If Cricketers Were Cartoon Characters

Thank you IPL, for grinding cricket down to a screeching halt.

This is the time of year where instead of the *real* game we have an exhibition of cricket ball abuse featuring teams tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum while us poor fans and purists have been forced to revisit our old highlights collections, banish cricinfo.com to the wilderness, and suffer severe writers block.

Devoid of inspiration, what must the dear old blogger resort to?

Trivia!

Some months ago there was an internet obsession with dopplegangers, or lookalikes. Unfortunately most of the time it was clutching on straws, heck people tell me I look like Jehan Mubarak, big deal. And truth be told human to human lookalikes are a tad boring, so we see the same person twice... we've seen twins before and not the Schwarzenegger-deVito kind either.

So instead I present to you, animated and cartoon contemporaries of famous (and not so famous) cricketers of recent times.

Ryan Sidebottom is Sideshow Bob
While one plotted to destroy Bart Simpson, the other plotted to destroy New Zealand batting line-ups.

  

Darren Lehmann is Shrek
The team even nick-named him Shrek, so everyone is in on this one.

   

Shiv the Selfish, Really?

And so England's international cricketing summer is up and running, with the West Indies facing the best test team in the world at the Home of Cricket this week. The weather has been decidedly moist in England over the past few weeks but remarkably it stayed dry for whole of the first day at Lords, and a packed house was treated to some fine cricket. Jimmy Anderson, proclaimed the ECB player of the year earlier this week dominated early on with the ball, teeing Kieron Powell up with a textbook out-swing, in-swing combination, before some nice stroke play from Barath and the hyperbole-drenched Darren Bravo - who was relentlessly compared to one Brian Charles Lara all day on Twitter - steadied the ship before lunch.

The Plunder games – Week 6 Recap

Have you been too busy studying for your exams to take note of what has been going on in the IPL? Or have you been too engrossed in searching for a job to know who has hit the most ‘DLF Maximums’ over the past week? Maybe all your time is being taken up by stalking your ex-boyfriend; or you could just be some closeted IPL fan who likes to keep up appearances by publicly denouncing the ‘pajama cricket’ but want to know how your favorite IPL team is doing?

Never fear. For the attention-deficit IPL fan in you, I present to you ‘The Plunder Games’ – a weekly recap of all the IPL action. Here, you can catch up with all the past week’s action in just 10 minutes.

Game 54: MI vs RCB

Royal Challengers Bangalore 142 for 1 (Gayle 82*) beat Mumbai Indians 141 for 6 (Karthik 44) by nine wickets

Match in 140 characters: RCB bowlers finally fire to restrict the Mumbai Indians to 141; Gayle and Kohli seal the chase without any fuss, as RCB move to 4th spot

Charlie Sheen Winning Moment: When the Mumbai Indians somehow rebuilt their way back to 100/4 in 15 overs, it looked like they had a good launching pad for the big hitters to come in and boost the run rate; instead it was that man Murali, who not for the first time derailed the opposition’s hopes by picking two wickets off successive deliveries.

Viagra Performer of the day: Chris Gayle got the Orange Cap, scored 500 runs in the tournament, and scored another match winning knock to lead RCB to victory. He has hardly been troubled this season, and it is a troubling sign for all bowlers as IPL 5 reaches it business end.

Best tweet of the game: Umpire thinks about giving it out. But then sees it’s Bhajji, decides NO WAY can Bhajji get a wicket. (by @thecricketcouch)

Jimmy Anderson Raring to go Against West Indies

Very nearly 9 years ago to the day, a young Lancastrian with a wild mane that made KP's "badger mullet" look like a short back n' sides burst onto the international scene. His name was James Michael Anderson and his objective was to become the finest fast bowler his country would see for a generation. 

Anderson was an instant England success taking a five wicket haul on debut against Zimbabwe at Lords in 2003. He was an archetypal England county cricketer, bowling with swing at a decent lick of pace, taking a shed load of wickets in the process.

Things obviously progressed apace for the Burnley Express until England's coaches decided to meddle with his unconventional bowling action. Duncan Fletcher and then bowling coach Troy Cooley believed his action could cause injury later in his career, but a drastic re-engineering of his technique brought about, ironically, an injury in the shape of a stress fracture to the back. 

The Plunder Games – Week 5 Recap

Have you been too busy studying for your exams to take note of what has been going on in the IPL? Or have you been too engrossed in searching for a job to know who has hit the most ‘DLF Maximums’ over the past week? Maybe all your time is being taken up by stalking your ex-boyfriend; or you could just be some closeted IPL fan who likes to keep up appearances by publicly denouncing the ‘pajama cricket’ but want to know how your favorite IPL team is doing?

Never fear. For the attention-deficit IPL fan in you, I present to you ‘The Plunder Games’ – a weekly recap of all the IPL action. Here, you can catch up with all the past week’s action in just 10 minutes.

Game 44: KXIP vs RCB

Kings XI Punjab 163 for 6 (Saini 50, Hussey 45, Mandeep 43) beat Royal Challengers Bangalore 158 for 5 (Gayle 71, Kohli 45, Mahmood 3-20) by four wickets

Match in 140 characters: PK and Mahmood restrict RCB to 158 despite another Gayle 50; freak run outs threaten to derail easy chase, but Chawla takes KXIP home

Charlie Sheen Winning Moment: KXIP should never have had to sweat in the closing stages of the game, after the impressive performance of their seamers and their top order batsmen; but there they were, inducing themselves into a state of panic after some tight bowling by RCB in the final overs. With 2 runs needed off 2 deliveries, it needed the much maligned Piyush Chawla to deliver the winning moment with a thumping hit over long on.

Viagra Performer of the day: Azhar Mahmood continued his impressive performance in the IPL, bagging the MOM award for his efforts; but he reaped the rewards of Praveen Kumar’s highly skilled opening spell where he conceded only 8 runs off his stipulated overs, which was bowled to the likes of Gayle and Kohli.

Best tweet of the day: At the end of the day, Ravi Shastri is the real winner coz the match has gone down to the wire! #ipl (by @coolfunnytshirt)

Hampshire comment: Stalemate against Falcons

The end of the football season showed us cricket lovers a few things. One is the delight we can all share in the fact that a Joey Barton equivalent doesn't exist in the sport. The other is that, in its purest form, the exhilaration of success and devastation of failure are what makes sport what it is; the greatest entertainment on earth.
 
And it was with the Premier League's Mancunian dichotomy in mind that I chose to reflect on the bore draw between Hampshire and Derbyshire this weekend - probably not my smartest moves.
 
And sure, losing two full days of cricket to rain as we did at the Ageas Bowl last week was never going to be conducive to achieving a result in this match, and so it came to pass with the game petering out into a tepid draw on a sunny Saturday afternoon.