I Don’t Like Cricket…
July 3, 2006 at 1.38 pmI was going to start this post with a throwaway line from that song…but instead I thought I’d see if I could find its lyrics…
DREADLOCK HOLIDAY
10cc - 23/09/1978 (GREAT year!)
1 week at #1 - 13 weeks in chartsI was walkin’ down the street,
Concentratin’ on truckin’ right,
I heard a dark voice beside of me,
And I looked ’round in a state of fright…I saw four faces, one mad; a brother from the gutter.
They looked me up and down a bit and turned to each other.I say, I don’t like cricket, oh no,
I love it!
I don’t like cricket, no no,
I love it!Don’t you walk through my words, you got to show some respect.
Don’t you walk through my words, ‘cause you ain’t heard me out yet.Well, he looked down at my silver chain.
He said: "I’ll give you one dollar".
I said: "You’ve got to be jokin’, man,
"It was a present from me mother".He said: "I like it, I want it, I’ll take it off your hands,
"And you’ll be sorry you crossed me,
"You better understand that you’re alone" (a long way from home).And I say, I don’t like Reggae, no no,
I love it!
I don’t like Reggae, oh no,
I love it!Don’t you cramp me style, don’t you queer me pitch.
Don’t you walk through my words, ‘cause you ain’t heard me out yet.I hurried back to the swimming pool,
Sinkin’ piña colada.
I heard a dark voice beside me say,
"Would you like something harder?"She said: "I’ve got it, you want it, my harvest is the best,
"And if you try it, you’ll like it, and wallow in a Dreadlock Holiday".And I say, don’t like Jamaica, oh no,
I love her!
Don’t like Jamaica, oh no,
I love her, oh yeah.Don’t you walk through her words, you got to show some respect.
Don’t you walk through her words, ‘cause you ain’t heard her out yet.I don’t like cricket, oh no,
I love it (Dreadlock Holiday).
I don’t like Reggae, oh no,
I love it (Dreadlock Holiday).
Don’t like Jamaica, oh no,
I love her (Dreadlock Holiday).
It really is quite a dark song, (presumably) about a man on holiday in Jamaica. He tries (?) to talk cricket and reggae, but still gets mugged. He also gets offered some drugs. There are probably all sorts of other hidden meanings of which I know nothing, too.
The song’s become something of a summer anthem for cricket fans, but only that one chorus really. One of my stronger childhood memories is of listening to cricket on the car radio while waiting for my dad (I did A LOT of sitting in the car waiting for dad when I was younger), parked up somewhere in Willesden on a hot summer’s day. It was the time of one of the series against the West Indies, so songs like that featured pretty large.
Back then, the streets of Kensal Green were quiet enough to play cricket in. How times change.
Okay. Did you find this post by Googling for "the I don’t like cricket song", or something similar? Trust me, you’re not alone.
Bear with me here. You probably like cricket…right? How about online games? How about… * cue drumroll * …an online cricket management game?
Battrick. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s fantastic. You get your team, you train your players, you choose your lineups and, twice a week, your lads play one-day games against other people’s teams. Real people. You get commentary too, in real time — you can spend an entire Friday following your team score
First class games are in the pipeline too — four whole days of cricket to follow!
It’s not easy — it’s going to take two years rather than two weeks for you to get to the top. If you make it, that is — you’d be competing against 7,000 other cricket lovers from all around the world.
What’s the catch? There isn’t one, apart from the addiction that WILL take hold. It’s completely free — you can get from bottom to top without paying a penny/rupee/cent/rand/etc.
So, just have a look. Go on. See what you think. And please leave me a comment saying what you do think. Or if you’ve got any questions.
Anyway, this post was meant to be all about the two ODIs I watched last week, so I’ll stop blathering…
Old Trafford - 4th Eng vs SL ODI
Whenever The Mighty Sri Lanka tour England, I organise a trip to Old Trafford for a bunch of mates.
