The misery continues for the England cricket team being easily beaten by 8 wickets with four and half overs to spare in the first one day International Triangular Series match at the MCG. England’s first three batsmen really failed to do anything with the highest scoring of the trio Michael Vaughan only scoring 26 runs. The next three batsman in did much better adding a combined total of 172 runs with Pietersen being the standout player scoring 82 off 91 balls including 3 sixes and 4 fours. Dalrymple fell victim to a poor umpiring decision while on 2 runs caught off McGrath’s bowling, but the replays clearly show that Dalrymple never even got close to the ball. Flintoff maintained strike as much as he could to bat England through to the close of the innings scoring an unbeaten 47 runs, which left Australia needing 243 runs to win the match! Australia only needed four batsman to take the victory over England with three of those batsman making over 50 runs. But what was most disappointing was the amount of extras that Flintoff and Lewis gave away, 13 extras in the first 4 overs, mostly wide balls. But the biggest blow was Pietersen’s rib injury off McGrath’s bowler after charging down the wicket at the fast bowler; which will see the Englishman out for the rest of the series. This is a disastrous turn of events for England as Pietersen is clearly England’s best strike batman, England will be struggling to find someone of his quality on the one day field of play! All England need now to compound the humiliation would be for New Zealand to make the short hop over to Australia and beat the Aussies on Saturday night, but I think that’s unlikely with Australia’s world dominance!
So David Beckham is to go to the MLS in the US to improve and raise the profile of the game in the US, not for the money. Erm, right; that’s the biggest load of bollocks I have ever heard; $55m per annum, that’s more than $1m per month, $150,000 per day, and it’s not about the money *cough*bullshit*cough*; let’s face it, it’s not like he needs the money! I can’t see how he will raise football’s profile in the US when the vast majority of Americans have never heard of him, and the ones that know the name don’t know why he’s famous.
I found this article on the BBC News website very interesting. It basically says that making employees redundant would – “improve productivity and financial performance”. This is why I am glad to be out of the cattle market that is employment in this country. I would hate be have an axe constantly over my head wondering when it would fall. Personally I think that things should go the other way, less managers and more people that actually do the work. That was my main issue with working at Derrys, too many managers and supervisors that do very little, just show their faces every now and again, which adds nothing to the companies productivity in my opinion, but it’s very much an old boys club!