Tag: ODI

Who Wants To Be A Multi-Billionaire? England v South Africa ODI, Lord’s, 31 August 2008

I have two abiding memories of this Sunday at Lord’s with Daisy.

They both relate to the charming South African gentleman and his Zimbabwean friend who sat next to us in the Mound Stand. We chatted with them at length in the earlier part of the day.

In particular, the Zimbabwean gentleman explained the currency chaos prevailing in Zimbabwe at that time; sacks full of bank notes to buy basic items, the authorities producing ever larger, ludicrously large denomination bank notes; worthless before they had even rolled off the printing presses.

I asked the gentleman if I might buy some from him for our Z/Yen edutainment boat trip games. He said he had none with him but sack loads at home. He said his wife would bring some for me when she was next in London  (in a few weeks’ time) and refused to take money for them. He did not even accept the offer of hospitality on the boat in exchange.

To his credit, he followed through with his promise. A few weeks’ later a mysterious woman apparently arrived at our St Helen’s Place offices with a large envelope stuffed with billions upon billions of Zimbabwean dollars:

Try for the fifty billion?

This multitude of notes came in very handy in Z/Yen edutainment games for many years and I really am very grateful to the kind man who took so much trouble to respond to a casual request that came up in chat at cricket.

I also remember feeling slightly sleazy about the matter as, given his refusal to take anything in reciprocation, the transaction felt, in essence, as though I had successfully begged for money – albeit worthless money. Janie and I debated that aspect for a while, as I was at that time in the process of preparing my Gresham Lecture on Commercial Ethics.

But I digress.

The other abiding memory was the disappearance of that South African and Zimbabwean double-act as soon as a heavy storm blew across. It was very heavy rain, but it was scheduled to pass quickly and the new drainage at Lord’s is terrific. I even said to them that I thought the game would restart within an hour of the rain stopping, despite the heaviness of the rain.

The gentlemen both said that they had spent too long over the years waiting for Lord’s to fail to dry, so headed off as soon as the rain relented.

Play did resume within an hour of the rain stopping. It proved to be an exciting match in the end.

Here is a link to the scorecard. 

The multi-billion dollar earning aspect of this day is now immortalised on the King Cricket website – click here or below:

https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/england-v-south-africa-lords-odi-report-from-2008/2017/12/11/

Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, a scrape of that piece may be found here.

A Quieter Couple of Weeks, Ending in Gastro Bistro, Clapham, 6 July 2008

After the wonderful yet strange evening in Uxbridge 24 June, a quieter couple of weeks before the next excitement.

25 June

There was an England v New Zealand ODI at the Oval, which I didn’t attend but I was able to catch the end of it on the TV after work. The scorecard – click here – reveals how close the game was but does not reveal the controversy over Collingwood’s captaincy after he insisted, against the advice of the umpires, on progressing a run out appeal in unusual circumstances, against Grant Elliot – the Kiwis went on to win the match anyway. The Sussex v Middlesex match that evening seemed tame by way of comparison; I’m pretty sure I listened to most of it:

27 & 28 June

The last T20 group match was at the Oval against Surrey. I know I missed it completely, because Daisy and I were taken out for dinner by Jamil and Souad – I’m pretty sure we went to Noura in Belgravia, but Daisy’s diary should confirm or deny when we get around to checking – see “A Couple of nights out”.

27 & 28 June

A yes, we indeed had a couple of nights out:

A Brace Of Birthday Dinners For Daisy, 27 & 28 June 2008

4 July

Following a working week that looked quite light on meetings and evening engagements, but did include another Z/Yen Boat Trip on the Wednesday, on the Friday, I took a day out at Uxbridge. Middlesex were hosting the visiting South Africans in a warm-up match.

I wrote quite a lengthy report for MTWD on that day – click here.

Here is the scorecard from that tour match.

6 July

A relatively quiet weekend culminating in a lunch out with my mum at Gastro in Clapham. I had not seen this Jay Rayner review – click here – when I booked it.

It seems to divide opinion on TripAdvisor too – click here.

Actually, Janie and I rather liked the place, but I do recall that the Sunday menu was not quite as advertised and in any case the dishes on offer were of an kind unfamiliar to mum, who got a bit shirty about it all.

