But at what cost? Michael Vaughan was again injured in Tuesday’s one day match against New Zealand. Vaughan had only been back for three matches before suffering from a hamstring injury while out in the field on Tuesday, he is expected to sit out the next match against Australia. Andrew Flintoff has been reinstated as captain until Vaughan returns, but we saw what sort of effect that the captaincy has on Flintoff, so I question Duncan Fletcher’s wisdom, I think Strauss would make a better captain. Flintoff has played much better since have the burden of the captaincy lifted off his shoulders, in fact he was the difference maker in England’s win over New Zealand scoring 72 runs off 75 deliveries. With the exception of Bell, who scored 45 runs; no other England player scored more than 30 runs, Nixon did well to score 15 runs and partner Flintoff to almost the end of the match eventually getting run out trying for a single. So in the end England won by 3 wickets, but with only one delivery to spare, so it was a hard fought win, and Flintoff got a well deserved man of the match award. But Flintoff was lucky not to be out after he lofted the ball high in the air and was caught; but the umpires ruled not out as the ball was over waist high before touching the ground, so hence no ball and a player can’t be given out on a no ball! Not exactly an awe inspiring performance from England, but you have to think if Pietersen didn’t get injured we would have won with more ease especially if Flintoff and Pietersen got a partnership going!
It’s another win for Plymouth Argyle beating Peterborough 2 – 1 in the FA Cup third round replay at Home Park after the Posh held the Pilgrims to a 1 – 1 draw at London Road. Peterborough struck first when Aaron Mclean calmly rounded Luke McCormick to slot the ball home from 15 yards out in the 13th minute. It only took five minute before goal machine Barry Hayles equalised after some slick passing between the striker and Reuben Reid to defeat Mark Tyler. It was a further nine minutes before Plymouth took the lead, David Norris made a zig-zag run into the box to calmly slot the ball past the hapless Posh keeper. The match was much more what you would expect from this type of match playing a team two divisions lower than ourselves, so onward to the 4th round away at the Underhill Stadium against another League Two team, Barnet, let’s hope we can put this one away at the first attempt this time, we could really do without another FA Cup replay!
Work has been a bit up and down really, Monday night was good there was a decent crowd, the bands were pretty good, but stand out act again was Castor Troy, although I was pleasantly surprised by Ammafist with their funky metal fusion sound. Although one of the bands were taking the piss with the flyer situation, handing flyers to people coming up the stairs to the gig anyway, so the promoter lost out on £2, with 36 flyers in, that’s £72 lost. Suppose I should explain the flyer situation, we used to operate a system where for each flyer handed in for the band, the customer would get in £1 cheaper and the band gets £1 for each flyer. But this has been stopped now because of abuse like this; the idea is that flyers can be handed out in town or printed off the internet to attract people to the gig, but standing at the bottom of the stairs giving flyers to people that were coming anyway is completely out of order, which has ruined it for bands that genuinely do bring a load of people and deserve the money. Now no bands will be paid unless otherwise agreed with the promoter in advance. Tuesday’s open mic night wasn’t so fun, firstly we didn’t have a guitar to use until nearly 10pm, almost an hour after open mic should have started. But I did manage to extract an 800w amp from the old amp rack that used to power the old PA upstairs, although because it has been hammered over the years, the DDT circuit kicks in earlier than it should. But there was one girl who I won’t name that got so drunk that she could barely stand up throwing abuse at me, trying to dictate what I should do and tried to keep playing with her friend and never actually achieved playing anything. After 45 minutes of this I really had enough and just switched off the channels. I had at least another couple of people to play still with only 40 minutes left of the night. Next week I am going to have a list of time slots that people can play, they write their name down in the next available time slot and that is when they’ll play, it’ll be a first come, first serve basis, open mic night needs some order brought to it, the situation is ridiculous at the moment