Is it the fate of old books that they should ever and only be dusty? Is their purpose solely one of being the last resting place of dried food particles, dead skin, mould spores, pollen, fabric fibres and the house dust mite? Generally, it is, until that moment when one is wrenched from under the weight of this powdery detritus that is then blown away with a force normally reserved for a stubborn cake candle and is allowed to settle on a companion novel, compendium or almanack.
Ah yes, almanack, a word that could have been invented with dust in mind, a repository in page form of a year gone by or of a year to come, a work of reference which, as with all works of reference, is designed to accommodate an ashen layer of house garbage in tiny form. Even the titles of almanacks come with an in-built antiquity that presupposes the gathering of dust. "Old Moore's". Or "Wisden".
If there were to ever be a census of shelf space devoted to collected works, prominent among them would be Shakespeare, Dickens and "Wisden". For many of its one hundred and fifty years, it was cricket's first and last word, the sport's own "Oxford English Dictionary". It was the indispensable source of information for those times when you were suddenly struck by not having total recall of the State Bank of India's match against the Ceylon Board President's Under-27 XI in September 1968. The dust would be scattered, down would come the 1969 edition and, of course, the bank had won by an innings and 29 runs.
But now, it is the last word in a different sense. By the time its word is uttered, it is outdated. In this year's "Wisden", the editor, Lawrence Booth, takes the England and Wales Cricket Board to task for reasons already long in their discussion and dissection by forums and social media. Its slavish attention to scorecard detail and to the statistical archived obsessions of cricket has long since been replaced by Cricinfo and its real-time updating. Its stumbling towards modernity has permitted some recognition of sub-continental usurping, but it hankers for the days when the Marylebone Cricket Club not only drew up the rules of cricket, it also ran it.
Yet it retains an aesthetic pleasure. It has a sturdy, comforting presence in contrast to the immediacy but also disposability of web and digital rivals. Its status as an almanack affords it an authority of endurance and continuity. As spring arrives along with optimism, it appears each April. It is the start of the season.
Venerability of this type can be applied to Mallorca, where the timing of its season is coincidental, where statistical obsession is as pervasive and as meaningless to anyone but the propagandist, where the rules were written, where the first and last words on tourism were once uttered, where an industry in its mass form was founded and from where it was exported and shared with others who were to become rivals and who were to reinvent the rules.
When Kerry Packer shocked the world of cricket in the 1970s with his World Series, "Wisden" was apoplectic. The old order was being shattered. Its timing was also coincidental. The startling rise of Mallorca and its assumption of tourism hegemony faltered in the mid-70s. The oil crisis was its own shock. It was one from which the island would learn, they said. The rules did need to be amended. More control was needed. Less reliance upon foreign tour operators was required. But once there was recovery from the shock, the urgency of renewal was lost. Things could carry on as they were. For "Wisden" and its Anglo-centric view of the world, this was true of the post-Packer era. it hadn't been as much of a shock as had been thought.
However, this complacency was deceiving. Changes were coming. Cricket was being consumed by greater brutality. The Caribbean led the way. Over there, away from the games on the beach or on the rock-hard pitches of Jamaica, a touristic brutalism was being unleashed. It was Sandals, not Club Med, which really made the all-inclusive.
This brutality was met with Australian aggression and cock-suredness and also, the biggest shock of all, an assertiveness previously unknown on the sub-continent. It fostered what there is now. The quirkiness of the State Bank of India has been replaced by the World Bank of cricket - the Indian Premier League. "Wisden" is still apoplectic.
In the same way, Mallorca was confronted with ever-increasing challenges to its authority, from those destinations to which it had exported and which rewrote the rules of quality and of resorts. And they now do so in a touristic real-time of web and mobile sharing. There is no need for an almanack. The book is constantly being rewritten.
Showing posts with label Cricket. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cricket. Show all posts
Thursday, April 09, 2015
Thursday, March 05, 2015
The Moneyball Of Tourism
There is an interesting debate going on in the world of sport at present. It is one being had principally in cricket and concerns the England team more than others. It has to do with the compilation of statistical information in guiding and setting tactics. The team is told that a certain score should guarantee victory. Bowlers are told to pitch a ball in a certain place with a certain style, as this will lead to a wicket being taken rather than other deliveries.
The England cricket team, a generally joyless and robotic formation, is currently enduring a period of massive underachievement and of resounding defeats. Blame for this is being levelled at all sorts of targets, with the use of statistical information and the reliance placed on it by coaches at the top of the list. Yet, there was a time, not so long ago, when stats had helped England to overachieve. The data collection was thus seen as having given England a competitive advantage over other sides. Now, and possibly for a variety of reasons - changes to fielding regulations, for instance - big data appears to be a hindrance; it is causing England to play in a restricted fashion and, more often than not, to lose and to lose heavily.
A root of this sporting obsession with statistics is "Moneyball", the book that was developed from the use of so-called sabermetrics analysis in baseball. But it is only one root. For many years, the English Football Association employed Charles Hughes as its director of coaching. His statistical analysis bred the "long ball", but Hughes insisted that the science of his analysis was beyond dispute.
The analysis that cricket has at its disposal gives evidence that is irrefutable. Every single delivery is analysed. A total picture of how runs are scored, how wickets are taken is formed. But cricket's analysis, the son of Moneyball, cannot be compared with baseball. There are vastly more variables in cricket than in baseball. The wicket and its condition (not a factor in baseball) is just one of them. Nevertheless, the science is sound. It has to be because of the completeness of the data. But then this was what Charles Hughes claimed, and Charles Hughes was wrong. In the pursuit of statistical perfection, the intangible was lost: the soul of the game, the moments of inspiration and genius, the tolerance of the individual.
Statistical completeness is thus nothing if it is not complemented by the beautiful recklessness of flair and the unorthodox. England's cricket team lacks a brutal creator, a De Villiers or Gayle, or a fearsome destroyer, a Johnson or Malinga. Indeed, it positively discriminates against the non-conformist, as Moneyball appears to insist that it does.
But what happens when the statistics are not complete yet are still held up as a type of Moneyball justification? Some of Mallorca's tourism statistics are complete. Airport arrivals can be calculated accurately, but what do they tell us? Who are these travellers? Where are they going? Why are they here? It is completeness without discrimination. Data without information. As annual scores edge up, they are cause for numerical celebration but no more. The tourism spend statistics, on the other hand, are not complete. They are extrapolations from samples, the validity of which the statisticians will defend. They may have some accuracy within an acceptable range of deviation, but if they are determined by wrong questions being put, by wrong things being measured, by an almost infinite variance on account of the who-where-why tourist mix, how can they be construed as showing the reality? They can't, and even the national secretary-of-state for tourism has accepted as much.
The statistics are a defence shield that obscures the painful orthodoxy of thinking, tactics and strategy. There were more "tourists", i.e. airport arrivals, in January. Hooray, the winter message is getting across. No it is not, and it won't while the flair of promotion as exhibited by others, e.g. Croatia, is inhibited and an automaton Moneyball preference for defining tourism through numerical software is valued over the human ware of original thought and a passion for innovation. The winter message, such as it is, is shackled by an orthodoxy of product offer which apes that of so many competitors, but it is compensated for by the array of summer statistics which dispassionately speak of incremental growth and of percentage increases.
Neither sport nor tourism can be calculated solely in statistical terms. They are human activities with all the emotion, difference, imperfection that these imply. But they are also activities in which the previously-thought impossible can take hold. England's cricket team is realising this, as it struggles to compete with the unconstrained joyousness of so many opponents not inhibited by a Moneyball straightjacket. There is a message for tourism. Think the impossible, rather than think only of the statistic.
The England cricket team, a generally joyless and robotic formation, is currently enduring a period of massive underachievement and of resounding defeats. Blame for this is being levelled at all sorts of targets, with the use of statistical information and the reliance placed on it by coaches at the top of the list. Yet, there was a time, not so long ago, when stats had helped England to overachieve. The data collection was thus seen as having given England a competitive advantage over other sides. Now, and possibly for a variety of reasons - changes to fielding regulations, for instance - big data appears to be a hindrance; it is causing England to play in a restricted fashion and, more often than not, to lose and to lose heavily.
A root of this sporting obsession with statistics is "Moneyball", the book that was developed from the use of so-called sabermetrics analysis in baseball. But it is only one root. For many years, the English Football Association employed Charles Hughes as its director of coaching. His statistical analysis bred the "long ball", but Hughes insisted that the science of his analysis was beyond dispute.
The analysis that cricket has at its disposal gives evidence that is irrefutable. Every single delivery is analysed. A total picture of how runs are scored, how wickets are taken is formed. But cricket's analysis, the son of Moneyball, cannot be compared with baseball. There are vastly more variables in cricket than in baseball. The wicket and its condition (not a factor in baseball) is just one of them. Nevertheless, the science is sound. It has to be because of the completeness of the data. But then this was what Charles Hughes claimed, and Charles Hughes was wrong. In the pursuit of statistical perfection, the intangible was lost: the soul of the game, the moments of inspiration and genius, the tolerance of the individual.
Statistical completeness is thus nothing if it is not complemented by the beautiful recklessness of flair and the unorthodox. England's cricket team lacks a brutal creator, a De Villiers or Gayle, or a fearsome destroyer, a Johnson or Malinga. Indeed, it positively discriminates against the non-conformist, as Moneyball appears to insist that it does.
