Classic Tweets – Cricket Japan extend the ECB XI a Homeward Bound Invitation

“Dear @ECB_cricket, this might not be a great time, but as there’s room in your schedule, fancy a game in Japan on the way home? #challenge“

Tweeted by – @CricketJapan on 9 March 2015

Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff – The New King of Rock & Roll

Twenty20 cricket and Elvis impersonators are not things that naturally go together you would think.

Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff, former England cricket captain and Elvis enthusiast, thinks differently.

Check out his form whilst mic’d up during a Big Bash league game. Not a bad choice of material either.

On This Day…1921

1 March 1921

On this day in 1921 the Australian Cricket team completed the first ever clean sweep by Australia of an Ashes Test series winning 5-0, a feat not repeated for 86 years.

The 1920/21 Ashes Tour of Australia by the English Cricket team was the first after the Great War.  Australia fielded a strong young team captained by charismatic all rounder Warwick Armstrong.

Australia won the series 5-0 with appocryphal accounts of Armstrong resting his three strike bowlers and reading the newspaper during the final session of play in the fifth test.  According to legend he allowed the field to set itself and his part time bowlers to rotate at will whilst reading the newspaper which had blown across the ground.  When asked what he was doing he is said to have replied ‘I want to see who we’re playing.‘

The stuff of legend. 

On This Day…1975

25 February 1975

On this day in 1975 England quick Peter Lever bounced New Zealand quick Ewen Chatfield hitting him in the temple.  Chatfield collapsed onto the pitch clinically dead.

The 1974/5 tour of Australia and New Zealand was not a happy one for England.  They had been comprehensively beaten by a resurgent Australia spearheaded by fast men Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson and were not having the better of it in their struggle with the New Zealand Black Caps.  

In his Test debut at Eden Park in Auckland Number 11 Chatfield was putting up stubborn resistance with Geoff Howarth when England fast bowler Peter Leed decided to test him out with a bouncer.  This was the era before helmets and much of the modern protective gear worn today was available to players and the bouncer hit Chatfield on the temple.

Killer Quotes – Steve Waugh on holding on to catches.

“Mate, how does it feel to have dropped the World Cup”

Steve Waugh

Considered by some to be one of the most classic sledges in sporting folklore it is denied by Waugh that he ever uttered the words to Herschelle Gibbs after Gibbs dropped the catch which allowed Australia to tie the Semi-Final and for South Africa to be eliminated from the 1999 ICC Cricket World Cup on a countback.  Other players there that day swear they heard him say it.

That same year during the 1999 Rugby Union World Cup held in the United Kingdom when Australia eliminated South Africa in extra time via a Stephen Larkham field goal Steve Waugh is rumoured to have sent a congratulatory fax to John Eales, the then Wallabies Captain, in which Waugh made the observation that the only thing more satisfying than beating South Africa in extra time to advance to the World Cup final was to tie with them and eliminate them on a countback.

I guess Steve Waugh loved to stick it to the South Africans.

Killer Quotes – Keith Miller on Pressure, war and cricket

“Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, cricket is not.”

Keith Miller – Australian cricket legend

Keith ‘Nugget‘ Miller was a war hero who served in the RAF in the Battle for Europe and is widely regarded by those in the know as Australia’s greatest cricketing all rounder. He was a every inch the dashing hero with an Australian irreverence and disregard for authority, strikingly good looking with rakish charm and the confidence born of a knowledge and faith in his own abilities it is little wonder he was, reputedly, very much the ladies man even being romantically linked with Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister.

Miller was the embodiment of the complete man and had the perspective to understand what those in the present generation of sporting celebrities seem, by and large to have forgotten and Roman Generals receiving tributes following a glorious conquest retained slaves to remind them of – Fame is fleeting, you need to keep perspective about what is real and what really counts.