Quieter day on the Bollyline front

In the last few days "Bollyline" has become a popular media tag (perhaps more so outside Australia) to describe the current situation. It's got a nice ring to it, but I'm not sure whether the jaunty, lavishly choreographed, happy ending style of Bollywood movies is apposite.

Perhaps at the moment we are only in the intermission, another defining characteristic of most Bollywood movies, as we await the next steps, most of which will be attempts to resolve the issues which have arisen in the last week (has it all really happened in such a short time ?).

Only The Advertiser of the papers I've looked at today (the others are The Australian and The Age) has a big front page splash "Ponting: we're not arrogant or cocky", which is watered down on the Adelaide Now website to "Ricky Ponting denies his team arrogant, big-headed".

Sledging

Warwick Hadfield, ABC RN's estimable breakfast program sporting commentator, has produced an interesting survey of sledging in (mostly, but not entirely Australian) sport. You can listen to or download the program (at least for the next few weeks) or read the transcript here.

I was particularly interested to see his (and Ian Chappell's) view of the origin of the term:

According to Ian Chappell, the former Australian test captain and a bloke who in his time did a fair bit of sledging, the term for insulting an opponent to get him or her to break their concentration is named after the singer Percy Sledge.

Back in those more genteel times, off the field at least, a bloke who swore in front of a woman was dubbed a Percy, or a Sledge. These days they are called comedians.

"A batter of great might" 1773 style

I recently came across this on the free part of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography website (unlike its Australian counterpart only a small part of the English one is free).

It's from a biography of Sir Horatio Mann, in his day (the 18th century) a famous English cricketer. An extract:

The only evidence of Mann's skills as a cricketer lies in some lines of doggerel written in 1773 after he had batted in a match between Surrey and Kent:

At last Sir Horace took the field,

A batter of great might,

Moved like a lion, he a while

Put Surrey in a fright.

(Haygarth, 1.10)

Note the use of the word "batter": it is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of a term which is now the preferred, non-sexist, one to describe the likes of Ricky Ponting, Kevin Pietersen and Mohammad Ashraful. I'll no longer have any qualms about using it in future posts.

While I'm on Sir Horatio, here's more from his DNB entry:

Mann's twenty-two runs [in the match described above] proved to be his highest known score and only one other innings is recorded. What contemporary fame he had as a player must lie in any achievements in the years preceding 1772 in matches not recorded in Haygarth's Scores and Biographies. This ‘agreeable, gay and affable’ man (ibid., 1.55) found his chief satisfaction in cricket through his ability to organize, his delight in entertaining, and his compulsion to bet.

Batters and betting on cricket. Some things don't change much.

Wood-ball news

Several media sources, including The Australian, The Age and Cricinfo (but not the ABC even though it has Jim Maxwell on the spot in the Caribbean) report that Pakistan players have been banned from speaking English at media conferences during the World Cup. They will speak in Urdu, partly to avoid misunderstanding, and partly to promote tourism to Pakistan. The second objective may be very difficult to achieve, at least as far as Australia is concerned, if DFAT's Travel Advice remains in force.

That said, it will be interesting to see how the Pakistan policy works out in practice. English is the language normally used by media commentators, yet when I was in India two years ago I heard TV commentary which switched between English and another language (presumably Hindi) without warning. It wasn't too hard to pick up the gist of what was happening said, not only because the pictures spoke for themselves but also because some terms (eg "over") weren't translated.

As far as I can tell there's no requirement for matches to be conducted in English. This is borne out by the existence of an official Urdu translation of the Laws of Cricket produced under the auspices of the MCC and the Asian Cricket Council, whose logos appear on the cover. This presumably means that there are no discrepancies between the two versions, especially over matters which have recently been contentious, eg Law 42 (which covers fair and unfair play, including ball tampering) .

According to a 2005 Asian Cricket Council report there are also Marathi and Mandarin translations of the Laws of "Wood-ball" :

'Wood-ball’ is the literal translation of what cricket is called in Mandarin. Danny Lai of the HKCA says “because there are no cricket terms in Chinese we have to search for and sometimes develop new terms to accommodate the translation. Some terms we purposely kept in English simply because they are intrinsic cricket language and inseparable from the game.”

The translation took over six months to complete, with five people working on it - one translator and four staff from the HKCA to proof read. A huge labour of love by people dedicated to cricket, it took more than 500 hours to fine tune, amend, and finalise. “Very hard work”, confirms Danny Lai.

The Laws of Cricket in Mandarin now join the translations in Urdu (by ACC Umpiring Resource Person Mahboob Shah) and Marathi as Asian versions of the laws as codified by the MCC.

Mr. Li Gaochao, head of the Chinese Cricket Association says, “we expect this kind of step to have a very positive effect on promoting the game in China.”

Now that cricket, like many other things, is on a sound legal footing in China I shall watch for signs of its development there.

PS If DFAT feels so strongly about travel to Pakistan (and I wholeheartedly support them letting people know their views) I wonder what it will do about the Women's World Cup which is scheduled to take place there later this year.

"The most hilarious press release ever issued by a senior politician"?

This (minus the question mark) is Matt Price's assessment of Mike Rann's tribute to Shane Warne (who today took his 700th test wicket). It hasn't yet appeared on Mr Rann's website but Matt has transcribed it to his blog. A print edited highlights is at Matt's sport column at p39 of Saturday's Australian.

I'm reluctant to agree that it's the most hilarious press release ever, but I concur that it is over the top. It is certainly much more flowery than the statement issued by Prime Minister Howard in a doorstep interview (but perhaps he didn't want too many people to ask him about his retirement plans).


[Slightly different version posted at Casting a short shadow]

Requiem for Duff Batting and other poems

I recommend David Fine's latest pieces, which he wrote soon after last Tuesday.

Here's an extract from "The English Disease":

Like syphilitic medieval kings, England
suddenly went mad. No apparent cause,
no seeming attempt to stem noble pause
in bedlam's frenzy to lose without stand.
Fumbling wickets tumbled from their own hand,
Misery's drubbing unconceived before
they gouged their own wounds to bone...

The poem elaborates upon the comment made by Greg Baum in the SMH and Age:

Like medieval royals with syphilis, they went suddenly mad. England lost its last nine wickets for 60, the same England that made 6-551 declared in the first innings.

Where is cricket's left field?

"Voges call comes out of left field" is the headline of an article attributed to Courtney Walsh (the former West Indies quick bowler?) and Malcolm Conn in The Weekend Australian (not online) which reports an unexpected selection in the Australian squad for the third cricket Test..

"Out of left field" is a term which derives from US baseball, not cricket. It's global English managementspeak missapplied to this situation. Why should our distinctive and descriptive sporting language have to follow the current iteration of our foreign policy and be embedded in the US variety?

What's wrong with "Voges surprise selection in squad" as a headline?

The current issue of Quadrant has an article "Americanising Australian English" by Robert Solomon (not online) which explores this further.

[Also posted at Casting a short shadow.]