But what happens when the statistics are not complete yet are still held up as a type of Moneyball justification? Some of Mallorca's tourism statistics are complete. Airport arrivals can be calculated accurately, but what do they tell us? Who are these travellers? Where are they going? Why are they here? It is completeness without discrimination. Data without information. As annual scores edge up, they are cause for numerical celebration but no more. The tourism spend statistics, on the other hand, are not complete. They are extrapolations from samples, the validity of which the statisticians will defend. They may have some accuracy within an acceptable range of deviation, but if they are determined by wrong questions being put, by wrong things being measured, by an almost infinite variance on account of the who-where-why tourist mix, how can they be construed as showing the reality? They can't, and even the national secretary-of-state for tourism has accepted as much.
The statistics are a defence shield that obscures the painful orthodoxy of thinking, tactics and strategy. There were more "tourists", i.e. airport arrivals, in January. Hooray, the winter message is getting across. No it is not, and it won't while the flair of promotion as exhibited by others, e.g. Croatia, is inhibited and an automaton Moneyball preference for defining tourism through numerical software is valued over the human ware of original thought and a passion for innovation. The winter message, such as it is, is shackled by an orthodoxy of product offer which apes that of so many competitors, but it is compensated for by the array of summer statistics which dispassionately speak of incremental growth and of percentage increases.
Neither sport nor tourism can be calculated solely in statistical terms. They are human activities with all the emotion, difference, imperfection that these imply. But they are also activities in which the previously-thought impossible can take hold. England's cricket team is realising this, as it struggles to compete with the unconstrained joyousness of so many opponents not inhibited by a Moneyball straightjacket. There is a message for tourism. Think the impossible, rather than think only of the statistic.
Monday, December 01, 2014
Descanse En Paz: Phillip Hughes
It was when I saw that "Ultima Hora" had run the story about Hughes that I realised how deeply and how widely news of his death was being experienced. Contemporary communications being as they are, news agencies being as they are, it was a story which might not have touched the Spanish media in years gone by, but because of the instantaneousness of communications, it did. But this was the death of a cricketer. Un jugador de críquet. They don't play cricket in Spain. What do the Spanish know of this sport?
Well, they do of course play cricket in Spain. The national side may in international terms be in the minor league but national team there is, though to suggest that the overwhelming majority of Spaniards would have a clue about the sport - quite how it is played or quite how silly mid-off might be translated into Spanish - would be well wide of the mark.
Sport has over time followed its own evolutionary pattern of separate development, but there are - as with all evolution - common origins, for example hitting something with something else, which became a bat, while the thing to be hit was moulded into a shape that would allow smooth movement - the ball, the pelota. The Spanish - the Basques originally - have "pelota", which migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, just as much of the British Empire formed a common bond on the cricket pitch. The sports are different but they are not different. They share a common root and they share a commonality in being a sport.
It was this commonality which came across most in the reports of Hughes's death. A sportsman had been killed doing what he did, playing sport. That cricket might be a sport of arcane rules and jargon to the uninitiated doesn't matter. It is still a sport and so part of a global community which comes together in the name of sport; hence the many DEPs that were contained in the comments to those reports.
The comments were, from the point of view of an English-speaking, cricket-loving observer, more interesting than the reports themselves. "Marca", the leading Spanish sports daily, had several pages of them on its website. The first one I came across said: "apart from being very boring, cricket is also dangerous and should be banned". Another opined that cricket was "a foolish and risky game". Others acknowledged the risks but no one else went so far as to suggest that cricket should be banned, though one added that "frankly, it seems stupid to me to play with balls that can kill". The counterpoint to this was one which said: "People die in cycling, motorcycling, skiing, and I could name others. Sport has a risk. If you don't want to assume it, then don't play it. But using a ball of foam rubber would be like limiting speeds on motorways to 20kph in order to avoid deaths".
It was the ball and its characteristics and the nature of protective gear which dominated the comments. There were those who, not having experienced cricket, were curious as to how the ball was made and others who expressed surprise that there was not greater protection. For those who didn't fully appreciate what had happened, someone went into some detail in explaining how "Hughes had turned on his vertical axis" (in cricketing parlance, he was playing the hook shot) and been struck where it was unusual to be struck. There was also surprise as to the sheer speed with which the ball can be bowled (or, in the absence of a Spanish verb "to bowl", can be thrown or slung). A Pakistani commenter came on to say that Shoaib Akhtar had bowled at 160kph (100 miles per hour).
Unrelated to the incident, someone else, not having any knowledge of cricket, had looked it up on Wikipedia. It was a sport with "a very interesting perspective". It was supposed that England would dominate it, but it turns out that England had never won the World Cup. He noted that India were the current champions and that the tournament had also been won by the West Indies ("a coalition of Caribbean micro-nations that seems to have been a good team").
Well, there's no need to rub it in about England's ongoing failure, but it was a comment which, I guess, highlighted how little would be known of cricket in Spain. Yet despite this, many people wished to comment, and overwhelmingly the feeling was one of sadness. The world of sport had come together. Phillip Hughes, DEP.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
The Power Of Nicknames
A recent Facebook observation implied that the new coach of the England cricket team, Peter Moores, would impose a less frivolous atmosphere in the England dressing-room. Out would go nicknames and in would come respectful monikering. Mr. Moores, for example.
Latching onto this cricketing nicknaming theme, it occurs to me that nicknames can say a great deal about a team's style and intent. In the recent Ashes series, England were soundly thrashed by a side who can count among their playing and coaching ranks a Buck, a Rhino and a Boof. Darren Lehmann's boof alter ego apparently comes from having a big head (it's Aussie slang), but it also has an onomatopoeic quality. Boof, biff. And never was a nickname more apt than Ryan Harris's Rhino, a thick-hided Mammalian bowling machine whose lumbering demeanour belies an ability to hurl himself and the ball at enormous velocity. Even mild-mannered Chris Rogers, bespectacled off the field, passes through an imaginary phone booth on the walk to the wicket and becomes a Buck superhero.
England never stood a chance. Their nicknames said it all. Swanny, who swanned off home. Belly, who perhaps prefers the cuteness of the y suffix to an alternative that has found its way onto cricket forums: the combining of his names Ian and Ronald to form Iron. This might sound sturdy, but it does also have a very different and wholly unwarranted rhyming-slang meaning. And then there is Captain Cook, limply labelled Chef. In another life, his home one, he also has the y treatment. Cooky. I know this because a some-time resident of Mallorca is a vendor at the market at his wife's family farm. She is on good Cooky-naming terms with the England captain; not, alas, that she has the faintest idea about cricket.
So, rather than dispensing with informality, Mooresy should insist that the players acquire more macho nicknames. Perhaps they could consult the list of Gladiators' names - Cobra, Trojan, Warrior - or perhaps they could just start playing half-decent cricket. Nicknames do have a certain power after all. Some have been more like honorary titles that have bestowed greatness onto their holders. There was no greater than The Great Communicator, there was no more steadfast than The Iron Lady (her ironing not having been of a disparaging Belly style of course).
In addition to greatness, the nickname can help to soften the image, to make the almost non-human appear to be human. Which brings me to Spanish and Mallorcan politicians. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero never lacked in appearing to be human. While his Bambi nickname may have made him even more human (in an anthropomorphic way), it didn't do a great deal for a tough-guy image, one that he most certainly lacked.
In Mallorca there aren't really nicknames for the local politicos. Maria Antonia Munar, currently residing at his majesty's pleasure, did have one - the "princess" - but she was unusual in that she elevated herself to a position of self-appointed Mallorcan royalty. It wasn't necessarily complimentary, but nicknames for politicians rarely are.
Where the president of the Balearics is concerned, he remains stubbornly non-nicknamed, despite my best efforts to re-name him. For the record, these have included: Bowser, after the greedy, fire-breathing Super Mario character; J.R., which shouldn't require a great deal of explanation for those of you familiar with a scheming and manipulative oil baron (a nickname which can now be discounted because of presidential opposition to oil prospecting off the Balearics); Count Dracula, on account of a certain physical resemblance, as opposed to any possible blood-sucking instincts. The nearest that President Bauzá has come to a nickname has been the one assigned to him by union leader Lorenzo Bravo. But "fascist" can't really be termed a nickname. It is pretty squarely an insult (and a stupid one at that). More possible is "the pharmacist", a frequent enough reference to his one-time day job and, more controversially, to the allegations of his having retained links to his pharmacy business that were incompatible with his presidential position.
Back in national politics, we have Zapatero's successor, Mariano Rajoy. When he was debating with Solzhenitsyn, Uncle Alfie Rubalcaba of PSOE, prior to the last election, I described this as the battle of the beards. In one sense, this was rather unfortunate. Beard is another slang word. It is one reserved for a woman who makes a gay man appear to be straight. The English Wikipedia page for Rajoy once had to remove his a.k.a., i.e. La Trotona de Pontevedra. Basically, this was a furtherance of the rumour that he was gay and had married on the advice of one-time Francoist minister, Manuel Fraga.
There are nicknames and there are nicknames. They should, one hopes, have a certain affection or satire, but they shouldn't overstep the mark. As with the stupidity of Bravo's name-calling of Bauzá, so it was with Rajoy. There's insensitivity, too, based on unkindness and usually untruths. Iron.
Latching onto this cricketing nicknaming theme, it occurs to me that nicknames can say a great deal about a team's style and intent. In the recent Ashes series, England were soundly thrashed by a side who can count among their playing and coaching ranks a Buck, a Rhino and a Boof. Darren Lehmann's boof alter ego apparently comes from having a big head (it's Aussie slang), but it also has an onomatopoeic quality. Boof, biff. And never was a nickname more apt than Ryan Harris's Rhino, a thick-hided Mammalian bowling machine whose lumbering demeanour belies an ability to hurl himself and the ball at enormous velocity. Even mild-mannered Chris Rogers, bespectacled off the field, passes through an imaginary phone booth on the walk to the wicket and becomes a Buck superhero.
