Shane Warne has Better Things to Do!
Shane Warne will not be trying to do the difficult job of helping out the Aussies in the next Test Match, as he seems to have found something better to do.
Bet of the Month
Ipswich is a close town and rumours get around quickly.
The football team has been terible recently and it is not the team I saw at Middlesbrough or Sheffield United.
So what has gone wrong?
I’ve heard several theories and although, I have my own, I’m keeping it quiet.
But let’s assume Roy Keane doesn’t last the week! Ipswich is an honourable man, and Marcus Evans, the owner, doesn’t seem to be a man to act in haste.
So what would happen if a new manager came in. There are after all some good candidates tending their gardens or walking the dog at the moment. There are a lot of good players at Ipswich Town and they probably need rearranging and remotivating more than anything else. So a good man-manager, like Bobby Robson or Alf Ramsey should have no problem creating a team, without too much trouble. The team is almost a bit like a car with contaminated fuel. And then there are the njured players, who should return soon.
So how about two bets if Keane goes; beat Chelsea in the FA Cup and make the playoffs. The odds for the latter are only five-to-one now, so perhaps the professionals have already helped themselves.
The Acceptable Face of Violence
I’m very much against violence, except in one place; the boxing ring. Judging by the reports this morning, the fight last night between Amir Khan and Marcos Maidana was a real thriller.
I like Khan and he seems to be wearing his world championship belt with dignity. It was also reported that when he went training in the Philippines recently, with the incomparable Manny Pacquiaio, who is also trying to do his best for his troubled homeland.
I think it is true to say that the Muslim community both in the UK and worldwide needs more role-models like Khan.
We will have the World Cup in an Islamic country in 2022. It would be wonderful, if the England team contained one or more footballers with Islamic roots.
Eleanor Oldroyd Solves the Aussies Problems
Eleanor Oldroyd is the First Lady of Fighting Talk and on today’s show she gave her learned opinion on how to improve the dreadful performance of the Australian’s so-called cricket team. She actually made two suggestions.
- We persuade the ICC to let the Aussies have a third innings.
- The English team play French cricket, which would mean they had to face the bowler directly.
The latter is a really serious suggestion, as it would probably mean that the likes of Strauss, Pietersen, Bell and Collingwood would rise to the challenge with superb stroke-play.
If you’ve never listened to Fighting Talk, it is one of the best programs on Radio 5 and is also available as a podcast.
Today’s was a particularly good edition, with the program finishing with Eleanor explaining how athletes fail drug tests for too much testosterone and/or Viagra.
The Day I Stood on the Queen
Putting up the story of the Queen’s Award Reception yesterday, reminds me of one of my other royal stories.
One Saturday, C and I were at a loose end, so we took the Cessna 340, Delta-Delta, and flew into Newbury racecourse. It had an airstrip in those days in the centre of the course.
I,m not sure if we had a runner, but it may have been the day that Vague Shot ran in the Newbury Spring Cup, with the great, Steve Cauthen, in the saddle. When they assess the history of British racing at the end of this century and they rate the great jockeys, it will not be Lester Piggott, Frankie Dettori or Fred Archer, who will be rated the greatest, but the quiet impeccable American from Kentucky, Steve Cauthen. On the track, few could ever match his skills and especially his judgement of pace. Vague Shot’s victory under top weight in the Royal Hunt Cup in very heavy going, could never have been achieved by any other jockey. It was just one of many where he was totally at one with the horse in an impossible situation. He did the same at Nottingham on a horse of ours called Golden Panda, that was named after a Chinese restaurant, which he coaxed home on the 8th of August 1988, which was a day the bookies regretted, as every Chinese restaurant in Suffolk helped themselves to odds of 12-1.
But it is Steve’s personality that made him the greatest. To him every owner and horse was a friend to be treated the same. If you were the local greengrocer with a horse in a selling plate, you got the same treatment as the Queen would have in a Group race. One of my memories of Steve was of him at Haydock Park, between rides, where he spent perhaps twenty minutes talking to a young man in a wheelchair by the entrance to the weighing room. How many sportsmen would do that?
But to return to that day at Newbury and the Queen. We were in the paddock with the trainer of Vague Shot, Clive Brittain, waiting to put the jockey up on one of his runners. A horse in front of us, decided to rear up and as one does, C and I took a few steps back. However, at the same time another horse spooked at something and did the same thing, with those in between taking avoiding action.
I ended up stepping on the Queen. When I realised what I had done, I apologised profusely.
She just gave a knowing smile, put a finger to her mouth and walked to a safer place.
Spammer Responsible for a third of all Spam in Court
I like this story from The Register. Here’s the first few paragraphs.
A Russian who allegedly at one time ran a network of compromised machines responsible for a third of global spam appeared in federal court in Wisconsin on Friday to deny the charges.
Oleg Y Nikolaenko, 23, a resident of Moscow, faces charges that he forged email spam messages in violation of the US CAN-SPAM Act, following his arrest in Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel last month.
Prosecutors allege that the Russian was responsible for pumping out a staggering 10 billion spam messages per day, touting penis pills and counterfeit goods using the infamous Mega-D botnet network.
I wonder how many spam e-mails we’re going to see from Russia selling tickets, hotels and flights to the World Cup in 2018? Probably none, as Putin has given Sepp Blatter his word!
Will The Aussies Turn to Shane Warne?
It is being rumoured that the Australians might turn to Shane Warne to help them get even with England in The Ashes.
