There isn’t much that can be said about England’s performance against South Africa in the world cup super 8’s. Heads will roll after England’s humiliating 9 wicket loss to the Proteas, Michael Vaughan and Duncan Fletcher are sure to be top of the list of personnel to go before the summer. I’m sure there will be the usual excuses about poor preparation, but at the end of the day England weren’t good enough, there needs to be some big changes to get English cricket back on track. Let’s look at the England batting performance, let’s start with Kevin Pietersen; after all his talk about taking the game to South Africa, he made a grand total of 3 runs off 16 deliveries, simply not good enough from a player of his calibre. Andrew Flintoff did bugger all with the bat again, only managing 5 runs, the only innings of note were Andrew Strauss who made 46, Paul Collingwood who made 30 and Ravi Bopara who made an unbeaten 27 runs. The Proteas made it look easy as they cruised past the target of 155 that the English has set for them in less than 20 overs. There’s still one game left to play, but that will only be for pride, England cant qualify for the semi’s after this loss. If England lose to the out of form West Indies then that’ll mean that England lost to all five test sides in the super 8 phase. There really isn’t any excuse for England’s performances over the winter and this world cup, winning the Commonwealth Bank championship was obviously a blip as they didn’t carry that form into the world cup. I just think that the Aussie took their foot off the gas and paid the price when England found some form for a few games. I hope that England have better fortunes in the rugby world cup later this year, what is it with English sport, we show promise before major tournaments then crumble under the pressure when we get there, it’s certainly a rollercoaster ride being an England fan!
Last night at open mic was pretty good for a change, it started out slowly and as usual no-one really wanted to get up first, but thankfully someone decided to bite the bullet and go up first, Dan I believe his name was. He was good, but his friend Kelly was the one that really impressed, totally amazing voice, best I’ve heard at Voodoo’s open mic! There was another guy that got up, who impressed everyone in the bar, he managed to pull off beat-boxing and singing at the same time, well impressed with that, another guy got up who I didn’t catch the name of, he had only just taken up playing guitar and it was his first public performance and he was incredibly nervous, but he was amazing, really powerful clear tuneful voice. This for me was the best open mic night yet musically, not the most fun open mic overall, but a very enjoyable one non the less. On the way home I thought that I’d grab some food from Jakes as everyone kept on telling me how good it is; and I have to agree, I had a double cheeseburger and cheesy chips, it came to almost 6 quid, but it was so amazingly tasty that its easily worth that; I would definitely recommend Jakes!