Tag: australia

All of the best about *that* match

Siddharth Monga on Cricinfo

Slightly delirious, if you ask me, but given the circumstances, who can blame Sharda Ugra?

Vivek Kaul pours cold water on this being the rebirth of Test cricket, as only a finance/econ writer can – but a genuinely fun read nonetheless.

Sambit Bal, to end on as perfect a note as we started.

The title of the post is edited (it originally read as “five of the best”) – but here’s more to add in:

Sidvee, being Sidvee. Self-recommending, as they say. (There’s a post about reflections on this essay next week, plijj keep an eye out for it)

Girish, along similar lines.

Greg Baum, gracious as ever.

And a request: send more along! Happy to read as many as you can send, and add all of them in here. Whatay repository this has the potential to be!

Sidvee was kind enough to send along this Twitter thread by @_ImPK. It is ridiculously, impossibly good. Please see the whole thread, for it contains much more – I have only listed here articles from that list that are about the Brisbane test. Thank you, Sidvee and @_ImPK!

Bharat Sundaresan, who points out that this time, it was the Aussies looking at the Indian team in awe. I watched the ’99 series, so I cannot tell you how much this means to me.

There was a point, while watching this match, when – and this is true – I was on a Signal call with a friend who is in Atlanta. He shared his screen with me on the call, because Sony Liv (eff you, Sony Liv, eff you) was on the blink here. Among other things in this post by krtgrphr, this resonated so much.

Geoff Lemon, over in The Guardian.

When Ian Chappell says he’s never seen the likes before, that’s saying something.

Heroes assembled, indeed. Vinayakk Mohanarangan over at Scroll.

Niyantha Shekhar Dunkirks her way through the match. And it is every bit as spellbinding as the movie. For a cricket fan, it’s even better.

For these times, this series. Barney Ronay in The Guardian.

Pant had nine successive scores of 25 or more in Australia heading into the Brisbane test, Rohit Sankar informs us. He does much more than that, of course.

Jarrod Kimber points out that the person who’s been on our screen the most during the series is probably the physio, and it’s not even hypoerbole. (I’m joking, Mr. Pujara, I’m joking.)

Only Prem Panicker can combine Simon Barnes, western novels, and a reference to Horatius in a piece on a cricket match. The Getafix of cricket writers. He’s got one more piece out, but it is behind a paywall, and I cannot read it. But it is Prem Panicker, so sight unseen.

Again, I’m a glutton for more, so if you find more pieces, please, send them along. Thank you.

RoW: Links for 25th December, 2019

  1. A collection of links about Thailand.
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  2. About East Asia, which is a region of the world I continue to be fascinated by – it began with How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell, and has been only accentuated by reading more about it.
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  3. This didn’t work out so well, in retrospect, but one lives in hope. Five articles about Australia.
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  4. Gun control and the USA.
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  5. And East Asia all over again – the 100 books about China is a treasure.

RoW: Links for 9th October, 2019

  1. On China’s reforestation programme. Also, if you haven’t already, read Seeing Like a State.
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    “After a half century of blistering economic growth, China is increasingly looking back at the environmental havoc it wreaked and searching for a greener path forward. It has boosted renewable energy, declared a “war on pollution,” and vowed to lower carbon emissions. But if Grain-for-Green is an indication, preserving biodiversity may represent a new challenge in China’s push to go green: protecting and restoring natural spaces with an eye to not just quantity, but quality.”
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  2. A review of No Friend But The Mountains, by JM Coetzee. I have not read the book, and am not sure I want to. Not, I hasten to add, because of the quality of the book or the lack of it, but because of the utter heartlessness the review manages to convey of a nation I am conflicted about.
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    “The UNHCR has been extremely critical of Australia’s offshore policies. In 2017 it concluded that PNG and Nauru were intrinsically unsuitable as resettlement homes, given “the impossibility of local integration.” In other words, Papuans and Nauruans do not want refugees living among them, and refugees do not want to live in PNG or Nauru. New Zealand has offered to take 150 of the inmates, but Australia has vetoed this offer on the grounds that former detainees might make their way from New Zealand to Australia, thereby weakening the deterrent power of Australian policy.”
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  3. A thought-provoking write-up by Danny Quah:
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    “In the new world order Asia’s leadership does not mean Asia has to become alternative architect. Instead, Asia only needs to be articulate and empowered consumer, and allow demand and supply to work in the marketplace. With care, thought, and unity, ASEAN (and indeed all of Asia) can continue to make a success of this new marketplace for world order.”
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  4. “A course at Yale-NUS College on dissent and resistance in Singapore was canceled two weeks before it was scheduled to start, the Singapore-based The Straits Times reported. Yale-NUS president Tan Tai Yong said some of the planned course activities and speakers would “infringe our commitment not to advance partisan political interests in our campus” and potentially expose students to the risk of breaking the law.”
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    Via (where else) MR, dissent on dissent in Singapore.
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  5. “Lok, 31, lives with her parents in North Point, in Hong Kong Island’s Eastern District. It is more than an hour away from the island of Tsing Yi, where 35-year-old Chau lives with his parents. Their three-year-old daughter, Yu, spends Monday to Thursday with Lok and the weekend at Chau’s. They can’t move in together in one of their family homes, Lok says, because the bedroom space is simply too small for two adults and a child.”
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    Not me being lazy, I promise, but this too, from MR… on the space crunch in Hong Kong, but oh so much more.

ROW: Links for 24th July, 2019

How to learn more about a country? Read a bit about it! In the process of writing up these ROW links, I plan to link to five articles (mostly random) about a country. The only thing that is common to them is that they’re all about one particular country.

And today’s country is Australia: I have not (yet) been to the country, but loved reading about it in Bill Bryson’s book, and loved hating the Australian cricket team (still do!). But on a more serious note, it is a country that I need to read more about.

In no particular order, or theme, five articles I read recently about Australia:

  1. “It’s on the matter of culture that Alan is most unconsciously revealing — unconsciously because Alan’s generation did not think of it as “culture” so much as of “character”. His upbringing was simple, in farming country near Gosford since swamped by housing. “I didn’t known what a steak was until I got to Sydney,” he recalls. “My mother knew how to cook rabbit 10 different ways.””
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    How to not begin with an article on cricket? Alan Davidson, the original Wasim Akram – and a profile on him by Gideon Haigh. Please read, if you are a fan of cricket, Haigh’s book on Warne, called… “On Warne“.
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  2. “Australia loves larrikins, as long as they are white, and polite, and display no flamboyance and voice no controversial opinions. Australia laments there is no colour in public life anymore, complains that sports-people show no personality in their interviews, and then punishes them the moment they do. Australia is willing to embrace Nick Kyrgios, as long as he becomes someone else.”
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    From Australian sportsmen then, to Australian sportsmen now. Nick Kyrgios.
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  3. “Australia will be a great nation, and a power for good in the world, when her head of state is a part-Aboriginal and her prime minister a poor man. Or vice versa.”
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    Words written by Les Murray, who passed away recently. This article is via The Browser, and is worth reading for glimpses of Murray’s poetry, but also for an insight into Murray’s opinion about Australia.
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  4. “It is commonly reported that the colonisation of Australia was driven by the need to address overcrowding in the British prison system, and the fact of the British losing the Thirteen Colonies of America in the American Revolution; however, it was simply not economically viable to transport convicts halfway around the world for this reason alone.[4] Many convicts were either skilled tradesmen or farmers who had been convicted for trivial crimes and were sentenced to seven years’ transportation, the time required to set up the infrastructure for the new colony. Convicts were often given pardons prior to or on completion of their sentences and were allocated parcels of land to farm.”
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    Almost everybody who has attended a class I’ve taught on Principles of Economics knows the story – well, the story stands on somewhat weakened foundations.
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  5. Finally, Professor Cowen picks his favorite things Australian. I am gloriously unaware of all of them.

Video for 14th July, 2019