Catch it!

No, not swine flu. The last day of the cricket's on and I'm not there - my sister just texted me to say there are seats but here I am at work and it looks like rain may be on the way. (If you don't know the area, Wolverhampton is twenty minutes away from Birmingham on the train and Edgbaston's a suburb of Brum). So I'm stuck with the OBO.

After three terrible, rain-ruined days, it's a real battle. I thought the Aussies would pull back into contention after chucking their first innings away for 203, but they're now on 171-4: better than before but still not much of a challenge for England. I wonder what's happened to the Australians. They used to be a) winners, b) hugely competitive and c) charming/amusing with it. Now they're none of these things and the world's slightly poorer for it.

(Oh yes, a note for our American readers).

Cricket's like baseball, only better. A match can last 5 days and still end in a draw. Breaks are taken for drinks, lunch and tea. The US and Canada had a regular test match well into the twentieth-century and I gather the tradition has been revived. The only cricket match in American literature is in Little Women, which makes sense as the game hung on in Pennsylvania longer than elsewhere - baseball took over during the Civil War because it was easier to carry all that stuff around. American cricket now centres on Indian computing experts in California and Caribbean immigrants in NY, rather than sad old English expats trying to show off…