Cricket

Greg Baum in the SMH today - Cocooned in sycophancy, the Australians seem not to grasp nor care how poorly this behaviour sits with the other half of a cricket-following public they repeatedly and ever more deeply divide, even in their finest hours. They also do not seem to care or grasp how it rankles with opponents, and how insufferably arrogant it makes them look. Do they really think they are the only country that plays with passion and pride? Do they think they patented the will to win? Do they think they have cornered the market in competitiveness? ...

Alva Noe on the tricky issue of umpiring (in this case, for baseball): External Realism does a good job accounting for the fact that we all recognize that there are “bad calls” and the fact that dispute and controversy seem to be an ever-present part of the game. Because there are real facts of the matter about what happened, it makes good sense that we reckon umpires can be wrong. In comparison, Internal Anti-Realism seems helpless to make sense of this. If what an umpire says goes, then how can we even take seriously the idea that an umpire might be wrong? ...

Not for the Australian cricket team, not yet. The incident: A. B. de Villiers, third ball of the second over, Australia v South Africa, 20-20 match, gets a Tait special in his gut, edging off his bat. In pain, he keels over and inadvertantly hits the stumps, out hit-wicket. The man is doubled over in pain on the grass, and the Australian team? Celebrating away, meters from the man. This is an image that will linger in my mind for a while yet - that the disgusting sporting behaviour continues, that not a man on the Australian team took a second to ask that de Villiers was ok. ...

Now that was a proper Test match. I’m not bitter or anything, but this could’ve been 2-1, you know what I mean? Or at least 1-1. That would’ve made things interesting.