quarter to seven on Thursday evening, just as the sun was starting to dip and the shadows to stretch out towards
Deion Jones Womens Jersey the wicket, the ground staff switched on the floodlights and shortly after the players walked out for the final session. Cook and Root shine for England against West Indies in day-night Test Read more It was all a little discombobulating. Not for the players, who seemed to cope easily enough – Alastair Cook batted on regardless, entirely unruffled – but for the fans. A lot of them left before the end, so the stands were emptier in the final hour than they were in the first, which is the reverse of how this is supposed to work. But then those who stayed behind were making more than enough noise to cover for the ones who wanted to beat the rush, because they seemed, in the large part, to be steaming drunk. ?? inRead invented by Teads You wonder whether it was this way when they played the first game of floodlit cricket, at Highbury football stadium in 1952. It was a benefit match between Middlesex and Arsenal, which was broadcast live on the BBC. They say cricket errs on the conservative but it took the ECB only 65 years to follow it up by organising a day-night Test match. In its defence, there has been an awful lot to ponder. How well would the pink ball compare to the red? How hard would it be to bat in the twilight? And, the principal consideration, what would it all mean for lunch and tea? Cricket, as Bill Bryson once pointed out, is the only game to incorporate meal breaks. They are the architecture of the day’s play. The tea break was, surprisingly enough, an Australian invention. It was brought over to England by their skipper
http://www.footballpanthershop.com/Devin_Funchess_Jersey_CheapJoe Darling on the 1899 Ashes tour, and fixed in the county championship in 1919. The rhythm has been immutable ever since. The old Nottinghamshire batsman George Gunn had such firm ideas about the timings that, so the story goes, he got himself out on purpose during a match at Canterbury when he found out the umpires had moved the interval back by half an hour. “I always have my lunch at one o’clock,” Gunn was supposed to have told the umpires as he walked off, bat under his arm, middle stump flat on the ground behind him. There may be trifle for tea, but tea is not a trifle. The ECB, mindful of this, decided the simplest solution was to shift everything back three hours. Which must have seemed the straightforward thing to do but in fact it created its own, unforeseen set of problems. The lunch break started at four in the afternoon, which seemed just a touch bohemian. At that hour, it scarcely qualified as lunch at all, but another category of meal altogether. Trunch, perhaps. It could be one of the great accidental inventions, like Post-it Notes and Play-Doh. It may end up as the ECB’s one indisputable contribution to western civilisation. Advertisement The advantage of Trunch is that it also meant everyone had the opportunity to sneak in a second breakfast earlier in the day, sometime after elevenses. As for tea, it now doubled up as dinner, and came at twenty to seven in the evening. A 20-minute break that gave everyone just enough time to make it halfway through the queues at the food stalls. Although by that point, to be honest, a lot of spectators in the Hollies were too trollied to worry. The late start had surely cut into the profits at the coffee shops but these losses were outweighed
http://www.broncosfootballprosshop.com/Emmanuel_Sanders_Jersey_Cheapby the gains made at the ground’s many bars. Cricket fans never seem to have any compunction about starting early. Social norms do not apply any more than they seem to at airports and cross-Channel ferries. And in the view of the eight men in fancy dress at the All Bar One in Birmingham New Street early Thursday morning, as well as, you suspect, one or two others among the 21,000 who turned up, the great advantage of day-night timing seems to have been that it meant they could start drinking earlier and go on drinking longer. Warwickshire made sure they were well catered for. There are, at a rough count, 30 bars around Edgbaston, among them two fully blown pubs serving a selection of real ales, a cocktail shack, a gin shop, two wine bars and a camper van offering a selection of Pimm’s cocktails. By 5pm, then, three fancy dress cops were chasing half a dozen fancy dress robbers around the ground. Along with the more traditional round of applause, Joe Root’s hundred was celebrated by a couple of bold sorts whipping off their tops and waving them around their heads. And by 8pm, Mr Blobby was leading Dick Tracy, the Mario Brothers, four Teletubbies, Gandalf, Noddy Holder and the Jamaican bobsleigh team in a conga line around the grandstand. The final session was played to a chorus of Neil Diamond’s bah-bah-bahs and Tom Jones’s la-la-las. Pretty much everyone left in Edgbaston seemed to be absolutely blottoThe 2008 Olympic road race champion Samuel Sánchez has tested positive for a growth hormone-releasing peptide and has been withdrawn from the Vuelta a Espa?a, the UCI has announced. The 39-year-old, who won his gold medal in Beijing, rides for BMC Racing and has been provisionally suspended after the failed drug test, cycling’s world governing body added. Becky James retires from cycling at 25, one year after Olympic silver medals Read more A UCI statement said: “The Union Cycliste Internationale announces that Spanish rider Samuel Sánchez González was notified of an adverse analytical finding (AAF) of GHRP-2 in a sample collected in the scope of out-of-competition control on 9 August 2017. “The doping control was planned and carried out by the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation, the independent body mandated by the UCI, in charge of defining and implementing the anti-doping strategy in cycling. “The rider has the right to request and attend the analysis of the B sample. In accordance with UCI anti-doping rules, the rider has been provisionally suspended until the adjudication of the affair. At this stage of the procedure, the UCI will not comment any further on any of these matters.” Growth hormone has been shown to reduce fat, increase lean body mass and improve aerobic performance. Sánchez was second at the 2010 Tour de France, behind Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck, and has won stages at the Tour and the Vuelta. He had been listed to start the Vuelta in Nimes on Saturday but has now been withdrawn and suspended by BMC Racing. A statement from the Swiss-American team said: “In accordance with BMC Racing Team’s zero tolerance policy and UCI regulation, Sánchez has been provisionally suspended with immediate effect. Until the results of the B sample are provided, no further action will be taken. “All riders and staff are held to the highest ethical standard and BMC Racing Team is extremely disappointed to share
David Harris Womens Jersey this news on the eve of the Vuelta a Espa?a. Lo?c Vliegen will replace Sánchez at the Vuelta
