I love Oz but it did take a while inwardly not to do a second take when I was there when called a 'pommie bastard' before realising the contect of local usage

The following is indicative of attitudes to terminology down under:

'The terms Pommy, Pommie and Pom, in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand usually denotes an English person (or, less commonly, people from other parts of the UK).

The Oxford Dictionary defines their use as “often derogatory” but after complaints to the Australian Advertising Standards Board (ASB) regarding five advertisements poking fun at “Poms”, the board ruled in 2006 that these words are inoffensive, in part because they are “largely used in playful or affectionate terms”. The New Zealand Broadcasting Standards Authority made a similar ruling in 2010.

Despite these rulings, the terms are considered offensive and derogatory by many British, regardless of context.

The community organisation, British People Against Racial Discrimination, was among several complainants who had objected to the use of the word ‘Pom’ as a ‘derogatory’, ‘offensive’ and ‘racist’ slur.

The Advertising Standards Board gave careful consideration to whether the ads breached the section of the Advertiser Code of Ethics dealing with discrimination and vilification.

In deliberating on the complaints, the Board considered that the use of the word ‘Pom’ is part of the Australian vernacular, which is largely used in playful and often affectionate terms.

The Board also found that ‘Pom’ is not used in a way to vilify, or incite racial hostility towards, people of British extraction, particularly when considered in the context of the cricketing tradition and affectionate rivalry between the two countries.

The Board unanimously dismissed the complaints against the five ads.

we are Donald ducked if it rains :)

:p

The mind games have begun

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/59530925

EFA :p

Lol

Don't know if this is mind games, but the Aussies have named their 11 already.

Including Stark, Hazlewood, Cummins and Lyon - Rubbish bowling attack, that:supergrin::rolleyes:

I know he has a half decent record, but I’ve never had Lyon as a particular great bowler. I think he’s breakable

I used to think that, but he is very good. Not sure if it's 300 or 400 wickets, but he is a great back up, when their pace bowlers need a rest - he keeps it tight.

Just shy of 400 I think. I’d have him firmly in the ‘good solid bowler’ category. Nothing wrong with that of course and better than we have currently for sure

I did read the team and they have this new keeper which I think is who Bonesy mentioned the other day.

I wouldn’t dismiss the bowling as rubbish.

I think Carey is the wicket keeper Bones mentioned some pages back. Well roll on 8th I am going to take some time off to watch this (disgusting I know)

I think he may have been being sarcastic

I have reluctantly signed up for BT App just for a month so I can watch it on my phone in bed

Bonesy being sarky??? Sweet mother of nectar, never

:)

Fine piece by the Aussie Gideon Haigh in The Times:


There is nothing good about Sandpapergate, even the word, born of that mindless habit of affixing the suffix - gate to any imbroglio. Were Watergate repeated today, as The Times writer Matthew Parris has observed, it would automatically become Watergategate.

Yet 3½ years on, Australian cricket, and Cricket Australia (CA), are legroped to the events of Newlands — just how tightly has been evinced by the past few weeks.

After all, it was Sandpapergate that gave us, on the spur of the moment, the captaincy of Tim Paine, then the expanding cult around his being a redemptive figure, which CA knew to be flawed at best. Only Paine has now paid the price for that, just as only Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft paid the price of the events of Newlands.

Sandpapergate also defines our future leadership. Pat Cummins, unbesmirched, succeeds; Smith, semismirched, must work his passage back as vice-captain.

Warner, with many of the attributes of a successful captain, remains permanently disbarred from office. Marcus Harris is an indirect beneficiary too.

More generally, on the eve of the next home Ashes summer, the exit of Paine demonstrates that we are still living out the unaddressed consequences of the last.

Cast your mind back to the Gabba Test of four years ago, on the first morning of which Paine sent his smokiest sexts.

The prelude will be remembered for a weird trash-talking Nathan Lyon presser; the postlude involved Smith and Bancroft guffawing over a sneakily leaked nothingburger of a story about Jonny Bairstow.

Paine was "partying like a rock star"? Of course he was, because Australia four years ago was a pretty obnoxious team. And, frankly, nobody at CA had any problem with that, from the chairman and chief executive downwards. Remember that putrid parade float after the Sydney Test? Jeepers creepers.

They didn't even have a huge problem with it afterwards. "Winning is everything ... Suddenly we have a culture problem — we didn't have one when we were winning!" an

Australian player told The Ethics Centre during its 2018 "cultural review" of the Australian game.

As The Ethics Centre concluded, Newlands was "not an aberration" but "an extreme example of a latent tendency growing out of the prevailing culture of men's cricket in Australia".

The French philosopher Montesquieu had a dictum that applies well to CA, and equally to the England & Wales Cricket Board in the day of Azeem Rafiq: "If a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle."

Sandpapergate was the accidental battle result — and let us not forget how accidental it was, depending as it did on a single SuperSport camera being trained in the right direction to detect Bancroft's malfeasance. But the general cause was the team's sense of impunity and entitlement in the context of CA's organisational arrogance.

"Ultimately," Greg Chappell says in his new book Not Out, "every one of us in the organisation was guilty." Now retired and deprogrammed from the cult, he concedes: "We all walked past things we shouldn't have walked past, from top to bottom."

It has been rightly observed that there was a disproportion to the response after Sandpapergate.

But the team was finally picking up the tariff for its general dislikeability.

The bullies, we learnt, were also cheats.

A lot of distaste localised in Warner, which suited his coaching and managerial enablers, who thereby escaped with minimal damage to their reputations. The lack of a comprehensive public accounting for events at Newlands, the drive to quickly designate the guilty so that everyone else could stop saying sorry, remains a problem, not relieved by the scrutiny of The Ethics Centre.

Given the time and resource constraints on investigating officer Iain Roy in 2018, is CA really sure it knows the whole history of Australia's preparing balls for reverse swing in and around Newlands? Or does it fall into the category of things for which it is better to have, to borrow from Watergate, plausible deniability?

It confirmed some apprehensions in May when Bancroft confided in an interviewer: "Yeah, obviously what I did benefits bowlers and the awareness around that, probably, is self-explanatory." "The investigation was a thorough one," countered Nick Hockley, CA's chief executive, when asked about Roy's report. "As far as we are concerned, the investigation is closed." In the matter of Paine, as in Sandpapergate, the CA board has faced the baneful combination of good intentions and no good choices. It is possible to sympathise with their predicament. But CA's tendency to secrecy has had two negative consequences: it has developed not only a horror of negative publicity, reflected in the haste of its recent deliberations, but also a reputation for expedient behaviour, which has damaged its public credibility.

It is the worst of both worlds.

Because the natural inference to draw from "move along, nothing to see here" is: "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" It has been said that Americans before Watergate believed everything their government told them, and that after they believed nothing. Will that be Sandpapergate's legacy in Australian cricket?

F~cking arseholes - Anderson's out of the first test already.

FFS but better than pulling up after five minutes like last time.

This is true. I wonder who will replace him. Perhaps it will be Darren Gough who appears to have eaten the 16 sacked Yorkshire folk?

It’s fine.
Woakes and Robinson will do the damage.

We’re winning this test.

He’s fit to play at The Gabba. They don’t think he will manage 5 Tests so are targeting the ones where they think he can have most impact. Seems reasonable.

But you can still pretty much double your money on this 1st Test with an insurance bet. I just lumped on Australia at 5/6. Weather looks like it just might hold long enough for a result.

No Jimmy. Fvck and bollocks.

Do extremely well to take 20 wickets now.