An array of bright, zesty flavours at Chin Chin, where the only problem was having to choose only some of the items from what looks to be a menu that is all hits, no filler.
The search for Australia’s best young cricketer begins with the hopefuls tested under the watchful eye of Allan Border, as the dream starts to become a reality for fifteen talented sportsmen.
After a montage of high-energy international games, we zoom in to Lee Furlong (“Foxtel personality and cricket lover”, according to the narrator) and Allan Border. “Are you in?” she asks, “Or are you… OUT?” completes Allan Border, who has clearly been put through dramatic-pause bootcamp. More montage-ing, in which Ricky Ponting observes that he’d have liked Cricket Superstar to have been around when he was young, although I can’t see why. He managed to get a baggy green and take the national captaincy without the help of a televised talent quest, which promises to include challenges of no cricketing value whatsoever.
This is the first episode and I was diligently taking notes whilst watching only to decide that the entire 61 minutes (including ads) was preamble and that I’d have to watch at least one episode with the top 15 to decide whether or not to persevere. Some observations:
Watching cricketing hopefuls drop catches is not as much fun as Pants on the Ground-type Idol auditions.
In terms of entertainment value, the over-confidence of the Victorian “ladies man” was just as difficult to watch as the tongue-tied awkwardness of the poor South Australian contender.
There are 18 year-old radio relationship counsellors? I weep for the future.
The camera work needs to improve. I was having some grumpy David Stratton “keep it STEADY!” moments.
Tension over who was to be selected was almost non-existent as most of those through had been featured heavily throughout the episode. Makes me wonder why they bothered with the “tryouts” episode at all, really, given how dull it was.
Really not sure why they needed to include a keeper and a range of bowlers in the fifteen. We need opening batsmen!
Every time I hear “Foreign Land”, which is far more often than I would like to (around no times being the optimum number of times), I think of Richie Benaud.
I’ve become slightly addicted to widgets. My commitment to a clean desktop is at risk of being compromised by this, so I went in search of widgets that would go in other places. Cricinfo offers a number of options, so I added their “live score” widget to this blog. Unfortunately, the default is to add it as a post, so I tried experiementing with making it a blog-widget. This worked, but the right-hand side of the score box was cut off due to the restricted column width of the old theme.
What to do?
As much as I liked the black-ness of the old theme, I started browsing around WordPress for an off-the-rack theme that would allow me to keep my custom header, but also give the Cricinfo widget room to breathe. This is the result.
As I have a couple of weeks of holiday at my disposal, I am thinking of playing around with CSS to see if I learn anything. In the meantime – and, given my penchant for procrastination, this could be a long time – this is the new look. It’s by no means perfect, but it will do for now.
