Category: Writing (my writing)

The Day I Was Press-ganged Into Becoming A Live Cricket Commentator, Jagdalpur, 6 February 2011

cropped-073-Bhawaripatnam-v-Konta-Guest-Commentator-Ged-Ladd-Chakka-P1010467.jpg

Strange things can happen when you travel in India but this event, from Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh, in the central plains of India, must qualify as one of the strangest things that has happened to me in my entire life.

I reported this story at length on the King Cricket website, under my nom de plume, Ged Ladd.  Janie and I have nicknamed each other Ged and Daisy for as long as anyone can remember.  Click here or below for the story and further links.

Interstate competition, Bhawaripatnam v Konta at Jagdalpur – match report

If by any chance something goes awry with King Cricket site, the piece is scraped to Ogblog here.

Frankly, some of the comments are better than my report – it is worth reading for them. King Cricket can be like that.

Below are the two newspaper articles that appeared at the time. First up, the front page of New India:

Front page news in New India

Ameya from the King Cricket site has kindly translated the substance of the above article as follows:

The New India headline says ‘Bastar weather is great for cricket’. The article mentions you saying that Bastar has conducive weather for cricket. I’m assuming you were simply commenting on the weather that day.

Article goes on to say that you and Jenny (they get your names right for the most part, except you are Iaan) are foreign tourists, that you are cricket fans, that you encouraged players, and that you did commentary on the game ‘in English’.

Next up, the back page of the Bastar Sun, which got a great many of the material facts about the event wrong. I recall us having quite a laugh with Jolly about that article at the time. I shouted out to the King Cricket community, “perhaps someone now would care to translate it for us in full”…

Back page news in The Bastar Sun

…and Ameya kindly obliged with the following:

The Bastar Sun is where things get more interesting. The bold black font headline says ‘London’s John Harik does commentary’. The smaller red blurb says ‘Foreign player does commentary’.

You are John Harik and your ‘associate’ is Revis Harik. No mention of marriage or professional commentary anywhere. [apologies – that was my inaccurate recollection]

The article says you (cricket lover from London) and your associate were enjoying the match when the organisers spotted you and requested you to do commentary. You proceeded to ‘enjoy the responsibility’ for about an hour, and also chatted with and encouraged some senior players.

As for the match itself, Konta Chhattisgarh won the toss and chose to bat. After making 172/8 in their 25 overs, their seam bowlers were taken to the cleaners by Bhavanipatanam Orissa’s openers. While the spinners did apply some brakes, the match was over within 22.2 overs. Rinku top scored with 77(71). The writer was puzzled as to why Konta chose to bat first, to which one of their officials said that they didn’t want the pressure of a chase and wanted to set a high score.

Many thanks to Ameya for the translations.

If you want to see the pictures from our several days in the Bastar region of Chhattiisgarh, including the events described in this story, click here. 

Middlesex Ged Ladds v Bastar Jolly Rogers, Garden Cricket At the Bastar Jungle Resort, 5 February 2011

At the Bastar Jungle Resort, in Chhattisgarh, central plains of India, we had great fun playing garden cricket after our touring on a couple of evenings; especially 5 February.

Tennis ball bounce?
Tennis ball bounce?

I described the background and the matches at length on the Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) web site when we returned from India. Read all about it by clicking the photo above or clicking here.

Just in case anything ever happens to MTWD and/or Sportnetwork, I have also scraped the report to Ogblog – here.

The match report doesn’t mention the mess I made of one of my arms by trying to hit the cover off the ball in the final match of the “series”. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose when it comes to Ged Ladd and playing sport. Ironically, earlier that same day I had my 15 minutes of fame as a live cricket commentator and thus soon to be minor celebrity in those parts – see here. 