I’m not too sure how the matter got resolved but I seem to recall the lunch event being salvaged somehow, I think through some good staff making appropriate amounts of fuss around mum and looking after her nicely. Or did we move on to another place to get that fuss? Janie might remember.

I do recall resolving not to book such a place again for mum – the familiar “old-fashioned Italian or French bistro” places she’d been to before being the best bet for her now. Oh well.

England v India 7th ODI, Lord’s, 8 September 2007

Who’d have thought that a seven match ODI series between these two teams would go down to the wire?

I booked this one mostly because Janie was at that time expressing a preference for ODIs and it seemed a rare opportunity to take in some late season cricket at Lord’s.

Still a bit numb from all that had happened this summer, my recall of this match is not great. We’d been out to dinner with Charlotte the night before – she left quite early in the morning while we prepared the picnic.

Judging from the scorecard, it looks as though India finally ran out of steam at the end of a long tour.  Lord’s tends to get lower and slower by the end of the season. Perhaps the Indian batsmen set off trying to score far more than would be possible. Perhaps England bowled well.

No perhaps about our picnic – it would have been a good one.

England v West Indies, 1st ODI, Lord’s, 1 July 2007

It was just me and Janie that day. After Pauline’s extraordinary behaviours over cricket and Proms for two years in a row, Janie threatened to dump me if I was daft enough to get Pauline a ticket again in 2007. I took the hint.

I think we were in the Upper Edrich and reasonably near the front.

My main memory of the day was calling my folks from the ground before the game started – we always try to get in early ahead of the crush at the gates. Mum reminded me that dad had not finished his food when we all went out for dinner on the Friday before – described here. She then added that he had pretty much not eaten since, claiming that he had no appetite; she was worried. I remember trying to allay her concerns while agreeing that they should go to the doctor the next day (Monday) if he did not feel better in the meantime. I remember also confiding to Janie that I thought it was a very worrying matter. My dad being off his food was a non-trivial turn of events.

Ah yes, the cricket match. In truth, I really don’t remember much about this match.

Fortunately, for those of us with short memories for ODIs in years gone by, there is the Cricinfo scorecard to remind us what happened. An England win in an ODI at Lord’s – how could any of us forget?

 

A Tied Final To An International One-Day Cricket Tournament, At Lord’s, Janie And I Were There, 2 July 2005

Writing on 21 July 2019, I have been thinking about close and tied matches a lot lately. The cricket world cup was decided on the finest of margins last week, as was the Wimbledon Gentleman’s Final – the first ever to go to tie break:

The Day England Won The Cricket World Cup, England v New Zealand, 14 July 2019

Today, Janie and I were battling out the tightest of sets of tennis, as oft we do. We ended the match at 5-5 as a tie. We tend to do that if the scores are level at 5-5 or 6-6. Janie and I believe in ties.

Of course there is a huge difference between amateur sport and professional sport. But Janie also felt strongly that the 2019 world cup should similarly have been determined as a tie and shared between England and New Zealand. I’m not 100% sure; it certainly isn’t the modern way for tournaments.

But on the way home from our epic tennis tied match today, my mind wandered to a match that Janie and I witnessed in that glorious and exciting summer of cricket that was 2005. We went to Lord’s to see the final of the one day international (ODI) tri-series between Australia, Bangladesh and England; a final between England and Australia that ended as a tie.

How was that tie resolved, I wondered. I couldn’t remember. So I looked it up.

Here is a link to the scorecard and Cricinfo resources on that 2005 tied match.

In fact, back in 2005, the playing conditions for that tri-series – presumably agreed between the three nations but ultimately under the auspices of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) rather than the International Cricket Council (ICC) – determined that final as a tie if the scores were level after 50 overs.

England and Australia shared the trophy.

No super over (I don’t recall ever seeing those back then), no boundaries count back (I don’t recall seeing that until this most recent ICC World Cup), no priority to the team with the most wickets remaining at the end of their innings (that method had been discredited quite early in the Duckworth- Lewis era as anathema to the mathematical logic of wickets and overs as being algorithmic-equivalent resources that can become exhausted).

It had been a great match, that 2005 ODI final. At first we thought England were way ahead…

…even when Australia crawled back to post 196 runs…

…until England ended up 33/5 and we thought England had blown it…

…until England somehow managed to crawl back to 196/9, securing a couple of leg byes off the last ball to tie the match.

