Out on the Wiley Windy Moors...

... there stand two dry stone walls, facing each other, eighty yards apart. Between them is not heath, but finely cut green grass. For most of their length, the walls are natural stone. Only the central section of each wall is whitewashed.

Haworth West End cricket club possess the highest cricket ground in Yorkshire, and perhaps the most wind-swept cricket ground in the world. Cricket grounds need a sightscreen behind the bowler's arm, so that the red ball is clearly visible to the batsman. On Haworth moor, the white walls serve as a wind-resistant sightscreen. Of course the walls are only about five foot tall, so the sightscreen only really works for very small bowlers.

The pavilion of this cricket ground was the starting point of a fell race yesterday. 279 people lined up to run across Haworth moor and back again, including me and my dad. Running across a moor is similar to running anywhere else. Except every now and again the ground suddenly gives way, and you find yourself with one leg on solid ground, and the other leg knee deep in a mini peat bog. If this happens while tramping uphill or against the wind, you pull your foot out and continue. If this happens going downhill wind-assisted, you either trip and tumble, or come to an emergency stop. I did both a couple of times, and was happy to return to the cricket pavilion with both ankles intact.


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Bowl Bloomin' Straight!

This looks like it is a Monty Python inspired joke, but it is deadly serious. The game of 20 overs (120 balls) a side cricket between India and Pakistan ended in a tied score, and a bowl out.

The perils of wearing a cricket helmet.

or

A good excuse to write dislodged lots

Today England beat the West Indies in the Old Trafford test match. The oddity of the match was Kevin Pietersen being out, "Hit Wicket", due to his helmet being dislodged by Dwayne Bravo.

This wouldn't have happened 25 years ago, as players then played without helmets, despite the rather hard ball being aimed at their heads often enough. Here is Ian Botham showing how to do this successfully and without bothering to look at the ball, and here is Brian Close facing a much more dangerous West Indian fast bowling attack than the current one with a lack of protection.

When I started this post, I thought that this danger started with helmets, but having read the wikipedia article for hit wicket above, apparently the weight of a cap is enough to dislodge a bail, and caps can be removed from heads by either the ball or the wind. Several such incidents are recalled here anecdotally, including one of being out "hit wicket" via a dislodged toupee.

Things you may not wish to know.

1/ I have one black toe nail and one white toe nail which is about to fall off. I would go to the doctor, but he/she would tell me to stop playing football, so I won't.

2/ I headed a goal from a free kick for Torpedo Entenhausen this week. I saw the ball at the last second, tried to stick my head in the way and nearly missed it. The result was a most professional-looking glancing header just inside the far post. We lost the game, but only just. Here is a completely unrelated piece of footballing commentary, in German.

3/ When sober, I can juggle 3 balls with my eyes shut for quite a while. The first requirement is to throw accurately. If the first ball thrown doesn't land in the other hand then it's a nonstarter. No matter how well you throw, though, the pattern will slowly drift away unless there is some feedback of how things are going wrong. Usually when juggling this feedback comes from the eyes, but provided the corrections are small it can come from the hands, by feeling exactly where the ball lands, and correcting the trajectory of the next ball.

(So if your blind and reeding this why not try and learn teh juggling)

I can't do the whole thing anything like this well, though.

4/ When drunk, I can't juggle two half-filled half-litre plastic bottles. I found this out whilst travelling with the U-Bahn. The moment of inertia of a half-filled bottle is a very funny thing indeed, and the bottle seems very reluctant to go round in a circle. Trying to compensate for this I gave the bottle an extra twirl, causing it to fly through the carriage and nearly hit someone on the head. He was surprisingly understanding.

5/ Australia won the cricket world cup. For some reason the final of this tournament which has, in the best traditions of cricket, been going on for ages, had to be settled in one day. And it rained. So they shortened the match and finished up playing in the dark.

The Game of Love, Unity and Murdered Coaches.

If you don't know what cricket is it's about time to find out, for the cricket world cup is underway in the West Indies. India look as though they are about to go out and Pakistan have departed minus their coach, who departed in the dearly sense of the word.

