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It's just not baseball

It's just not cricket ... and nor is it baseball © Getty Images

Cricket and baseball have so much in common. Bats, balls, and err ... ball-tampering scandals. Following hot on the heels of Ovalgate, this year's World Series showdown between the Detroit Tigers and the St Louis Cardinals has been besmirched by Smudgegate. The man in the eye of the storm is Kenny Rogers, the Tigers' star pitcher, who produced a wrecking-ball of a performance in the first inning (sic) of the second game of the series, only for the all-seeing eye of television to notice that he had a "a brown substance just below the thumb of his left hand". According to the Cardinals hitters, the ball had been doing "interesting" stuff during that inning, and their testimony was sufficient for a scandal to erupt. Suffice to say, Rogers was rested after pitching 23 consecutive "maidens" - to roughly translate his feat to cricket-speak (I thought baseball was meant to be the glamorous game?) - and the Tigers surrendered the series 4-1.

Bindra the Bolshy Bolshevik
Inderjit Singh Bindra, the former president of the BCCI, got incredibly shirty at the weekend after his organisation was accused of being "bolshy" by the veteran Australian journalist, Mike Coward. "I have read and understood Marx, Lenin and the Bolsheviks well, I think," announced Bindra who, having thumbed through his thesaurus to find out what he'd been accused of, latched on to the first (archaic) definition, vigorously denied it, and in doing so, proved beyond all doubt that he was guilty of the second, more commonly accepted, definition. "I don't want to extend the Marxist dogma further lest it is interpreted using dangerous analogies," he continued (Perish the thought! - Ed). "Yes, in a way he is right, like Bolsheviks our Board is full of revolutionary ideas as we believe in equality ... to call us imperialists sounds funny as we have never showed the imperiousness of absolute monarchs!" And so it went on. Other synonyms for "bolshy" include "obstreperous", "stroppy" and "stubborn". Of course, none of them remotely apply to the BCCI.

Best foot forward
What is it about cricketers and reality TV shows? First there was Phil "King of the Jungle" Tufnell, then there was Darren "Fancy Footwork" Gough. And now, it's the turn of Mark "Cheeky Bum" Ramprakash, who is currently stealing the show on the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing. "Mark is the hottest guy ever to appear on the show!" enthused one of his many female obsessives on the official fansite, and even the cynical bookmakers at hecklerspray.com, who were desperately trying not to enjoy his performance, were moved to declare that "Ramprakash resolutely failed to suck at dancing the cha-cha-cha". Accordingly they have offered him the promising odds of 4-1. One word of warning though. Steer clear of Ian Botham. Ramps's rival, DJ Spoony, failed to heed this advice and bombed out of the programme just hours after being frogmarched at extreme pace through the streets of London, on the final leg of Botham's latest walk in aid of Leukaemia Research. Coincidence? I think not.

Click here to watch Ramprakash in ballroom action.

Andrew Symonds: reflecting on a Cardiff bender © Getty Images

Famous last words
"Ah, it's only Bangladesh. A little bit of fizz won't be a worry." Those were the profound thoughts that flitted through Andrew Symonds' mind on the eve of last summer's infamous and arguably Ashes-campaign-derailing attempt to drink the bars of Cardiff dry. Speaking at the launch of his autobiography, Roy: Going for Broke, Symonds explained how he returned to his hotel after sunrise, settled down to breakfast with his team-mates, and was later awoken by Michael Clarke throwing him in the shower. Somehow he made it to the ground without arousing the suspicion of John Buchanan or Ricky Ponting, but then spoiled the effect by slipping off a wheelie bin while doing his stretches. A Symonds-less Australia slumped to a humiliating defeat, and he will have to live with the guilt for the rest of his days.

Midnight Rambler
Who would make your dream commentary team for this winter's Ashes? If you're going to be watching through the night from England, then "Anyone but Bob Willis" would probably be the answer. But the Aussies are aiming a little more left-field than that. According to the Aussie rumour mill, Channel 9 are trying to pursuade Mick Jagger to make "cameo appearances" for at least one of the matches. "I know it's something Channel 9 is working on,'' said the ubiquitous "insider". "It's pretty universally known that he is a massive cricket tragic." It is indeed. In 1997 Jagger famously set up his own internet company, in affiliation with Cricinfo, and settled down in his tour trailer to watch Adam Hollioake's men sweep all before them in a famous Sharjah one-day triumph. But the prospect of him sharing the mic with Tony Greig would trump that tale ... and some. Still, you can't always get what you want.

Pot calls kettle black
Geoffrey Boycott never had a spectator's lunch deposited at his feet during a one-day international innings, as happened to another bloodyminded opener of his generation, Sunil Gavaskar. But, in a career that was famous for its singularity, he didn't often let the demands of one-day cricket interfere with his primary professional purpose - the numbing accumulation of run after run after run. So, it was somewhat odd to read his Daily Telegraph column this week. Writing after another dispiriting one-day defeat, Boycott announced that Duncan Fletcher had reached "the end of his shelf-life". "Saturday's latest debacle has confirmed my feeling that the time has come for a change in the England dressing-room," he added. Strange timing indeed, coming within weeks of the start of the Ashes - the one contest that Boycott, of all people, would surely recognise as the true test of Fletcher's mettle.

Quotehanger
"Boys, I have to tell you this - I'm going to order myself a club sandwich and a coke, and I'm gonna lie right here by the pool and take in some rays for the rest of the afternoon. Right or wrong, that's what I'm going to do." Herschelle Gibbs addresses the media after finally deigning to be interviewed by Delhi Police, six years after he was implicated in the match-fixing controversy.

And finally ...
England win cricket match shocker. No, really, they did!