The talismen

Is it just me, or is there something faintly ludicrous about pieces such as this one by Simon Barnes?

Flintoff came on as first change and made it his business to change all that. It was extraordinary the difference he made as soon as he came into the attack. The game’s intensity was instantly racked up. In the day’s most compelling passage of play, he came at Hughes with total ferocity and he instantly made it personal.

He turned it into a duel. He pulled rank and told Hughes that he was still wet behind the ears. He intimidated Hughes with his sense of authority. He also intimidated with such things as pace and bounce, with short balls intended to scramble the senses.

True, James Anderson and Stuart Broad had also been bowling with pace and purpose, but Hughes had no problem with them. It was the way Flintoff made such a set at him that made the difference.

Mind you, he also had a crack at Simon Katich. This was the one that got away, an impossibly sharp caught and bowled chance, the meaty hand grasping it with two or three fingers — for a second it was there — but it squeezed out almost reluctantly and fell to the ground. Sometimes Flintoff will turn himself into a Rodin statue, holding a vigorous pose to indicate extremes of emotion. There he stood, legs planted wide apart, head bowed, hands clasping head: Freddie Agonistes. It would have been a different day for all had that one stuck.

But he got his man. He got the upstart Hughes, befuddling him and inducing an inside edge, and a rather good catch from Matt Prior. Cue the next Rodin statue — legs once more straddled, chest inflated like a bellows, arms wide, hands high, no smile, gaze level: Freddie Rex. The entire team were ignited with hope and belief. Nothing to do but watch the next wicket fall.

Flintoff came on as first change and made it his business to change all that. It was extraordinary the difference he made as soon as he came into the attack. The game’s intensity was instantly racked up. In the day’s most compelling passage of play, he came at Hughes with total ferocity and he instantly made it personal.

He turned it into a duel. He pulled rank and told Hughes that he was still wet behind the ears. He intimidated Hughes with his sense of authority. He also intimidated with such things as pace and bounce, with short balls intended to scramble the senses.

True, James Anderson and Stuart Broad had also been bowling with pace and purpose, but Hughes had no problem with them. It was the way Flintoff made such a set at him that made the difference.

Mind you, he also had a crack at Simon Katich. This was the one that got away, an impossibly sharp caught and bowled chance, the meaty hand grasping it with two or three fingers — for a second it was there — but it squeezed out almost reluctantly and fell to the ground. Sometimes Flintoff will turn himself into a Rodin statue, holding a vigorous pose to indicate extremes of emotion. There he stood, legs planted wide apart, head bowed, hands clasping head: Freddie Agonistes. It would have been a different day for all had that one stuck.

But he got his man. He got the upstart Hughes, befuddling him and inducing an inside edge, and a rather good catch from Matt Prior. Cue the next Rodin statue — legs once more straddled, chest inflated like a bellows, arms wide, hands high, no smile, gaze level: Freddie Rex. The entire team were ignited with hope and belief. Nothing to do but watch the next wicket fall.

You can almost hear the trumpets blare, the drums roll through every one of those 303 words [I counted].

Bloody hell, mate — for all that regal flourish, Flintoff got one wicket. One. Of a greenhorn playing his third Test, and his first Ashes.

It’s only just now that I got some breathing space from the usual Friday madness to check the scores — judging by the way an Australian team that is clearly way past its peak is going, England is going to need a heck of a lot more than one solitary talisman held together with rubber bands and string: it needs eleven talismen. Scan the horizon, and there seems nary the signs of one.

Right, I’m done and dusted for the week; see you Monday, with Bhim and all else.

Marital arts

Thanks to a wife with a thirst for exploring the limits of endurance, I was forced to watch episode one of Rakhi Ka Swayamvar.

My nerve held — by a thread, but it held — through the opening minutes. The breaking point came when the sutradhar in white asked Rakhi how preparing for this momentous occasion had changed her.

Rakhi widened her eyes [One of her more ‘endearing’ traits, that — when she wishes to convey earnestness, she gradually opens her eyes as wide as they’ll get, like we’d do at the optometrist’s], fixed the camera with an unblinking stare, heaved up a sigh from somewhere deep inside that padded choli, and went: Meri andhar ki aurat jaag chuki hai.

My strength failed me at that point; my friend Amit Varma seems to be made up of sterner stuff, however, vide this post. For the really hardy souls out there, here’s video.

Tangentially related, I also found via Amit’s blog this link to a William Saletan article in Slate that makes a pro-life case for masturbation.

Why does frequent ejaculation help? Greening’s theory is that it shortens the period during which sperm are exposed to harmful molecules in tubes emerging from the testicles. He concludes that to improve their odds of achieving pregnancy, “[c]ouples with relatively normal semen parameters should have sex daily for up to a week before the ovulation date.” But if the exposure theory is correct, he notes, the key isn’t sex. It’s “ejaculatory frequency.”

