I saw Flintoff in his prime…

...another time, another time.

Yes, yes, yes. I was at the Oval on the fourth day. I saw England gloriously, triumphantly, reclaim the Ashes by taking ten Australian wickets on the fourth day of the fifth Test. I was slap bang square of the wicket as Freddie Flintoff smashed down the stumps to run out Ricky Ponting.

It is ridiculous to invest the amount I do into what is, after all, a game. In lots of other areas of life, I like to think I have a good grasp of perspective, of what is important. Clearly, when it comes to sport I don’t. It is ridiculous to treat a sport this importantly.

But I do. And the more you invest in something, the greater the pay offs are. Seeing us collapse against WI in Jamaica, watching us toil on flat pitches to take twenty wickets in the rest of the Carribean, seeing us labour fruitlessly in the field in Cardiff, and that is before I even mention the ignominy of the 1990s…it just makes moments like this all the sweeter.

For most of the day, I didn’t think we were going to win. At ten past five, with about an hour’s worth of overs left, we still had five wickets to take and whilst I didn’t really think we’d lose, I was resigning myself to watching the moment of victory on TV the next day.

And then – suddenly, gloriously, brilliantly – the last five wickets tumbled and we had won. It was a beautiful day at the Oval. It feels like it has been the only summery day of the summer. I have been to last days at the Oval a couple of times before and there is something incredibly romantic and nostalgic about them – the end of summer, the end of certain players’ careers, the ends of innings, seasons, games, series and eras. The whole day felt magical, unreal. Even now, only a couple of days on, I can’t quite believe I was actually there. I feel now like I am a small part of a great tradition that stretches back through so many great players and matches, right back to the foundation of the Ashes – all those great moments from the past at the Oval, and I have been present for one of them.

So yes, it is completely ridiculous to invest this much in a sport and for it to mean this much to me, but it does.

Amazing.

Daisy Christodoulou : 25 Aug 2009 17:10 |  Tags: Cricket |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Cricket Quiz!

OK here is your quiz question for today, no cheating and looking at cricinfo for answers.

Andrew Flintoff became the sixth player to get his name on both the bowling and batting honours board at Lord’s. He scored his century against SA in 2003, and now he has a five-for to go with it.

Who are the other five?

Three are English, one an Aussie and one an Indian.

Answers tomorrow.

Daisy Christodoulou : 21 Jul 2009 17:34 |  Tags: Cricket |  Comments (17) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Alistair Cook and Ravi Bopara

I whinge a lot on this blog about West Ham’s golden generation. Lampard, Rio, Carrick, Cole, etc. Michael Carrick I saw play in a youth match at Chadwell Heath in about 98. Cole was injured. But there is another great East London/Essex generation.

ALISTAIR COOK and RAVI BOPARA.

I don’t have an equally cool story about how I saw Cook and Bopara for Essex when they were 16. I did champion Cook’s cause from 05 onwards and I did send my Essex supporting friend a postcard the day before Cook made his debut saying he was going to be a champion. She’d better have kept it. I remember clearly Bopara’s one day debut when I was really impressed by his nerves of steel – he batted with Nixon in a WC match against SL that should have been a thumping defeat and only wasn’t thanks to his and Nixon’s efforts.

Ravi B is an authentic East Londoner, from Forest Gate. Cook is adopted from Bedford, like Carrick was adopted from Newcastle. They have just said on the telly that they first played together for Essex at under-14 level. And now they are scoring Test match centuries together. THAT IS SO SWEET! It is also like another great East London/adopted East London pair. And I don’t mean Cole and Carrick.

“[Geoff Hurst] later recalled that the first time he played alongside Bobby Moore was for an Essex school’s cricket team.”

Let’s hope Ravi and Ali have the same success!

