TNT!

I had just been reading up on oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone", and then I saw Adrian Barath make his century. Adorable! The leap of joy, the being swept up and spun around in Dinesh Ramdin's arms, the salute to the crowd and the team, but the clincher of his place in Cricket Love history was his lean into Ramdin's chest—it bordered on a nuzzle—to go in for a second cuddle. I was combing the interwebs for pictures of the cuddles in particular and thought I had found one, but it turns out it was Barath engaged in yet another delightful cuddle in another game entirely. He can't help himself, he's Adrian Boris "Mr Oxytocin" Barath.

Adrian Barath & Lendl Simmo, 29th January 2009 (WI vs England) (AP/AndresLeighton (c))

It was a long way from Peter Roebuck's polite (?) inquiry of Fazeer Mohammed on Day 1 as to whether Barath and Ramdin's background was middle class or, rather, perhaps, "peasant". Oh Peter. Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter. Oh Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter. What will I do with you?

A more palatable moment in Grandstand camp was when Ponting dropped Travis Dowlin off Mitchell Johnson, which yielded this clipped exchange:

Roebuck (I think): Uncharacteristic.
Maxwell: Most.

Quite!

And I was glad to see that Nathan Hauritz has not lost his flair.

A shame about, well, the rest.

Laird of the Lairs

I jumped up and down and clapped my hands and hooted when I saw Warnie leading the pack out onto the ground in the Australian Cricketers' Association XI v Australian XI T20 game last night. And hooted pretty much every time he was shown on screen—because of joy, of course, but also no small amount of hilarity.

Warnie, you are such a Lair. You are a Hilarious Lair. You are Laird of the Lairs. "Lair" is apparently an Australia-specific slang term, and I'm not surprised given people like Warnie wandering around.

Let me count the ways. I think he's been dyeing his eyelashes for a while, but is it possible a little eyebrow-waxing has entered the picture? On top of the blonde-tipping, yeah-yeahing, teeth-whitening, sun-bedding (would Warnie go the fake tan or the full carcinogen-rich approach? I suspect the latter—it could after all be a full-body nicotine stain…) and my flatmate read that striking shiny smoothness as assisted by the botulinum toxin: hardly unlikely.

I mock not, of course. I delight in.

Other things from the night:

Generation X Captain Warnie's recurring "Noice…" vs Generation Y Captain Clarke's recurring "Awesome…"

Healy on Lee Carseldine's tremendous 6 at the beginning of over 14: "Look at the contact, look at the carry, look at the camerawork…"

And who was that hollow-eyed young man from a Flannery O'Connor novel that bowled the last over? Nathan Rimmington, taking Movember's mission to raise awareness of male depression and wasting diseases to a whole new level.

Getty Images (c) 2009

Panna cotta-shaped

They had to express the Spirit of Christmas in two courses, and I’m not sure why Katich’s collapsed panna cotta—whose overall effect was, in his own words, “Depressing. And disappointing.”—didn’t count as a rather astute and modern interpretation of the theme.

But it didn’t, so Katich is the first Celebrity Masterchef semi-finalist to go, but not without leaving us with an appropriate analogy the next time a batting order goes disastrously wobbly.