England never stood a chance. Their nicknames said it all. Swanny, who swanned off home. Belly, who perhaps prefers the cuteness of the y suffix to an alternative that has found its way onto cricket forums: the combining of his names Ian and Ronald to form Iron. This might sound sturdy, but it does also have a very different and wholly unwarranted rhyming-slang meaning. And then there is Captain Cook, limply labelled Chef. In another life, his home one, he also has the y treatment. Cooky. I know this because a some-time resident of Mallorca is a vendor at the market at his wife's family farm. She is on good Cooky-naming terms with the England captain; not, alas, that she has the faintest idea about cricket.
So, rather than dispensing with informality, Mooresy should insist that the players acquire more macho nicknames. Perhaps they could consult the list of Gladiators' names - Cobra, Trojan, Warrior - or perhaps they could just start playing half-decent cricket. Nicknames do have a certain power after all. Some have been more like honorary titles that have bestowed greatness onto their holders. There was no greater than The Great Communicator, there was no more steadfast than The Iron Lady (her ironing not having been of a disparaging Belly style of course).
In addition to greatness, the nickname can help to soften the image, to make the almost non-human appear to be human. Which brings me to Spanish and Mallorcan politicians. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero never lacked in appearing to be human. While his Bambi nickname may have made him even more human (in an anthropomorphic way), it didn't do a great deal for a tough-guy image, one that he most certainly lacked.
In Mallorca there aren't really nicknames for the local politicos. Maria Antonia Munar, currently residing at his majesty's pleasure, did have one - the "princess" - but she was unusual in that she elevated herself to a position of self-appointed Mallorcan royalty. It wasn't necessarily complimentary, but nicknames for politicians rarely are.
Where the president of the Balearics is concerned, he remains stubbornly non-nicknamed, despite my best efforts to re-name him. For the record, these have included: Bowser, after the greedy, fire-breathing Super Mario character; J.R., which shouldn't require a great deal of explanation for those of you familiar with a scheming and manipulative oil baron (a nickname which can now be discounted because of presidential opposition to oil prospecting off the Balearics); Count Dracula, on account of a certain physical resemblance, as opposed to any possible blood-sucking instincts. The nearest that President Bauzá has come to a nickname has been the one assigned to him by union leader Lorenzo Bravo. But "fascist" can't really be termed a nickname. It is pretty squarely an insult (and a stupid one at that). More possible is "the pharmacist", a frequent enough reference to his one-time day job and, more controversially, to the allegations of his having retained links to his pharmacy business that were incompatible with his presidential position.
Back in national politics, we have Zapatero's successor, Mariano Rajoy. When he was debating with Solzhenitsyn, Uncle Alfie Rubalcaba of PSOE, prior to the last election, I described this as the battle of the beards. In one sense, this was rather unfortunate. Beard is another slang word. It is one reserved for a woman who makes a gay man appear to be straight. The English Wikipedia page for Rajoy once had to remove his a.k.a., i.e. La Trotona de Pontevedra. Basically, this was a furtherance of the rumour that he was gay and had married on the advice of one-time Francoist minister, Manuel Fraga.
There are nicknames and there are nicknames. They should, one hopes, have a certain affection or satire, but they shouldn't overstep the mark. As with the stupidity of Bravo's name-calling of Bauzá, so it was with Rajoy. There's insensitivity, too, based on unkindness and usually untruths. Iron.
Monday, April 07, 2014
The Tourism Season: It's just not cricket
Who said that the season is getting shorter? Quite the opposite. It is getting longer. Fact. In 1964 it started on 2 May. This year it started on 6 April. Ok, some explanation is needed. The season - the tourism season - is underway (sort of), a number of places having opened over the first week of the month, but I'm not referring to the tourism season. The English county cricket season started on Sunday.
Fifty years ago, resident and tourist alike would not just have had to wait until what has become the official start of the tourism season - May - to catch up with the county scores. They would have to have waited for as long as it took for a British newspaper to find its way on to a newsstand. It seems remarkable now, when scores are available in real time, that this delay was still with us until relatively recently, a delay which, before printing in Europe, typically meant that a paper was read a day late. In the good old days of early tourism, it would have been a longer delay. Matches would have finished by the time it was possible to pore over the scorecards for the first day's play.
Had you been a tourist or resident desperate to know the scores from the first matches of the 1964 season, you would have been engrossed by the passage of play of the first two games of that season. They were slow, painfully slow. This was, after all, the era of the young Geoffrey Boycott and the year when the most mind-numbingly dull test match of all time was played - England v. Australia at Old Trafford. Simpson batted into the third day in scoring 300, and Barrington spent most of the rest of the match making 250. The result? It was a foregone conclusion from the first ball. A very bore draw.
Oddly enough, and despite the sheer tedium that was most cricket in the early 1960s, it still had a hold over the nation's sporting affections (the nation largely of course having been England). But then we didn't really know any different. There was a tradition, and this tradition demanded lack of excitement and staidness. It wasn't just cricket. This was British society fifty years ago, one that was right on the cusp of being shaken out of its traditional stuffiness, stiffness and dullness.
For the tourist (British, that is) in search of the cricket scores in 1964, he encountered something that was anything but dull. This was the new world. Yet for all that there was sun, sea and sombreros, British customs demanded that some traditions were transported south. In compiling the history of the last 50 years of Mallorcan tourism for the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" last year, I was struck by how pervasive this export was. Local hotels had to adapt to different tastes, and local bar owners had to learn how to make a proper cuppa.
Cricket, in its longer form, persists with its bizarre ritual of the "tea break". It is doubtful that much tea is now drunk, as the break is a period for a brief encounter with the masseur and for the quaffing of bananas, but it is a relic of a bygone era, when tea was taken around four o'clock: by cricketers and by the rest of Britain. The tourist would have wanted his or her afternoon cuppa as well until he or she came to appreciate that there were alternatives and they were available in industrial quantities at dirt cheap prices.
What any cricket-loving from the early 1960s tourist would have been unable to indulge in would have been a decent game of beach cricket. I don't know if there has ever been any worthy research into the subject, but I would suggest that the rise of the holiday to Mallorca (and other destinations), where beaches are unlike Weston-super-Mare's, had something to do with the decline in cricket's popularity. Football can, after all, be played on soft sand.
For all that it was new and exciting, the Mallorcan holiday back then held true to traditions that were not Mallorca's but were those of other nations, the British in particular. The first phase of tourism was, in a sense, akin to the rituals and norms of English county cricket. Predictability was demanded, but in pandering to this predictability, Mallorca fell foul of the stodginess that typified cricket.
The holiday to Mallorca became, inadvertently therefore, a tradition with the trappings of an imported culture. It required shocks to wake the island out of the stupor that this created, just as it needed shocks to shake cricket out of its torpor. Kerry Packer and the World Series were cricket's equivalent of the oil crisis. And much closer to the present day, the emergence of fast and furious competitors in distant lands - Egypt, Turkey and so on - is like IPL and T20, with the axis of cricket power having been tilted.
Cricket has had to adapt. Its county season starts a month earlier in order to accommodate the brashness of the 20-over thrash. A traditional sport, shaken to its roots, has been able to move with the times. For Mallorca, the most traditional of holiday destinations, the season hasn't truly started. It has typically got later and shorter.
Fifty years ago, resident and tourist alike would not just have had to wait until what has become the official start of the tourism season - May - to catch up with the county scores. They would have to have waited for as long as it took for a British newspaper to find its way on to a newsstand. It seems remarkable now, when scores are available in real time, that this delay was still with us until relatively recently, a delay which, before printing in Europe, typically meant that a paper was read a day late. In the good old days of early tourism, it would have been a longer delay. Matches would have finished by the time it was possible to pore over the scorecards for the first day's play.
Had you been a tourist or resident desperate to know the scores from the first matches of the 1964 season, you would have been engrossed by the passage of play of the first two games of that season. They were slow, painfully slow. This was, after all, the era of the young Geoffrey Boycott and the year when the most mind-numbingly dull test match of all time was played - England v. Australia at Old Trafford. Simpson batted into the third day in scoring 300, and Barrington spent most of the rest of the match making 250. The result? It was a foregone conclusion from the first ball. A very bore draw.
Oddly enough, and despite the sheer tedium that was most cricket in the early 1960s, it still had a hold over the nation's sporting affections (the nation largely of course having been England). But then we didn't really know any different. There was a tradition, and this tradition demanded lack of excitement and staidness. It wasn't just cricket. This was British society fifty years ago, one that was right on the cusp of being shaken out of its traditional stuffiness, stiffness and dullness.
For the tourist (British, that is) in search of the cricket scores in 1964, he encountered something that was anything but dull. This was the new world. Yet for all that there was sun, sea and sombreros, British customs demanded that some traditions were transported south. In compiling the history of the last 50 years of Mallorcan tourism for the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" last year, I was struck by how pervasive this export was. Local hotels had to adapt to different tastes, and local bar owners had to learn how to make a proper cuppa.
Cricket, in its longer form, persists with its bizarre ritual of the "tea break". It is doubtful that much tea is now drunk, as the break is a period for a brief encounter with the masseur and for the quaffing of bananas, but it is a relic of a bygone era, when tea was taken around four o'clock: by cricketers and by the rest of Britain. The tourist would have wanted his or her afternoon cuppa as well until he or she came to appreciate that there were alternatives and they were available in industrial quantities at dirt cheap prices.
What any cricket-loving from the early 1960s tourist would have been unable to indulge in would have been a decent game of beach cricket. I don't know if there has ever been any worthy research into the subject, but I would suggest that the rise of the holiday to Mallorca (and other destinations), where beaches are unlike Weston-super-Mare's, had something to do with the decline in cricket's popularity. Football can, after all, be played on soft sand.
