Word: cricketer
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Like other games that lend themselves to statistical reduction, cricket can be brutally efficient in judging its players across the years. There?s usually no need to look beyond the weight of runs scored and wickets taken to assess a player?s proper place in the cricketing pantheon. But averages speak of substance rather than style. A talented showman and a dour plodder can be mediocrities on the numbers grid, although the first might have soared as often as he flopped, while the second never got off the ground. David Hookes, who died on Jan. 19, was not a cricket...
Hookes?s death following a violent incident outside a Melbourne hotel was overplayed by adrenaline-charged journalists, but the reaction of cricket lovers has been profound. For many Australians aged 35 to 45, ?Hookesy? was a childhood sporting hero (a spunk for women of all ages), announcing his abundant talent and displaying his surfie looks in a spectacular way during the season of 1976-77. After a string of high scores for South Australia, the 21-year-old made his national debut against England in the Centenary Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The blond, left-handed batsman tonked opposing...
...game during the Super Bowl), we might take a moment to ponder the ways in which football really is America?s game. With apologies to Bronislaw Malinowski - whose pioneering treatise on the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea led to studies of the ways in which the islanders appropriated cricket and turned it into a native ritual - let?s explore how we Americans took over the primitive sports of soccer and rugby and adapted them to our belief system...
...Americans have ?optimized? rugby according to our notions of progress, there are still things many team owners might like to import from Trobriand cricket. While in football, the home team wins most of the time, in the Trobriand Island sport the home team always wins. There is still consolation for the visitors though, since the home team throws a feast in their honor. Huge differences remain, however. While football, with its fighter plane flyovers and other militaristic trappings often seems to celebrate war, cricket was introduced to the Trobriands in 1903 to replace war. How primitive...
...foreign affairs. Some royals, such as the Kings of Mysore, Baroda and Travancore, were enlightened rulers who promoted the arts and built colleges and irrigation works. But most, as the photos in this book amply testify, spent their time hoarding diamond necklaces of breathtaking size, playing polo and cricket, and nearly shooting India's tigers into extinction. In 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's future Prime Minister, lamented that most of the princely states were "sinks of reaction and incompetence." A mass of desperately poor peasants tilled the land for the benefit of a small group of landowners...