Parliament of soils

I couldn’t get back into the game after the rain delay yesterday, but I did enjoy, during same rain delay, a chat between Drew Morphett and Ravi Shastri. The topic of sledging came up among general reflections on the Test tour, and Shastri said that he encouraged young Indian players to welcome the sledging they might receive in Australia, as “it can only improve your vocabulary.” The highlight however was when Drew asked him if he could share any memorable sledging moments on air and Shastri demurred on the grounds that the exchanges involved “unparliamentary language”.

Spectacular turn of phrase. And not just a turn of phrase, I discovered: parliaments all over the world have officially deemed certain words or phrases to be “inappropriate for use in the House whilst it is in session”, by the same stroke creating a valuable resource for sledgers with sledging block.

Wiki provides a list of invective by country and date, with Canada featuring prominently for some reason (they do seem a bit strict) and New Zealand contributing some impressive antipodean colour. I take pleasure in imagining some of the following repartée:

Hilfenhaus: You, sir, came into the world by accident (Canada, 1886) and are lacking in intelligence (Canada, 1934).

Kohli: And you, sir, are a bag of wind (Canada, 1878) inspired by forty-rod whiskey (Canada, 1881).

MS Dhoni: Trained seal (Canada, 1961)

Michael Clarke: Highway bandit (Norway, 2009)

MS Dhoni: Pompous ass (Canada, 1967)

Michael Clarke: Piece of shit (Canada, 2011)

Haddin: You have the energy of a tired snail returning home from a funeral (New Zealand, 1963)

Laxman: Yeah? Your brains could revolve inside a peanut shell for a thousand years without touching the sides (New Zealand, 1949)

Tony Greig: 臭罌出臭草 (Hong Kong, 1996: "foul grass grows out of a foul ditch", )

Tom Parker: 仆街 (Hong Kong, 2009: literally "stumble on street", akin to the English "go die") 

In the light of recent switch hitting events, I particularly like the potential uses for girouette, meaning "weathervane" and banned from Quebec parliament in 2007.

Ashwin: You, sir, are a girouette (Québec 2007)

Dave Warner: Sticks and stones, you dim-witted saboteur (Canada, 1956)

Ashwin: Oh, fuddle duddle (Canada, 1971, euphemistic substitution for "fuck off"*).

Wiki says that in 1997, the terms “liar” and “dumbo” were ruled unacceptable in Australian parliament, but on the whole you can’t read the Wiki article on unparliamentary language without coming away with the impression that what is unparliamentary language in the rest of the world is Australian parliament’s meat and potatoes. More specifically the impression that Paul Keating’s advisors had standing instructions to alert him the moment an item was banned from Irish parliament so he could splice together tirades wholly from their cutting-room floor. To wit: brat, buffoon, chancer, communist, corner boy, coward, fascist, fatty, gurrier, guttersnipe, hypocrite, rat, scumbag, scurrilous speaker, yahoo. Either that or Irish parliament took PJK as its model of disorderliness.

* This is what Pierre Trudeau effectively claimed to have said when accused of mouthing the words "fuck off" at the opposition, and this incident would be a valuable defence for players against Channel 9's lip-reading exercises.

T20 x 2

T20 I

I only heard about the David Warner “shot that rang out across the world” on the car radio Friday morning. Switch-hitting, eh? I always thought Mickey Arthur sounded like the name of a baseball coach. I’m in the “for” camp, naturally, because I can’t resist a showman, the freakier the better, but I will be interested to see whether T20 gives the English language “switch hitting” as a viable alternative to the football-inspired “shifting the goalposts” and the… cross-country horse-riding-inspired “swapping horses midstream”.

I also heard that Jim Maxwell isn’t pleased about it, but he has been a bit cranky this season generally. He was practically apoplectic at the Gabba about a notice on the board warning spectators against pitch invasion. This kind of killjoy authoritarianism is apparently the root cause of the decline of Test cricket audiences, he was really angry. I think he’s grieving Roebuck, and maybe he feels he has to stand up for the Spirit of Cricket “for two”, but he was always the more conservative of the pair, and maybe Roebuck was in fact a moderating influence.*

*I was about to get around to asking “Whatever to happened to Glenn Mitchell?”, which I have been meaning to do all summer, and jeez, I completely missed this. Get better, Glenn, I miss you.

T20 II

Well, Aaron Finch, obviously. Even while he was batting I thought he had a strapping “New Zealand” heft about him and indeed he appears to be a delicious amalgam of all of the charms of the New Zealand cricket team, including, unexpectedly, Daniel Vettori’s glasses.

PS. I like this picture on his Wiki page. No, really, not that, it's a really good kinetic shot - that baseball aesthetic again - and I find that cricket photography rather struggles with the "action" shot.

PPS. If you read down his cricinfo page, you'll see he got chucked out of the cricket academy for not keeping his room tidy. Behave.