The Lair

Never realized how popular the medium of ceefax (teletext?) was in the UK till I came here. It’s 33 years since the ceefax service launched and I use it for lots of things. In fact, I usually hit the ceefax page for most sports scores.

So about the Cricket World Cup.

The cricket ceefax pages have a number of entries on the world cup, including their seedings for the 16 teams participating and a set of pages which talk up a master blaster and bowling/all round ace for each team. The seedings first. Guess who’s top? Australia. Yeah. The allegedly very beatable team are still seeded Numero Uno and ceefax thinks they’ll get their third successive world cup victory this time around. In a move that dismays fans everywhere, the second seeded team is Sri Lanka. Yeah, there’s more but blah blah blah, whatever.

Two factors make me wonder if this is really justified. Then again, the ceefax pages haven’t been notorious for calling it correctly (unfair though, along with most of the planet – they didn’t call the England Ashes victory in 2005 nor the Aussie drubbing delivered in 2006). First, the SL team isn’t exactly a bunch of spring chickens and secondly, notorious slow starters or otherwise, they lost to NZ in the warm up match. SL’s Ceefax master blaster, Sanath J. was rested for the match and their spin ace Muralitharan got carted around the pitch for 60+ runs in his 10 overs. Hardly inspiring news for a team seeded to see Australia in the final, eh? Shades of ‘99, anybody? Just me then? All right.

Oh and the Six Nations stuff today is boring but tomorrow – England vs France. Woo. And Yaschvilli is probably playing.