Front row - (l-r) PhlAsh, Cattac (aka Chris)
2nd row - Katy (sunhat), Andy, Nic (cap), me, Dan
Front (actually the 2nd) row - Nic, me, Dan
2nd row - Kate (standing), Adam, Matt, Sam
Third row - Allan (tall), Pete, Nick, Adrian
Pete’s pasty was completely empty
The England team takes to the field
The hapless England fans had to make their own
entertainment - in this case, a 10m long snake
made of stacked plastic "glasses"
Clare, Chris and PhlAsh signal four…while nobody
else does! Not set up at all, then…
Toby, Allan and Pete signal rowdily
Linden and Sam (looking like a Miami Vice extra)
This time round, there was only one match there, a One Day International (ODI), and it was on a Wednesday.
Buoyed by the early response, I ordered twenty tickets, and pretty soon had plenty of takers. Closer to the game, however, lots of people dropped out. I did manage to get rid of all the tickets, eventually, but it was a close run thing!
So, we met up outside the ground just after 10am. The weather was fine, if a bit overcast. It was a fairly mixed crowd going, with connections all over the place:
- Hattrickers
Pete, Allan, Toby, Nick, Adrian - MUGSS (vaguely!)
Matt, Kate, Clare, PhlAsh, Chris D, Chris Y, Linden, Sam, Dan - ChemEng
Katy, Andy - Others
Al - ex-housemate)
Nic - friend of a girlfriend of a friend, met just a month ago
Adam - friend of a friend, met on a ski/snowboard trip
As always, some people fall into two camps, and I’d have probably met various people along the way, even if I didn’t know them primarily through MUGSS, etc.
Almost everyone got there in good time…Matt was the only exception, phoning in to say that he was running pretty late. He eventually joined us around midday, having actually gone into work that morning. His workmates didn’t expect him there, which gave him a bit of a clue. Unfortunately, he was travelling from the far side of Sheffield, so it took a while. D’oh!
We sat in a 4x5 block, which was handy. Of course, I was the only one supporting Sri Lanka - I was roundly jeered, by both my mates and a couple of groups behind us, whenever I proudly waved my flag, but I really didn’t care. All good-natured stuff, really. Directly behind us was a group of really annoying schoolkids - I really don’t think Allan was a fan!
SL batted first, and started very nicely indeed, with Tharanga, Jayasuriya and Mahela (Jayawardene) motoring along. Indeed, Mahela got a hundred. Apart from that, the middle order didn’t do too well (four batsmen all got out for seven runs apiece!), but the innings was saved at the end by some serious hitting from Maharoof and Bandara.
So, 318/7. A pretty imposing target, but considerably less than it was looking at one stage.
England started the chase well, with Trescothick and Cook batting pretty well. Strauss and Bell were pretty useful, and took the score to 161/4 off 28 overs.
Just about on course, then, but the run rate was still high. From there on, wickets fell steadily until England were bowled out for 285, with just over an over left. Looks as though Maharoof’s late flourish was the difference.
The England innings had been properly strangled
Mahela doing some damage
Proper reports and stuff:
To be honest, England got much closer than I’d expected. To make things interesting, I’d stipulated a "Mahinda’s pint target" - if they got within 30 runs of the SL total, I’d down a pint of Thwaite’s. I got pretty nervous towards the end!
So, everyone got on, and much beer was consumed. Thanks a lot to all who were there, for making it an absolutely superb day out in the sun.
Most of the group, sunned-up and sozzled
(l-r) Dan, Nic, Chris Y, Clare, PhlAsh, Kate, Al, Andy, me, Katy, Sam
(missing) Toby, Matt, Chris D ("Cattac"), Pete, Allan, Nick,
Adrian, Adam, Linden (taking the photo)
Thanks also to Linden, who supplied most of these lovely pictures!
Meeting Mahela
The one disappointment of the day (Pete’s pasty notwithstanding) came after the match.
Okay, so it was a fair wait at the
end, but some people are just far
too easily amused!
Now, Mahela Jayawardene is a family friend of Shaluki, one of my close friends back home. Indeed, his parents were staying at her place for the duration of the series.
I got a call from Shaluki a couple of nights before the match, with her father telling me that I should take my friends around to the pavilion at the end of the match, and Mahela would come out at meet us all (I’d met him once before, several years back).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get word to him - I should have been pushier with the door staff, I guess - so all I got was a handshake while he had to get on to the team coach.
Oh well. It wasn’t my idea, but it would have been nice.
Curry
After the match, where else to go but King Cobra?!