For all that it was new and exciting, the Mallorcan holiday back then held true to traditions that were not Mallorca's but were those of other nations, the British in particular. The first phase of tourism was, in a sense, akin to the rituals and norms of English county cricket. Predictability was demanded, but in pandering to this predictability, Mallorca fell foul of the stodginess that typified cricket.
The holiday to Mallorca became, inadvertently therefore, a tradition with the trappings of an imported culture. It required shocks to wake the island out of the stupor that this created, just as it needed shocks to shake cricket out of its torpor. Kerry Packer and the World Series were cricket's equivalent of the oil crisis. And much closer to the present day, the emergence of fast and furious competitors in distant lands - Egypt, Turkey and so on - is like IPL and T20, with the axis of cricket power having been tilted.
Cricket has had to adapt. Its county season starts a month earlier in order to accommodate the brashness of the 20-over thrash. A traditional sport, shaken to its roots, has been able to move with the times. For Mallorca, the most traditional of holiday destinations, the season hasn't truly started. It has typically got later and shorter.
Monday, June 17, 2013
The Only Mallorcan Way Is Essex
17 all out was something of a low point for the school under-15 cricket team. Mr. Mace the geography teacher, who doubled as an alleged cricket coach, was not greatly amused. Irresponsible batting, he said sternly, his eyes fixed on the number-three batsman and team captain. True, I had missed the ball, but the intent had been good; attempting to hit the fastest bowler on the Surrey schools cricket circuit back over his head before I had even scored.
As school sporting nadirs went it was about as bad as the defeat for the rugby XV when it played its first match after having been revived following a four-year hiatus. It started to become clear why the rugby team had previously been scrapped. It also became clear when we saw the opposition for that first game get off their coach that we were all about to die. The Army's Junior Leaders. The score would have been worse than 102-0 had the whistle for full time not been blown a good five minutes before it should have been.
But sporting embarrassments have to be placed in context. New Zealand once beat Portugal 108-13 in the Rugby World Cup and the other day Essex were bowled out for 20. Admittedly, both performances represent an improvement on my school's disasters (Portugal actually scored) but they go to show, as always, that it's not the taking part that matters, it's the losing.
How misfortunes change. Thirty years ago Essex skittled out Surrey for 14, so clearly the development of Surrey schools cricketers of the early 1970s had filtered through to the benefit of Surrey CCC. But how can one explain such a reverse in fortunes? One factor that is generally overlooked in any analysis of English cricket is the harmful influence of the foreign holiday, that to Mallorca in particular. Why? Tides. Tides and sand. It is impossible to have a decent game of beach cricket in Mallorca.
Back in the '70s and '80s, people still went to British seaside resorts and so they still put stumps in hard sand, were able to extract decent bounce off a short length with a tennis ball and were also able to demonstrate the art of the hook or pull shot even if this didn't result in a boundary. That was because the boundary, the sea, had disappeared halfway to Belgium or France. Once everyone started going "foreign" and heading off to destinations without miles upon miles of dirty, muddy, hardening sand, cricket lost one of its great learning grounds. In fact, it lost loads of them. Just as county cricket is no longer played at the likes of Clacton or Southend, so cricket is no longer played on the beaches, because everyone's gone to Mallorca and is playing beach paddle tennis instead. Essex CCC, deprived of a once thriving beach cricket tradition, can look forward to more 20 all outs, I'd wager.
It is sad that Essex should lose out to an island with which it has a great deal in common. Well, one great thing at any rate. Its size. When people ask me, as you can imagine that they often do, how big Mallorca is, I tell them that it is more or less the same size as Essex. And it is, give or take around 30 square kilometres. It may not be immediately obvious that their sizes are comparable, given that Essex has other stuff around it like London, but plonk Mallorca on top of Essex, bend it around a bit and lo and behold, Mallorca is Essex. Or vice versa.
In truth, size is about all that Essex has in common with Mallorca. Clacton isn't Cala Millor and Southend isn't Sa Coma. Essex also doesn't have any mountain ranges, but what it does have is its only way. Yet, when it came to the producers of "The Only Way Is Essex" choosing a location for the programme's holiday specials, they opted for Marbella and not Mallorca. Strange decision. If Mallorca can have Stacey Dooley and "Geordie Shore", it would love to have "The Only Way Is Essex" as well. As most of Essex appears to be in Mallorca at any given time, the decision appears even stranger.
The only reason I can think of for Mallorca not having been chosen is the embarrassment of that 20 all out and some form of punishment for why it came about and so the ruination of Essex cricket forever through the shipping of former beach cricketers en masse to Mallorca. Marbella, though, is surely equally to blame for the declining fortunes of Essex cricket. It's a pretty thin excuse and one that disguises the fact that Essex are simply useless. Rather like, it saddens me to have to admit, a certain under-15 school cricket team.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
As school sporting nadirs went it was about as bad as the defeat for the rugby XV when it played its first match after having been revived following a four-year hiatus. It started to become clear why the rugby team had previously been scrapped. It also became clear when we saw the opposition for that first game get off their coach that we were all about to die. The Army's Junior Leaders. The score would have been worse than 102-0 had the whistle for full time not been blown a good five minutes before it should have been.
But sporting embarrassments have to be placed in context. New Zealand once beat Portugal 108-13 in the Rugby World Cup and the other day Essex were bowled out for 20. Admittedly, both performances represent an improvement on my school's disasters (Portugal actually scored) but they go to show, as always, that it's not the taking part that matters, it's the losing.
How misfortunes change. Thirty years ago Essex skittled out Surrey for 14, so clearly the development of Surrey schools cricketers of the early 1970s had filtered through to the benefit of Surrey CCC. But how can one explain such a reverse in fortunes? One factor that is generally overlooked in any analysis of English cricket is the harmful influence of the foreign holiday, that to Mallorca in particular. Why? Tides. Tides and sand. It is impossible to have a decent game of beach cricket in Mallorca.
Back in the '70s and '80s, people still went to British seaside resorts and so they still put stumps in hard sand, were able to extract decent bounce off a short length with a tennis ball and were also able to demonstrate the art of the hook or pull shot even if this didn't result in a boundary. That was because the boundary, the sea, had disappeared halfway to Belgium or France. Once everyone started going "foreign" and heading off to destinations without miles upon miles of dirty, muddy, hardening sand, cricket lost one of its great learning grounds. In fact, it lost loads of them. Just as county cricket is no longer played at the likes of Clacton or Southend, so cricket is no longer played on the beaches, because everyone's gone to Mallorca and is playing beach paddle tennis instead. Essex CCC, deprived of a once thriving beach cricket tradition, can look forward to more 20 all outs, I'd wager.
It is sad that Essex should lose out to an island with which it has a great deal in common. Well, one great thing at any rate. Its size. When people ask me, as you can imagine that they often do, how big Mallorca is, I tell them that it is more or less the same size as Essex. And it is, give or take around 30 square kilometres. It may not be immediately obvious that their sizes are comparable, given that Essex has other stuff around it like London, but plonk Mallorca on top of Essex, bend it around a bit and lo and behold, Mallorca is Essex. Or vice versa.
In truth, size is about all that Essex has in common with Mallorca. Clacton isn't Cala Millor and Southend isn't Sa Coma. Essex also doesn't have any mountain ranges, but what it does have is its only way. Yet, when it came to the producers of "The Only Way Is Essex" choosing a location for the programme's holiday specials, they opted for Marbella and not Mallorca. Strange decision. If Mallorca can have Stacey Dooley and "Geordie Shore", it would love to have "The Only Way Is Essex" as well. As most of Essex appears to be in Mallorca at any given time, the decision appears even stranger.
The only reason I can think of for Mallorca not having been chosen is the embarrassment of that 20 all out and some form of punishment for why it came about and so the ruination of Essex cricket forever through the shipping of former beach cricketers en masse to Mallorca. Marbella, though, is surely equally to blame for the declining fortunes of Essex cricket. It's a pretty thin excuse and one that disguises the fact that Essex are simply useless. Rather like, it saddens me to have to admit, a certain under-15 school cricket team.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Scorecards In Heaven: Wisden
It's that familiar question. What do you miss about Britain? The reply is familiar, in my case at any rate. Not a lot. But in April each year there is an event which makes me wonder. It is a publishing event, one that heralds the start of summer and the return of the English cricket season. Wisden.
Arctic weather in Britain so late into the year is not so uncommon. One day in one April some years ago I stepped out of Baker Street tube en route to a meeting. It was snowing. That put an end to thoughts that I might just bunk off and go to Lord's instead. But coming back from the meeting, I found myself a nice, warm, cosy bookstore. I had yet to indulge in the annual ritual. That of the excitement of the sight of a pile of yellow-covered bricks of almanacks, their shiny white pages cut so perfectly that they looked like blocks of ice-cream.
How very different this edition was to my first Wisden. 1963's. It had become tattered. It still is tattered. Rather more in fact. It wasn't hardback, an omission on behalf of my father who bought it for me that some would argue was sacrilegious. A softback Wisden!
Hard or soft, the annual Wisden, for all its obscure coverage of public school cricket, an MCC tour to Bechuanaland, or cricket in Mongolia, was the excuse to while away hour upon hour poring over the previous season's county championship and test scorecards. They were the next best thing to actually being at a county game, to sit on the vast terraces of an empty Oval, a biting wind whipping in past the gas works while Barrington played out yet another maiden over that demonstrated the art of the forward defensive. And then there were the great scorecards, those that spoke of remarkable feats. For example, in the 1967 edition, there was the final test from the previous season: Graveney run out 165, but far more significantly, Murray lbw b Sobers 112, Higgs c&b Holford 63, Snow not out 59. Numbers nine, ten and eleven, a combined score of 234. Scorecard heaven.
