I imagine watching this FIFA 2011 own goal would be a similar experience to watching the Titanic sink

If you think Two Pricks At The Ashes means Ricky and Shane, then check out The Chuck Fleetwood-Smiths. It’s the latest roll of the dice from JRod and Sam, featuring the level of rapier sharp cricketing analysis you’d expect from the last two survivors on a lifeboat after they’ve eaten everyone else

BikesnobNYC’s visit to the Bike Expo is worth a read, if only to laugh at the guy selling butt cream

Age hasn’t made Gary Neville any less angry

Sportzfreak and the Beige One have blogged on Fill The Basin, Sunday afternoon’s benefit match for viictims of the Canterbury earthquake. Here’s my thoughts:

How much fun was it? Cricket is the perfect sport for This Kind Of Thing, not too much physical exertion for the oldies, and lots of space in between the action for farking about. Plus Adam Parore got hit with a bouncer while being a cock. That was a highlight.

Some of these guys could still be playing for the Black Caps. The Greatbach / Astle partnership in particular was as smooth and brutal as a gang fight in a butter factory. That said, the years haven’t been kind to Gavin Larsen’s bowling. Nor Sir Richard’s, who doesn’t play a lot these days, unlike Ewan Chatfield, who still turns out for his club “if they haven’t got enough players.” Bless. Tana Umaga, though, that guy could play for the Black Caps *now*. As could bloody Marc Ellis.

You there! This is what your hair looks like!

Subtle Rexona product placement.

Our PM smiled and waved a bat at Shane Warne’s friendly bowling, but good god; as a nation, we need to improve our banter. Ben Hurley struggled manfully to lift the standard, but John Key – is “Liz says Hi” the best you can do? It’s hardly “I can smell the uranium on your breath” is it? It doesn’t even make sense. Warne showed us how it was done with an offhand and off color crack about the TradeMe prize winner’s wife – the crowd went quiet as they tried to work it out. Warne’s a great sport, we couldn’t have asked for a better heavily botox-ed pantomime villain for this event. He needs to bowl his underarms a bit straighter though.

The whole day, complete with the perfect venue and rugby and Hobbit luminaries, was a raging success, not to mention a tribute to Stephen Fleming’s mana, determination and political and organisational skill. Surely there’s a role for him somewhere in the national setup in the near future?

I do have two grumbles – the TAB made their beachhead in the nation’s living rooms even bigger with their guy Mark Stafford doing much of the TV interviewing. He may be able to ask softball questions OK, but do you want or accept Goldstein or the Marlboro Man doing the same? I don’t, and I don’t see the difference. And, Ian Smith’s mean-spirited, un-funny comment about Geoff Allott still bothers me. Fuck off Ian Smith, you dreary know-all bore.

The Black Caps’ win over Pakistan has catapulted us from tournament also rans to the tournament’s Toxic Avengers. Ross ‘Rose’ Taylor celebrated his birthday by spending 30 overs looking more lost than Tony Grieg at a ‘knowing what the fuck you’re going on about’ conference, before launching into the Pakistan attack like it was his laptop during a heavy ‘tweeting’ session, and celebrating in the traditional manner.

In fact, if we grasp at straws hard enough and link Taylor’s innings and Irish legend Kevin O’Brien’s knock against England, we can call this the ‘berserker’ tactic. The equivalent of rugby’s ’99′ call, berserker use in cricket is a huge opportunity, and we could see soon teams sending their 12th man sprinting on with a bat in each hand to threaten the fielding side, in a move sure to be labelled the ‘Bracewell’.

The berserker – the future of cricket, or Graeme Smith relaxing in his hotel post-match?

Of course, after Pakistan’s Akmal let a golden Taylor chance go gleefully between himself and first slip, before clearing up any lingering doubt about his suitability to be an international ‘keeper by dropping Taylor all by himself, Some People On The Internet claimed ‘match fixing’. sportreview.net.nz can exclusively reveal the only ‘fixing’ of the tournament so far occurred when the Black Caps played Zimbabwe and everyone had their bollocks chopped off.

But these are early days in this 18 month long tournament, and we’re yet to see a clear favorite emerge. England have been the entertainers so far, losing to Ireland, tying with India, and facilitating a South African choke. You know that when you’re among Englishmen behaving weirdly and South Africans choking, you’re not in a Brixton nightclub but a cricket world cup, team.

Predictions at this stage: Vettori to struggle on manfully despite losing one or more limbs in the Sri Lanka match; Kyle Mills to put his hand up for berserker role, claiming he’s been doing it for years already; England to default match against West Indies, missing the toss and circling the ground in a double decker bus instead while blasting the Benny Hill show theme; and sportreview.net.nz to start watching a cricket world cup match and managing to stay up past the tenth over, in the prediction least likely to occur. Of course, in other sporting news:

Winning cricket’s world cup takes guts, determination and winning approximately 347 games of cricket. It seems the world cup organising committee operates best on a stonking brandy and pickled onion hangover, it’s the only way to explain the lack of lessons learned from 2007. The Super Eight round and Super Surprise round are out, replaced by the Play Off Huzzah and First Innings Sexy Points. Or something.

Australia captain Ricky Ponting accepts the 2007 World Cup, which took place over several years.

As for us, New Zealand’s national cricket team usually ride into every world cup as Dark Horses. Dark Horse is sporting journalist preview-writing code for ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue’, and as it happens, this phase sums up NZ’s pre-tournament form nicely – in fact, they’re pretty much the four horsemen of the cricketing apocalypse (stupid run out, pestilence, middle order collapse and short, wide outside leg stump) at this stage of the tournament.

