Injury Diary 2009

Imagine the setting if you will. Quality indoor cricket academy with fast bouncy rubbered flooring and several lanes of netting full to the brim with talented aspiring cricketers perfecting their individual trades. Now wipe that thought and replace it with my cricket team, Kirkbrae CC, an Edinburgh side more used to seeing down a pint glass than a cricket net. Maybe that explains why in the 2008 winter net sessions we saw more injuries than most Premiership football clubs see all season. Due to last year's spate of wrists, fingers, toes and face breakages I thought it may be of interest to keep an ‘injury diary’ in 2009 to see if we fare any better!

Saturday 24/01/2009
Not long after starting, our newly recruited South African fast bowler pulls up with a hamstring problem. Like a brave soldier he carries on…bowling spin and getting tonked. Mr Morely turns up towards the end despite pulling his calf muscle the previous week, and Colin (co-owner of Cow Corner) battles on bravely with his ever so slightly bruised foot. Colin was hit on the foot whilst batting before Christmas and it has remained tender ever since, hence his latest potty invention…which incidentally we will most certainly NOT be selling at Cow Corner. An arm guard strapped to the top of his foot!

KP nuts

Keven Pietersen’s ever increasing ego is now beginning to affect the other England players, say sources close to the South African husband of pop star Jessica Taylor.

According to our fictional source, the recent furore involving Peter Moores is just the tip of the iceberg. “When KP was born in 1980, his ego was that of a normal new-born baby, but due to unforeseen circumstances it has increased exponentially and doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon.”

The source went on to say, “The latest casualty was Mick (Michael Vaughan). It was horrible, there was Mick batting in the indoor nets with the other average England boys and Colly (Paul Collingwood) comes trundling in and throws one up in the air. Just as Mick is about to smash it, all the lights disappear and he takes it in the face…. KP’s ego had only gone and blocked all the light out, han’t it!?”

This is the latest of a string of incidents associated with the ex-England, South African captain. These incidents are alleged to have included the infamous break up of Liberty X and the televised show ‘Battle of the Egos’, which lead to the resignation of Carol Vorderman from Countdown.

Shane Warne's horror show

Shane Warne - how do you sleep?

Forget the shoe whitener! We bought a fair few copies of "Shane Warne's Cricket Test" when we opened over two years ago... We always meant to get round to having a look at it but only got the chance very recently to open one up and have a play.

Having had a play, I'd like to formally apologise to anyone who has bought one of these. Luckily, I don't think anyone HAS ever bought one from us. We did give some away as prizes at some point. We thought it looked like a GREAT prize, so I'd also like to formally apologise to anyone who might have thought they had won something decent. We hold Shane Warne responsible, but I know that won't make you feel any better or undo the damage already done, or bring back the wasted minutes of your life you might have spent playing this tosh.

Shane Warne's Cricket Test is a cricket DVD quiz. You use your DVD remote to play the game on TV. It's for one or two teams, and you play as England or Australia. You "bat" by answering the questions. Get it right and you've hit some runs. A scoreboard keeps track. That sounds OK, but the execution is embarrassing.

Questions come in categories like "Fast", "Medium" or "Spin" etc., but this has no bearing on what kind of question you get. And there's no indication of how many runs you'll get if you get it right. If you get it wrong, you see Warney making a big appeal to the umpire. You tend to survive a couple of appeals and are given out the third time. But then fairly often you will be told that you have been bowled, run out etc. without even facing a question. The question database must be tiny, cause we were getting repeats and we only played one game.

This DVD game, it turns out, is lame.

It's rubbish.

We hereby announce that the winner of the kack-handed bowling contest can have some shoe-whitener AND a Shane Warne DVD game.

OK he could bowl a bit. But a bottle of his hair tonic would be more fun than this. (Aaahh - maybe that's the idea. Maybe this game makes perfect sense after you've downed a few of those hair restorative things?)

Aussie challengers

Just as we were getting worried that Harmison's woeful entry might have scared away serious contenders, these beauties arrived in the Cow Corner inbox. All the way from Australia! Some good efforts, I'm sure you'll agree, but brace yourselves to behold the wonder of "Stevo."

First up Dave:


Jess - we thought you'd managed it. For a moment there we really thought we were going to have to send shoe whitener all the way round the world!? Nice try.


A noble effort from Nat.


But Stevo, Stevo, Stevo, Stevo... Good god man! This has got to be our favourite so far.


Don't worry - there's still plenty of shoe whitener. Will we have a winner before we sell it off?