Cricket is a mad sport. Its utter and innate insanity explains its attraction to many who border on having less than total contact with the real world. Eccentric sport invites eccentrics, and so Sir Patrick Moore is remembered in this year's Wisden, one of his greatest insights into cricket having been to observe that quick bowlers on Mars would have found it difficult to obtain any swing. It is a sport devoted to its own record-keeping. If cricket were to be given a school report, the comment would read that it was good at its sums. No sport has made statisticians famous in the way that cricket has: Bill Frindall, aka the Bearded Wonder, Messrs Duckworth and Lewis.
The Spanish don't have a clue about cricket. They may have a national cricket team, one largely comprising those with names that you would expect to be lining up alongside Saeed Ajmal, but in terms of the team registering with the national consciousness, it rates about as well as the British conkers team does. There was once a whole programme on the RNE3 national radio station given over to Neil Hannon's Duckworth Lewis Method and the group's eponymous album. What was the station thinking of? Not even true and British aficionados of cricket have the faintest idea how Duckworth Lewis works.
There would be little point trying to indoctrinate the Spanish and Mallorcans in the idiosyncrasies of cricket. How on earth would you overcome the issue of breaking for tea, especially when, and despite over a half a century of practice, the Mallorcans still haven't figured out how to make a cup of tea? Cricket is the great cultural divide. It is inherently bonkers and British. Let's leave the Catalans to building human towers and the Spanish to bullfighting.
For all that there is the annual ritual with Wisden, it is now something of an anachronism. Its scorecards have been usurped by online archives and real-time updating. It is no longer quite the reminder of culture from Britain that it once was. There is still the hankering after shivering with a cold pint as Onions bowls to Trescothick, but distance has been removed thanks to the internet and Cricinfo. Yorkshire all out 96. Chris Nash smashing 80 out of 104 in reply for Sussex. 80 out of 104. Scorecard heaven.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Arctic weather in Britain so late into the year is not so uncommon. One day in one April some years ago I stepped out of Baker Street tube en route to a meeting. It was snowing. That put an end to thoughts that I might just bunk off and go to Lord's instead. But coming back from the meeting, I found myself a nice, warm, cosy bookstore. I had yet to indulge in the annual ritual. That of the excitement of the sight of a pile of yellow-covered bricks of almanacks, their shiny white pages cut so perfectly that they looked like blocks of ice-cream.
How very different this edition was to my first Wisden. 1963's. It had become tattered. It still is tattered. Rather more in fact. It wasn't hardback, an omission on behalf of my father who bought it for me that some would argue was sacrilegious. A softback Wisden!
Hard or soft, the annual Wisden, for all its obscure coverage of public school cricket, an MCC tour to Bechuanaland, or cricket in Mongolia, was the excuse to while away hour upon hour poring over the previous season's county championship and test scorecards. They were the next best thing to actually being at a county game, to sit on the vast terraces of an empty Oval, a biting wind whipping in past the gas works while Barrington played out yet another maiden over that demonstrated the art of the forward defensive. And then there were the great scorecards, those that spoke of remarkable feats. For example, in the 1967 edition, there was the final test from the previous season: Graveney run out 165, but far more significantly, Murray lbw b Sobers 112, Higgs c&b Holford 63, Snow not out 59. Numbers nine, ten and eleven, a combined score of 234. Scorecard heaven.
Cricket is a mad sport. Its utter and innate insanity explains its attraction to many who border on having less than total contact with the real world. Eccentric sport invites eccentrics, and so Sir Patrick Moore is remembered in this year's Wisden, one of his greatest insights into cricket having been to observe that quick bowlers on Mars would have found it difficult to obtain any swing. It is a sport devoted to its own record-keeping. If cricket were to be given a school report, the comment would read that it was good at its sums. No sport has made statisticians famous in the way that cricket has: Bill Frindall, aka the Bearded Wonder, Messrs Duckworth and Lewis.
The Spanish don't have a clue about cricket. They may have a national cricket team, one largely comprising those with names that you would expect to be lining up alongside Saeed Ajmal, but in terms of the team registering with the national consciousness, it rates about as well as the British conkers team does. There was once a whole programme on the RNE3 national radio station given over to Neil Hannon's Duckworth Lewis Method and the group's eponymous album. What was the station thinking of? Not even true and British aficionados of cricket have the faintest idea how Duckworth Lewis works.
There would be little point trying to indoctrinate the Spanish and Mallorcans in the idiosyncrasies of cricket. How on earth would you overcome the issue of breaking for tea, especially when, and despite over a half a century of practice, the Mallorcans still haven't figured out how to make a cup of tea? Cricket is the great cultural divide. It is inherently bonkers and British. Let's leave the Catalans to building human towers and the Spanish to bullfighting.
For all that there is the annual ritual with Wisden, it is now something of an anachronism. Its scorecards have been usurped by online archives and real-time updating. It is no longer quite the reminder of culture from Britain that it once was. There is still the hankering after shivering with a cold pint as Onions bowls to Trescothick, but distance has been removed thanks to the internet and Cricinfo. Yorkshire all out 96. Chris Nash smashing 80 out of 104 in reply for Sussex. 80 out of 104. Scorecard heaven.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
For The Spanish, It's Just Not Cricket
Cricket is quite possibly the most stupid sport ever invented. It couldn't be anything other, given some of its arcane modes of batsman dismissal, arcane that is to all but the aficionado, and its archaic-sounding fielding positions. What is "silly mid-off" other than incredibly silly and indeed stupid, and you would need to be incredibly stupid to stand at silly mid-off as a hard round thing is being hit with tremendous force by someone with a hard wooden thing straight in your direction.
The Spanish have, in a rare act of historical sanity, managed to avoid cricket. Or had, until the MCC was formed in 1975. Not the MCC, but the Madrid Cricket Club. Legend has it that cricket has an altogether longer history in Spain - a "strong and rich history", according to the International Cricket Council, which dates back to the Peninsular War and British soldiers having a game or two to pass the time. The ICC is over-egging this history. Nothing much happened, cricket-wise, between 1809 and 1975, except possibly for a few beach games played by British tourists before they realised that most beaches in Spain, certainly in Mallorca, don't exactly lend themselves to playing cricket.
The development of cricket in Spain being relatively recent (and a recent history that includes the forming of the Mallorca Cricket Club in 1988), a national Spanish side has not exactly taken the sport by storm. Spain's most recent venture into the international arena (at least, the most recent I can unearth) was the European Division 2 Championship in 2011. Spain lost to Austria and Belgium, but beat Sweden and Greece and thrashed Malta, two bowlers with distinctly un-Spanish-sounding names, Talat Ali and Tanvir Iqbal, taking five and three wickets respectively.
It is the presence of non-Spanish names in Spanish national teams that gives the game away. It is hardly surprising that cricket is played at test level by countries where English is either the main language or one widely understood. You really can't expect countries with languages ill-equipped to define and translate concepts such as silly mid-off to truly get the point of the sport.
There is a Wikipedia page for "criquet" which lists "formas de hacer out", among which is leg before wicket. The Spanish explanation is basically correct, but it can't hope to do justice to the complexities of the LBW rule. It's the same in other languages. As a 14-year-old, I attempted the same explanation in German to the family I was staying with. And when it got to "bowl a maiden over", they had clearly come to the conclusion that cricket was a sport for lunatics. Mind you, I thought my improvisation of "ein Mädchen überzuwerfen" was a pretty decent attempt. Unfortunately, though, literally throwing a young girl over doesn't really get the point across.
A further reason, one imagines, for the stuttering development of cricket in Spain is a cultural one. How on earth would you explain the necessity to a Spaniard of "playing for tea"? And tea itself, as opposed to coffee, would not generally be high on the list of Spanish priorities in mid-afternoon, especially as the tea break is of only short duration and not the hour and a half normally required to take a cortado. There is another obvious cultural problem with this, which is that in mid-afternoon the Spanish would expect to be asleep and not expected to be standing around in the blazing sun, waiting to take evasive action as the hard round thing heads straight for them.
It is, therefore, no great surprise to learn that the qualifiers for the World T20 championship, currently taking place in the United Arab Emirates, do not include Spain. Mysteriously, they do include Italy; how they've managed to get into the group of sixteen non-test-playing countries, Lord alone knows. But if Spain were to break into the lower echelons of world cricket, then T20 might offer the opportunity. There is no need to worry about playing for tea in T20. Indeed, there is no need to worry about much of what cricket has traditionally placed as impenetrable obstacles. All that is required is to be able to hit the hard round thing with the hard wooden thing as hard and as often as possible. Even the Spanish should be able to figure this out.
But Spain will never be a world cricketing force. You have to have been born into the gloriously stupid culture of cricket to be so or to understand the sport. You'd never get a Spaniard to volunteer to field at silly mid-off. I would. And have. Ouch.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The Spanish have, in a rare act of historical sanity, managed to avoid cricket. Or had, until the MCC was formed in 1975. Not the MCC, but the Madrid Cricket Club. Legend has it that cricket has an altogether longer history in Spain - a "strong and rich history", according to the International Cricket Council, which dates back to the Peninsular War and British soldiers having a game or two to pass the time. The ICC is over-egging this history. Nothing much happened, cricket-wise, between 1809 and 1975, except possibly for a few beach games played by British tourists before they realised that most beaches in Spain, certainly in Mallorca, don't exactly lend themselves to playing cricket.