 

A Visit To Lal Bahadur Stadium, As Reported In A King Cricket Piece, 31 January 2011

This report for King Cricket relates to a small part of our India & Sri Lanka trip, which I shall write up more comprehensively eventually, for which the Ogblog placeholder and links can be found by clicking here or below:

India and Sri Lanka, 29 January to 26 February 2011, placeholder and links

Here is a link to the King Cricket piece, which relates to just one of the many places we visited in Hyderabad on 31 January:

Lal Bahadur Stadium in Hyderabad match preview

King Cricket published the piece on 18 April 2011. Just in case the above link goes duff, I have also scraped the report to here.

Frankly, some of the comments are better than my report – it is worth reading for them. King Cricket can be like that.

Not much used by 2011, Lal Bahadur Stadium

Middlesex v Surrey Day 3, Lords, Stumpfmerde & MTWD Match Report, 30 July 2010

Another day of county championship cricket at Lord’s that needs a bit of explaining.

Michael Mainelli and I had formed a bit of a tradition that, each year, we’d spend a few hours at Lord’s watching first class cricket and chatting strategically/laterally/crazily about our business, Z/Yen.

In earlier years, before such sessions took place at Lord’s, we called them “Stiermerde sessions”, not that bullshit came into it…of course it didn’t. Once such sessions were at Lord’s, we called them “Stumpfmerde sessions” instead.

Michael must have enjoyed it because his e-mail that evening included:

Great Stumpfmerde and thank you…

My response included:

Indeed I have cleared my e-mails and shall down tools. But I couldn’t do so before scribbling and uploading today’s match report.

http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/middlesex-ccc/s66/st161035/surrey-completely-clerihew-cornered

Very enjoyable day. And productive Stumpfmerdwise and bookwise too.

Oh, and you really did miss lots of excitement by leaving early – 6 wickets in the last hour, five of them to the youngster Toby Roland-Jones who is the product of your charming neighbour’s brother at the Middlesex Academy. What a happy coincidence!

Just in case anything ever goes awry with the MTWD website, I have scraped that strange match report to here.

I must say that it had completely escaped my memory that I witnessed that exceptional breakthrough performance by Toby Roland-Jones on a Stumpfmerde day – in my mind I would have completely separated the two events.

Here is a link to the Cricinfo scorecard for that match.

I’m glad I spotted the star quality that evening. Neville Cardus would not have spotted it better. Nor would Cardus have reported in clerihews.

Middlesex v Sussex, Uxbridge, Party At End Of Day Two Plus MTWD Match Report Day Three, 22 & 23 July 2010

Uxbridge Cricket Club and Ground

This will take a bit of explaining, as the match report I wrote for the Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) website – click here to see that – is a sequence of haikus.

(If anything by chance happens to MTWD, that article is scraped to here.)

But I do remember the events of the 24 hours or so in question.

In those days, Vic Demain, now the head groundsman at Durham CCC, was the groundsman at Uxbridge. He would organise a charity party night during the county championship match to raise money for a good cause – breast cancer mostly.

This particular year, I was unable to attend the cricket on the day of the party, as it clashed with business meetings of such import I can barely bring myself to read the appointments for them in my diary without trembling.

So, I decided to hot-foot it to Uxbridge after my last meeting (in Kings Cross) and arranged for Daisy kindly to collect my weekend gear from the flat and take it to the house.

That way, I could commute to Uxbridge to the party, cab it to Daisy’s after the party, commute to Uxbridge the next day (Day Three, the Friday) and have Daisy join me for the conclusion of play and a lift home.

Simples.

I recall the charity party was a good one that year. I think I might have ended up with some Middlesex memorabilia and a lighter wallet, but that’s the idea of such things I suppose.

I also remember having terrible trouble meeting up with my minicab driver, as the gate I thought would work for my collection was locked and we struggled to work out how I might get out without walking for 10-15 minutes around the ground and adjacent fields. I think we ended up with me jumping the gate, in the style of the escape Daisy and I had made from Laos some years earlier:

When Janie And I Jumped The Border Into Thailand At Chong Mek And Then Blagged Our Way Out Of Thailand Again, 19 and 26 February 2001

But I digress.

The haikus describe Day Three in superb detail – here’s the link again – but just in case you want to know more, here is a link to the Cricnfo scorecard etc.

