88 days to go

The football season is practically over; the final round of the Premiership was completed on the weekend. Pretty exciting stuff on the last day to round things off, mostly at the foot of the table with all the 4 teams at the bottom a chance to stay up. Of course only 1 was going to so well done to West Brom, they were the only one of the 4 to win their match, thus becoming the first ever Premiership side to be bottom at Christmas and stay up.
Anyway, so apart from the FA Cup final this weekend and the Champions League final next Wednesday, the football season is over. There are 88 more days until the Premiership kicks off again, how will I cope with the absence of football? Well it shouldn’t be too much of a problem, international Rugby and Cricket will fill the void I’m sure. The Lions tour of New Zealand will be starting in a couple of weeks, followed by the Tri-Nations, as well as the much anticipated ashes series where England will no doubt fail to achieve the high levels of expectations that have been placed on them.

England of course are shooting themselves in the foot, months before the ashes even begins. Shane Warne is currently captaining county side Hampshire; he is taking a shitload of wickets and last week scored his maiden first class century with a 107 run knock in only 72 balls. The other star performer for Hampshire has been Aussie test batsman Simon Katich; also scoring runs freely and getting comfortable playing on English wickets. Brad Hodge and Mike Hussey are among other Australian squad members currently playing in the English county season.

Obviously county sides are free to recruit whomever they wish for their 2 allowed overseas players. However if I were involved with English cricket this year, and wanted to see the national side take advantage of their best opportunity of ashes success in years; then I would be making sure Australians stayed the hell away from cricket pitches here until they have to stride out to the centre on day one of the first test! Least of all Shane Warne, one of Australia’s main weapons, the most successful bowler ever in the history of cricket, who’s bowling the English have never been able to come to terms with. Shane is getting comfortable playing in England again, he’s getting used to the pitches, and he’s sending down plenty of deliveries to batsmen who are going to have to face him for their national side in July and August. He’ll be used to the way they play their strokes against him and will search for weaknesses he can exploit. By the time the ashes come around, he will be well and truly practised against England’s batting line up. Well done Warnie and all the other Aussies playing county cricket this year.


Work is pretty busy at the moment as we are reviewing a lot of end of year reports, thus the reason for the sparseness of my postings recently.