The so-called
International
Cricket World Cup



is finally over – a strange combination of drawn-out yawn, rip-off, farce, and sinister mystery.

The sinister mystery of course was the murder of Bob Woolmer, an event probably not directly caused by his team’s (Pakistan) premature exit from the tournament, or the impulsive fury of a disappointed fan, but the well-planned execution of a stringer who either was not playing along with agreed match-fixing arrangements or was about to blow the gaffe on the billion dollar industry. Everyone knows the one-day game is riddled with corruption, and every unexpected result, and even every unexpected episode – like two wickets in an over - is automatically suspect.

Bob Woolmer may have been a big man, but he was a midget in comparison to the godfathers of illegal cricket betting.

The on-going plodding efforts of the local police were derisory – the murderers would have been out of the country within an hour of the deed being done – creating a new simile in the English language – as useless as a Jamaican pathologist.

The drawn-out yawn was the two month long tournament itself – from 16 original teams, some of which could hardly hold a bat the right way up, we reduced to a mystifyingly named “Super 8” phase, the participants of which played every combination of each other and which therefore seemed to go on for ever. There was and is one cricketing superpower – Australia – just as there is a global political superpower – with all the other teams being also-rans, so there would never be any doubt of the result.

The rip-off was the huge expense of the proceedings for any fan wanting to attend – hanging around in the West Indies for two months is not the cheapest part of the world, not to mention the costs of flying around from island to island to follow your team, plus the ticket prices in the vast, newly built stadiums, which therefore remained largely empty and will stand as terrifying white elephants for the future of these small nations, whose arms were twisted to build them.

The farce was the siting of the tournament on tropical islands where it rains all the time, and came fittingly to a head in the final on Saturday, which limped along on an on-off basis due to the weather, was shortened, and ended twice – in the almost total darkness! Don’t we have weather forecasts these days? If on/off rain was predicted for the whole day, why not postpone the whole event until Sunday? Do teams spend several years in properation for the final, only to be fobbed off with a truncated parody of a match, because of rainy weather? Since everyone had been waiting two months, another day would not have made much difference.

All of this is based on One Day International cricket, a pantomime version of the ancient game, where the players wear neck to toe coloured pyjamas (some of which must be excruciating in the heat) and play a game which has the most Byzantine arcane rules of any sport, including the so-called Duckworth-Lewis rules, where one needs a laptop and statistics degree to decide who won! And not even then, because officialdom in the final match could apparently not fix on the winning figure, leaving the losing team (Sri Lanka, the winning one being of course Australia) to battle on literally in the dark. Imagine a football cup final whose length could be reduced to a 15-minute play each way at the whim of the referee, or a match decided by 1.35 goals!

Oh yes, and as another part of the farce, we have the 'umpires', relics of an earlier gentlemanly era, mostly elderly portly figures with acute visual and hearing impairment, who made decisions, chiefly on leg-before-wicket and catches at the wicket, seemingly at random. Where do they get them? We could only hope that the number of batsmen given out when they were obviously not, were approximately equal to the converse case, and so cancelled out. If not due to incompetence, the inevitable suspicion, for every incomprehensible verdict, is of course match fixing again.

We have the (awesome) computer graphics technology to make decisions of hair-fine accuracy now, so for heavens sake use it, and relegate the human ‘umpires’ to field supervisors, holding bowlers’ glasses and setting up the stumps etc.

So next time please, shorter and simpler.

Boris Yeltsin





is dead and buried; the tributes have been made, the pundits have opined, and the journos have moved on.

I was very sad to hear the news last week; not that I am a believer in coincidences, but I had been wondering what had become of him when the flash came through.

He was a man who fundamentally changed his (vast) country - not many can say that; and a person who emerged from his conventional communist political background to show enormoous personal courage, to climb on that tank, face down the still very dangerous forces of the past and avert an unimaginable civil war.
Of course he has his detractors, from the minnows who moaned that he drank too much, to the ordinary Russians for whom idealism mattered less than the disappearance of their life savings.

The truth is that, although he was quintessentially Russian, Russians distrusted him - as in the communist era and now, they preferred a resulote leader who told them what to do and kept Russia strong, than an experimenter with newfangled and disorganised theories of 'democracy'.

His name will be remembered for centuries to come; though I hope not as the figure in the narrow window of the sole democratic Presidency of Russia - a slim episode between the country's last communist leader and the first fascist one.

The latest numbing catastrophe from the schoolyard

comes again from the US, where, as the world knows, 32 were shot to death in, not a schoolyard, but the 2000 acre Virginia Tech campus.

