Cricket - what cricket? And that's that...

In case you are wondering what has been happening to the Baulko cricketing boyz, the LoBats, you are not alone. It just all went quiet … mind you that's not a bad thing.

A quick enquiry with the team management resulted in a rather slow response… Finally a variety of rather incomprehensible official responses were provided, mainly by anonymous and highly dodgy sources. One of the responses was ‘I’ll call you back.’ Unfortunately I forgot to ask when – hence this could happen sometime in the next 10 years. We’re not even sure we remember the question.

A lengthy press release was issued by another anonymous and highly unreliable source that claims to be part of the Lack of Brains and Trust (LoBat). It was 15 pages long and the main story to come out of this facsimile was that now my fax machine is out of paper. It said that a number of factors had contributed to a very quiet finish to the season. Most of those factors were highly confidential and can not be revealed, but what can be said was that there was a lot of rain and most of the players were not allowed to go out in the rain by their mums who were worried they would catch a cold.

Although the fax was 15 pages long, 14.5 pages were blank, so that's all we can say about why it's been rather quiet in the cricketing world of the Hills district. There were some nasty rumours that a number of the boys were unable to play because they were burnt out by all their commitments to a variety of things, from IPL watching to barbeques, baby sitting, lawn mowing and general laziness. We have not been able to confirm any of these rumours, so they will not be reported…

Another nasty rumour claimed that the Baulko LoBaTs were thrashed to smitherines and the players, captain, coach, physio and team psycho have been suffering from shock. Further rumours were that they had been given a special ward in the Hills district loony hospital… These rumours were strongly denied, hence it's a safe bet they are as close to fact as you will find…

In the end, the season ended, at least we believe so. The boys had a beer, then another and then another 10 each… So the next six months will be back to playing shadow cover drives in the privacy of one's living room, day dreaming of the centuries and five wicket hauls that never happened… imagining that when everything looked lost, the skipper threw the ball to you or asked you to go out and bat and you turned the game around – from ensuring that we were heading to a slow defeat to getting us there very quickly…

Howzat? Have a good off season boyz…