Perhaps others in the crowd thought differently, but Janie and I left the ground feeling thoroughly satisfied with our day’s entertainment, the thrills and spills of the ebb and flow…

…and a feeling that justice had been done to a hard-fought match when the trophy was shared for a tie.

Who would have won on a super over? We’ll never know.

Who would have won on boundary count-backs? Australia.

Who would have won on the basis of fewer wickets lost? England.

Who gives a fig how the match would have been determined if the playing conditions had been different? Only a pedant, really, as either or both teams might have played the final few balls differently if other playing conditions were being applied.

It was a summer of fine margins, really. England prevailed in the tournament that really mattered, the Ashes…

Later that summer… (thanks to Charles Bartlett for the picture)

…we were there that day too – the final day of the 2005 Ashes series – to be Ogblogged in the fullness of time. But that Ashes win came as a result of a drawn match at the end and a couple of really tight finishes, especially the Edgbaston test (also to be Ogblogged in the fullness).

But in early July, the excitement was that tied ODI. In fact, that tied ODI match at Lord’s was not the only tie I witnessed that season…indeed not even the only tie I witnessed that month, July 2005 – I even participated in one:

Far And Away The Most Exciting Game Of Cricket I Have Ever Played, Tufty Stackpole v The Children’s Society, North Crawley, 31 July 2005

What a season that 2005 season was. Not least because of the tied matches.

The Day Charley The Gent And I Witnessed The Tied World Cup Cricket Semi Final At Edgbaston…On A Screen In Barcelona, 17 June 1999

Image “Diving For A Tie” produced in collaboration with Dall-E

The headline is a little deceptive, because Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett and I were not in Barcelona the City, but we were, along with a great many Z/Yen people and one or two other Children’s Society people, in Barcelona, the tapas and wine bar in The City.

Twenty years later, at the time of writing, Barcelona is still there – click the image for a link.

I had spent the whole day in the City. My diary says we had a PAYE inspection that day. I think it might have been that magnificent day that the inspector challenged us for claiming that we had an expenses procedure dispensation (which of course we did have) as he could find no record of us ever having been issued with such a dispensation. Linda Cook went to the archive files and dug out our dispensation letter which happened to have been issued by “Phil”, the very tax inspector who was before us that day. He almost apologised, claiming that files had been lost in an office move. He didn’t stay long after that.

But of course you don’t win tax inspections; the best you can hope for is an honourable draw or a tie.

Which brings me to the World Cup Semi Final.

But before that I need to explain why Charley The Gent was at our offices that day. You see, Teresa Bestard, who was one of Z/Yen’s first employees and who had done a great deal of work for The Children’s Society under Charley’s auspices, was leaving Z/Yen that day.

Teresa was (is) a Catalan with roots in Barcelona and Majorca. She chose the Barcelona tapas and wine bar as a suitable venue for her leaving do.

I arranged to meet Charley and Tony to go through some business stuff at Z/Yen around 16:00, so they could conveniently join the leaving do afterwards.

Nobody had been thinking about cricket at this juncture. Not even Teresa, who was good pals with Bob Willis, following a different wine bar incident (with me and others) in a different part of London – see relevant Ogblog piece by clicking here or below:

An Evening With Teresa Bestard, Bob Willis & Others, Albertine Wine Bar, 19 August 1997

On arrival, Chas did ask me if I was aware of the Australia v South Africa semi-final score. I wasn’t. He told me. I said it sounded close, but edging towards South Africa. Chas said he fancied Australia for the match. He wanted to bet. I said I don’t like to bet. He suggested a one pound stake. I accepted, with the proviso that if the match was a tie, both pounds would go to The Children’s Society.

Chas doing his Children’s Society cricket captain bit, back in 1998

We were not expecting to follow the latter stages of the World Cup Semi-Final, but Barcelona had other ideas. They were pumping the match out on big screens throughout the bar.

Great…

…said the cricket tragics, e.g. me and Charley. Teresa did not seem well pleased. She was already vocally irritated with us for a supposed slight; we had invited Mary O’Callaghan along to the event. Teresa saw this as Z/Yen inviting Teresa’s replacement to Teresa’s own leaving do. Actually we had hired Mary before we even knew that Teresa was leaving and had asked Mary along to several events to meet the team before she joined; this was the one she could make.