However, not out of the blue, as the usual cliché has it – in fact, the Tech seems rather a flaky place, with a shooting incident on the first day of the academic year, and death threats to unspecified persons just this week. The CNN commentator, with unaccustomed frankness, posed the questions: why always schools or colleges, and why (usually but not always) America? Good questions. Why schools? I suppose because unstable and often affluent teenagers, sated by violent TV and websites (and NOT desperate deprived individuals, as some social apologists would have it) enact their bloody fantasies on the environment they know best – their schools And why America? Forgive us if we mention America’s gun culture. In a country where the absolute right of a wild-eyed adolescent to buy the automatic weapon of his choice, no questions of ID asked, is enshrined in the Constitution, it is somehow more likely that these incidents will take place in the US than elsewhere. Of course, the gun lobby are already rushing in. If only the kids in the college had had their own automatic weapons, this would never have happened – the assailant would not have dared to shoot etc. Funny that hours after heavily armed (as well as heavily overweight) police arrived at the campus, the gunman was still merrily shooting away.

This raises another strange point. There was at first apparently a shooting incident involving a mere two deaths, at around 7am. The authorities naturally assumed that this was a normal American college morning (“I don’t like Mondays” etc) and did not react seriously. Meanwhile, the gunman walked unchallenged to the other end of the mile long campus, and started shooting up an engineering building, two hours later! He got as far as another 30 deaths before turning his gun on himself – the authorities were still running around sending emails, updating their website and taking videos. Could not the police have taken him out hours earlier?

President Bush called on a 'loving God' to provide consolation for those bereaved. I have one question: "why did the loving God not prevent the attack in the first place. Strike the perpetrator with a heart failure, or jam his gun? Shouldn't have been too difficult.

As I said, the ‘conservatives’ are already rushing in, blaming liberal college culture etc. Actually, I think one of the solutions would be to round up conservatives and the NRA, arm them to the teeth, if they are not already, take them to an appropriate locale, say Death Valley, and let them wipe themselves out – it would leave the world a better and cleaner place (and a few fewer gun lobbyists).

The iconic author and great humanist Kurt Vonnegut has died. His attitude to life, and the inspiration for his greatest work, came from his experience as a POW in world war 2, imprisoned at Dresden, when the Allies, preferring a classical city with little military signifance as a target, to the by then well-known locations of the Nazi death camps, flattened it in a one night fire storm than killed 100 000 civilians. Vonnegut survived because the prisoners had been temporarily held in an underground meat storage facility - hence "Slaughterhouse 5".

One of his lesser known jobs was that of a car dealer specialising in SAAB's. This enterprise failed, and he blamed this on the crap product. SAAB's have improved in the meanwhile, and I dedicate my trusty chariot (above) to his memory. I hope GM will belatedly recognise him as one of their more illustrious salesman. He also joked that because of this, he never received the (Swedish managed) Nobel prize for literature..

He seemed to have had writer's block in later life, not producing much. However, when the president incumbent of the White House incumbed, probably the worst President since Franklin D. Pierce, the ensuing outrages forced him to come out of retirement for his last work - "A man without a country" which says it all. It applies (or should apply) to many. Read it.

Battle of Britain

stuff it ain't

This is Faye Turney (Turkey?)

the intrepid if rather overweight British gender equality sailor who in company with 14 of her fellow 'coast patrollers' was captured and then released by Mahmood the Munificent last week. Mr. Blair of course raised an emetic high moral storm about perfidious Iran and how the sailors were well within Iraqi territorial waters. How you define territorial waters in an enormous ill-defined muddy estuary is a bit puzzling, and begs the ur-question: who gave the Brits the right to be in Iraq or its waters in the first place? Why were the Brits so upset - I mean, it's not as if the Iranian navy is patrolling the coast of the Isle of Wight. No, these sailors were simply pawns in the sad little charade of the last act of Empire, and not very well equipped ones, in a little unarmed and unprotected rubber dinghy; so they rightly thought: why should they sail Mr. Blair's ducks for him?

So, in a very un-stiff upper lip manner, they sang whatever tune the Iranians wanted: apologised for straying into Iranian territory, thanked their captors for the good treatment etc etc.

When released, the predictable happened - Ms. Turney headed straight for the media, as fast as her pudgy legs would carry her, offering her 'story' for a 6 figure sum, meaning presumably more than £ 100 000. According to British military relulations, serving members are not allowed to give their accounts to the media - this time the rules were relaxed - why? was the MOD promised a percentage? And of course this time Ms. Turvey was singing a different tune, to up the ante - how she was threatened with death and rape, and stripped almost naked (could not have been a pretty sight). At least she must have felt under some honest impulse to earn her £100 000 plus. Only when howls of rage from the public intervened (for instance from a mother of one service person killed in Iraq, who unfortunately never had the opportunity to sell his story) did the British Ministry of Defence pull the plug and forbid any more of the gallant mariners blabbing to the telly. Wouldn't have been much to their stories anyway.

Moral of the story: if you start a shabby little war under false pretences, don't expect the hapless soldiers sent there to be heroes. As Slate magazine said, they are not defending their country; they are just pulling down their salaries. And who ever died for a salary (especially not good ones)?