poms have selective memory of standards
COULD the Poms get over themselves already? They lost the first Ashes test because the other lot played superior cricket. That’s how sport works.
Not, it seems, if you wear three cowardly lions rampant on your chest. Then, if your name is James Anderson, you go blithering to the umpires about the nasty words Michael Clarke spat at you.
If you’re Andy Flower, who isn’t even a Pom — Zimbabwe must be so proud — you can’t see the hypocrisy in bleating about “standards” when, mere months ago, your own team’s standards sank to what the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Conn called “free-spirited urination” on the pitch at the Oval.
Would someone please smack these sad wastes of humanity on the head and tell them to grow the hell up?
AUSTRALIA’S newspapers haven’t shied away from taking the fight to the English.
Also in the Telegraph, Anthony Sharwood told readers what he really thought: “England, a nation led by a family which has never worked for a living, and where millions of people dutifully follow their example, is up to its usual tricks again today.
“That is, if you take the word ’England’ to mean the combined England and SA cricket team, and if you take the word ‘tricks’ to mean ‘whingeing’.”
Damn straight; go, you good thing.
NOT that all Aussies are made of such stern stuff. A veteran crime reporter, John Silvester, told a Melbourne radio station that, under Victoria law, criminal prosecution could follow if sledging of the kind heard at the Gabba sullied the Boxing Day test at the MCG.
“By any definition, the cricket field is a workplace because they are professional sportsmen,” he said.
“And those sort of comments would clearly be in breach of the [relevant] law, which is now a criminal offence for which you can now get up to 10 years’ jail. And I put it to you that if Channel Nine turn the stump cam down, and they heard it, they could be charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”
Once, cricket was a game of wit and wonder. Now, it is the revenge of the nerds.