Some neutrals, such as Jacqueline Goldberg, Michael Mainelli and Linda Cook, used the language of indifference towards the cricket, but in truth couldn’t help but become more and more interested in the final overs of the match, as it became clear that the result was on a knife edge and the match was a real thriller.

Here is a link to the scorecard and Cricinfo resources.

I hope The Children’s Society made good use of the £2 it scored from that bet. The charity benefited from our subsequent charity matches to a much greater extent than this wager.

Below is a video of the highlights/denouement of that match:

Teresa’s leaving do went on for hours after the cricket finished and everyone relaxed into the wine and tapas. It was a very good leaving do for a very special member of the team.

But I’m afraid the cricket tragics amongst us will remember the evening primarily for that astonishing tied World Cup Semi Final, as we lived every moment on those big screens in Barcelona.

Zimbabwe v Australia At Lord’s, World Cup Match, 9 June 1999

This was the first time that Janie (Daisy) ever visited Lord’s.

It was my second ever, and last, visit to Lord’s in the 20th century. It was also the only time I actually bought tickets for Lord’s that century, having been taken as a guest on my sole previous visit there:

My First Visit To Lord’s, England v Pakistan Day Two, 26 July 1996

Unaccustomed as I was to buying tickets for Lord’s back then…oh boy have I made up for it since…and probably a bit slow of the mark for the World Cup to boot, I ended up getting Lower Compton seats some rows back. All has changed since (he says, 25 years later), but back then the Lower Compton was a wind tunnel affair through which you got a somewhat restricted view and in particular had no clear view on a scoreboard.

Who knew that it can be really cold in London at a cricket match in June? Who failed to learn from this 1999 experience?

Middlesex v Australians, Lord’s, 19 June 2010

Once I became better acquainted with Lord’s for a while I would book the Lower Compton front row, which avoided the wind tunnel and tended to have a decent view. But never again did I make the mistake of buying tickets in the middle or rear of that stand. The new Lower Compton is SO much better.

Returning to 1999, we nevertheless had a great day, despite the ordinary seats. It is so difficult not to have a good day at Lord’s. It was even, somewhat surprisingly, a good match, with Neil Johnson & Murray Goodwin keeping Zimbabwe in the hunt for most of the match. All the Cricinfo resources for this match can be found here.

The Day England Were Knocked Out Of the Cricket World Cup By India, While I Made A Three-Hundred Mile Round Trip Visit, Probably Against My Will, 22 June 1983

Kapil Dev, India’s cricket captain, didn’t help my mood that day.

I missed seeing any part of England being knocked out of the first cricket world cup in 1975, for good (albeit unsuccessful) sporting reasons:

A Truly Thrice Awful Day In My School/Sporting Life, 18 June 1975

I also missed seeing any of the 1979 final, in which England lost out to the West indies in the second cricket world cup; no doubt because no-one else at Alleyn’s school was sufficiently willing to score a first team cricket match rather than watch the final:

The Day England Lost The Cricket World Cup Final To The West Indies, While I Scored A Different Match, 23 June 1979

But I have a seemingly weak reason for missing the entirety of the 1983 semi-final, in which India made short-shrift of England, while on their way to that historic trophy-lifting victory in the third cricket world cup.

Yes, I played cricket the day before; an epic “thanks for coming” appearance for The Players in the Keele Festival Week traditional Gentlemen v Players beer match:

My “Thanks For Coming” (TFC) Keele Festival Week Match, 21 June 1983

So what could possibly have prevented me from hanging up those boots and spending at least some of the day watching the cricket on TV? It was, after all, festival week, a time of year that I especially loved at Keele, after all the term work and exams were over, when I could enjoy all that Keele had to offer without even the slightest pang of guilt.

The relevant passage reads (and yes I did need a magnifying glass and some deep thought to translate it):

Rose early – went – hitched- to London to see Sean and Marlenne [sic] – got train home – tired and pissed off after.

Sean and Marlene (I’m pretty sure I have spelt the name wrong in the diary) were the brother and sister-in-law respectively of my then girlfriend, Liza.

