Muller Award For The Week Ended 10 May, 2024
Highlights from the last week of cricket
Something new I’m trialling during this period of no Test cricket. The Muller Award has been a long-running segment on Can’t Bowl, Can’t Throw, the cricket podcast I co-host with Cat Jones. It celebrates the career of Scott Muller, and rewards the great and stupid moments in cricket.
Nominee - Nathan Lyon’s shameful lack of self-belief
The Ashes series that won’t die continues to not die. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m contributing to this ongoing zombie banter plague, by writing these very words. This is the dread cruelty of the bind in which we find ourselves.) This time, the excuse to talk about the undead (‘urndead’?) series is the announcement of the upcoming third season of The Test, which follows Australia’s tour of England last year, including the World Test Championship final.
Nathan Lyon, promoting the series in his role as Cricket Australia’s official PT Barnumesque huckster and troll, therefore popped up on a BBC podcast claiming that if he’d not been injured, the final scoreline would have been 4-0 to Australia.
His comments immediately, of course, revived the interminable ‘banter’ about who from this Ashes series is living rent-free in whom’s head. (Answer: everybody. Everybody is living rent-free in everybody else’s head, like some kind of ghastly cognitive timeshare mind apartment scheme. Notable ironic exception: Travis Head, who lives in the heads of all of India instead. Roomy!)
More disappointing from my perspective is that the 4-0 claim suggests that Lyon doesn’t believe he could have manufactured a win at Manchester. Can we somehow inspire him to be a little more positive in his thinking?
When will all the exhausting back-and-forth about the 2023 Ashes end? Answer: in about eighteen months, when the 2025-26 one begins. A glimmer of hopelessness to which we can all cling.
Nominee - Tymal Mills’ Bluey dilemma
One England cricketer who is dealing with an entirely different Australian media blitz is poor old Tymal Mills, who tweeted the following:
Has anybody else’s child watched the new episode of Bluey and is not obsessed / petrified by the thought of moving house? Daily conversation in our house at the moment 🏡
Same old Aussies. Always terrorising England cricketers’ children with critically acclaimed cartoons that offer heartwarming and humorous storytelling, appealing to both children and adults alike.
Nominee - Thailand
Meanwhile, the Women’s T20 World Cup qualifying rounds wrapped up, with Scotland and Sri Lanka both qualifying for the tournament in October.
Good for them, obviously, but the team that won my heart was Thailand, who heroically finished third in their group, with two wins and two losses from their four matches, despite never once hitting triple figures.
Thailand’s results:
Bowled out for 55 against Sri Lanka and lost
1/64 against Uganda and won, chasing down their 62 all out
1/56 against the USA and won, chasing down their 54
Lost to Scotland after making 5/99 from their 20 overs batting first
A stunning rebuke from the Thailand women’s team to the IPL’s belligerent batting balderdash. Great to see. Impossible to imagine the BCCI recovering from this.
Winner - Artificial Intelligence
Still on women’s cricket, we also discovered this week that during last year’s women’s Ashes, England used an AI company to help with squad selection.
This is precisely the kind of reckless technology that was the basis of the most recent Mission Impossible movie (Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part One: The Encoloning: Prologue), which explains why Ash Gardner had no choice in the Women’s Ashes but to ride a motorcycle off a cliff and into Trent Bridge.
England coach Jon Lewis claimed they ran ‘about 250,000 simulations with The Entity, with all permutations of what could happen. It helped us win the T20 series to get us back in the Ashes.’
Look, I only took a semester’s worth of Computer Science classes in Uni, but couldn’t they have programmed this ChatLBWT AI to help win enough matches to actually regain the Ashes? If you’re going to dabble with artificially intelligent supertechnology that will inevitably escape its boundaries and enslave humanity, at least go for the win, ladies. Or would have been the 250,001st simulation?
(I’d propose using the AI to terminate the men’s Ashes banter, but there are limitations to even the most powerful of technological breakthroughs.)
Plugs
Other things for you to read now that you’re no longer reading this.
Cricket
Can’t Bowl, Can’t Throw - New Episode, The Jake Fraser-McGurk Of It All - an episode so shocking that Facebook refuses to let us promote it!
Alex O’Hallory - The Best Junior Cricketer in the Galaxy
My new book for children aged between 7 and 13. If you are outside this age range you do not have my permission to enjoy it.
Non-Cricket
Alex O’Hallory - The Best Junior Cricketer in the Galaxy
There’s also plenty of non-cricket, comedic sci-fi in there too. Find a child to read it to.