Well, it’s almost Ashes time again and despite both teams showing a remarkable ability of late to lose for no reason, this could end up being a fairly close contest (in the same sort of way that Afghanistan vs Bermuda is close). It’s been commonly agreed that Australia are touring with too few batsmen, which they may end up regretting, but by the same token, England have as many batsmen as they need available to them, yet can’t seem to shake the brittleness that’s been plaguing them for the past year or so.

With all this in mind, we’ve decided to offer up a few of our own predictions regarding the series. Please note that we at Kiefpant bear absolutely no ill will towards bitchy, whiny, arrogant, attention-whoring ex-pats with identity crises.

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“He made one mistake on Saturday, but so did other players. What I have learnt in South Africa is the following; if you take your car to a garage to be repaired and the owner is black and he doesn’t do a good job, you will never take it back there again. But if the owner is white and the garage makes a mistake, people say, never mind, he made a mistake and will take it back again”.

This was the response of SA coach Pieter de Villiers to criticism of his selection of Ricky Januarie as reserve scrumhalf for the Springboks. True story, folks. You can’t make this shit up. Januarie is overweight, unfit and the slowest distributor of the ball in world rugby. He’s still riding on the credit he earned when we won the Eden Park test last year. How long can one inspirational try keep a man in a team that he’s clearly not good enough to play in?

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Yes, I know the title seems obscure, but bear with me for a few minutes. Today cricket was played, but once again it was underwhelming and failed to generate any real excitement. The tournament has only just started but already I can’t help but get that feeling of overkill.

I’m sure we can all appreciate the enormous business venture that is the IPL T20, but one can’t help but wonder what the long term cost might be to the game of cricket. In a country as cricket mad as India, where even the lowest paid blue-collar labourer will gladly save up for a year to see one live match, the long term effects would be minimal – fair enough. But for the rest of us, how long can we take this barrage of cricket before it becomes too much and cricket itself begins to lose its appeal?

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