Joe Denly is the third England cricketer in five weeks to be injured playing football. At any rate, he’s the third as long as you count Matt Prior, who suffered a back spasm that, some say, had nothing to do with football and could well have happened while he was climbing the stairs to the pavilion or even while he was stretching after getting out of his car.
Ian Bell, though, was certainly a victim of football, damaging an ankle in the run-up to the Edgbaston Test in July. And on Thursday, Denly twisted a knee after a “clumsy” challenge by Owais Shah during the kickabout that members of the squad like to use for aerobic exercise in the outfield.
So no wonder leading voices in the game, including Jonathan Agnew on Radio 5 Live, are crying out to the England camp to stop this football madness. It’s carnage out there. They’re dropping like flies. Soon there won’t be anyone left to represent the country. And what’s football got to do with cricket anyway?
Now, the more no-nonsense among us might argue that the problem could be solved at a stroke if there was someone on the backroom staff to say: “Just run it off, son.” But we must not forget that these are cricketers. Physical contact is alien to them in the course of their professional business. Except, of course, physical contact with the ball off a shorter length. Or, occasionally, physical contact with Mitchell Johnson, down the wicket, in a bit of chest-to-chest after a particularly meretricious bouncer.
Cricketers, accordingly, are delicate creatures and should be protected. I don’t suppose synchronised swimming teams warm up with a quick kickabout in the car park. Same should go for cricketers.
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The challenge, then, is to come up with a game to replace football in the England warm-up that doesn’t put the players in permanent peril of hideous injury, yet which doesn’t lose the all-important opportunity to bond as a team that Andrew Strauss is said to find in football. And naturally, in this context, one’s mind turns automatically to the ever-popular playground classic, “it”. Or, if you really wanted to up the team-bonding aspect, “kiss-chase”.
Imagine the thrill of trying to make it back to “homey” (the kitbags) with Ryan Sidebottom steaming after you from the pavilion end. Yet the downside, admittedly, is the risk of overexcitement. It might be hard to get the players to settle down quickly afterwards, especially if it was a windy day.
In which case, how about a game of quoits? There’s a limit to the amount of damage even a cricketer can suffer from a gently lobbed coil of soft rubber, even on a damp Old Trafford outfield that isn’t doing much.
It’s worth considering, as is French cricket. Again, hours of aerobic but non-threatening fun are available from this underrated variant on the full-size, stump-centred game. Has to be played with a tennis ball, of course. French cricket with a cricket ball is just asking for trouble of a shin-related nature. And one hand, one bounce applies, obviously.
Did you know, by the way, that the French never play and, in most cases, have never heard of French cricket? You do now.
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So, kiss-chase, quoits and French cricket. There’s got to be something there for our Ashes-winning heroes, hasn’t there? Or, if it’s hard to choose, five minutes of each. Hey presto, the team are warmed up, properly bonded and, most important of all, available to play.
Failing those, though, how about rugby union? The handy thing about rugby union being, of course, that all the injuries are fake.
Stealing Berlino is a bear necessity for London 2012
Backlashes: they’re almost inevitable, aren’t they? It’s never a matter of if. It’s only ever a matter of when. Any mascot who puts his furry head above the parapet knows this.
So it was that Berlino the Bear - hymned to the skies for his performance at the World Athletics Championships in Germany and widely acknowledged, in awed tones, among aficionados of the padded animal game as “the fifth Banana Split” - found himself hearing from the boo boys.
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Even before his guest appearance at the Aviva British Grand Prix on Monday, there were cynical mutterings that the ursine athlete-grappler was all very well in the sunshine of Berlin, but that he wouldn’t fancy it up North on a typical August Bank Holiday (horizontal rain, wind direct from the Urals, possibility of ice storms, etc).
And true, after some welcome grip-and-grin with Spikes, the UK Athletics mascot, the velour-coated German quietly withdrew as the rain fell and was absent from the main events. Coverage on the BBC website described it as “a shocker from the bear in Gateshead. He’ll have to raise his game.” “He’s gone missing,” Steve Cram told TV viewers with a mocking tone it pained us to hear.
On the contrary, Berlino appreciated that he was a guest and behaved accordingly. He was, after all, on Spikes’s turf. It would hardly have become the visitor to go piggybacking Jessica Ennis or rolling in the sandpit with Phillips Idowu. As such, he demonstrated humility, tact and an informed awareness of his environment that is, let’s face it, rare among the fluffy-suited community.
Which is why we launch our campaign today to have Berlino made a naturalised Londoner so that he can qualify for the 2012 Olympics. Surely it’s only a matter of paperwork and, if the will is there at government level (as it has been for senior figures’ nannies), the application can easily be fast-tracked.
Some will say that London 2012 should have its own mascot. We say, wake up to economic reality - as far as we can make out, the Olympic Stadium will be doing well if it ends up with a full complement of door hinges. Here is a mascot with a proven track record. Let’s steal him. Over to you, Lord Coe.
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Why yawning at 200mph can be a dangerous pursuit
An extraordinary admission from the world of motorcycle racing. Seizing on a rare lapse by Valentino Rossi, his Fiat Yamaha team-mate, Jorge Lorenzo was able to win the MotoGP race in Indianapolis last weekend and, musing on his failure to string these kind of performances together more often, he said: “It has been difficult to keep my concentration for 20 laps because I was a little bit bored.”
Well, that’s perfectly understandable, isn’t it? You’re on a screaming 800cc motorbike, racing many other screaming 800cc motorbikes at speeds well in excess of 200mph and tipping into corners so far that you brush the tarmac with the tip of your helmet, all the while realising that the consequences of getting it even slightly wrong, or just being plain unlucky, include getting wedged head-first up the white-hot exhaust pipe of the bike in front of you and/or leaving the circuit in a number of very small pieces and having to be put back together with a Meccano spanner. No wonder boredom is an ever-present threat for the jobbing rider. Frankly, it’s a wonder any of them stay awake.
Next week: Rubens Barrichello confesses that, without Heart FM at high volume and a family-size pack of Mars Planets on the dashboard of his Brawn GP Formula One car, he’d be nodding off by turn four of lap 12.