We LET you win!

I must apologise for this post, but I haven't really sat down and watched the cricket for ages, and I felt that I must report back the exciting events of this morning. Plus I'm totally sleep-pdeprived and figured at least this had a framework rather than the mildly incoherent ramblings of the last day or two... here goes:

So I had to be up at the crack of dawn this morning to take my mom to get her car serviced. More accurately, I had to go and fetch my mom after she dropped her car off and take her to work. She left at around 7:30 am leaving me sitting with my birds, clutching a huge mug of coffee 9for the record, Lara gave me a giant mug for Christmas, and I thank her in my head every morning...) watching the end of the latest SA/Australia test match with my dad.

When I left we were tailing by 150 runs with one wicket in hand, which basically meant that we were never going to hit the total (not with low order batsmen) and so if we lasted out the last 20-odd overs we could force a tie. In the meantime, the batsmen in question were: one of our best bowlers, who unfortunately thinks that hes a great slugger and tends to swing blindly, and a newish recruit who had a freshly broken finger. On top of all the the pitch looked like some kind of cracked and dried up mud-flat. And who says cricket can't be exciting?

It was kind of silly, we already won the series, but the idea of our team coming home undefeated was kind of exciting! Once I got home from depositing my mother at the church (not abandoning her, she works there) I saw that my Dad was finishing his breakfast in front of the TV (a total NO-NO in my house, watching the TV at all during daylight hours has always been forbidden) and the cricket was still going. It seemed that with 4 overs to go, we were trailing by around 130 runs and the guy with a broken finger was out and replaced by our captain. Our captain is a great batsman, but during the last match he broke his hand and injured his elbow pretty badly.

So we sat and watched. It was less watching and more taking turns to cover our eyes at every ball, particularly when Slugger was on strike. he was dropped twice while I was out, and rather than doing the sensible thing and blocking everything that came at him, he decided to show off and hit two boundaries, nearly getting caught on his three-for-three attempt. At the end of that over the captain was on strike and trying desperately to get a a single to get to the safe end. We kind of wanted him to stay on strike because he relies on luck a little bit less... anyway there were something like 17 balls left, or 7 minutes if they finished before the time cut-off... and the captain was bowled out.

We were SO close!!! But at this point, I feel that I must say:

1. we won the series already
2. we nearly tied with two different guys playing with broken fingers

On the flip side, the bowler did deserve credit for navigating the cracks on the pitch and getting it past him. If the other batsman had done something stupid he would have been lynched the second he got back home.

So yes, Australia, you won. But only because we let you!