Ashes Rumours

Sometimes I love twitter. When I have not been next to the TV or radio, I have been able to follow the ashes by watching the feed of my friends' twitter updates (I am @marcwestius), and not only do you get frequent updates, you get all sorts of colour in the form of personal opinion. Of the Ashes cricketers, Graham Swann, Jimmy Anderson and Phil Hughes are on twitter, with Hughes notably informing us of his sacking before the Edgbaston team was announced. By the way, does anyone else think that it is completely NOT in the spirit of twitter for Hughes to send his messages to his agent, who then sends them to "the IT guy" in India to update the twitter stream? Hardly fast-paced microblogging!

Anyway, one of the cool things that twitter does is aggregate opinion on various topics. By using a hashtag, status updates can be pooled by subject. One the best topics recently is #ashesrumours, started by @FollowTheAshes. There are some common themes, here are some of the best so far:

• on the same flight that david boon drank 52 cans of beer, geoff lawson drank 52 west coast coolers
• Shane Warne broke Boons 52 beer record at his daughters ballet recital.
• Sally left Brand Power as it has been taken over by a former English skipper and renamed Brand Gower.
• Justin Langer is in fact the first Terminator prototype, he went missing from a factory in Singapore in 1994
• as punishment for his poor bowling performance, @philtufnell was once made to run 10 laps of Mike Gatting
• Several Australian batsmen have been forced to sit out training after contracting Swann Flu
• @swannyg66 wanted to be the next Warney.....but he lost his mobile phone
• in honour of his father, bruce lee, brett lee once starred in a film called 'enter the batsman'
• Brett lee is the love child of a stripper name crystal and bing lee
• andrew strauss is a cyborg....but a really annoying one
• Andrew Strauss can carry 12 cricket balls clenched between his buttocks
• when don bradman met king george in 1934 he only referred to him as the 'g-dog'
• Ricky Ponting will change his nationality to a New Zealander if he becomes the 1st Aussie capt. to lose the Ashes twice in Eng
• Ricky Ponting and George W Bush swapped jobs for a period of 7 weeks in 2006 without anyone noticing
• Graeme Manou doesn't even know who he is
• Shane Watson & Sth African rugby player Percy Montgomery to play Prince Charming in Shrek 4. Darren Lehmann to play Shrek
• Shane Watson once broke his neck shaking his hair
• Shane Watson once cut his arm off whilst filing his nails
• shane watson once broke his leg padding up to bat.
• What, a buttock strain now? Shane Watson confident that his injuries are behind him
• Stuart Broad is still dressed by his mum before every match. She also does his hair.
• Nathan Hauritz likes to play with his new transformers figures for at least 30 minutes before taking the field
• graham Onions only realised he had an amusing surname when Monty Panesar started making bhaji jokes.
• eddie mcguire is also the president of paul collingwood the cricketer
• Andrew Flintoff practices his bowling style by throwing rocks at puppies.
• Umpires Billy Doctrove and Rudi Koertzen often enjoy a spliff or two during breaks
• despite being the great great grandson of alexander graham bell, ian bell has never used a telephone
• Ian Bell is so virile that he made 7 women pregnant, just by smiling at them
• shane warne's smoking makes up 50% of aus's greenhouse emissions.
• Sir Geofrey Boycott killed 17 Nazi Stormtroopers with a stick of his Grandmother's rhubarb
• Boycott to take all 11 batting slots at Edgbaston - as the only man who can do it properly.
• Boycs once killed a man with his bare hands for batting 'like a woman'
• Rumour has it that Mitchell Johnson can bowl
• Ravi Bopara can, in fact, bat.
• If he wanted to, Mitchell Johnson could probably hit a barn door at 10 paces
• Marcus North is taping a series of commercials in which he sells GPS devices to Mitchell Johnson.
• 3 women died of excitement at Lords, when Jimmy Anderson smiled at them
• At Lords, the Queen slipped her phone number to @JimmyAnderson9
• Daniel Radcliffe to be announced as 12th man, with a special brief to fill in for J Anderson if required.
• @jimmyanderson9 was once mistaken for derek zoolander. Actually, it may have been twice.
• The Headingley Test of 1981 was re-enacted on location in the Arizona desert when tapes of the original were lost.
• when simon katich wears a woollen jumper, the static from his chest hair powers his car.
• Richie Benaud invented the Flipper in honour of his favourite TV show.
• The pitch at Edgbaston is so wet that one of the rollers sank.
• Ian Thorpe will be 12th man for Australia at Edgbaston.
• Swimming googles have been supplied to all the players and officials for start of play at Edgbaston
• Phil Hughes had a small role as a House Elf in the new Harry Potter film
• It wasn't only Phil Hughes in the Potter film - Andrew McDonald played one of the Weasley brothers
• stuart broad was also in harry potter as malfoy's double. But he just couldn't look evil.

Looking forward to more!

Who will win the Ashes from here?

With England up 1-0 after 2 Tests, can Australia fight back? Or is the momentum now against them? They fought back from 1-0 down in 1997 in England, but that was a vastly different team. Have a vote in our poll - we'll shut it down just before the 3rd Test to capture what people are thinking at this stage of the series.

Test Retirement

There was a time when players used to retire from cricket at the end of their career. However a new concept has begun to raise it’s ugly head; “Test retirement”. The second announcement in a week of a prominent cricketer came today when Chaminda Vaas announced that he was retiring from test cricket to focus on Twenty20 and Limited Overs cricket. This coming of course, off the back of the much publicised announcement from Andrew Flintoff of exactly the same thing.

