You can always tell when England are playing in a big sporting tournament. Well, generally you know anyway because World Cups and stuff are quite well publicised. But its the headlines. They’re the real benchmark for progress. And its always the same, whatever the sport. It starts with the massive optimism. The ‘blank slate’. The ‘everything to play for’ mentality and the sometimes true belief that ‘we can win this!!’. As happened with the cricket. We have home advantage and as number one ranked in the world in one-day cricket we entered the tournament as favourites. Which never ends well.

After a win or two the excitement reaches explosive levels and it just becomes a foregone conclusion, a virtual parade to the trophy. Then we lost to Pakistan. Oh well. They were never supposed to be that good, brought us down to earth, good reality check, don’t get over confident, blah, blah. Then we lost again. And yesterday we lost again again to the auld enemy. Not the Scots, they’re even aulder and not actually playing, but Australia. And that stings. That’s mean and horrible. We hate losing to Australia more than any other cricket team. It’s like losing to Germany at football.

And that’s when the headlines change. When the parade to victory becomes a little more statistically complex. We have two games left and if we beat both India and New Zealand then we’re in the semi-finals, no problem. But if we win just one of them…

Then it all comes down to other teams doing things, or not doing things, which may, or may not, affect our ranking, depending on the results of even other teams doing yet more stuff. Its like being a Spurs fan. So basically; we need to win. Every game. I’m sure that never featured in the original game plan, because we already won the tournament before the first ball was bowled. But now its important. Winning. Against two very good sides.

COME ON ENGLAND!!!!

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx