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Cricket, boring or what?

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It’s Friday morning, and I get a text message from a friend of mine. “Gentle reminder. We are World Fucking Champions. Still can’t quite believe it”. My heart races again. A tear forms in my ear. There’s a clenched fist somewhere and my heart races. We were there. We were there. We were there.   --- The four of us - Dan, John, Suzy and myself- had paid over £1,000 to be the World Cup Final. We’d paid an ‘Official Travel Company’ for the four tickets, bought after we hammered South Africa at the over. We’d lamped a possible semi-finalist, and we were confident we could smash the rest of them until the final games. And then Pakistan happened. Then Sri Lanka happened. And then Australia happened. Panic Stations were hit, with the maths talked about ad nauseum on Whatsapp. Basically: If we went out before the semi-finals, we could put the tickets onto the secondary market, where they would be snapped up by confident India fans, who would sel...
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£1.7m for seven weeks' work. Not bad, Ben Stokes.

Ben Stokes has just found out that he's going to play in the IPL - and when he does, he'll be getting £1.7 million for around seven weeks' work. The England player will go to Rising Pune Supergiants after the team won a fierce bidding war for his services - which have thus far been unproven at IPL level. Stokes doesn't only bring a strong bat to the league - he's also a bowler that - to use the aged-old phrase - can't be kept down. Sure, he was smashed out of the yard by Carlos Brathwaite in the World T20 in April 2016, but he bounced back pretty well. Stokes averaged 23.00 in the T20 series against India with 3 fours and 2 sixes, and had an economy rate of 8.18 - which actually doesn't look too bad at T20 level (at Test level he would never bowl again!). Ironically, Stokes may not play all the games for the Supergiants due to international commitments for England - he's only recently been made vice-captain. Englishmen also getting good dough...
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Welcome To The Rooting Around For Hope Cricket Blog!

I have loved cricket for 30 years, even though, historically I have been crap at it. Favourite moments of (my own) cricket career - in order include: Spending all afternoon of one day of Game 6 of Horris Hill in 1989 blocking everything and anything that came to me with my 'Slazenger V Carribean', ending up with 11 not out, and pissing out of just about everybody. Managing 2 in a season. That's right.....TWO. And that was off a leg glance. I celebrated like I'd just scored a century off West Indian fast-bowling. Getting a chap called Reda Said, who the day before had scored 83 in a stunning effort the first XI, caught behind off his glove while he was trying to smash my spin to Kingdom Come. To be fair, he would have succeeded, but the ball bounced a bit.  Spending most weekends for cricket teams at Horris Hill (prep school) and St Edward's School, Oxford, with a scorebook and scoring the game. And in the latter days, getting paid in cigarettes, booz...
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