A Cricket Sonnet (with tip of the Hat to John Keats)

Themes: Cricket

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other pitches than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
By her tall seamers with guileless bowling bent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For wickets ‘Strine, and with inward groan
Hunger for fields and Foes to test one’s own.
Who’d exegete what bat or bowling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless fielders;
Enough her trembling leg-glances for me,
Enough her harmless shows of leather flinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Ashes of steeper chance, and bear their winning,
Toe to toe ‘gainst more doughty willow wielders.

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$42 Billion Dollars for Real Aussie Battlers

Themes: Cricket

I had this thought the other day:
the recent catastrophic decline in world financial institutions has happened in tandem with a similarly catastrophic decline in Australia’s cricketing prowess.
I believe that the co-incidence can be represented thus:

Given that the current wisdom about how we should get ourselves out of this financial hole involves the random application of bales of cash – $42 Billion dollars worth, i.e. 42 000 000 000. (Yes my friends, that is an 11 digit number, more than would have fitted on my calculator back in the olden days)

My thought is this, what if we spent $42 000 000 000 on Aussie Cricket? Perhaps if we stopped the rot in Cricket we could also stop the financial crisis?
Hooray! We’d be the best again, and save everybody!

With $42 Billion dollars we could probably afford to give all our crickets awesome exo-skeletal implants, or maybe splice together the genes of Glenn McGrath with Shane Warne, and grow über-cricketers in test-tubes.
We could afford to unfreeze The Body of THE DON…
It’s breath-taking.

The best way to get the ball rolling is to get our fearlessly independent members of the Senate on side. They will be voting on the Bill in the next couple of days.
Let’s think strategy:
the Greens are a write-off, those turkeys don’t know their Silly Mid-On from their Leg Before.
Bob Brown, YOU ARE A NATIONAL DISGRACE.

so, it all comes down to Xenofielding and the Liberal Party.
What was it that Churchill famously said?

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

or was it,

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston, you are a TRUE CHAMPION.

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