Daisy Christodoulou : 14 May 2009 18:44 |  Tags: Cricket Football |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Goalkeeping

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Some of the comments on this blog discussed the standard of goalkeeping in the Liverpool Chelsea match. Personally, I think Reina, Cech and Fabianski have all done appallingly lately. Good goalkeepers seem a really really rare breed lately. I would compare it a little bit to cricket – I think the standard of wicketkeeping has declined since it’s become as important for a keeper to work on his batting. Likewise, in football, but less obviously, the abolition of the backpass rule means that there is even more pressure on keepers to be decent footballers – to be able to clear the ball effectively under pressure, find players and set up attacks.

At the moment Edwin van der Sar is pretty fantastic and has been for several seasons, although as I recall he did have a ropy first season at United. He is also a good footballer, as you would expect from a Dutchman. I have a soft spot for Robert Green, although this season he’s not been brilliant. Kirkland is so injury prone. Foster looks good, but he is still young. David James occupies the same place as Ian Bell in my mind – why? why? why? for so long? WHYYYYYY? Carson…I wonder if that Croatia goal will destroy him. The heartbreaking thing about goalkeeping and wicket keeping- I used to be one – is that one mistake can define a match, maybe a career. Strikers get another chance to make amends. For goalkeepers, that is it. Although of course, I suppose in the case of David James, SEVERAL mistakes can define a career. Another side issue – the best American players tend to be keepers, and they produce a few of them – Kasey Keller, Brad Friedel, Marcus Hahnemann, and of course Tim Howard, first American to win the FA Cup.

Buffon is probably the world’s best. Toldo who is now Inter’s reserve was bloody good. Schmeichel obviously, a modern great who also brought something new to the game with his giant throws.

I was discussing with a student in my class the other day goalkeeping captains. A difficult role. Dino Zoff managed it – and managed to be a manager as well, which is equally rare. And even further back, Lev Yashin, who also redefined the role and even before abolition of the backpass popularised the concept of keeper as sweeper. And of course Gordon Banks, who is at the centre of two great sporting counterfactuals – what if he hadn’t lost an eye? And what if he hadn’t got food poisoning? Which brings us back to poor old Peter Bonetti, one mistake defining a career.

Wicket keeping post to follow soon.

Daisy Christodoulou : 20 Apr 2009 22:57 |  Tags: Football |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

West Ham stay up!

Amazing! This time two months ago I thought we were down and out – I think everyone did. Not only were we about ten points adrift of safety but we just didn’t look like winning. Or scoring. Even when we did score we’d throw it away (Spurs) or the referee would cock things up for us (Fulham, Newcastle). Then it all turned around against Blackburn where we got quite a bit of luck and from then on something seemed to click – we started playing good football, the defence seemed a bit more solid, the goals started flowing. There was a brief dip when we lost heavily to Sheffield United and Chelsea in the space of a few days, but they were the only times we didn’t win in the last NINE games. Seven wins out of nine is fantastic, amazing form, up there with the title contenders.

As regards the whole Tevez saga, I think it’s been blown out of proportion. Dave Whelan and the Sheffield chairman have been sounding like they were the Birmingham Six or something. I find it very hard to stomach anyone in football trying to take the moral high ground. I know this is not an excuse for wrong doing, but it still pisses me off.

The truth of the matter is that, on the football field, we have pulled off a stunning escape, but also that Sheffield United have collapsed. They were ten points safe at one point, and even just a few weeks ago when they beat us, from the way Neil Warnock celebrated at the end, they thought they were safe. As soon as it looked like they might not be safe, Warnock started whining about legal injustices. You do wonder that if he had just concentrated on winning his last two games, he wouldn’t have had to worry about so-called injustices. In their game against Aston Villa last week, they pretty much capitulated.

As regards the Tevez situation, I’m pretty much as confused about it as I think most honest people are. This is not an issue that does have a lot of precedents. A lot of the precedents that are being thrown around either involve the Football League, not the Premier League, or are to do with player registration, or player ownership which is not the case here. As Mihir Bose makes clear here, this is a relatively unknown situation. It seems pretty clear that we were guilty of something to begin with. The question would seem to be a) how harsh the original punishment should be and b) if there is still some irregularity surrounding Tevez’s contract. As regards a), there is precedent in the Premier League of a tough fine being seen as more appropriate and replacing a points deduction – Spurs in 1995. As regards b), if Tevez’s contract is still breaking the law that’s pretty serious, but I have a feeling Dave Whelan is shit-stirring and we are going to be OK.

