It was an afternoon of low workplace productivity, as hordes of cricket followers the world over (well, Darren and me) sat in front of their computer screens, transfixed, as the endlessly regenerating scorecard page at cricinfo.com showed Jason Gillespie's unlikely but inexorable march towards a double century. Gillespie would have been known, in olden-day cricketing parlance, as a batting "bunny". It would not be going out on too far of a limb to predict that no nightwatchman will ever again, in the history of the game, score 200 runs. Some credit must go to the Bangladesh bowlers for being sufficiently poor as to allow Gillespie (recently shorn of his trademark mullet, and by all accounts bowling quite well too) to score the runs. But he still had to score them. And score them he did.
All of which inevitably brings to mind Ricky Ponting's recent, but subsequently retracted ("no pressure! no pressure!") observations about the sustainability of Bangladesh's status as a test-playing nation. You would have to think that, notwithstanding the Australians' little stutter at the start of the first test, he was not too far off the mark.
Meanwhile, "Party Like It's 1964" sits in third place in Miles Jupiter Glaspole's AFL footy tipping competition, after three rounds. Which probably means it's all downhill from here.
