The Bright Side

So it all turned out to be true then - with both captain and coach gone on the same day leaving English cricket looking about as organised as a surrealist's free form art installation .

You can choose your own label from the following catalogue of disaster: debacle, farce, cock-up, or perhaps all three simultaneously, but no-one's emerged looking good from the process*: Pietersen for his wilfull petulance, Moores for his inability to handle the game at the highest level and the ECB for putting the ferrets down English cricket's trousers and then acting surprised when they end up fighting tooth and nail near some vitally important regions.

Still our naturally sunny and not at all in any way misanthropic life-hating outlook forces us to consider the bright side.

What do you mean, what bright side? Read on grasshopper to discover,

One: If it were done, 'tis well it were done quickly. Better that this happens now, than a month before the ashes . At least it will give Strauss two short series to stamp his authority on the team. It'll also mean we might get decent coach, rather than someone who's simply got the relevant ECB badges.

Two: It proves that cricket matters. It was the lead item on pretty much every form of media yesterday and shows just how integral cricket remains to the English psyche. On a day when myriad other stories from the sorry world vied for our attention, Cricket grabbed all the headlines, set the national news agenda and remains as important as ever.

For that small comfort at least, we should be truly thankful.

* Apart from Andrew Strauss who should have been made England skipper after the domestic Pakistan series.

England Woeful England

Widely previewed over the past 24 hours, the axe has finally fallen and if reports across the mainstream sites are to be believed, both England captain Kevin ‘KP’ Pietersen and coach Peter Moores have fallen on their collective swords this lunchtime.

It’s still unclear whether Pietersen has gone or has threatened to go if Moores stays – the only quote comes from Sky news who managed to ambush KP on his mobile but all he’d say was: "I am not in a fit state to talk."

Uneasy is the head that wears the crown and all that... Moores we were expecting, but KP as well? From the reports, it looks like he gambled on a ‘back me, sack him’ power play with the board that has spectacularly failed, but it would be pretty damn shocking to see a self-inflicted ousting only five months after he’d assumed the captaincy.

If it’s all true and that’s yet to be determined, with various sites currently getting splinters in their arse through all their fence sitting, the whole sorry spectacle has been thoroughly unedifying as watching Mike Gatting going on a rampage in your local cake shop. To misquote dear old Oscar, to lose either captain or coach may be regarded as misfortunate but to lose both at the same time? That looks like sheer carelessness.

Whatever way things pan out, KP has come out of it smelling of ordure. This is not so much washing your dirty laundry in public, as soiling it, flaunting it and then offering to rub the remains into the noses of random passers-by.

Even the news that Australia has had its worst ever sporting year is scant consolation on this darkest of days.

The Window

It’s Day Two in the tortuous return to working life and despite a bit of competition from the Aussie v SAF series, it’s the transfer window – which has not so much opened as been kicked asunder – which is occupying our thoughts.

Clubs and bosses may openly say they dread it, but players and agents love it, especially the current winter one where allegedly ‘no significant business is done’.

Bollocks.

For fans, the winter window is a boon during the dark days of January when thoughts turn to the loaded revolver in the drawer and the rest of the year stretches out before you like a prison sentence.

This is a time when you positively need those outrageous rumours, public hissy fits and the perennial ‘who’s going to gamble on Michael Owen’ sweepstake.

Okay so far it’s been pretty predictable stuff: with Lassan Diarra off to Real and Jermain freshly confirmed back at Spurs this lunchtime, but the rest of the month promises lots of interest and a fair amount of intrigue.

Carlos Tevez has openly rebelled at Man Utd (inadvisable), Andrei Arshavin threatening to buy out his contract to join Arsenal (huh?) and Man City have been linked to every single existing footballer on Earth (even our agent has been approached, but we’ve turned it down).

So here’s to the window: relish it, celebrate it, savour every column inch and outrageous rumour no matter how improbable. It is the stuff of which dreams (and nightmares) are made.

Happy new year, Heureux Nouvelle Année, feliz año Nuevo ...and all that innit?

And boooom! Just like a Stevie G head butt we’re back! It’s the cold hard shell shock of the first day back at the coalface and we’re still reeling after eleven days of late rising, slack living, alcoholic indulgence and Christmas pudding overload.

Ah the true spirit of Christmas... How was it for you?

Still, during these long bleak dog days as the New Year slowly starts to form and come into focus, there’s been no lack of spurting action to get our teeth into.

The award for most surprising event goes to Stevie G for the ‘incident’ in the night club and kidding aside, we hope the Scouse and England midfield dynamo gets away Scot-free. Some players undoubtedly deserve to be on the wrong end of a nightclub shooing, but not Stevie G, who, is so virtuous we are told, he drops farts of the purest perfume.

Elsewhere, a splendid FA Cup third round threw up the usual shock and some little awe with self-styled ‘richest club in the world’ Man City falling on their arses to lowly Notts Forest. That played most mightily on our chuckle bone - hilarious.

Murky Ides of March doings in the world of cricket too with KP on the point of ousting Peter Moores from his position as England coach. It’s always dangerous to change horses mid-race, especially with the Ashes looming but better now we suppose than then.