The development of cricket in Spain being relatively recent (and a recent history that includes the forming of the Mallorca Cricket Club in 1988), a national Spanish side has not exactly taken the sport by storm. Spain's most recent venture into the international arena (at least, the most recent I can unearth) was the European Division 2 Championship in 2011. Spain lost to Austria and Belgium, but beat Sweden and Greece and thrashed Malta, two bowlers with distinctly un-Spanish-sounding names, Talat Ali and Tanvir Iqbal, taking five and three wickets respectively.
It is the presence of non-Spanish names in Spanish national teams that gives the game away. It is hardly surprising that cricket is played at test level by countries where English is either the main language or one widely understood. You really can't expect countries with languages ill-equipped to define and translate concepts such as silly mid-off to truly get the point of the sport.
There is a Wikipedia page for "criquet" which lists "formas de hacer out", among which is leg before wicket. The Spanish explanation is basically correct, but it can't hope to do justice to the complexities of the LBW rule. It's the same in other languages. As a 14-year-old, I attempted the same explanation in German to the family I was staying with. And when it got to "bowl a maiden over", they had clearly come to the conclusion that cricket was a sport for lunatics. Mind you, I thought my improvisation of "ein Mädchen überzuwerfen" was a pretty decent attempt. Unfortunately, though, literally throwing a young girl over doesn't really get the point across.
A further reason, one imagines, for the stuttering development of cricket in Spain is a cultural one. How on earth would you explain the necessity to a Spaniard of "playing for tea"? And tea itself, as opposed to coffee, would not generally be high on the list of Spanish priorities in mid-afternoon, especially as the tea break is of only short duration and not the hour and a half normally required to take a cortado. There is another obvious cultural problem with this, which is that in mid-afternoon the Spanish would expect to be asleep and not expected to be standing around in the blazing sun, waiting to take evasive action as the hard round thing heads straight for them.
It is, therefore, no great surprise to learn that the qualifiers for the World T20 championship, currently taking place in the United Arab Emirates, do not include Spain. Mysteriously, they do include Italy; how they've managed to get into the group of sixteen non-test-playing countries, Lord alone knows. But if Spain were to break into the lower echelons of world cricket, then T20 might offer the opportunity. There is no need to worry about playing for tea in T20. Indeed, there is no need to worry about much of what cricket has traditionally placed as impenetrable obstacles. All that is required is to be able to hit the hard round thing with the hard wooden thing as hard and as often as possible. Even the Spanish should be able to figure this out.
But Spain will never be a world cricketing force. You have to have been born into the gloriously stupid culture of cricket to be so or to understand the sport. You'd never get a Spaniard to volunteer to field at silly mid-off. I would. And have. Ouch.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
If Mallorca Were Really Like Trinidad
Where would we be without Wikipedia? Forget the dangers of putting Google into Google and breaking the internet, if you were to type Wikipedia into Wikipedia, the world would come to an end.
Apropos of very little, I happened the other day to enquire about the Balearics in Wikipedia. The most interesting bit was to do with how organisations like the IMF spend their time. You might think the IMF would be dashing across the globe with suitcases of notes to help bail out basket-case economies, but no, it does something altogether more important. And it's not just the IMF. The Spanish national statistics office as well; it's at it. Not content with coming up with useless information on how much tourists spend (or don't), the statistics office, together with the IMF, so says Wikipedia, which cites them as sources, are figuring out where Mallorca and the Balearics are comparable with.
On the scale of pointless exercises, this is one that leans towards the "nul point", but nevertheless I feel it incumbent upon me to let you know that the Balearics are like Trinidad and Tobago and also the Bahamas, while not of course forgetting East Timor.
It's all a matter of size, where T&T are concerned: the same or similar land area to the Balearics. The economy equates to that of the Bahamas and population to that of East Timor (aka Timor Leste). Why the IMF and the stats people bother drawing up these comparisons is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's some sort of work experience task for geography, economics and demographics internees. You wouldn't imagine that the head of the IMF is spending much time calculating the relative land masses of individual island groups, or maybe Christine Lagarde is.
Up to a point, I feel slightly insulted, and that's because I have previously compared Mallorca to Essex in terms of size. Maybe I should go on to Wikipedia and add this information, as it seems more relevant than a comparison with Trinidad. I mean, it's not as though you get many tourists from Trinidad. Essex, on the other hand ... .
But if Trinidad it is, what would it mean if Mallorca were really like Trinidad? Well, for a kick-off there would be more of a Carnival than the half-hearted affairs you normally get and so a bit of a plus point for the off-season tourism. And tourism wouldn't be promoted by Nadal on a boat but by Brian Lara on a sun-kissed, palm-lined beach playing cricket while happy, smiling locals drink milk straight from the coconut. Hmm, sun-kissed, palm-lined; sounds a bit familiar, I suppose, though whether they have the red beetle palm plague in Trinidad I couldn't honestly say.
And thanks to Lara, the Sa Pobla Cricket Club wouldn't have a grass-less field but a stadium welcoming the Barmy Army (more tourism of the drinking class, but, boy, can they put it away) rather than playing host to the All Essex Secondhand Car Dealers Veterans XI.
Apart from Carnival, cricket, calypso and a lot more curry, if Mallorca were really like Trinidad and were genuinely blessed by having one very important natural resource, it would be in a lot better place than it currently is, because, and to continue a recent theme, what has Trinidad got that the Balearics don't and that many would hope it doesn't have? Yep, you guessed it. Oil. Oil and gas. Oil by the barrel load. Oil and gas equate to 40% of GDP. They haven't worried too much if there is the odd refinery on the landscape. Rather than Port of Spain, it's a bit like Port Talbot.
The comparisons that the IMF and the statistics office give out could as easily put the Balearics on a par with Trinidad and Tobago in terms of GDP; it's how the GDP is comprised that matters. But in an uncertain future, what should it rather be? Tourism or oil?
This is not the first time I have, pretty much by accident, stumbled across a Mallorca is like somewhere comparison. It happened back in June (22 June: "The Weaver's Tale") when I looked at Mauritius and its textile industry. And the point about Mauritius was that the government there set out a deliberate strategy to diversify the economy, with textiles forming an important part.
Trinidad got lucky. It had the oil. Tourism is more important to Tobago and both islands benefit from it, but the diversification underlines the fact that island economies, such as Mallorca's, cannot rely so heavily on one industry and one so geared to only a part of the year. If Mallorca were really like Trinidad, it would be Carnival all year.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Apropos of very little, I happened the other day to enquire about the Balearics in Wikipedia. The most interesting bit was to do with how organisations like the IMF spend their time. You might think the IMF would be dashing across the globe with suitcases of notes to help bail out basket-case economies, but no, it does something altogether more important. And it's not just the IMF. The Spanish national statistics office as well; it's at it. Not content with coming up with useless information on how much tourists spend (or don't), the statistics office, together with the IMF, so says Wikipedia, which cites them as sources, are figuring out where Mallorca and the Balearics are comparable with.
On the scale of pointless exercises, this is one that leans towards the "nul point", but nevertheless I feel it incumbent upon me to let you know that the Balearics are like Trinidad and Tobago and also the Bahamas, while not of course forgetting East Timor.
It's all a matter of size, where T&T are concerned: the same or similar land area to the Balearics. The economy equates to that of the Bahamas and population to that of East Timor (aka Timor Leste). Why the IMF and the stats people bother drawing up these comparisons is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's some sort of work experience task for geography, economics and demographics internees. You wouldn't imagine that the head of the IMF is spending much time calculating the relative land masses of individual island groups, or maybe Christine Lagarde is.
Up to a point, I feel slightly insulted, and that's because I have previously compared Mallorca to Essex in terms of size. Maybe I should go on to Wikipedia and add this information, as it seems more relevant than a comparison with Trinidad. I mean, it's not as though you get many tourists from Trinidad. Essex, on the other hand ... .
But if Trinidad it is, what would it mean if Mallorca were really like Trinidad? Well, for a kick-off there would be more of a Carnival than the half-hearted affairs you normally get and so a bit of a plus point for the off-season tourism. And tourism wouldn't be promoted by Nadal on a boat but by Brian Lara on a sun-kissed, palm-lined beach playing cricket while happy, smiling locals drink milk straight from the coconut. Hmm, sun-kissed, palm-lined; sounds a bit familiar, I suppose, though whether they have the red beetle palm plague in Trinidad I couldn't honestly say.
And thanks to Lara, the Sa Pobla Cricket Club wouldn't have a grass-less field but a stadium welcoming the Barmy Army (more tourism of the drinking class, but, boy, can they put it away) rather than playing host to the All Essex Secondhand Car Dealers Veterans XI.
Apart from Carnival, cricket, calypso and a lot more curry, if Mallorca were really like Trinidad and were genuinely blessed by having one very important natural resource, it would be in a lot better place than it currently is, because, and to continue a recent theme, what has Trinidad got that the Balearics don't and that many would hope it doesn't have? Yep, you guessed it. Oil. Oil and gas. Oil by the barrel load. Oil and gas equate to 40% of GDP. They haven't worried too much if there is the odd refinery on the landscape. Rather than Port of Spain, it's a bit like Port Talbot.
The comparisons that the IMF and the statistics office give out could as easily put the Balearics on a par with Trinidad and Tobago in terms of GDP; it's how the GDP is comprised that matters. But in an uncertain future, what should it rather be? Tourism or oil?
This is not the first time I have, pretty much by accident, stumbled across a Mallorca is like somewhere comparison. It happened back in June (22 June: "The Weaver's Tale") when I looked at Mauritius and its textile industry. And the point about Mauritius was that the government there set out a deliberate strategy to diversify the economy, with textiles forming an important part.
