20 overs not enough

I went to the England Australia Twenty 20 game yesterday, and it was a desperate display. Not only did Australia post a record Twenty Twenty international innings, but England barely reached half the Australian total in reply.

The spectacle itself was good fun .. there was lots of dance music, as spun by Judge Jules, and the floodlights made it really quite light in the ground. We also noticed that 20:20 is obviously an opportunity to get on it very early. The couple next to us got through about 6 beers in the 3 or so hours, and in front of us were a large corporate party, and they had interestingly been to a meal beforehand. That's not interesting, but apart from drinking several glasses of wine beforehand, their guest speaker was Damien Martyn, who shockingly retired from Test Cricket hours before the Perth Test. He said that he had had enough of top level cricket, and that he wanted to go out on top of his game.

In terms of the game, it was good to see Michael Vaughn back, and he put a reasonable knock together. However, as usual Freddie was disappointing, and James Anderson was dire. Universally popular as always was Monty Panesar, even if the dance music drowned out the Barmy Army's songs.

But just following the retirement of Langer, Warne and McGrath, it was good to see some of the Aussie's new breed .. and they were very good indeed. Cameron White, Shane Harwood and Ben Hilfenhaus all performed well, as did stalwarts, Ponting, Gilchrist and Symonds, who all scored close to 50. On this performance Andrew "Roy" Symonds has cemented his place in the squad, producing some containing spin bowling to augment the medium pace swing bowling he produced in the Tests.

Let's hope England do better in the imminent OneDay series with Australia and New Zealand. Hope appears to be all we have.

Morrissey in Eurovision?

Well, they say there's nowt as queer as folk .. they're not wrong. I read today in Mx, which is Australia's version of the Metro paper, which is given free to travellers on the tube, that Morrissey is to be linked with next year's Eurovision contest.

The contest has long been an extremely camp joke, one that is best enjoyed with a Eurovision party, involving many friends, and only slightly more wine than Terry Wogan appears to enjoy on the evening, which is still a lot.

Desperate to disprove this scandalous rumour, I searched on the web, and these articles (1 2) both seem to confirm it.

In the wake of another lamentable performance from the UK entry, with Daz Sampson's Teenage Life coming 19th out of 24 entrants, Morrissey said: "I was horrified but not surprised to see the UK fail again in the Eurovision Song Contest. And there is one question I keep on asking: 'Why didn't they ask me?' That question keeps going round my head."

Of course, everyone thought that Mozzer was expressing disdain with his usual casually arrogant dismissals .. apparently not. Watch this space

Baz-o-saurus

One of the guys we are travelling with is a guy called Rupert. He's well educated, extremely funny and well travelled.

He has undoubtedly, in all his travels, managed to develop his own vocabulary, and this has contrived to produce a much cleverer version of Del-boy. I include some of his gems here (with translations):

She knocked me bandy, right enough

she certainly caught my attention, and made a dramatic impact. She was an attractive lady.

He's a b*stard for cricket

his admiration for cricket takes on unusual, almost obsessive behaviour

We've had the luck of the nine blind b*stards

Just when you think things couldn't get any worse, they have taken an unfortunate course, leaving us feeling disappointed

It's a right touch

that was a stroke of luck

I never turn down fizz

given the opportunity to exercise my body, get my head down and labour hard, I will never turn a blind eye to it. In fact, I rather like it

to be updated..

Say What You See

I am firmly entrenched in Aussie culture now, and one of the great things I've noticed is the ability that the Australians have to describe things exactly as they see them, and not beat around the bush.

Some of the funnier ones have related to serious issues like Drink Driving. In the MCG, we noticed lots of signs encouraging people not to partake of the sauce and get behind the wheel; such as "Drink, Drive .. Bloody Idiot", a slogan I couldn't imagine seeing in England. Also, "Order a cab home, you bloody legend". Somebody is clearly having fun putting the campaign together too. There was a billboard, with the words "Drive Hammered, Get Nailed". To the point .. say what you see.

We've spent the last few days inside the SCG, watching the demise of English Cricket in painful installments. Sydney have an AFL team clled the Speed Blitz Blues, a name that confused us (we're used to things like Rhinos, Warriors, Bulls etc). Then we looked around the advertising hoardings, and everything related to reducing driving speeds in Australia. Of course the opportunity to put some cricket references was not overlooked. Some of the advice started from a billboard showing a policeman holding a speed camera with the words "Caught Out", to the more obvious "Beaten by Pace? .. slow down".

My favourite, and perhaps the bluntest of all was a slogan on the side of a bus advertising Life Assurance. It said simply .. "Prepare to Die". Genius.