It’s anarchy, baby!

I turn my back for one week. One bloody week.

And this is what happens.

The PCB lose the few remaining marbles they had left rattling around in the bottom of their metaphorical marble bag, Michael Clarke departs New Zealand amid vague but intense furore over his wife and her illicitly-photographed ladybits, Raquibul Hasan flounces off in a huff leaving Bangladesh cricket behind, and Shakib-al-Hasan, whom I love, but like most 20-something males I’m actually acquainted with, feel an intense need to smack upside the head sometimes, put England in to bat in the Test match for reasons that I can’t even begin to imagine.  It’s hard to know which story to focus on, or in fact if it’s worth focusing on any of them rather than just retreating to the sofa with videos of old Test matches to take my mind off the insanity.

One thing has stayed the same, though: the steady stream of search terms leading to my blog running along the lines of ‘Is Tim Southee single?’ ‘How about that Tim Southee? ROWR!’ etc. etc. My personal favourite was the lone searcher who typed in ‘Does Tim Southee have a hot body?’ To this person I can only say, Honey, if you need me or any other random internet source to tell you that, you’ve got more issues than I’m qualified to help with. (The answer, by the way, is ‘Eh. Kinda. Guptill and Taylor have got him beat, if that’s the age range you’re looking at.’ Of course, it could be the teeth or the youthful braggadocio that get you hot, in which case nothing I say extolling the merits of the older more mature guys is going to make a difference, really.)

I know Alastair Cook and Paul Collingwood have done well in the Bangladesh test, but a large element of that was Shakib sending them in to bat in the first bloody place, so yes, well done Captain Maybelline and the Frustrated Golfer, but forgive me for not being overly thrilled about your achievements, because I was rooting for Bangladesh to begin with anyway. At least the always-awesome Shane Bond came through with his double-wicket maiden in the last ODI against Australia to restore some sense of the natural order of things – as in fact did New Zealand’s batsman by collapsing in a reassuringly familiar fashion twice in a row, but frankly that was a tradition I was kind of hoping they’d abandoned.

In case anyone happens to be waiting for me to mention the IPL, release the breath you’re holding before you hurt yourself.

Yeah, it’s another post about me. Sorry.

So I went to this match over the weekend. Given that I’m neither English nor Pakistani, that T20s are my least favourite format of the game by some distance, and that this was one of only two matches in a largely meaningless series, it should not have been a particularly huge deal. Thing is, I don’t get to watch cricket in the flesh, in actual stadia. Like, ever. Doesn’t happen. Hasn’t happened, as a matter of fact, since I was about 9 years old, and I’m in my early twenties now. So even given all those dampening factors, I had been nevertheless bouncing around like an overcaffeinated Red Setter for about a week beforehand.

I went, I watched and I wrote. Specifically, I wrote a Fan Following report for Cricinfo’s Page 2, which you can read here.

I also took approximately 580 photos, a few of which you can see here. I picked the best ones, honest.

You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

Enjoy!

*Shameless Plug Alert!*

Well, not quite. Maybe? Anyway, while I have still not got around to writing about the Afghanistan v. U.A.E. game for the half-dozen people who would have been interested to read it, I have put up some pictures from the match – of the action in the middle as well as of the fantastic fan presence – on my photo blog. You can see them here.

Iain O’Brien wants YOU…

…to read this blog. (Well, one of the posts on this blog. Semantics.)

This makes me ridiculously happy, especially since I didn’t have to bribe/blackmail/beg him to tweet that. He is just that awesome (which, I should say, I knew before the blog-pimping happened.)

I am thrilled, I am proud, I am…suddenly kind of regretting those posts involving Iain, jrod, and implications of a shared Twitter-facilitated foot fetish.

Oops. Oh well.

Cheers, IOB. You rock.

Like this. But HARDER.