The third Test is almost upon us. We've been dyeing our shorts pink at Beige Brigade HQ in the days, swotting up on Adelaide's craft and non-craft beer establishments in the evenings and dreaming of victorious post-match forays to the Barossa Valley in the nights.
The first flash of pink leather will be spotted at 2pm on Friday afternoon, local time, and we are absolutely fizzing at the bunghole about it. But in the City of Churches this weekend just gone they worshipped at the Temple of Rock as 50,000 AC/DC fans descended on the Adelaide Oval (see the makeover here ). AC/DC is a band close to Radelaide's heart, after Angus and Malcolm Young first hooked up with Bon Scott at the Pooraka Hotel.
With 800 metres of turf ripped up, the groundstaff working 24/7 this week to remove belt studs and beer vomit from the surface, plus a new ball being tested in the twilight, it's more like heading along to watch a raffle than a Test match.
Keep an eye on Brendon McCullum'sTest cricket six count : with 97 he is currently third equal on the list alongside Jacques Kallis, and just behind Adam Gilchrist (100) and Chris Gayle (98). Most sixes in the most buttoned-down form of the game is a great pub record to hold - we will be encouraging him to punish Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon on his way to the record this weekend.
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How the hell do you make a pink cricket ball? Kookaburra explains, off the back foot: "I don't think any Test ball has gone through the level of testing and development that this ball has..." I love the chap slogging the crap out of it toward the end - a left-handed exponent of the back away cut and the cow corner heave.
Hats off to Crash Lander and the Central Districts crew getting batting surgeon Mahela Jayawardene to Nelson, Napier and New Plymouth this summer. There's a sweet profile on the Sri Lankan legend in the Hawke's Bay Today , kicking off with how his brother's death by brain tumour changed his world view before he even hit 20. He sounds like a very, very decent human being.
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Red card to the ground announcer at the Eden Park Outer Oval if this is true - there has been an allegation made that he played an Adele Lauire Blue Adkins medley when Nathan 'Komodo Dragon' McCullum entered the fray on Sunday afternoon. The decent crowd was also left utterly bamboozled when the Duckworth-Lewis comparison score was easier to see on the scorecard than the actual score. Cue mass confusion when Vettori-esque Sam Wells monstered a six over the West Stand and into Eden Park Inner Oval - punters thought it was Super Over time, but the grim reality was that Auckland had won by 1 run.
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Nerd Corner: Beige Brigade HQ recently came into the possession (via Trade Me of course) of a cricket trunk from the NZ cricket team from 1927. Jamie and the crew at the NZ Cricket Museum gave us the low-down: "1927 was a very famous tour - while NZ didn't play any Tests, they did enough to prove worthy in the eyes of the Imperial Cricket Conference and the MCC's 1930 tour to NZ featured Tests off the back of this tour. Roger Blunt was a Wisden Cricketer of The Year in 1928 because of how well he performed. The team actually travelled to and from England on the RMS Tahiti so, if this case has the HMS Athenic's name on it, it possibly belonged to manager Douglas Hay (who returned later).
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Michael Clarke has come out with a tanty just in time to spruik his new book about a disastrous Ashes tour, led by him. Gideon Haigh sums it up beautifully and saves you ever having to read the tome. "The interesting part of Clarke's diary...is the conflict with his own batting in the northern summer, which is narrated in nerdy detail. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross devised the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In the mourning of his game, Clarke undertakes a similar journey..."
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WATCH: The preview of Warriors, a new documentary film charting how the Maasai Cricket Warriors team formed in Kenya has helped change attitudes towards the traditional but abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation. The only Maasai cricket team on the planet makes it to Lord's...the film-makers talked to Test Match Special too.
READ: Daniel Brigham has penned a gem on ship-steadying Kane Williamson, beneath an atypically cheesey headline it is fulsome in its praise for NZ's first Test cricket centurion, Stewie Dempster. On Williamson: "It is passive batting, runscoring by stealth; the antithesis of David Warner but just as effective. He bats in a trance, a postman on a beautiful summer morning who knows every millimetre of his route. There is no weakness. There should be. Every batsman has some sort of frailty. Not Williamson, though. If it exists, no one's found it."
LISTEN: In The Pink Stubbies Episode of The BYC podcast the boys are dressed to glow. The Godfather is gutted with Steve Smith's lame declaration, Off White Thunder reckons Pup has revealed his true colours and Walter Hadlee's lawn bowl antics are aired. Violence Corner is in Grimsby, hometown of controversial Australian Pom Darren Pattinson.
WATCH: Gem of a stumping in Indian domestic cricket. Looks like it was filmed in The Great Subcontinental Smog of '81 but trust me, it's recent.
Middle & Leg is a cricket newsletter for New Zealand cricket fans who like a dose of optimism and a tablespoon of take the piss with their weekly cricket informational. It is tapped out by Paul Ford, co-founder of the Beige Brigade, and one-seventh of the Alternative Commentary Collective. You can email him here beigehq@beigebrigade.co.nz