Trinidad got lucky. It had the oil. Tourism is more important to Tobago and both islands benefit from it, but the diversification underlines the fact that island economies, such as Mallorca's, cannot rely so heavily on one industry and one so geared to only a part of the year. If Mallorca were really like Trinidad, it would be Carnival all year.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Death Of A Sporting Hero
A rare thing for this blog, but for once something that has nothing to do with Spain or Mallorca.
Basil D'Oliveira has died.
Why, among other deaths, should D'Oliveira's passing demand that I indulge in a spot of obituary writing? He wasn't, after all, that great a cricketer. He was a good one but no more than that. The reason lies in his story and in the way it affected me.
A South African Cape coloured, D'Oliveira was denied the opportunity under South Africa's apartheid system to play cricket at the highest levels. He came to England, took British citizenship and qualified for the test team. His inclusion in the England side set off two momentums - one was the later selection of other South Africans but without the same moral justification; the second was the eventual abandonment of apartheid.
As a nine-year-old, I didn't appreciate what apartheid meant, but it was as a nine-year-old that I first saw D'Oliveira play. It was the Hastings festival match against the touring Australians, and he was in a team - A.E.R. Gilligan's XI - with another South African (Eddie Barlow, who was to become a fierce critic of apartheid) as well as a Pakistani, Mushtaq Mohammad.
What stood out from this match was the fact that, in the days when six-hitting was a rarity, D'Oliveira hit two, both out of the ground. For a nine-year-old, he was an exciting and unusual player; only Gary Sobers or Colin Milburn hit sixes.
It was my great uncle, who took me to the match, who explained the situation with D'Oliveira. I'm not sure he particularly approved of "Dolly" possibly playing for England, but for me it was hard to get my head around why he couldn't play for South Africa. But when he first appeared for England, two years later, I was ecstatic. I had, in my own small way, discovered D'Oliveira at the Hastings match; he was "my" player.
It was a further two years on when the full implications of D'Oliveira's England test place were to surface. He hadn't had a particularly good season, but he was chosen for the final test of the summer when Roger Prideaux was declared unfit. I was at that Oval match, one famous for its storm and Derek Underwood bowling England to victory against Australia on a badly rain-affected wicket.
D'Oliveira scored a hundred. 158 to be precise. There seemed to me no reason why he wouldn't now be selected for the winter tour. To South Africa.
I recall my shock when listening eagerly to the radio as the tour squad was announced. D'Oliveira wasn't in it. Tom Cartwright, a better bowler but not in D'Oliveira's league as a batsman, was chosen ahead of him. There could only have been one explanation, as far as I was concerned: politics.
What happened next was either fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your point of view. Cartwright developed an injury, couldn't tour and so D'Oliveira replaced him. It was then that all hell broke out. The South African government claimed it was a political selection, which was a bit rich, the tour was called off, South Africa's own tour of England in 1970 was cancelled, and eventually sporting sanctions were imposed which did have a profound impact on finally ending apartheid.
What wasn't known, but now is, was the part that the English cricketing establishment had played in seeking to keep D'Oliveira out of the squad. The journalist and commentator E.W. Swanton was to the fore in doing so, as was Colin Cowdrey, the England captain at the time. On purely cricketing grounds, Cowdrey might have had a reasonable argument, while it also came to be known that Dolly did like a drink. But the politics had initially overriden both D'Oliveira's credentials as a player and any question as to his fitness.
A further two years on, I sat my English O Level. The exam included the option to write an essay on a sporting hero. Afterwards, I asked a friend, who I knew would have taken the sporting option, who his subject had been: Tommie Smith, the American sprinter who had given the black-gloved fist salute at the 1968 Olympics. I had written about D'Oliveira.
From different sports, we had both come to write about similar things. Through sport, in addition to music of the time as well as the not infrequent news of race issues in America, we had been exposed to the injustice and absurdity of racism. Our education was not that of the classroom but of the sports arena. It was the lesson as to the grotesqueness of racism and apartheid and the effect it could have on one man, not a great cricketer but a good cricketer, that affected me, and one I have never forgotten.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Basil D'Oliveira has died.
Why, among other deaths, should D'Oliveira's passing demand that I indulge in a spot of obituary writing? He wasn't, after all, that great a cricketer. He was a good one but no more than that. The reason lies in his story and in the way it affected me.
A South African Cape coloured, D'Oliveira was denied the opportunity under South Africa's apartheid system to play cricket at the highest levels. He came to England, took British citizenship and qualified for the test team. His inclusion in the England side set off two momentums - one was the later selection of other South Africans but without the same moral justification; the second was the eventual abandonment of apartheid.
As a nine-year-old, I didn't appreciate what apartheid meant, but it was as a nine-year-old that I first saw D'Oliveira play. It was the Hastings festival match against the touring Australians, and he was in a team - A.E.R. Gilligan's XI - with another South African (Eddie Barlow, who was to become a fierce critic of apartheid) as well as a Pakistani, Mushtaq Mohammad.
What stood out from this match was the fact that, in the days when six-hitting was a rarity, D'Oliveira hit two, both out of the ground. For a nine-year-old, he was an exciting and unusual player; only Gary Sobers or Colin Milburn hit sixes.
It was my great uncle, who took me to the match, who explained the situation with D'Oliveira. I'm not sure he particularly approved of "Dolly" possibly playing for England, but for me it was hard to get my head around why he couldn't play for South Africa. But when he first appeared for England, two years later, I was ecstatic. I had, in my own small way, discovered D'Oliveira at the Hastings match; he was "my" player.
It was a further two years on when the full implications of D'Oliveira's England test place were to surface. He hadn't had a particularly good season, but he was chosen for the final test of the summer when Roger Prideaux was declared unfit. I was at that Oval match, one famous for its storm and Derek Underwood bowling England to victory against Australia on a badly rain-affected wicket.
D'Oliveira scored a hundred. 158 to be precise. There seemed to me no reason why he wouldn't now be selected for the winter tour. To South Africa.
I recall my shock when listening eagerly to the radio as the tour squad was announced. D'Oliveira wasn't in it. Tom Cartwright, a better bowler but not in D'Oliveira's league as a batsman, was chosen ahead of him. There could only have been one explanation, as far as I was concerned: politics.
What happened next was either fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your point of view. Cartwright developed an injury, couldn't tour and so D'Oliveira replaced him. It was then that all hell broke out. The South African government claimed it was a political selection, which was a bit rich, the tour was called off, South Africa's own tour of England in 1970 was cancelled, and eventually sporting sanctions were imposed which did have a profound impact on finally ending apartheid.
What wasn't known, but now is, was the part that the English cricketing establishment had played in seeking to keep D'Oliveira out of the squad. The journalist and commentator E.W. Swanton was to the fore in doing so, as was Colin Cowdrey, the England captain at the time. On purely cricketing grounds, Cowdrey might have had a reasonable argument, while it also came to be known that Dolly did like a drink. But the politics had initially overriden both D'Oliveira's credentials as a player and any question as to his fitness.
A further two years on, I sat my English O Level. The exam included the option to write an essay on a sporting hero. Afterwards, I asked a friend, who I knew would have taken the sporting option, who his subject had been: Tommie Smith, the American sprinter who had given the black-gloved fist salute at the 1968 Olympics. I had written about D'Oliveira.
From different sports, we had both come to write about similar things. Through sport, in addition to music of the time as well as the not infrequent news of race issues in America, we had been exposed to the injustice and absurdity of racism. Our education was not that of the classroom but of the sports arena. It was the lesson as to the grotesqueness of racism and apartheid and the effect it could have on one man, not a great cricketer but a good cricketer, that affected me, and one I have never forgotten.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Football: It's not cricket
At five minutes past four local time yesterday afternoon Luis Suarez missed a penalty for Liverpool. It would have signalled the first cries of exasperation and the first curses of the new Premier League season in Bar Brits the length and breadth of Mallorca. The footy was back, the Saint Mick was flowing and the tills were alive with the sound of euros.
In a multi-screen Bar Brit would have been a corner of a bar in a foreign land that was forever, or at least on Saturday afternoon, England. An England that once was. Cheers there would have been, but they would have been a momentary distraction for the bellydom bemoaning Suarez's miss. At five minutes past four local time Kevin Pietersen caught Sree Sreesanth. England had thrashed India, had claimed the number one spot in the world test cricket rankings and had restored the order of Empire.
During the lunchtime interval before the confirmation of England's newly acquired status, there was an interview on "Test Match Special". It was with Dan Stevens who plays Matthew Crawley in "Downton Abbey", a period drama set at a time when Empire was starting its decline but when civility was encapsulated by the village green and a gentlemanly ethos of cricketing fair play and values.
Stevens went to Tonbridge School. Its annual fee of over 31,000 pounds is greater than the national average wage and, so, far greater than that earned by inhabitants of inner cities, assuming they earn at all.
Cricket is still a sport of the public school. As it always has been. Yet it was, until around the fifties and sixties, a game of the people as much as football was. It is popular now, but not to the extent it once was. The downturn in its popularity and the supremacy that football assumed coincided with the irreversible changes to English society from the sixties onwards.
Football reigned through the wasteland years of the seventies, the brutality of the eighties and into the newly aspirational nineties, the Premier League being born out of clubs' demands for ever more television money. So started the golden era of English football, golden in terms of the sheer amount of cash the game could generate. It became unquestionably the people's game.
Yet this people's game, at least in its Premier League manifestation, is far removed from the people. They have been taken in, exploited and made complete fools of. But they still lap it up. They still flock to the Bar Brits, donning their replica shirts.
