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?)

Shoe whitener

We have a number of things that are really difficult to sell. But what has been THE worst performing product in the history of COW CORNER. Shoe whitener?

It was my idea. I said we needed some and we bought a pack of 12. In two years we have sold ... 1 tube of the stuff. Surely the bloke had another use for it, NOT cricket-shoe related.

Shoe whitener: for people who wear leather cricket shoes and who want to ensure they are kept sparklingly white.

In the world of shoe whitener do people still wear cotton flannels and woollen cricket sweaters? Are they either clean shaven or sporting a splendid set of whiskers? Batsmen probably smoke at the crease. And they don't cheat. And maybe there are wives making cricket teas. And there aren't competitive league games. And the draw wouldn't have been abolished in ESCA (our local league).