Michael J and I were thinking of going to Lords today, to watch the cricket. As it turned out, he had other business (good luck with that mate - he knows what I mean), and we scrapped the idea.

Just as well we did. Had we gone, at the sort of time we probably would have gone, then according to the radio commentators I was listening to this morning we would have been stuck in a huge queue outside the ground, while everything interesting that was going to happen all day happened, in the morning.  Lords beat the drum, sold tickets for the last day for a mere tenner, but then didn’t open enough gates when lots of people showed up.  Very bad.

They said the blockage was something to do with “security”.  The terrorists have won!

By the time many of those unfortunates who did accept this offer got into the ground, it was effectively all over. Bangladesh had five wickets left, but lost them too quickly to make a proper fight of it.  The only excitement concerned whether one of the England bowlers would five wickets in the innings (which he did), and then ten wickets in the match (which he didn’t).. This is a new chap called Finn, who is very tall, who is, they say, quite fast, and who keeps falling over after bowling, which is not what you want, is it?

Surrey, my county team, are meanwhile showing signs of life. (I realise that now, absolutely nobody is reading this. Did you know that all rabbits born on a Thursday have poisonous bites? It’s true. If nobody dares to disagree in the comments, I will draw the inevitable conclusion, although it is true about the rabbits, if not widely known. I looked for this at Snopes. There is nothing there about this not being true, so it must be.) They won both of their limited overs games the weekend before last, the first with an improbably good late batting performance when all looked lost, and the second by taking two early wickets and never letting up, winning crushingly with vast numbers of overs and wickets to spare. (I wonder if those links will last.) Both are great ways to win, from the morale point of view. Then, in the next unlimited overs game, they looked on a hiding to nothing, until a big last wicket stand by Surrey’s two South African fast bowlers got them to first innings near equality, when a huge first innings deficit followed by defeat on the last day looked inevitable.  Instead, following that big stand Surrey managed to bowl the other fellows out cheaply and then win, with the South Africans also getting lots more wickets. First unlimited overs win for Surrey since the last time they had an unlimited overs w, a long, long time ago.

Although, one of those South African fast bowlers, Nel, was fined and banned for two games for misbehaving, in the very game he did so well in. Nel is a schizophrenic sort of a person (persons?), with an alter ego called “Gunter”, and it was presumably Gunter who did the misbehaving. It usually is, according to what I’ve read. So why was Nel expected to carry the can?  As commenter Yorvik says:

All well and good banning Andre for two matches but wouldn’t it be better to ban this Gunter chap for life? He seems to be the one causing the problems.

Indeed.  I mean, in Gotterdammerung, we don’t blame Siegfried for what he did when magically disguised as someone else, even though his behaviour was far worse. Did Nel/Gunter refuse to recognise the love of his life and cause her, with his various miscalculations, culminating in his death, to give up on everything and jump into a bonfire? On a horse? I think not. (Incidentally, I rather think that Siegfried’s alter ego may also have been called Gunther, in the sense that he was disguised as another character in the thing called Gunther. (I have many recordings and DVD’s of the Ring Cycle, but have never really got stuck into them all for a solid fortnight, ignoring everything else. I just like the way it all sounds.) So anyway, how about that? Does Nel like Wagner, I wonder? Please add Wagner comments to prove that you have read this far.)

So anyway, Surrey are now playing Glamorgan. The first day was lost to bad weather, and during the second Glamorgan made nearly 400. But Surrey are now batting, and at tea have reached two hundred plus for three.  Two of their newly acquired players, an unproven but presumably promising young chap fresh out of college and a very expensive new wicket-keeper that they have recently bought from a Poor County somewhere to the west, who is both a very good wicketkeeper and a dashingly free hitting batsman, flailed away to put on nearly a hundred for the first wicket. The wicket-keeper in particular really put his pedal, as they say in other places to the ones I generally frequent, to the metal. He got a dashing eighty something, at about a run a ball.  He generally gets out for a dashing 25 at a run a ball, so this could yet get interesting.  On the other hand, Surrey have also bought in a prestigious new batsman, Younis Khan, who recently retired in a huff from being a Pakistan test cricketer.  He got out for a duck.  On the other other hand, Ramprakash is now on 70.

England have now duly won their game against Bangladesh.  It was all over by tea.  And oh dear, the Surrey game just got interesting but not in a good way, with Surrey losing two sudden wickets, Ramps and new dashing young captain Rory Rory Hamilton-Hamilton-Hyphen-Brown-Hyphen-Stroke-Undeserved-Good-Looks for a golden duck.  What’s a golden duck?  It’s a duck made of gold.  What did you think it was?  Plus, did you know that they have recently discovered that there are certain very small physics type particles that have the ability to travel faster than the speed of light?  Yes.  But the bad news is: they don’t go much faster. About ten percent faster, which is nothing. Apart from setting the scientists at each other’s throats, because for them this is a big drama, it will hardly make any difference.  Science fiction, for example, where the entire Galaxy is shrunk by warp speed travel back to the size of medieval Europe with everybody just a day or two away and all fighting each other like in Star Wars, will continue to be science fiction rather than any sort of guide to the actual real future.  Mobile phones may get ten percent faster when you are talking to Australia or the Moon or something.  Other than that, nothing very significant, unless you are a theoretical scientist.  It’s amazing what a persevering reader can learn from the blogs, don’t you think?