If your wife is available and she’s game for sex every night, great. But what if she’s tired, sore, or not in the mood? What if you have to work late and she has to go to sleep? What if one of you is out of town? What if your son can’t sleep and needs to be with Mommy? Or what if medical advice to have daily sex stresses her out? From a fertility standpoint, says one expert, that kind of pressure “may add even more anxiety and do more harm than good.”

Fortunately, you can ejaculate without her. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Oh, and on the Flowing Data site I found this visualization that seems to suggest that Buddhism alone among the world’s major religions sanctions masturbation and homosexuality both. Really?

The Zen of being Roger Federer

I wasn’t hugely taken with the recent Wimbledon finals between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer — the game was too error prone, too lacking in tennis of the highest quality, to qualify as a classic. That said, this New York Times oped on Federer offered up for your reading pleasure. Sample clip:

The third was the fact that Federer wore a belt — a belt — in his stylish shorts, as if he was ambling through a Calvin Klein ad rather than serving 50 nonchalant aces and putting on a record-breaking athletic display.

Perfection is always a little unworldly, the more so when it’s packaged in Switzerland, and of course perfection can be galling. I wanted Roddick to win because he may never play that well again while Federer will seldom play much less well. I wanted Roddick to win because he broke a sweat.

So is Federer real, or is he in fact the computer-simulated perfect tennis player, a science fiction hero, his body heat drawn invisibly into energy creation, switching from slice to topspin backhand on the basis of some nerd’s formula no opponent can grasp or grapple with for long?

Truth in advertising

The fuss over some comments Adam Gilchrist made in his book True Colors isn’t parallel to what is currently happening with John Buchanan’s book on T20 cricket in which, among other things, he finds Yuvraj feudal, Sachin not inventive enough for the shortest form of the game, and Sunil Gavaskar, who turns 60 today, a stick in the mud.

There is one point of similarity, however: Gilchrist then, and Buchanan now, say they have been quoted out of context, and that you have to read the book in its entirety. Seems to me, especially in Buchanan’s case, this is just a way to flog a few more copies.

His swipe at Gavaskar comes while Buchanan is talking about a franchisee meeting with the IPL bosses in Goa this year. He claims his suggestion for more international players in the playing eleven was referred to the IPL technical committee headed by Sunil Gavaskar.

“What this means is that any idea that affects the way Twenty20 might be played are referred to a committee chaired by a person who is blinkered by bias and tradition.”

If that is an exact quote, why the devil do I need to read the full book to “understand”? Seems clear enough to me — what is not so clear is why, having written the thing, he is in such haste to walk it all back [then again, the answer might lie in a very natural desire not to burn all his bridges with Indian cricket — on the other side of some of those bridges are some very lucrative contracts].

It is a fact that Buchanan called for more foreign players in the playing XI [He’s said that publicly as well, at which point Virender Sehwag famously retorted that this is the Indian Premier League, not the International Premier League]. It is a fact that all such suggestions are referred to the technical committee for evaluation. It is a fact that Sunny Gavaskar heads that committee. And it is a fair opinion [think back to the ICC technical committee’s long years spent ‘evaluating’ changes to how games are umpired] that Gavaskar tends to take the traditional view of most things, and when it comes to change, is a member in good standing of the ‘make haste slowly’ school.

So what is there in any of this to call for panicky back-tracking? [And what is it with ‘authors’ who write books they can’t then stand in back of? Don’t you re-read what you wrote, before you send it off to the printers, for christ’s sake?]

Elsewhere, Buchanan is on even less solid ground: he says things about Yuvraj Singh, as gleaned from Tom Moody, that the KXIP coach says is untrue.

“I was surprised to hear that I have been quoted in John Buchanan’s most recent book. I have neither read the book nor been intimated by John about its release with my supposed quotes,” Moody said.

The former Sri Lanka national coach further added that he was rather taken aback by Buchanan’s reference to Kings XI captain Yuvraj Singh. ”I certainly cannot recall any such conversation.

“I am not in the habit of airing team laundry on such trivial matter,” Moody shot back.

The book has Buchanan saying that Moody told him “Yuvraj would just walk off after training, leaving all his gear and rubbish behind because he was in the habit of someone else picking up after him.”

Now don’t tell me I have to read an entire book to find out why there is a Moody quote in there that the man says are not his words?

It is a classic he-said, he-said, and there is likely no definitive way of clearing it up. Readers will therefore likely make up their own minds on whether the quote is accurate or no — and as things stand, Buchanan’s stock is so far below par, he’ll likely find few believers.

Personally, I find this whole ‘controversy’ merely boring. And I am not in a desperate hurry to get hold of this book either — I read his earlier one, If Better Is Possible, sometime back and was totally underwhelmed.

PostScript: Slow blogging day. Fridays usually are, since I have a newspaper to help produce. See you on here much later in my day, maybe, or on Monday with Bhim and all else.