The Anonymous Widower

I Was There!

There is an old Max Boyce song or tale about Llanelli beating the All Blacks, 9-3 in 1972.  Upwards of 50,000 Welshmen claim that they were in Stradey Park that day, when the figure was probably around 20,000.

My only real “I was there” moment was that I was in Trafalgar Square on July 6th, 2005, when London won the right to hold the 2012 Olympics.  I was on the steps of St. Martins-in-the-Fields and I have the pictures to prove it.

So how many fervent Welshmen will claim that they were in Cardiff, when England played their “Get Out of Jail Free” card yesterday.  Read Tom Fordyce for an excellent piece on how the bowlers batted out a draw.  I couldn’t possibly claim it was a well-deserved draw could I?  But then it is always worthwhile to rub an Aussie’s nose in it.

I listened to the story unfolding in the car between Dunkirk and Rotterdam, not on the BBC’s Test Match Special on Long Wave, but the regular Five Live broadcast, with Mark Pougatch, Alex Stewart, Jason Gillespie and Pat Murphy.  It was nail-biting stuff.  Not that I do that anymore. 

At one point, I went through a tunnel and there was cheering on the other side.  Had England lost a wicket?  No they’d scored a four.  Everything was cheered and even after a dot ball, you’d think that England had won.

So it was all great fun!  But I can’t agree more with Jason Gillespie, when he suggested that a bit of pace, rather than two spinners might have blasted one of Anderson and Panesar out.  But then that is just a what if!

Panesar, like all good Sikhs, showed his honourable fighting qualities and has given the selectors a real dilemma.  They probably need to drop one of the spinners, and he would have been the most likely, as although they both bowled badly in Cardiff, he is the lesser batsman.

But can they drop one of the heroes of Cardiff?

July 13, 2009 - Posted by AnonW | Sport | Cricket, Olympics