It seems the real drama was to unfold the next day.

There aren’t many websites upon which the groundsman might report the day’s proceedings in fine style, but MTWD managed to secure the good services of Vic Demain for the Day Four match report – click here for that report. A thumping good read.

Middlesex Till We Chai, MTWD Match Report, Middlesex v Bangladeshis, 5 July 2010

While thinking through what to do with my old MTWD match reports on Ogblog, I stumbled across this one – I think one of the last (or should I say most recent) reports for MTWD. I thought I’d retroblog it right now.

Here’s a link to the article on MTWD, in all its glory with pictures and everything.

Given SportNetwork’s track record, I have uploaded the text of my MTWD pieces into Ogblog, so if the above “proper” link doesn’t work, you can at least read the text here.

Finally, if you are the sort of person who cannot bear to read a match report without a scorecard, here’s a link to the scorecard.

 

 

 

Middlesex v Australians, Lord’s, 19 June 2010

Looks cold…IS cold!

One of my favourite King Cricket “match reports” this – it is the story of a freezing cold day at Lord’s in mid June with Daisy (Janie) watching Middlesex play a match to help warm up the Australians.

Here is a link to the King Cricket match report.

Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, here is a link to the scraped version.

Here is a link to the scorecard and all those geeky details on Cricinfo.

I don’t think we stayed until the end – we went to the National Theatre that evening and I’m pretty sure we went back to the flat first.

MTWD Glossary 2.0, 2 June 2010

Following the phenomenal success of my MTWD T20 Glossary in 2008, which almost without question ensured, single handed, that Middlesex won the competition…

…it seemed sensible to update the glossary a couple of years later.

Here is a link to that 2008 glossary.

If anything were to go awry with the MTWD website, here is a scrape of that piece.

I don’t think this update was as successful as the original. For sure Middlesex were nowhere near as successful in 2010.

For some reason, the page on the MTWD site seems to have picked up some corruption, but the scrape of the page to Ogblog is legible, so I am linking on to that – here.

A Business Trip To Manchester Including A King Cricket Report On The ICC World T20 Semi-Final and Dinner At Obsidian Restaurant With Ashley, 13 May 2010

Sometimes my King Cricket reports can work like super diary notes. This one, from May 2010, is a good example, as I write in August 2017.

It seems that I was on business in Manchester and had arranged to meet Ashley at a posh new restaurant, Obsidian, now defunct. Jay Rayner stuck the boot into the place a few weeks after our visit – here.

I recall cunningly arranging a slightly later than usual meet time with Ashley so I could see the denouement of the World T20 Semi-Final between Sri Lanka and England.

I wrote it all up on King Cricket – here.

If anything ever happens to King Cricket, the piece is scraped to here.

Everything you might want to geek about the cricket match can be found on Cricinfo – here.

I recall a very convivial evening with Ashley after the match. The restaurant seemed quite good, but I seem to remember that Ashley had a fist full of vouchers, which enabled us to try the place at modest prices. We concluded that the meal had been good value for us, but that the place would not pass the Manchester “value/how much?” test once at menu prices.

Ashley might recall more about that evening; if he does, no doubt he’ll chime in Ogblog-like.

Tibet v England Impromptu Cricket Match in Yunnan Province, April 2010

In the high hills of Yunnan Province, in South-West China, on the lower reaches of the Tibetan plateau, you don’t expect much in the way of cricket experience, least of all playing the game, but when you travel, stuff happens.

I reported this extraordinary event on the King Cricket website, where I write occasional pieces under my nom de plume, Ged Ladd.   Janie and I have called each other Ged and Daisy since the mid 1990s.

8508375212_99c02a3240_z

Click here to read the report.

Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:

Tibet v England match report

Among my King Cricket pieces, this one comes second only to my impromptu live commentary experience in India, which can be found through this link.

But I digress.

If you would like to see photos from the few days we spent up in the high hills of Yunnan Province, including photos of this event, then click here.