Here is a brief guide to cricket:

1/ How to bat for Kazachstanis.

2/ The game's jargon explained by Willow and Stumpy.

3/ The tea towel explanation of the game, and also in German.

4/ An actually quite helpful explanation of the game.

5/ Of course all this knowledge is no use if you don't play with style. Curtley Ambrose demonstrates.

So having got through all that you have deserved a few beers, just keep the number of the coastguard to hand.

A stick of rhubarb.

It took me a couple of days to work up to this, but England (without Trescothick) managed to throw away the second Ashes match. Having scored over 500 runs in the first innings and having declared (that means that they were so confident of not losing that they gave up their remaining wickets voluntarily) they were in control of the match, but they blew it on the morning of the fifth day. It took me a couple more days to see the funny side, but quite amusing in hindsight are the comments in the 25th over from Rob Smyth: "If England lose this game I'll run through Oxford Street tomorrow wearing nothing but a relentless glow" and in the 31st over from Brad in California "So let me get this straight, you're not watching, not listening to, but reading about a game that has been going on for five days, and is almost certain to end in a draw". England lost, quite disastrously, but at least that showed Brad in California, Haa.

For anyone who takes pleasure in English disasters, you can read all about it here and here too. There are lots of amusing quotes, such as "Let's face it," says Matt, "it is going to be a draw.", " "That was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever seen."

And now for something completely different, here's a YouTube link to a football match in the days that Referees wore impeccably straight bow ties.

Something I should have done a while ago.

The only thing I managed to do today was to go to a psychotherapist. There are two reasons that I made this appointment, and one of them is a bit embarassing. The first is my failure to go about getting a job in any kind of sensible manner. I just can't keep a positive mindset long enough to go through the process of reading an advertisement, writing an application, going for an interview and then accepting a job. I've got a CV which would suggest a job involving complicated physics stuff or some kind of responsibility or importance, and I generally don't feel up to it.

Possible jobs (I just opened up an old Physikjournal) include working with an "intense optical fs-laser in two-colour pump-probe experiments" or "non-equilibrium phenomena in multiphase flow through porous media"

This kind of stuff scares the shit out of me. Some other jobs require that you are "Belastbar": able to work under pressure, and I'm not. The second and real reason that I went to a psychotherapist is because of the England cricketer Marcus Trescothick. A couple of weeks ago he decided that touring Australia swinging a piece of wood was too much for him, and I knew how he felt.

Here is a report from Geoffrey Boycott on Trescothick's departure, and I found the comment from Melanie most useful.

Burnout is not solely a mental fatigue it is physical, the body no longer has the physical resources to cope with demands being made upon it and this leads to the mental stress and illness. Gastro-intestinal illnesses are induced by the body’s constant demand on adrenalin to keep things going – high levels of adrenalin in the body cause a reduced blood-flow to the stomach and intestines, this in turn affects the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food, which in turn affects the body’s ability to renew its resources.

As far as I can work out this is what happened to me two years ago. I pushed myself too far in my PhD and broke down completely. Sleeplessness, depression, stomach pains, an ear infection and a general feeling of exhaustion and worthlessness. Now I'm alright, as far as it goes, but I'm scared to do anything with my life. I also still get really nervous whenever I'm woken up by a telephone. So I'll book an appointment for a therapy course on Monday.

The shrink asked me whether there had been a history of depression in the family. My honest answer is that I don't know. It's not the kind of thing we really talked about, and the only way I'd have known is if a relative had blown their head off, which they haven't, so I guess things can't have been that bad. This design for life probably explains why I haven't taken this step earlier, but I can't think of any good reason for not doing it now.

Hamburg again

The least said about Hamburg and Hermes the better. It's depressing me too much, and I want out of here.

I'm surfing the internet quite a lot at the moment, and am desperate enough to read the reports of english county cricket matches. The bitterest rivalry in county cricket is Yorkshire vs. Lancashire. It all goes back to the wars of the roses, and neither team likes to lose this match.