The richness of the sport, the attitudes that surround the game and the exposure of the wealth and misbehaviour of players are the stuff of constant media fascination, fed to a fanaticised public incapable of discerning the degree to which it is being manipulated and driven by the game's marketing. Despite the cost of football, be it that of a Sky subscription or the cost of attendance and travel, the public refuses to turn its back on a sport which has lost any sense of moral compass. The most sickening word in the football vocabulary is a four-letter word - "scum". Teams are scum, other fans are scum. It is a filthy word that sums up the attitudinal wrongs of a sport that in its playing is the preserve of the filthy rich.
Cricket has acquired its own wealth, its own disposability, its own attitudinal failures. It is still played on the playing fields of the public schools, attended by the sons of bankers who can afford thirty thousand a year fees. Yet despite its wealth and a history redolent of Empire and the public school, it is more of a people's game in that it has not lost sight of its core values. It comes close to doing so, but somehow manages to pull back from the brink. Fair play just about prevails.
It fails, though, to capture the following of those who inhabit a Bar Brit and who have been sold and continue to be sold a game that is as socially divisive as bankers earning huge bonuses. Football constantly searches for role models, as though this quest were an admission that the game has no core values. And who does it throw up? Terry, Cole, Rooney. Millionaires all.
The Bar Brit football fan who bleats about the criminal avarice of rioters fails to appreciate that what's on a plasma screen on a Saturday afternoon is avarice gone mad. Football is a game lacking a sense of fair play. It is one dominated by its "scum" attitudes and its glamorisation of those of questionable intelligence and personal values. This, not cricket, is what you mainly get on a plasma screen. So why should anyone be surprised when someone smashes a shop window and helps himself to his own screen?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
In a multi-screen Bar Brit would have been a corner of a bar in a foreign land that was forever, or at least on Saturday afternoon, England. An England that once was. Cheers there would have been, but they would have been a momentary distraction for the bellydom bemoaning Suarez's miss. At five minutes past four local time Kevin Pietersen caught Sree Sreesanth. England had thrashed India, had claimed the number one spot in the world test cricket rankings and had restored the order of Empire.
During the lunchtime interval before the confirmation of England's newly acquired status, there was an interview on "Test Match Special". It was with Dan Stevens who plays Matthew Crawley in "Downton Abbey", a period drama set at a time when Empire was starting its decline but when civility was encapsulated by the village green and a gentlemanly ethos of cricketing fair play and values.
Stevens went to Tonbridge School. Its annual fee of over 31,000 pounds is greater than the national average wage and, so, far greater than that earned by inhabitants of inner cities, assuming they earn at all.
Cricket is still a sport of the public school. As it always has been. Yet it was, until around the fifties and sixties, a game of the people as much as football was. It is popular now, but not to the extent it once was. The downturn in its popularity and the supremacy that football assumed coincided with the irreversible changes to English society from the sixties onwards.
Football reigned through the wasteland years of the seventies, the brutality of the eighties and into the newly aspirational nineties, the Premier League being born out of clubs' demands for ever more television money. So started the golden era of English football, golden in terms of the sheer amount of cash the game could generate. It became unquestionably the people's game.
Yet this people's game, at least in its Premier League manifestation, is far removed from the people. They have been taken in, exploited and made complete fools of. But they still lap it up. They still flock to the Bar Brits, donning their replica shirts.
The richness of the sport, the attitudes that surround the game and the exposure of the wealth and misbehaviour of players are the stuff of constant media fascination, fed to a fanaticised public incapable of discerning the degree to which it is being manipulated and driven by the game's marketing. Despite the cost of football, be it that of a Sky subscription or the cost of attendance and travel, the public refuses to turn its back on a sport which has lost any sense of moral compass. The most sickening word in the football vocabulary is a four-letter word - "scum". Teams are scum, other fans are scum. It is a filthy word that sums up the attitudinal wrongs of a sport that in its playing is the preserve of the filthy rich.
Cricket has acquired its own wealth, its own disposability, its own attitudinal failures. It is still played on the playing fields of the public schools, attended by the sons of bankers who can afford thirty thousand a year fees. Yet despite its wealth and a history redolent of Empire and the public school, it is more of a people's game in that it has not lost sight of its core values. It comes close to doing so, but somehow manages to pull back from the brink. Fair play just about prevails.
It fails, though, to capture the following of those who inhabit a Bar Brit and who have been sold and continue to be sold a game that is as socially divisive as bankers earning huge bonuses. Football constantly searches for role models, as though this quest were an admission that the game has no core values. And who does it throw up? Terry, Cole, Rooney. Millionaires all.
The Bar Brit football fan who bleats about the criminal avarice of rioters fails to appreciate that what's on a plasma screen on a Saturday afternoon is avarice gone mad. Football is a game lacking a sense of fair play. It is one dominated by its "scum" attitudes and its glamorisation of those of questionable intelligence and personal values. This, not cricket, is what you mainly get on a plasma screen. So why should anyone be surprised when someone smashes a shop window and helps himself to his own screen?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Smokers Outside The Bar Doors - New Spanish Smoking Law
The new smoking law has become a bit clearer - sort of. Issued by the central government in Madrid, it will, in 2010 (not clear exactly when**), mean that in all "public spaces" that are closed, i.e. the interiors of bars and restaurants and so on, smoking will be banned. There is none of this determination by size of establishment or any of the previous confusion. Nor would it seem, unless the regional government proposes otherwise, will there be separate regulations for Mallorca, which had been the case. Public spaces that are not closed, e.g. terraces, will remain unaffected. While smoke can of course circulate and dissipate more readily outside, this lack of prohibition is still not great news for those who might be at a table next to one of smokers setting fire to themselves. Nevertheless, the new law does now seem to be taking shape, much to the annoyance of the "club of smokers for tolerance", which apparently can boast some 100,000 members across Spain, and to bar and restaurant owners who fear loss of trade.
One of the arguments against the new law is that it will just compound problems caused by the economic crisis, to which though one might argue that there is no good time to introduce such a law, in the sense that whenever it is introduced it will have an impact, as has been the case in the UK. As has previously been reported, owners who had invested in creating physical barriers are moaning twice over because those investments will now have been for nothing, assuming they did actually make such investments.
The smokers tolerance crowd are also arguing that the new law is likely to lead to disturbances, akin to those witnessed, apparently, in Paris and Italy where smokers gather outside doors, with their drinks and cause a nuisance to neighbours and passers-by alike. Add to this the fact that drinking in the streets is generally prohibited, and, so the smokers say, you have a toxic mix of potential trouble. They may have a point, or they may not. Either way, what with the introduction of that other law - the one about interior temperatures and doors being closed - there is likely to be no lack of open to interpretation. As is always the case.
** And as is always the case, the timing is unclear. Some reporting says "from 2010", which could mean from the start, while there is a conflicting report which suggests that the law will not go through parliament in 2010.
Divine Cricket
Around the time that the first test match between England and South Africa got underway yesterday, the national radio station RNE3 offered something of a cricketing tribute. Not, one imagines, that they for one moment knew anything about the game at Centurion. Nevertheless, there it was - on this most eclectic of Spanish music stations - a song from the "Duckworth Lewis Method" album by the group of the same name (Neil Hannon, The Divine Comedy), with references to getting your pads on and the like.
How big, do you suppose, does a song about cricket play with a Spanish audience? Not very, one would think, especially as the lyrics are of course in English and obscure to any - even to English speakers - who might not understand the cricketing motifs in the song, after which the presenter explained that it came from a concept album about cricket, a sport that no Spaniard would have a clue about. What would have been better, would have been if the presenter had tried to explain the Duckworth Lewis Method to a Spanish audience.
QUIZ
Today's title - Had this before, but "Smokers Outside The Bar Doors" is a corruption of which song by which band?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
One of the arguments against the new law is that it will just compound problems caused by the economic crisis, to which though one might argue that there is no good time to introduce such a law, in the sense that whenever it is introduced it will have an impact, as has been the case in the UK. As has previously been reported, owners who had invested in creating physical barriers are moaning twice over because those investments will now have been for nothing, assuming they did actually make such investments.
The smokers tolerance crowd are also arguing that the new law is likely to lead to disturbances, akin to those witnessed, apparently, in Paris and Italy where smokers gather outside doors, with their drinks and cause a nuisance to neighbours and passers-by alike. Add to this the fact that drinking in the streets is generally prohibited, and, so the smokers say, you have a toxic mix of potential trouble. They may have a point, or they may not. Either way, what with the introduction of that other law - the one about interior temperatures and doors being closed - there is likely to be no lack of open to interpretation. As is always the case.
** And as is always the case, the timing is unclear. Some reporting says "from 2010", which could mean from the start, while there is a conflicting report which suggests that the law will not go through parliament in 2010.
Divine Cricket
Around the time that the first test match between England and South Africa got underway yesterday, the national radio station RNE3 offered something of a cricketing tribute. Not, one imagines, that they for one moment knew anything about the game at Centurion. Nevertheless, there it was - on this most eclectic of Spanish music stations - a song from the "Duckworth Lewis Method" album by the group of the same name (Neil Hannon, The Divine Comedy), with references to getting your pads on and the like.
How big, do you suppose, does a song about cricket play with a Spanish audience? Not very, one would think, especially as the lyrics are of course in English and obscure to any - even to English speakers - who might not understand the cricketing motifs in the song, after which the presenter explained that it came from a concept album about cricket, a sport that no Spaniard would have a clue about. What would have been better, would have been if the presenter had tried to explain the Duckworth Lewis Method to a Spanish audience.
QUIZ
Today's title - Had this before, but "Smokers Outside The Bar Doors" is a corruption of which song by which band?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
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