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.