Often, if a match is heading for a certain draw because there won't be enough time for all the innings to be completed, a captain in a commanding situation will make a "sporting declaration". This means that he forfeits some of his batters to speed up the game, losing potential runs in the process. The upside is that there is then more time to bowl out the other side and win the match, the downside is that the other team could win. In any case the spectators will be entertained, and a win would be worth many more points than a draw.

A defeat by your bitterest rivals is unacceptable, though, so Yorkshire decided to carry on batting through the last day to secure a safe draw. For the last few hours of the match there was no possibility of victory. Blah blah blah, you say. Well all this is leading to a lovely quote from the match report on the bbc website.

Such was the dull nature of the game in the closing stages, Lancashire's Mal Loye fielded wearing a trilby hat.

Rain Stopped Play

A cricket match at the highest level has five days to be completed, with roughly six hours per day. If it rains or it is too dark then play is suspended, and the time is usually lost. Should the match be incomplete after five days then a draw is declared. It is therefore possible to draw a match simply by having bad weather. Take for example the first test of the ashes series of 1926, played at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. After less than an hours play it started raining, and kept on raining. Play was never restarted and the match was drawn. Only two of the England team even got onto the pitch, the rest stayed in the Pavilion and presumably drank a lot of tea. Fortunately there were four more matches in the series, which England won 1-0.

The Pakistan team of 1998 were unluckier. Trailing 1-0 after the first two matches of their series against Zimbabwe they must have fancied their chances of winning the last match in Faisalabad to draw the series. Unfortunately the match was abandoned due to four days of fog.

Our local cricket match yesterday suffered a similar fate. A pitch inspection revealed that it was raining, and so we moved directly to the beer garden. By the time the rain had stopped the light was too poor, and play was abandoned.

Here is a link which can be saved for a rainy day: a list of strange weather events which have occurred during cricket matches, which goes to confirm a quote by Benny Green, which roughly went as follows

The world is divided into two groups of people: those who think that nothing ever happens during a cricket match, and those who know that anything that could possibly happen already has.

England 824 Pakistan 659 (match drawn)

After five days the Lords test match ended in a draw. I've been in Germany long enough now to see the amusing side of this: a sport which not only takes five days to play, but a sport which doesn't even get a result in five days. In case you are wondering why England didn't win by simply having more runs (824 of them in total), the answer is that Pakistan still had six batsmen left who could have made the difference had the match continued for another day or two.

But five days it is, although the match didn't last exactly five days: with about half an hour left to play both teams decided that they couldn't win, so they packed it in and went for a cup of tea.

Here is a picture from the bbc website of the Pakistani captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, playing a forward defensive shot. The key to playing this shot is a good pair of trousers. They should be tight enough to not flap around, but elastic and roomy enough to let you take a good step down the pitch. Once you've got the trousers everything else (bat and front leg together, head directly above the ball, bat angled to the floor) will just fall into place.

Cricket Match

In a bid to stave of homesickness and civilise Germany (or at least a small part of Bavaria) I organised a game of cricket yesterday. I am on a steep learning curve here. I have learnt that a rasp is coarser but much quicker than a file. I have learnt the expensive way that if you want to buy a cricket bat cheaply on a german flea market the correct opening line is "Was is denn das fuer ein komisches Stueck Holz?" [1] and not "Ein Cricket Schlaeger! Wie schoen, so was wollte ich immer haben" [2]. I have also learnt that the action to bowl a cricket ball is the same as the action used to throw a hand-granade (thanks to Marc). I could have sworn that he at least once he tried to pull the pin out of a tennis ball before starting his run-up. On the whole the game was a success, and I have three converts to the game. Next week: reverse swing, googlies, doosras, tea breaks, how to shout "how's that" in a more convincing manner.

[1] translation: What is that strange piece of wood you have there?
[2] translation: Please accept my life-savings, house, belongings and the hand of my eldest daughter in exchange for your cricket bat.