They arrived in India after the most notorious plane journey since that one time David Boon sank 184 cans of piss during the flight from Hobart to Launceston, thanks to an unverified combination of a few drinks, a fan, some hanky and / or panky and Tim Southee. A series of denials and refuting ensued, the likes of which haven’t been seen since Glen Turner shaved off Richard Hadlee’s moustache in the midst of some high-jinkery-jiggery-pokery in Brisbane in 1984, forcing Hadlee to go to ground and grow his Mo and his Mojo back behind closed doors.

The Black Caps’ chances of fulfilling their traditional world cup role of beaten semifinalists is unclear – after sneaking past Ireland by 32 runs, the Indians inflicted the heaviest, most morale-sapping defeat since, well, you take your fucking pick. sportreview.net.nz still maintains we have excellent players, and if they all played to their potential we could do something in this world cup, but then sportreview.net.nz’s strengths don’t lie in actually knowing stuff about sport, as regular readers are all too aware.

Thankfully, India have problems of their own. Being forced to carry on like the freaky dancers at 2’24″ in this video could prove distracting, and makes Stephen Fleming’s Rexona can costume look like James Bond’s evening wear.

In fairness, it seems like the Black Caps’ biggest challenge could be overcoming the Twitter ban – New Zealand cricketers tweet more than a castrated budgie, and being muzzled like this could prove a distracting distraction from distractions at best, and provoke a misguided players’ protest at worst. I think we can safely put the Kenyan’s thrashing down to a Twitter-related backlash, but remains to be seen if that online momentum can be maintained into a match against anyone decent. Maybe John Wright should impose a ‘listening to some sweet Metal on MySpace’ ban before we play Australia.

Two and a bit games into the Pakistan one day series, and the big story is the Black Caps’ efforts on the information super highway, with Scott Styris, Ross Taylor, Martin Guptil, Tim “Timmy” Southee, Darryl Tuffey and Jesse Ryder all joining up on popular social networking site Critter, where international cricketers send each other messages by way of cricket balls thrown at message recipient’s head at 140kph, when said message recipient isn’t looking Twitter, and Tweeting up a storm.

Predictably, our sporting media found Jesse Ryder’s waste of time tweet while fucking about on the internet researching the issues of the day, and created a ‘mediashitstorm‘. Mediashitstorm* is defined in the Oxford Feckin Massive Dictionary All Journalists Are Contractually Obliged To Keep On Their Desks as a media-enabled variation of storm in a team cup, surrounded by a veil of shit, disguising the fact there’s not actually a story in the cup. Those in the Black Caps’ communications department can thank their lucky stars Critter Twitter was not around in years gone by:

The most glaring absentee from the Black Caps’ Twitterati is Dan Vettori, who claimed at a press conference ‘he wasn’t a narcissist like Styris‘. sportreview.net.nz can reveal Vettori instead uses ‘Vetter’, an extremely exclusive social networking site for those that understand the pressures of being captain, selector, coach and extremely exclusive social networking site administrator, where he happily ‘Veets’ about his breakfast most days.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of all this Creeting Tweeting is that international cricketers put their trousers on one leg at a time, and get paid out by the missus, same as the rest of us.

NEWSDESK: Champion Australian Rules team St Kilda were joined by the Black Caps at a full contact tackle session today. The Saints, who are on pre-season training camp in Queenstown, raised a few eyebrows when the Black Caps asked to join in the session.

“Mate, there was no-one else around for us to smash over or coathanger. Next thing, the geogrpahy field trip we saw in the carpark turned out to be the Kiwi cricket team! Har! Whatever,” said Saints halfback Jarryn Geary. “McCullum was talking himself  up, reckoned he was ‘targeting’ one or two of the boys. After the first hit, though, he mumbled something about ‘IPL’ and ‘insurance’ and farked off. Spent the rest of the session talking to our kit guy about tattoos.”

Saints captain Nick Riewoldt was equally scathing of McCullum’s performance: “Don’t reckon he’ll be a factor in the world cup. Do they have ‘you must be this high to ride’ in India? Harhaharharharhar.” Asked to rate the Black Caps’ chances in the upcoming world cup, Riewoldt said they’d need to work on their footwork and shot selection. Asked if any Black Caps could make it as Aussie Rules players, Riewoldt replied “Nah.”

New Black Caps coach John Wright was seen walking the boundary moaning softly for much of the tackle session.

NEWSDESK: International athletes have voted Wellington the best city in the world to lose their match in, according to a UK website. “Whether an athlete wants to weep quietly in the back row at World Of Wearable Arts, a radical Tana-style haircut on Cuba Street or a fight down Courtney Place, Wellington offers something for everyone,” said Babs Eyewear of travelgrumble.co.uk.

Second place sporting loser city Birmingham labeled Wellington’s rugby sevens event a ‘loser festival’, and the manner in which the whole city embraced loserdom for two days as ‘unseemly’, but this was batted away by former mayor Kerry Prendergast. “This is Hurricanes town, we don’t need to import losers. The fact of the matter is losers feel loved in the capital, we’re confident a peanut butter milkshake can wipe away any tears.”

New Zealand sporting greats Martin Crowe and Todd Blackadder have backed Wellington as a town for losers. “I Got Over Missing Out On A Triple Century At The Basin With A Quick Trip To Kelburn On The Cable Car. Walking Alone Around The Botanic Gardens Gave Me Time To… Think. Just Think.” Former All Blacks captain Todd Blackadder revealed that Al Brown took him fishing for Pilchard after John Eales got that fucking kick in 2000: “They’re very underrated eating,” said Blackadder.

Rig went on to say ‘that was weak from the man in the white’.