First test

At last some Test cricket!! Day one, Sri Lanka stuck us in and shortly after lunch I'm thinking "What is going on?  How can SL have us five down?"  Then Hales and Bairstow restored something approaching normality.  Day two, Bairstow whacks a great century, we make a respectable 298 then Jimmy & Broad bowl them out.  Day three, Jimmy is brilliant, watching it on TV was a privelige  and Sri lanka lose by an innings.


Five long months with no test cricket and its all over in a flash!  Dull weather at Headingly in May will always be bowler friendly and Anderson was just too good.  Hard to believe he'd never taken a 5 for here before.  This could be a golden summer for Jimmy.  Bairstow looks better with every innings and with nine catches his place behind the stumps is secure but could there be a case for moving him up to concentrate on his batting and bringing back Buttler at 7?  There are still places up for grabs in England's top five.  Stokes was injured so it looks like an in form Chris Woakes will get another chance as a like for like replacement.  He's lucky, hopefully he'll make the most of it.

It starts again at Durham on Friday.  Sri Lanka will surely play better but won't come close to winning.  England shouldn't miss Stokes too much this time but against better opposition...

A Decent Ride

My favourite author is back!  "Juice Terry Lawson" is one of Irvine Welsh's best creations who first appeared in "Glue" then "Porno" soon after and a couple of cameo's since.  Regular readers know Juice Terry is a likeable rogue; a shagger who totally embraces his addiction to sex.  Now it's Terry's turn to take the lead role in a story and take us on a rumpy bumpy humpy ride.  We are back in Edinburgh and Welsh's city is every bit as vivid as the city portrayed by Ian Rankin.  Just a whole lot darker.

Irvine Welsh books have many constants. Sex, drugs, violence, appalling behaviour from all directions and the boundaries of good taste are well and truly booted down.  Most of all they are literally laugh out loud funny all the way through and the author usually manages to find a shining light to lead us out of the murk and into Euphoria.  "A decent ride" has all these ingredients and is a brilliant read but for once I'd pretty much guessed what was going to happen and the twists didn't have the shock value of classic Irvine Welsh.  This isn't necessarily bad because it usually went the way I wanted it to go.  Juice Terry has to actually grow up, take stock and become sensible but will he actually learn anything from the experience?  Does the addicted reader want him to?

I actually read to proper reviews of this book but not until after I'd finished reading it myself.  A review in the Guardian by Stuart Kelly is negative and dismissive, it's writer has made the mistake of taking the book seriously.  It's a comedy you twat.  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/24/a-decent-ride-irvine-welsh-review-novel

This one by Anthony Cummins in the Telegraph is a lot more how I saw it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11541477/A-Decent-Ride-by-Irvine-Welsh.html

By the way both reviews contain spoilers.

Football

My interest in Football has been waning for years and even Leicester City winning the Prem doesn't fill me with any great excitement.  I know a few genuine Leicester fans (loads more have come out of the woodwork lately...) and I'm pleased for them.  I'll always follow my local team Ipswich Town (our season tailed off a few weeks ago...) but I simply can't afford to watch them very often.  Does this Leicester win really give hope to all the smaller teams like the Town?  Almost certainly not.  Is it really such a big deal when the club is owned by Thai billionaires?  Money still talks.

For as long as I can remember West Ham have played at Upton Park and this is the final season that it will be the clubs home ground.  As far as I know this is the stadium they played their final game last night yet in recent weeks I've heard it referred to as the "Boelyn ground".  I'd never heard it called this in the previous forty odd years but now it seems its been called this all along???  I'm confused.

I was thinking all this Football would be over in a few weeks time but I've just remembered there's a European championship coming up next month, it never ends.  This time next week I'll be excited about sport again, it will be the eve of the first test match of the summer.

