Sport Today

Will the 2nd start on time?

Dunno what Dungford can add to the obvious "f*ing windy". By the time he
types anything else it will already be out of date.

Er, it was rather windy.  Never mind the bails blowing off all the time (no
need for a Justin Langer in these parts), at the junior match I attended
this morning entire sets of stumps (which sit in a plastic based rather than
being inserted into the ground) were dropping like flies.

When I read Graeme Smith's pre-match quote about the South African team not
being bothered by a bit of wind because they'd played in Port Elizabeth, my
first thought was "you don't know what you're talking about".  After the
first day he admitted the wind had been stronger than he'd anticipated, and
today the wind was much stronger than yesterday.

Still, one has to say that South Africa has harnessed, or rather coped with,
the wind much the better of the two teams.  Kallis and Pollock chugging in
off five paces may seem an incongruous sight, but eight of NZ's
first-innings wickets fell from balls bowled into the wind, which tends to
blow straight down the pitch.

I went along for the morning session, which started badly when NZ lost two
wickets whilst I was queueing to get in the gate.  But it was worth the wait
to see Martin's innings.  There was a decent round of applause the first
time he hit the ball, and the crowd erupted when he scored his run, the
significance of which was duly announced over the public address system.  He
actually played about half a dozen half-decent shots, and was cruelly denied
a crack at getting on the scoresheet again when he drove one through extra
cover.  The ball went most of the way to the boundary and was easily worth
two, but the batsmen were thinking about who should take strike for the next
over and after meeting in mid-pitch returned from whence they'd come.

On my way out of the ground at the lunch break I ran into Zane Whitehorn of
this parish, who was dressed in shirt sleeves and admitted to not having
brought along anything warmer to wear.  I might pop in to Wellington
Hospital tomorrow to see how he's recovering.

Andrew