It comes as little surprise for this generation of players. Test cricket is a long cruelling game of stamina and can quite easily take it’s toll on the body, so it’s natural to understand why players like Flintoff who has struggled with injuries throughout his career would clearly look to find a way of extending it. Having a long career in cricket can be very lucrative these days, with all the money from the IPL it has never been a better time to play cricket.

In fact, the pay difference between playing test cricket and Twenty20 cricket is so great, that it’s getting to a point where Test cricket is actually becoming a bit of liability.

Look at the recent turmoil currently taking place with West Indian cricket. Pay is the central problem at the moment in the dispute – one can easily speculate the catalyst for this dispute, or at the very least one of the major pain points for some of the high profile players. The Test series between England and the West Indies. It was not part of the Future Tours Program, and the Windies had just recently defeated the English on home soil in a war of attrition 1-0 series. With Sri Lanka pulling out because of their players commitments to the IPL, the Windies were a last minute replacement, and the impact of this meant that star players like Chris Gayle were suddenly out of pocket, significantly.

The reality of the situation is that, unless you’re Australian, playing Test cricket can actually cost you money. Only Australian’s have voluntarily omitted themselves from playing in the IPL, this year Ricky Ponting, Michael Hussey, Michael Clarke and Mitchell Johnson were all high profile players that chose to make themselves unavailable for this competition – in fact Clarke and Johnson have steadfastly avoided even being a part of the draft process entirely. Is it really just a coincidence that these players are actually the top 4  money earners under lucrative Cricket Australia contracts?

It’s because they’re just about the only players who can afford it.

Ashes survival guide (if you're into science...)

Ashes backyard cricket
Originally uploaded by westius.

The sporting highlight of 2009 is here! The Ashes cricket series between Australia and England means little sleep for cricket-obsessed Aussies, and little work done by the English.

Here is our science survival guide to the Ashes:

• Ashes success and El Nino

Is the winner of The Ashes already pre-determined? Manoj Joshi has shown that the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon has a significant effect on the results of The Ashes cricket series when the series is held in Australia. The Australian Cricket team is more likely to succeed after El Nino years, while the English cricket team does better following La Nina years (the opposite phase). Their study, Could El Niño Southern Oscillation affect the results of the Ashes series in Australia? was published in the journal Weather.


• How to rank cricketers
  

Cricket is one of the world's most statistical sports, and mathematicians in cricket-loving nations love nothing more than delving into the minutiae of the numbers and diving into averages, strike-rates and custom-made measures of batting and bowling effectiveness.

For many people, including me, cricket isn't just a sport, it is a way of life.

These words could easily have come from me, but are actually the words of Rob Eastaway, a cricket-loving mathematician from the UK, and originator of the official International Cricket Council cricket-ratings which rank not only teams, but players within each team. In this podcast, I chat to Rob about how you mathematically rank cricketers.


• Science, Psychology and Cricket

Every cricket season, the TV coverage of cricket becomes more spectacular and technological, with the introduction of microphones to detect the finest of edges through to the keeper, improved abilities to determine the trajectory of a ball once it has left the bowler’s hand, and now even heat sensors to see how the batsman sweats.

But the scientific aspects of cricket are not limited to TV companies, with science playing an increasing role in shaping the performance of players, from their general fitness to specific training techniques for both their physical, and possibly more importantly mental, well-being. It is with science that countries are aiming to find the competitive edge.


• The curse of the duck

The recent news of the great Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar surpassing West Indian Brian Lara's record number of test runs has given maths-loving cricket geeks another opportunity to pull out their calculators and Excel spreadsheets. At the time of writing, Tendulkar had scored 12,027 runs across 247 innings, to overtake Lara's 11,953 from 232 innings. After a little investigation, I found that despite his outstanding average of over 54 runs per innings, Tendulkar's most common score in test cricket is ... zero! Even the great Don Bradman scored a duck more times than any other score. And their next most common? One! We look at how are cricket scores are distributed.

• Science, Cricket, Fitness and Psychology

Do you need to be fit to play cricket? Do the best batsmen in the world really have the ability to predict the type of ball they will receive before it even arrives? And is cricket really more of a mental game than a physical one?

In this podcast episode, we talk to Dr Rob Duffield from the School of Human Movement at Charles Sturt University who has found that indeed you really do not need to be as physically fit to play cricket as you do other sports such as football. We also chat to Dr Allistair McRobert from Liverpool John Moores University whose work has shown that the best batsmen can predict to some extent where a bowler will bowl. This work encompasses a look into the subconscious mental game of cricket and how the most successful players are more mentally prepared for the top level than lesser players. More on this topic can also be found in our article The Science of Cricket.


• Sex before Sport?

It is the virile sports-person's eternal question - should one abstain from a little bit of nookie before a big sporting event? If I was Michael Clarke and engaged to Lara Bingle, I wouldn't be...


• Economists, oil, cricket and correlation

Can we predict cricket results using the price of oil? Or is this just bad stats. Also see our article Poor correlations, or why it's not the fault of Aussie cricketers.

Good luck to all and come on you Aussies!

Choosing the right sub-atomic particle analysis facility is a little bit like medium pace bowling

I love this clip of former Australian cricket Damien Fleming on the comedy show Thank God You're Here, the Australian theatre-sports style show which essentially aims to embarrass celebrities. In this challenge, as Australian sportsmen tend to talk a lot about things they don't know, Fleming was set the challenge of marketing the Australian Synchrotron. His opening line, "choosing the right sub-atomic particle analysis facility is a little bit like medium pace bowling" is brilliant. Check it out below or on the youtube video: