Image by Privatemusings, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Ok so the first question you’re asking is “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”. This will be followed by “Where have you been all these years?”. I can’t answer the first due to legal reasons however I can have a stab at some professionally poor excuses for the second. Covid? Oh hang on that came 3 or so years after our last post. Retirement after reaching the zenith of cricket reporting and commentary? I think you can see the flaws in that effort. Well as my great great grandma used to say, if they don’t believe the lies then try to dazzle them with the truth. Let’s go with the oldest chestnut on the tree – the rest of life and work got in the way of a good time. But no more my friends. We’re back and will hopefully be filling your eyeballs with insightful and mostly ridiculous cricket coverage and commentary accompanied by all the inane royalty free images we can find.
Now to summarise the highlights and lowlights of our time away from No Ball – really good good and really shit. The Aussies won the T20 World Cup with some brilliant cricket in the back end of the tournament including some brilliant bat work from one our faves, Mitch Marsh. They went on to monster England in the Ashes, which featured my new favourite Australian cricketer Cam Green, along with a “it can’t get better than this” debut from Scott Boland and masterful twin inning tons from Usman Khawaja. Then everything turned to poo and we lost three Australian cricketing legends in too short a time. Warnie just felt like an immovable object on the cricketing landscape, despite his near 15 retirement from test cricket. His passing rocked me in a way I did not expect as I am sure it did for many others, cricket nuffies or not. As for Rod Marsh, well I was raised on a diet of “Bowled Lillee, Caught Marsh” and that man changed the idea of what a wicket keeper was forever. Then to top off the pile of existential excrement we lose Andrew Symonds, way too early. If you want to know how you win games for your country besides taking wickets and scoring runs then check out a Symonds fielding highlight reel. The thing is, he did all three.
Onwards and upwards though. We have so much great cricket ahead of us with the Aussie Sri Lanka tour just about to kick off, an exciting test series between New Zealand and England and of course the T20 World Cup rapidly approaching amongst so much more.