I spent plenty of time waving my flag gleefully
We headed back to Hardy’s Well, to meet up with some others. I nipped over to say hello to the hockey bunch in Platt Fields - it was 4-1 when I got there, so I joined the losing side and got things up to 5-6, before joining the other side and getting it to 6-6. I’m amazed I didn’t fall over more, after all the beer at the cricket!
Anyway, we had a lovely curry and then, knackered all, headed home. A pretty fantastic day!
Headingley - 5th Eng vs SL ODI
I got an email from Josephine on Thursday morning - her boss was trying to shift some tickets for the last ODI in the series, at Headingley on Saturday.
To cut a long story short (there’s a first time for everything!), I ended up going with Daf, one of her workmates, whom I’d met about three times previously. Nice chap, so I didn’t have any worries that we’d not get on.
I had to get up far too early on Saturday morning…not early enough, though, as I ended up missing my train to Leeds by a few seconds. No matter - the next one wasn’t far off.
A lovely day at Headingley
Found Daf at Leeds station, and we braved the taxi queue. We shared a cab with two others - a lad who was meeting friends at the ground, and a girl who lived close by (Headingley’s a seriously studenty area - roughly the Leeds equivalent of Fallowfield), who’d literally just gotten back from Brazil.
Got in, grabbed beer, and sat down. We had absolutely fantastic seats, right at the front of the North East Stand’s upper tier.
So, the match. England won the toss and batted first, on an absolutely glorious summer day in Leeds. After five overs, Vaas and Malinga kept the score down to something like 2/0, which is absolutely phenomenal stuff! However, once the ball softened a bit, Tresco and Cook started going well. 82/1…157/2…225/3…it didn’t look good for SL, really.
A thoroughly unholy lot!
The eventual target was 321/7. I reckoned that SL might have a bit of trouble. Okay, so the pitch seemed to have nothing in it, and the weather was fine…but it was Headingley, home of late swing and batting collapses!
How wrong I was. Jayasuriya was ANGRY! The fifty came up after five overs, the hundred after eight. I’ve never seen scoring like it. By the time we lost our first wicket, it was 286/1 off just 31.5 overs!
The eventual win had become something of a formality after the first ten overs, with SL reaching the target with more than twelve overs to spare. And that was after taking it easy for a while towards the end.
Utterly, utterly amazing hitting. If SL had batted first, we could have seen something REALLY special - if they’d batted like that for 50 overs, 400 would have been almost a certainty.
So, that brought the series to an end. England had been absolutely taken apart in the end, 5-0 at home. Okay, so it’s only ODIs and not Test cricket, and England were missing key players, but that’s still a worrying thumping. England have absolutely no chance at next year’s World Cup.
Sri Lanka celebrate their 5-0 thumping of England
Proper reports and stuff:
It was my first time at Headingley, and I was very impressed. A lot of money’s been put into the ground recently, and it showed. Relatively comfortable seats, with good raking and plenty of legroom. It’s just a pity they had no draught bitter on, despite having Deuchar’s IPA as their "Official Beer"
I asked a pretty blonde barmaid there about the Deuchar’s, BTW, and she’d never heard of it. An English student, she was just doing a bit of agency (bar)work to tide her over until she got a proper job. Her bitter/ale knowledge, unfortunately, topped out at Caffrey’s.
Penalties
If Trescothick had been given out on 30something, as he clearly should have been, the match might even have been over in time for the second half of England-Portugal!
As it was, we were in time to see the last few minutes of extra time on Headingley’s big screen, followed by the penalties. By the end of the SL innings, the ground was less than half full. Oh well.
So, England bombed out of the World Cup. On penalties. Again.
Birthdays
So, nicely sunned-up and sozzled, Daf and I headed back to Leeds station, where we parted ways. Back to Manc for me, to catch up with people for Si and Matt’s birthday celebrations.
I eventually joined the throng (Si, Matt/Barney, Mike, Pam, Spikey Rick, Linden, Rosy, Nick, Pete and Sarah) in 42nd Street for indie-oriented goodness.
Lots of people left early, leaving Linden, Rosy and me dancing away until just shy of 2am, when we got a cab back to Linden’s. Rosy and I walked the rest of the way home - I just managed to catch the last of the cricket highlights, then collapsed into bed.
It had been quite a session. What a day!
