Silly Lyrics Corner

County season is nearly upon us. Warm-up games have started. The weather is lulling us into a false sense of security and trying to convince us that maybe we won't be freezing our extremities off in the stands next week. The wiser among us are digging out our flasks and blankets just in case. And, with county season beginning, we can start our daily games of spot-the-Nando's-tweet. If you you follow any English county cricketers on Twitter, you'll know exactly what I mean.

So, in honour of the occasion, to the tune of Fernando by Abba...

T*TS! Now that I've got your attention...

Hands up who watches a lot of women's cricket. Be honest. Now, lower your hand if you're somehow involved in the women's game; coach, player, statistician, whatever. Anyone left?

My hand isn't up, and that's not just because I'm typing at the moment. I watched a lot of cricket last year. It started with the England / Australia ODIs and the World Cup on TV. Then we had the county season where I took up residence in the stands at the Oval. I listened to the commentary on my computer at home. Sri Lanka series on the TV with a brief attempt to watch a day of the Test live (bloody rain). India tests on TV and a couple of glorious days at the Oval. More county stuff, more international stuff. Cricket all over the place.

Men's cricket, anyway.

Silly Lyrics Corner

One of my rather dubious talents is writing alternative lyrics to songs. It's not much use except for amusing people, hence me inflicting my works of genius* on the internet. This one has been posted before on a different blog, but it's my work so I thought I'd share it here.

Now, something that amuses me in cricket is the way that commentators (by necessity, unless you're listening to Test Match Sofa) hedge around saying exactly what's happened when a player gets a cricket ball to the groin area. "Upper inner thigh... if you know what I mean" appears to be a favourite. Being of the girlie persuasion, I can't really sympathise with the level of pain (and will resist my usual trump card of "Yeah? Well I've had a baby!") but I've seen how it quite literally brings batsmen to their knees. A special mention has to go to Kumar Sangakkara who, in the Test against England at Lord's last summer, executed a stunningly graceful collapse in the face of what must have been pure agony.

 * This is sarcasm, just in case you weren't sure.

Stop putting grubby finger-marks on my cricket!

I do sometimes anthropomorphise cricket, as though the sport is a person with whom I'm still in the rose-tinted, grope-each-other-in-public phase of a relationship.* We have not yet reached the stage of "if you leave a wet towel on the bed ever ever again, I will stab you through the eye with a potato peeler" and I hope we never will. As such, I'm not keen on hearing the bad stuff about cricket and am tempted to put my fingers in my ears and sing if anyone says anything nasty. "Hey, you know that lovely bloke you just started seeing? Well, he slept with his ex-girlfriend's sister." La la la! I can't heaaaaaaar you! Actually, this analogy holds in two ways:

(1) I would be foolish to ignore that there are, potentially, signs that cricket is not as wonderful as I thought it was.

(2) I would be equally foolish to think that this meant cricket was rotten to the core and I should dump it immediately.

A woman? In the Pavilion?!

I'll tell you now that I didn't always love cricket. I describe myself as a recent passionate convert. Here's how it happened:

I was vaguely aware of Cricket hanging around at various points in my life, like that weird friend of your sibling who you'll say "hi" to but not actually meet his eye because then you'll inevitably have to have a Real Proper conversation with him. And that would be bad, because he's a bit odd, and you don't understand half of what he says, and Oh my god! What if that makes him think I like him? Eeeew!  So I ignored Cricket in quite a shifty way, despite other people assuring me that Cricket and I would get on really well if we got to know each other. I disagreed, claiming that Cricket was boring and insanely difficult to understand. Cricket continued to hang around in the background, unperturbed.

I tolerated Cricket over the years, went through phases of acceptance (Oh, Cricket's here again) and resentment (Is bloody Cricket here AGAIN??) and began to pick up bits and pieces about Cricket despite myself. Still, I maintained that we would never have a proper relationship because Cricket just Wasn't My Type.

Then, one day, it struck me that Cricket was, in fact, really lovely.