Moores was a political appointment (the first fruit of the ECB’s Elite coaching program) but has never struck us as having the cojones. The tale of the tape does not lie and England have become measurably worse since Moore’s arrival.

Time to put him out to grass we say and our pick and first prediction of the NY is to draft in Dav Whatmore. He's big, he's not fashionable and he used to sport a hilarious moustache, but he always got the best out of any team he coached and we'll need that kind of grit for the Aussie showdown this summer.

Toodle pip!

Ho fucking ho.... The year in review

Apologies for the dearth of updates recently we’ve had less successful posts than a Royal Mail delivery depot, but the Christmas round of works party (drunken JD-fuelled frenzy), the resulting day-long hangover (harsh skull throb) and the sheer gritted-teeth tedium of wading through all that Christmas pre-prep bollox has left little time for more serious, trivial or indeed rewarding work.

Anyway when we started doing this old shit, way back in February (although that seems like several lifetimes ago too), part of the reason was we knew we were in for a veritable bumper year-long festival of sport: the Euros, the Olympics, Formula One, pre-Ashes fever, it promised so much ...and we’ve managed to deliver so little

The fact that we haven’t managed to scratch our proverbial arse enough to actually knock out some stuff on half of it is neither here nor there... It has indeed been an epic old year and our personal highlights - in no particular order - include:

• Hoy’s triple gold triumph


• Stress free Euros, a pleasure to watch with England not appearing


• Lewis Hamilton storming to erm fifth to win the Drivers’ championship;


• The arrival of Senor Fabio, England winning 4-1 in Croatia and quite possibly
turning a corner.

• Cricket: shit results but the return of the Fred and Stuart Broad’s emergence.


• Murray's run, then the epic evening-long Nadal v Federer final


• Rebecca Adlington’s storming swim(s)


• Jimmy Page playing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ at the Olympics handover... a small but hopefully significant portent for 2012....
  

We’ll probably be doing toss all over Christmas probably except eating like a Trojan, watching crap telly, playing video games and drinking and farting a lot.

Still you never know there might be a few updates if our spleen is sufficiently riled or our alcohol level drops dangerously low.

So, in case there’s not, ho fucking ho from all at the Spurt, ‘tis the season to be pissed after all.

We hope you will be too, see you back in Jan.

Signs and portents

We thought we might struggle today, it being the Tuesday before Christmas week and intriguing spurting stories rarer than a tax collector’s smile.

Instead, we’re sounding the official world of spurt death knell and (slightly) lamenting the passing of Paul Ince, the unfortunate now ex-manager of Blackburn, who’s been sacked this morning following a recent run of poor results. Three wins in seventeen with Mark Hughes’ squad is hardly impressive, but it seems a touch premature to change horses half way through a race in such an arbitrary fashion.

Blackburn got all the plaudits for appointing a young English manager full of promise at the beginning of the season, so they deserve some stick for sacking Ince when it’s barely half way through. And Graeme Souness hot favourite to replace him? That is not so much rubbing salt into a wound as tipping in an extra bucket load. One word: lamentable.

Elsewhere a strange plague of kidney stones seems to be affecting Premier League managers from Phil Scolari to Rafael Benitez who are both currently feeling like they’re pissing razors. What does it mean? We’re not entirely sure, but we’re sure there’s a juicy conspiracy theory to be manufactured there somewhere.

Finally, we have further proof of the genius of Senor Fabio, who is currently in dispute with Wembley groundsman Steve Welch over the length of the sod. Capello wants a grassial bladeage measurement of 17mm while Welch insists 19mm is the correct measure.

A word of advice Steve, let Senor Fab have his way or a man in a dark coat will be paying you a visit fairly shortly.

Yet it’s just one more example of Senor Fab’s obsessive attention to detail which has seen the national side reborn under his tutelage this year. To paraphrase Harold Macmillan, “It’s the details dear boy, the details.”

Riposte

Well lift up our skirts, tickle our biff and call us Mystic Susan. Yesterday - in a rare outbreak of Sunday posting - we actually picked in reverse order ie. Adlington, Hamilton and Hoy, the exact finishing order of BBC Spurts Personality of the Year.

Naturally we didn’t have the foresight to put any money on it, oh no, that would be far too rewarding an outcome for the way this Christmas is shaping up.

However solace has come in the form of the return of Test cricket to our DAB radio and after all the drama, trauma and debate surrounding whether England should go back (something we again predicted – have we got a direct line to the spurting future or what?), it has been simply marvellous to wake up in this bleak English midwinter and be greeted by Test cricket's gentle cadences, immense subtleties and moments of tension and excitement.

And for a game which nearly never happened, it has been quite scintillating cricket and has almost had everything ... Straussy’s two centuries, Collingwood’s one, Swann’s double strike and a daunting total for India to chase on the final day. Sehwag’s blitz, Yuvraj’s defiance and then a match-winning century with the return of the Little Master.

The script has been perfect and we don’t even feel too disappointed by England’s loss, hell, we’re even a little exhilarated by India’s epic chase.

A return to proper Test match cricket has produced not only a magnificent game but the perfect cricketing riposte to the horrors of Mumbai.