A little bit of cricket trivia...

Are you sick of cricket yet? If so, I'm afraid it's going to be a LONG summer. My inane ramblings about cricket and other sports fill me with joy.

An interesting thing happened in the game between Chennai and the Port Elizabeth on Wednesday, which does happen occasionally but is still pretty amazing when it does. On the way to losing the game by little enough to knock Victoria out of the finals spot, Warriors captain Davey Jacobs played a defensive shot to a ball which then spun back and hit his stumps at speed. Luckily for him, though the bail was dislodged it fell back into place. According to the MCC Laws of Cricket:

The wicket is put down if a bail is completely removed from the top of the stumps, or a stump is struck out of the ground

Thus Jacobs survived and went on to score an impressive 32 to add to his swag of other tournament runs. More impressive than that freak occurence was the action of Indian captain and wicket-keeper MS Dhoni, who playfully removed the offending bail with his glove and appealed jokingly to the square-leg umpire, if was one of those moments that makes crickt people laugh, and everyone else wonder what the hell is going on, and how they were conned into watching a game of cricket in the first place.

Reading on in the laws of cricket, because I do that sort of thing, I came across this little gem:

The disturbance of a bail, whether temporary or not, shall not constitute its complete removal from the top of the stumps, but if a bail in falling lodges between two of the stumps this shall be regarded as complete removal.

One wonders how many times this incredibly unlikely event had to happen in a game for the rule to be codified in the laws.

South Australia will be playing the Warriors on Saturday night Adelaide time, and with that, the other semi tonight, the final of Sunday night, the SANFL preliminary final on Sunday arfternoon, the endless speculation about the coming commonwealth games and a little thing called the AFL grand final on Saturday afternoon it's going to be a big weekend of sport for South Australians.