Daisy Christodoulou : 15 May 2007 02:30 |  Tags: Football West Ham |  Comments (30) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

University Challenge Final

It’s a little bit belated, but I thought I would write a bit on here about Monday night, the final of University Challenge, and how happy we all are to have won. The final (along with the semi and quarter) was filmed back in October, and it has been a trial keeping it secret for all this time. In fact, maybe we haven’t always kept it a secret for all that time, but we tried. Monday night was really, really fantastic – it was amazing to see so many people in the Union during the vacations.

As regards the final performance itself, it wasn’t our best performance – that was against UCL in the semis – but it was still pretty decent. We went ahead early on and I think we were never behind. Manchester were a bloody good team who were extremely fast on the buzzers. However, I think the early lead we took put the pressure on and forced some errors. In particular, they buzzed in on the question about the year of the four roman emperors and were one year out. From the reaction of Tim Hawken, it seemed as if he knew the answer and had messed up. I know how he feels – it is a horrible feeling when you really should know the answer to a question and get it slightly wrong. However, this gave Rory Gill on our team the chance to say 69 on national TV, which will doubtless form the staple of his dinner party conversation for years to come.

For some reason in the middle of the match I froze. There were two questions I knew the answer to, but I just didn’t buzz. There was one about a Greek philosopher who gave his name to a medical syndrome. I knew it was Diogenes from reading about the Diogenes club in Sherlock Holmes. But even when they buzzed in and got it wrong, for some reason I didn’t buzz in, thinking that someone else on our team might have a better idea. The same thing happened with the first picture round about Turner. I had a fairly good idea it was Turner, but thought someone else might have a better idea. Obviously, Harold didn’t, as he thought it was Dali. But that gave Paxman a chance to sneer at him, which is all very amusing now that we have won. Obviously it is all fine now we have won, but halfway through the game I was thinking that if we lost from the position we were in I’d be having nightmares about Diogenes for the rest of my life.

Other than that, I was particularly chuffed with the cricket question. Cricket is probably the sport that comes up most often in University Challenge questions. Talking to the Manchester team afterwards, they said they’d had a cricket question in nearly every round, but we’d had none. So it was good to finally get a cricket question, and to get it right.

It’s been lots of fun doing interviews and receiving everyone’s congratulations. Thanks to everyone who has left messages on this blog. Right now I am back to the millstone of academic work, trying to complete my dissertation. University Challenge has been one of the highlights of my time at Warwick, has given me loads of fantastic memories and introduced me to some great people, not least Prakash, Harold and Rory.

Daisy Christodoulou : 21 Apr 2007 03:10 |  Tags: University Challenge |  Comments (14) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

WE ARE STAYING UP

Possibly. This entire season has been one catastrophe after another. When we lost against Spurs to two goals in the last minute, I nearly cried. But finally, in the last few weeks, things have started to look up. It may still be that will regret the points we threw away against Fulham, Newcastle and Spurs, but we are giving ourselves every chance. Today’s win at Arsenal was MASSIVE – I thought we might get a draw, maybe, but to become the first side to win at the Emirates (after being the last to win at Highbury) is amazing. OK Arsenal did their usual missing chances for fun act, but who cares. It’s going to upset every other side as well, because they must have put that down as a home banker. All the other results went for us today, Sheffield United and Wigan losing. Charlton are our biggest problem because they are on a good run too. Unlike us, they have relatively easy opponents in their last few matches.

We have a tough, tough run in, but that may well suit us, given that three of our few wins this season have come against Arsenal at home, Arsenal away and Man United at home. I really think we can beat Chelsea at home – they have not been playing well and are getting jammy results, I think we can trip them up. But first up is Sheffield United away, a huge fixture which we REALLY REALLY REALLY have to win, unlike those six-point matches against Watford and Charlton…dear lord they were awful.