In a way, I wonder whether some think this might be a good idea for England too, as some of their batsmen would just love to get at him and pay him back for all the damage he’s done in the past! Remember many of the England batsmen have had a good look at Warne lately in 20/20 cricket, so perhaps he’s not as feared as he once was!
Who Are West Brom’s Sponsor?
I’m just watching West Brom play Newcastle and their sponsor appears to be 247 999, arranged in two rows of three digits. Looking closely, you can just see 0800 in smaller numbers above them.
I thought it was probably some new on-line gambling company and it was only when I checked that I found it was the free phone number for Homeserve, who as far as I know are a perfectly legitimate company.
It’s Raining in Adelaide
C and I liked Adelaide, when we went there in the 1980s. But it didn’t rain. In fact in the whole three weeks we were in Australia we never saw any rain at all. This was unusual, as we usually had rain on holiday, just like Queen Liz does!
Adelaide is a unique Australian city in that it was planned by Colonel William Light to be a city with wide streets and lots of green spaces. It is also surrounded by a large area of parkland and has proved to be one of the best laid-out cities in the whole world. There is a statue to his memory called Light’s Vision overlooking the city with this inscription.
The reasons that led me to fix Adelaide where it is I do not expect to be generally understood or calmly judged of at present. My enemies however, by disputing their validity in every particular, have done me the good service of fixing the whole of the responsibility upon me. I am perfectly willing to bear it, and I leave it to posterity and not to them, to decide whether I am entitled to praise or to blame.
Light and his father, Francis, are two of those characters in history, to whom I am drawn. C and I came across the father first in Penang and realised that the founder of the settlement, had been born in Dallinghoo, which was the next village to Debach, where we lived at the time. So the father of the designer of Adelaide was a Suffolk man. In fact, he was the illegimate son of a woman in the village, who was taken under the wing of the local landowner. He certainly was a well-educated and successful man as this extract from Wikipedia shows.
From 1765, he worked as a private country trader. For about ten years he had his headquarters in Salang, Thailand, near Phuket, reviving a failed French trading post. While living there he learned to speak and write several languages, including Malay and Siamese. In 1785, he warned the Thais on Phuket Island of an imminent Burmese attack. Light’s warning enabled the islanders to prepare for Phuket’s defence and subsequently repel the Burmese invasion. For the British East India Company, he leased the island of Penang from the Sultan of Kedah, where many others had failed, and was supposedly given the Princess of Kedah as a reward (other sources state that the Princess was sent to covet Light’s aid on behalf of the Sultan). The multicultural colony of Penang became extraordinarily successful from its inception and Light served as the Superintendent of the colony until his death.
They were an amazing father and son, who from humble beginning made a real positive contribution to the world. We get massive tomes written about obscure and useless politicians, but where is the dual biography of Francis and William Light? A book was written in 1901 and it’s here in PDF.
Let’s hope the rain eases up enough for the Aussies to take their deserved beating!
Bonkers FIFA
I can understand giving the World Cup to Russia for 2018, but to give it to Qatar for 2022, is probably one of the stupidest decisions they have made in recent years, amongst a whole basketfull.
I’ve been to Russia to support Ipswich and although it was a day trip, it was a pleasureable experience. Especially as Ipswich won in the Olympic Stadium, where Seb Coe and Steve Ovett won their gold medals.
My only worry about Russia is that the Russian police are not noted for being friendly. Even a few thousand Ipswich supporters, who are not noted for trouble, were treated with strong suspicion. When I went to Belarus to support England, other England fans, I said that Minsk was a really pleasureable experience compared to an earlier visit to Moscow, where the police were overly aggressive.
But that is a problem, they will have to overcome, just as they’ll have to come to terms with black players, who often don’t get the best of reception from the crowds in Russia.
When I heard Qatar had won, I thought it was a joke.
The games will be played in very high temperatures, drinking by fans will be a problem and the population of Qatar is only 1.6 million, so it must be the smallest country ever to stage a World Cup. So if they fulfil their promise of building 12 stadia, they would just about be big enough to hold the whole population of the country.
I suspect that it will be the first World Cup that will be played in an alternative venue or it might well be the least successful in terms of visitor numbers. After all, some of the cheaper options for travel and accommodation, will just not be available.
I suspect too, that we’ve not heard the last of these two World Cup bids, when a few investigative journalists get their noses into the story.
I also can’t get it out of my mind, that for 2022, the United States was one of the bidders and I suspect that their bid was strong. So did the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan mean that no-one would vote for England or the United States.
This article from the Brisbane Times is a good summary of the farce. Like England, Australia got just one vote.
This paragraph from the article quotes Henry Winter of the Daily Telegraph.
But prominent English football analyst Henry Winter, while lamenting his country’s loss, wrote in London’s Daily Telegraph that Qatar’s win was “the real scandal” and that FIFA credibility was battered by its decisions.
“Yet the real scandal in FIFA-ville was the decision to award the 2022 tournament to Qatar, a soulless, featureless, air-conditioned, cramped place with so little connection to football it required hired hands like Pep Guardiola. It was as if FIFA were saying ‘to hell with the fans’. Qatar 2022 will be a joyless experience for supporters,” Winter said.
“FIFA’s credibility was battered yesterday, not by any allegations of corruption but by the cynical game of collusion and vote-trading that patently went on in Fifa House. All the fish are soiled.”
We’ve not heard the last of this scandal.
The Anonymous Widower 