Tony Cozier died today.  As a journalist and broadcaster he was the voice of West Indian cricket for over fifty years.  He was a great commentator with a melodious Bajan accent and supplied the soundtrack to the greatest Cricket team I have ever seen.  RIP 

Some elections and stuff

Thursday saw a series of elections up and down the UK.  I watched a bit of the BBC news before I went to bed, it wasn't even midnight and the pundits were predicting a bad night for the Labour party.  What would it mean for Jeremy Corbyn?  Was this the beginning of the end?

When the votes were counted things weren't nearly as bad as the media had gleefully predicted.  Yes Labour got a bit of a kicking in Scotland but who can blame the Scots for supporting a party that aims to take the country away from the control of Westminster?  I wish I had a similar option.  Other than that things went pretty well for Labour.  It's particularly pleasing that Londoners elected a Labour mayor and didn't fall for the vile racist Tory campaign.


In less than two weeks Test match cricket returns with a series against Sri Lanka.  It will be interesting to see who the selectors pick for the first test match.  Despite the good win away we are still unsure of what our best team is.  I expect them to pretty much stick with the same XI that played in South Africa.  The sad retirement of James Taylor opens up a space in the batting order which will probably be a straight choice between Bell and Ballance. England will always expect to beat Sri Lanka at home and after the retirement of two truly great batsmen, I think we'll do so comfortably.
My Team;
Cook, Hales, Compton, Root, Bell, Stokes, Bairstow, Ali, Broad, Finn, Anderson.

Mr Nice RIP

Howard Marks, the worlds favourite drug smuggler has died.  He wrote a brilliant autobiography called "Mr Nice" which was one of his many aliases.  His views on prohibition make absolute sense but our politicians are too cowardly to ever admit it.
There's a proper obituary here;
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/11/howard-marks-obituary

RIP Mr Nice

A Brief History of Seven Killings

"A brief history of seven killings" is written by Marlon James and starts in seventies Jamaica and ends in nineties New York and along the way there are a hell of a lot more than seven killings.

Back up a bit...  I'm a huge Bob Marley fan, I am white and middle aged (class?) so I would be right?  But I have been listening to Bob's music since my childhood and I always will.  I'm fan enough to have read loads of Marley biographies including Timothy White's brilliant "Catch a fire".  This book in particular describes an assassination attempt made on Marley on 2nd December 1976 at his home, 56 Hope Road, Kingston.  "A brief history of seven killings" starts with the events leading up to this attempt, the act itself and the immediate aftermath.

Beginning in loose fact with the whys and wherefores of the Hope road shooting which made headlines all over the world at the time, Marlon James story charts the fall out from this crime which is still officially unsolved. Throughout the novel Marley is referred to simply as "The singer".  The events are told in the first person by a cast of characters; "Top Ranking"gunmen and foot soldiers, politicians, terrorists, CIA and ordinary Jamaicans all of whose lives changed forever that day.  Many of these characters are thought to be based on real people and real events that occurred after 1976.  The narrator is a long time murdered "Duppy".

The story leaps forward in time and place.  Jamaica for more politics and the hope of peace in 1979, New York and Miami for cocaine murder madness in 1985 and a final bloodbath in 1991.  We follow some of these characters through the fifteen years of the tale but others don't make it, sometimes we feel sorry of the victims, sometimes we don't.  The Kingston slums are portrayed harshly as cruel and violent beyond belief as is the Bronx later in the book.  Life is cheap.  Different place, same characters, same result?

Is it any good?  Fucking hell yes!  The book is almost seven hundred pages long but I managed to read it in about five days.  The book was stuck in my hands and in my head and the only option was to keep reading and see where the madness would take me and who would be the survivors?  Then there's the question; of all the many hundreds of killings, which were the seven?  I'm pretty sure I worked it out and the one that got away.

Final

It was a really good T20 World cup from beginning to end.  In the semi's England smashed a good Kiwi side and West Indies beat the home favourites India.  The final swung both ways and with six balls to go I was sure England had it.  Then Mr Brathwaite hit four sixes...  Fair play to the West Indies for drawing solidarity from a farcical position regarding their cricket board.  Their team spirit made them unbeatable.