And of course, all this is hoping that we don’t stay up and then get points deducted for the Tevez/Mascherano signings. I notice Herman Ouseley is on the panel that decides our fate. I remember him being drunk and disorderly at a sporting event I attended in 2002. Perfect qualifications for judging a football team, then.

Daisy Christodoulou : 07 Apr 2007 17:15 |  Tags: West Ham |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Regeneration – Pat Barker

I have only just read this book for the first time, which is another bit of a shocker really. Seeing as everyone seems to have studied it for GCSE, I won’t go into plot exposition. I thought it was absolutely fantastic, very intelligent and very moving. I like books that blend history and fiction, and I would love to find out more about Rivers, the army psychotherapist who really did treat Siegfried Sassoon and who really did seem to become a kind of father figure to him. You can read his paper ‘The Repression of War Experience’ online and it contains some of the case histories that are used in the novel. In particular this paragraph seems to relate to the novel:

The training of a soldier is designed to adapt him to act calmly and methodically in the presence of events naturally calculated to arouse disturbing emotions. His training should be such that the energy arising out of these emotions is partly damped by familiarity, partly diverted into other channels. The most important feature of the present war in its relation to the production of neurosis is that the training in repression normally spread over years has had to be carried out in short spaces of time, while those thus incompletely trained have had to face strains such as have never previously been known in the history of mankind. Small wonder that the failures of adaptation should have been so numerous and so severe.

I would love to read the next two novels in this trilogy but whilst everyone seems to have read this one, no-one has read the other two. Anyone?

Daisy Christodoulou : 07 Apr 2007 03:52 |  Tags: Book Review |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Evelyn Waugh – A Handful of Dust

I haven’t blogged properly for a while, time to rectify this with a couple of BOOK REVIEWS! I only properly got into Evelyn Waugh this last summer, which is clearly a shocking oversight because the man is a comic genius. I read Scoop when I was very young and loved it. Probably, on balance, I would still pick it as my favourite Waugh, closely rivalled by Decline and Fall, which I read for the first time this summer. Decline and Fall is the blackly comic alternative to all those saccharine school stories, with a cast of alcoholic liars, lunatic aristocrats, and naive innocents. It also has some vague topicality as it satires Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, which David Cameron famously attended. The Loved One is also excellent, a satire on the American funeral industry which inspired Jessica Mitford’s investigative journalistic account, The American Way of Death. Also good is Put Out More Flags, which features the bad boy Basil Seal and a hilarious family of sub-normal war evacuees being carted round rural England wreaking havoc.

Anyway, A Handful of Dust is as good as all these, with the same surreal, amoral and imaginative humour. The plot concerns the upper-class Tony Last, his selfish wife Barbara and his slightly annoying son John. It is extremely funny, but unlike PG Wodehouse, say, who is quite similar to Waugh in some ways, there is this underlying edge to the humour that shows up the hollowness and superficiality of upper class British life between the wars. You can see this in Waugh’s titles: ‘A Handful of Dust’ is taken from Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem all about the West’s decline and fall, while ‘Vile Bodies’ comes from Phillipians, which is hardly ‘Eggs, Beans and Crumpets.’

The ending, in particular, is hilariously dark. I don’t want to give too much away, but there is the classic Waugh juxtaposition of British upper-class decadence with ‘uncivilised’ pre-modern societies. Wikipedia also informs me that the novel was rewritten with a happier ending for an American audience, which doesn’t surprise me at all. Go and read it and see if you are a tough Britisher or a wimpy Yank who would prefer some Canderel with their Waugh.

Daisy Christodoulou : 07 Apr 2007 03:27 |  Tags: Book Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

University Challenge Quarter Final

Warwick’s quarter final match against Aberystwyth is on this Monday, the 26th March, at 8pm.

Daisy Christodoulou : 25 Mar 2007 06:13 |  Comments (22) |  Close comments |  Report a problem