Spanky speaks!

Here's a turn-up - a Peter Roebuck article with a surprising lack of wankery.

In fact, you have to go to the fourth paragraph before you find any.

"But it is a mistake to curse the game with all its warts, for then one damns oneself."

And the sixteenth before you find a classical allusion!

"He had been a Gulliver tied up in doubt."

This IS an improvement.

Piss-taking aside, I think it's actually quite a good piece. Spanky presumes to know what's going in in Symonds' head a lot which I'm not sure he actually does, and I'm not quite sure that Symonds fishes with QUITE as much love-lorn poetry as Spanky thinks - "it is also part of his search for peace, outward and inward. Of course fishing does not bring inner peace as much as quietness" but on the whole, I agree with him on most counts. "Ask any captain worth his salt to choose between inflexible discipline and a maverick match-winner, and he'll find a way to accommodate the player. Of course it is not a carte blanche, but Symonds is a long way from becoming more trouble than he is worth" is a pretty decent summing-up of the situation, I'd say.

Well done, Spanky. Carry on like this, and you might even become readable.

Just for the record, I don't have QUITE as much of a fascination with Andrew Symonds as it might appear, but there's bugger-all else to write about cricket-wise at the moment, is there? I SUPPOSE I could write about the recent Bangladeshi ICL defection - but really - "Bangladesh team get even worse" is not that much of an interesting topic, now is it.