This was the one and only time I hitched all the way from Keele to London and it was an experience that, clearly, I was so keen not to repeat that I insisted on us getting the train home rather than trying to hitch home.

I don’t remember all that much about that London-bound, hitch-hiking journey other than the several discomforts of it; both physical (when sitting in passenger seats of 1970s/1980s lorries and mental (when I got that creepy feeling that the driver was more interested in my winsome, blond companion, Liza, than in the communitarian/sharing economy principles of helping a young couple who were hitch-hiking).

Sean and Marlene were (possibly still are) a very nice, very welcoming couple who lived in Stanmore. Sean, like Liza, had been raised in Keele itself, so they were not natural London sub-urbanites but seemed to fit into that mould very readily.

I recall that Sean was a hairdresser and the other thing that sticks in my mind is that they lived next door to a chap who had been in The Vibrators.

The diary entry infers that this day did not please me greatly. I am sure this was not Sean and Marlene’s fault; nor should I really blame Liza who had probably suggested the idea ages before – i.e. long before I realised that this 300 round trip to visit family in Stanmore was scheduled for bang slap in the middle of Festival Week and the day of the cricket world cup semi final to boot.

So it wasn’t a good day for me in North London.

It wasn’t a good day for England in Manchester either.

You can watch the highlights of the cricket match below:

Highlights (or should I say lowlights?) of the debates Liza and I might well have had about the quality of that day out and the possible repetition of such excursions are, mercifully, not available.

The Day England Lost The Cricket World Cup Final To The West Indies, While I Scored A Different Match, 23 June 1979

I have written up my take on England’s ejection from the first (1975) cricket world cup, click here or below:

A Truly Thrice Awful Day In My School/Sporting Life, 18 June 1975

I did not witness that 1975 ejection, but I clearly had it on my mind that day.

But by 1979, it seems, not only was I (once again) too busy pottering around with actual cricket at Alleyn’s School to witness the match, I don’t even mention the cricket world cup in my diary.

had lazy day (scored) easy evening

So lazy was I, that day, I abandoned capital letters and most punctuation.

“Scored”, on that day, will mean, “scored a school team cricket match”, not the other (chasing girls) type of scoring.

Sociologists of the future will be delighted to learn that, at age 16, I was doing my fair share of the other type of scoring; the page before and the page after in the diary attest to that.

But that week had been an exam week at school.

I have a funny feeling that this particular episode of scoring lazily for the school team was a match at Battersea Grammar School (or I should say Furzedown, as that school had, by then, become) playing fields, which at that time was situated a lazy stroll away from our home in Woodfield Avenue. I say that only because I remember being asked at the last minute to score such a match around that time and the use of the term “lazy” infers that I went to little bother all day, possibly including even an absence of travel bother.

The way that world cup final match turned out is well described on Wikipedia here.

The way the Alleyn’s School match turned out is lost in the mists of time, unless some archivist somewhere kept the scorebooks. Anybody know if such archives are available for inspection? If so, let’s just hope my scoring handwriting was better than my diary handwriting.

The MCC has put up a rather charming half hour highlights package from that 1979 world cup final match – jolly decent of them – in two sections – here they both are:

The Day England Won A Cricket World Cup Semi Final On Home Soil, While I Went To School And A Youth Club Committee Meeting, 20 June 1979

No need to hold on to your hats for this diary entry, readers. 20 June 1979 is not one of the more exciting ones:

School OK. Exec meeting – all OK

But like the best Greek dramas, the exciting stuff is all happening just off stage.

This was the year during which I went out with Gillian for many months – several mentions of those activities on the preceding and subsequent pages.

The perceptive reader / interpreter might notice that I describe the youth club meeting the night before as “near revolution”. That can only be to do with the welfare day we were busy organising, with representatives from all around the Southern Region due to descend on our tiny little Streatham enclave on 1 July. I’ll take soundings and write up that whole near-drama soon (he writes in June 2019).

And those keen on drama might note that I sat my AO-level Drama that week. B was the result of that, if I recall correctly.

But the diary is entirely silent about the fact that the England cricket team, who for sure were very much on my mind still that summer, as indeed they were every summer, won a world cup semi-final thriller against New Zealand that day:

Here is a link to the scorecard and Cricinfo resources.

While this link takes you to some video of the match, which I might myself watch some day…but not today.