Posts by Ben Chapman
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Green supporters are far more concerned for their party to act like a grown up and be independent. If that means giving some back to a Labour party that has consistently tried to marginalise them, perhaps Labour shold have thought about that a few years ago.
Though some Greens supporters are supporters because they thought the Greens could be relied on to work with Labour.
How many would not have voted for the Greens in the last election if they had known they would be entering into a memorandum of understanding with a National government?
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Looks like there might be a Twitter channel: iplanonymous
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The Shining = most definitely not scary. Stephen King in fact colourfully lambasted Kubrick for his total cluelessness in this regard on more than one public occasion.
While Stephen King has a masterful control of horror and creepiness in writing (his story of a surgeon stranded on an island facing starvation creeps me out just recalling it), Kubrick is seriously good at it on film. The Shining movie makes exceptional use of its medium, such as the sudden appearance of the bartender, the croaky voice of the finger saying "redrum", and the scene where Danny rides through the hotel on his trike going from carpet to bare wood floor, building suspension and emphasising the emptiness of the hotel.
I suspect, without knowing anything about the book beyond what I've read on Wikipedia, that if Kubrick had included all of King's themes, the film would have been even less scary.
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Morris dancers way too light to do the damage I’ve got in mind.
Roller derby?
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If it's possible for a chasing team to get the big score in the 4th innings, surely that's good for the game.
Well, not really, in my opinion. Mammoth chases should be exceptional.
In the three innings that precede the fourth, the team batting last tries to minimise their chase target, with the team batting first trying to maximise that target (allowing for time remaining). It shouldn't all come down to the last day, which would be the case if it is too easy to bat on the last day.
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It's easy to say in hindsight that it was impossible to get them out: we took our first ten wickets in one day and then had five sessions or so to complete the job.
I agree. I don't think that the fact that we didn't get them out is proof that we couldn't get them out. I think in this case we were done in by a faultless batting performance by the Indians second time up. You should really be hoping for a few more lapses in concentration or judgement. They just didn't give them up.
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Teams have been doctoring pictures for years. It's called "home-town advantage". If your team contained tearaway fast bowlers you'd instruct the groundsman to prepare a fast green pitch.
Not during a match though.
Any doctoring of pitches is limited to choosing between the heavy and light rollers.
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Surely there shouldn't be any such thing as an unattainable victory target. You want to give the chasing team hope that if they play brilliantly, they will win, against all odds. That's what makes great sporting events.
Strictly no target should be unattainable, but some targets should be inconceivably unlikely, so that the team captains can base their strategies around them.
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Re the Garth George article:
Don’t worry people. He sates in there that he is a “latecomer to cricket”
So he’s obviously a peasant too.
Which probably explains the complete lack of nuance in the article. Haydn is a latecomer to cricket too, but his articles about cricket are great.
The real problem with the Garth George article, for a godless republican abortionist like me, is that he is so fantastically offensively wrong about everything else, I have to be suspicious when I don't disagree with him.
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One of the beauties of test cricket was the evolving unpredictability of a wearing pitch. But it looks like they’re banning that.
This bias has to stop
While I do agree with you regarding the near-universal bias towards durable pitches, speaking just about the Napier test, there is good drama in a bowling team having two whole days to winkle the other team out without assistance from the pitch.
The biggest problem I have with non-wearing pitches is that previously unattainable victory targets can now be chased down, which makes it impossible to set a target.