question
Q: I drove through Toowoomba last week. And “Toowoomba”, as you know, is an old indigenous expression meaning, “The Place of Painful Memories”.
All right, I made that up. The meaning of the word “Toowoomba” isn’t entirely clear, and it’s the subject of heated debate between people who care about such things, but I’ve got my version, and I’m sticking to it.
It was 1979. I was in a bunch of schoolboys from Sydney on a tour of Queensland, and we were playing a game at Toowoomba. We bowled first, and we felt we were on top – we had the home side seven down for not much more than a hundred. But then, in came the Queensland Schoolboys opening bowler, a strapping farm boy called Ron Buchholz.
https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/436/max-bonnell/blog/1041/my-memory-of-toowoomba-the-bruises-and-ron-buchholz
answered
Q: The Australian Men’s Test Cricket team has had 47 Test captains since Dave Gregory was Australia’s first captain in the first test match v England in Melbourne in March 1877.
Only 2 of the 47 captains were born in Queensland and played first class cricket for Queensland.
Can you name the 2 players?
A: Bill Brown, Shane Watson
CricConnect Fans
6 months ago
question
Q: Australian cricket used to built as a pyramid. It was widest at its base, where we all started, playing at school, or in the juniors in a local park. A few hundred stepped past that on to the next tier, joining a Grade club. From there, at least in theory, you could scale to the very top of the pyramid – the Australian team – if you were good enough.
Today, the pyramid is looked on as a clumsy, inefficient and amateurish method of talent selection. Bright young kids are handed State contracts after bossing around a bunch of seventeen year-olds in age-group tournaments. People are picked on the basis of what they can become, rather than on what they’ve done. And maybe that’s better. Except that the pyramid worked. If you were good enough, you reached the top, having earned every promotion along the way. And if you weren’t – well, the pyramid delivered that message, too
https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/436/max-bonnell/blog/1037/scaling-the-pyramid
question
Q: Cricket is an unpredictable game, especially when you’re a swing bowler
I spent something over twenty years struggling to make the ball curl in the air. It was just about the only thing in cricket I could do. I found out pretty early on that I couldn’t bowl fast enough to bother anyone with pace, but I could learn how to move the ball sideways, so I worked on that. It was work, too – I spent lots endless time in the nets experimenting with different ways to make the ball change direction over 22 yards, so much so that I remember one frustrated batsman in the nets shouting at me, “can’t you bowl just one that just goes straight?”
These experiments never took me much beyond “conventional” swing.
https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/436/max-bonnell/blog/1038/cricket-is-an-unpredictable-game-especially-when-yoursquore-a-swing-bowler
question
Q: In 1985, I turned out for Stourbridge in the Birmingham League. Stourbridge is in the West Midlands, on the fringes of the Black Country, named for the thick seam of coal that sustained the region’s mining communities for a couple of hundred years. The locals speak a strange dialect of elongated vowels and swallowed consonants, which is recognisably English but at the same time impossible to understand.
Before the League season began, we played a single friendly match, against a team called Hagley. Hagley wasn’t in the League, but played its game at Hagley Hall, a magnificent Georgian building belonging to Lord Lyttleton. Since one Lord Lyttelton or another was often the President of the Worcestershire County Cricket Club, the grounds of Hagley Hall contained a perfectly-manicured cricket ground. That was where we played our first match in April, which I nearly called a warm-up game, except that would be stupid, because the temperature never rose above one degree.
https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/436/max-bonnell/blog/1040/rain-stopped-play
question
Q: Everyone hates a selector
So this kid Haworth turned up from Coffs Harbour, where his uncle held every possible batting record. He was 18 years old, left-handed, and quiet. Said nothing to anyone, just went into the nets and blocked everything. He could obviously play a bit, because no one could get him out, but it wasn’t clear where he’d ever score a run. He was short and skinny, and had no muscle anywhere that you’d notice. We thought he might be able to take the shine off the ball in Thirds, so we picked him there. He would have been in Fourths, but someone thought his off-breaks might be handy.
The first game was against Petersham. After the first day, the players from Firsts and Seconds were having a beer when a report came in from thirds. Haworth – who was now “Flea” – had top-scored, with 75. “Probably took him 75 overs”, someone suggested.
https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/436/max-bonnell/blog/1039/everyone-hates-a-selector
question
Q: Scaling the Pyramid
Anyway, so, we batted. It was a 60-over game, which was probably why I was in it (“Keeps it tight. Too slow to get people out, though.”). We made 226. Brad McNamara, only seventeen himself, somehow born with a flawless technique, stroked an elegant 60. Greg Douglas, the hardest hitter of a cricket ball in all of Sydney, hit a fifty too, landing several meaty blows against left arm spinner Freddy Freedman. I went in last, though not for long. Mark Waugh ambled in to bowl with the laziest run-up imaginable, but then suddenly the ball was fizzing past me, the pace coming from God-knows-where. I lunged forward to my first ball, and missed. An unimpressed voice came from gully: “f***ing second grader!” Nothing to lose, so I turned and answered, “Steve, it’s worse than that, I’m a second grader who can’t bat!” He did not smile. Mark’s third ball flicked the very outside of my pad and disappeared to fine leg. I was half way through running the leg-bye when the umpire gave me out.
https://www.cricconnect.com/profile/436/max-bonnell/blog/1037/scaling-the-pyramid
blog post
I drove through Toowoomba last week. And “Toowoomba”, as you know, is an old indigenous expression meaning, “The Place of Painful Memories”.All right, I made that up. The meaning o ...
blog post
At some point during the Sydney Test, as the light faded and the drizzle closed in, someone on the ABC radio commentary suggested: “we’d have been off ages ago if we were playing in England.” ...
blog post
If you’ve played cricket for long enough, then you do to. Who was it? The one who failed to appreciate the value of that 17 not out in Third Grade, and dropped you to Fourths? The one who didn ...
blog post
I spent something over twenty years struggling to make the ball curl in the air. It was just about the only thing in cricket I could do. I found out pretty early on that I couldn’t bowl fast en ...
blog post
Australian cricket used to built as a pyramid. It was widest at its base, where we all started, playing at school, or in the juniors in a local park. A few hundred stepped past that on to the nex ...
