Sport Fuelled Sunday

Yesterday was quite a day for sports fans. I don’t know about other sports fans but for a sports fan like me it was a hell of a day all right. It started out all slow, no big plans, but then since my malli (who while not being my blood malli, was still my malli, as I am his) came down from Aussie last week, us and the old school crowd decided to make a day of it.

So we’ve been hanging out at this hotel with this stop for coffee and sports bar inbuilt and after the usual walk around the donkey park stuffing ourselves with anything and everything and commenting and rating every single decent looking lady around the place (one main schoolboy practice that never fades when we’re e together). So we’re walking around in shorts and rubbers me, Malli, Jundar (broken arm in tow, hunting accident, don’t ask), and Tunks, and ended up hogging a table in aforementioned sports bar and delved into some good old fashioned schoolboy catch up talk and some unexpectedly good sporting action..

Lewis Hamilton streaked home in first place in the British Grand Prix finishing up on the top of the list with Ferrari drivers Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa, it was a thrilling race though and Massa and Kimi finished 4th and 13th. Rained like hell and quite a few drivers lost control and were out of the race including Honda’s Jensen Button. It was wet and wild and a nice race to be sure.

In the meanwhile Sri Lanka’s batting order starts to crumble after Sana’s initial blitzkrieg (‘what you bugger, we still need a 39 year old bugger to keep us out of the gutter?’) the rest of the batsmen proceed to cave in and SL, after looking extremely dangerous and poised to exceed 300, end up hitting a dismal 272 (or was it 273?). At this point the Indian guy at the next table wearing an ‘Ajay Jadeja’ cricket t-shirt looks extra smug and us having baited him for a while now, starts giving us sly looks and at one point points his finger at me and goes her-her-her-her-herrr!.. We suffer in silence.

But we have some diehard fans in the house especially this one chap that took it upon himself to shout out words of noble encouragement loudly from a table nearer to the screen (COMMON SANA! WELL PLAYED SANA! COMMON VASSIE, MENDIS I LOVE YOU! and YESSSS!! every time someone caught a ball in the field, a rolling ball mind you, and going OOFF! Whenever it passed within 10 feet of a fielder in the air) and although it is unclear as to whether he actually had an effect on our boys all the way in Pakistan, Mendis proceeded to tear into pieces the Indian batting order which had looked so good when starting off (Sehwag 50 off just 26 balls). Indian chap now looks thoroughly cowed and pretends to be more interested in the heating up battle between Federer and Nadal.

That was a fight to remember. All that hype and the game certainly lived up to it. A bit of background here, the Wimbledon as you have to know (if you don’t then it’s totally fine, I’m not that big on tennis myself) is the ultimate tennis championship and the most coveted of all. The come all and be all or whatever. Federer has won it 5 times in a row so far beating Nadal In the last two finals. He just needs to win it one more time to surpass Bjorn Berg to become the first guy to win 6 Wimbledon’s in a row so since Willie Renshaw (who played in the 1880’s). Nadal enters the game with four French Open titles under his belt and an advantage over Federer based on previous meetings. Anyways you can read all about how that turned out (Nadal won after a downright nail-biter) but the cricket was definitely the highlight of the day.

Mendis walks away the man of the match as well as the man of the series but how long will he shine? We could just picture the Aussies getting the VCR out and playing his balls (erm ) again and again and again in super-super-slo-mo. He’ll have a hard time remaining a mystery so he’ll have to work hard at developing the menacing consistency that Murali seems to have acquired over the years. But right now let’s all just feel good for a while cos the Lankans have fired again and hopefully this will be one of those winning seasons where the entire public will get so engrossed with cricket that our poor money starved government can finally reward itself a bit by increasing food prices a little further, what?