Cricket

[Buzzo]

Swann has quit

Disarray.

[Shaggy]

I would've dropped him anyway so I'm not arsed. He's not contributing anymore. Time for Monty.

[Alex]

At least Swann could bat a little. Monty offers nothing other than some spin. Shame he's gone and didn't get a decent send off.

[PTP]

Quitting in the middle of the series is a bait of a ****house thing to do imo

[Alex]

Anyone watching the SA v India game? Been a cracking test match. SA had to chase around 460 to win and they are 38 away with 7 overs left.

Should be a good finish.

[Chazza]

Quitting in the middle of the series is a bait of a ****house thing to do imo

[captainfog]

Yeah I agree, selfish from swanny, and a bit cowardly. He just didn't fancy it. You can bet he wouldn't have retired mid series if we were winning.

[Alex]

Or if it was Christmas in a few days.....

[EwarWoo]

Yeah I agree, selfish from swanny, and a bit cowardly. He just didn't fancy it. You can bet he wouldn't have retired mid series if we were winning.

Maybe he sees himself has a large part of the blame. He gets to the back end of a match and his elbows getting too stiff to bowl properly.

He feels hes a liability, he's a big part of the blame for the disaster, and so he's done the right thing and walked.

Wouldn't call that cowardice, the opposite really.

[Chazza]

Ashes 2013-14: Graeme Swann departs with swipe at England team-mates
Graeme Swann says some England players have "no idea how far up their own backsides they are" as he leaves the international stage.

Graeme Swann departed Test cricket with abrupt certainty on Sunday, but not before taking a barely disguised swipe at some of his fellow England players for not respecting the game.

“Some people playing the game at the minute have no idea how far up their own backsides they are,” Swann said at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday. “It will bite them on the a--e one day and when it does I hope they look back and are embarrassed about how they carry on.”

Swann refused to name those he considers the guilty men but it is well known that he and Kevin Pietersen do not send each other Christmas cards. If other players have raised his hackles he has kept them to himself. It was the most animated moment during his retirement press conference and the only one where he was critical of his team-mates.
Otherwise he was full of praise for players who had been his “family” for the past 5½ years.

“That is one of the things I’m nervous about to be honest because it is all I’ve been used to and all of a sudden I’ve got my wife and kids to go home to and I’ve not got that sounding board of the changing room with 15 other blokes who know where you’re coming from and have the same bawdy humour to put up with your jokes.

“It is well documented that some people struggle after retiring, but I don’t think I will from that point of view, it will just be weird. These are my best mates, and although I’ve got a good network of friends in Nottingham it is still going to be hard waking up without anywhere to be.”

Swann welled up several times when talking about the reasons for his retirement and what his career meant to him, but he refused to shed any tears.
“I’m not going to cry for you," he said. "I’ve seen so many people cry. It is very emotional because it’s the end of everything I've know, everything I’ve loved. It’s not just England. In February I’m going to have to go to Trent Bridge and clear my locker out. I have so many fond memories of that place.
"I know that’ll choke me up when I do that. But to sit here and know I’ve played 60 Tests and however many one-dayers and taken the wickets I have and been involved in the teams I have, I can scarcely believe it. I feel like a lottery winner, I feel ridiculous.”

As a Test spinner for England, he is second to Derek Underwood, in terms of wickets, and possibly Jim Laker, though he took more Test wickets than him. “When I went past Jim Laker my mum phoned me up and she was almost in tears as Jim Laker was her dad’s favourite bowler and I only knew Grandad Les until I was seven or eight.

“My mum knew nothing about cricket but she always heard him mention Laker and she could not believe I’d gone past him. I couldn’t believe it either as I didn’t know how many wickets he had taken. I feel very humbled to have done that.

“The other day I went past Brian Statham, there are stands named after him. Things like that make you pinch yourself and make you wonder how it has all been possible in such a short period of time. I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve achieved. I still think there has been some mystical force that has helped me along the way because surely it is not as easy as that.”

Swann’s decision to retire mid-series has not been met with total understanding and there are those who feel he should have stayed the course whether he was picked for the last two Tests or not. After all, his elbow must have still been hurting when he signed his central contract.

“There are people who pick fault with everything," he said. "But to carry on playing would be completely the wrong thing for the team regardless of the senior player junior player thing. If you are playing for the wrong reasons you are not helping anybody.

"If I played in this Boxing Day Test and the Sydney Test it would be to experience them again and go out waving to the Barmy Army as I walked off. That sort of player doesn’t deserve to be in the team. You don’t build teams around guys like that.”

Having been close to both captain and coach he found it hard to tell them of his decision which he says he made during the Adelaide Test when England were still only one down in the The Ashes series.

“Cooky knew," Swann said. "I stand next to him at slip and he said, 'I knew something was up’. I found it so hard with Cooky because we spend so much time together, we take the mickey out of each other all the time and we’re next to each other in the changing room too so for two or three days I’ve avoided him thinking the time is not right. So he knew something was coming. I walked into the breakfast room to meet him more nervous than I would be going out to play on the first day of the Boxing Day Test match. It was weird.”
Swann says he does not plan to play any more cricket unless it is with his son Wilf or daughter Charlotte, or if an Indian Premier League team makes him an offer he cannot refuse.

“I hope I will play games of cricket again in the future and enjoy them and I hope they’re alongside my little boy for the Sunday Seconds when he’s about 15 or something, just showing him the ropes," he said.

“I opened the batting with my dad in the Premier League in Northampton. We both got 100 in one game once and I was out in the 21st over. He said take your mark, carry on son and get a double here. I went: ‘Don’t be stupid dad’. I got caught on the boundary next ball and he, to prove a point, went on to get 160 not out. He just walked off and said: ‘You’re an idiot’.
“I’m not going to go and play league cricket. I just don’t like fielding enough to do it. But if Wilf gets into cricket and there’s a chance to play with him at some point then I’ll enjoy that.”

[captainfog]

****house thing to do that. Keep yer ****ing trap shut 'swanny' and stop trying to rock a boat that is already sinking.

[captainfog]

I wonder if Swanny will take the IPL $ (if they want him).

Anyway, end of his career aside, what a great bowler he was. Read today that since 2008 no other bowler has taken more test wickets than him.

[Shaggy]

Weird

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/dec/23/graeme-swann-grandmother-nasty-retirement?CMP=twt_gu

Graeme Swann's grandmother says 'something nasty' caused retirement

• Mina Swann blames unnamed Australian player for decision
• England have not been made to welcome, she says

Tom Bryant
theguardian.com, Monday 23 December 2013 16.29 GMT

Graeme Swann's grandmother has blamed an unnamed Australian player for the spinner's retirement, saying that "something nasty" must have happened to prompt him to give up his cricket career.

Mina Swann, 89, said that the Australian players had not made England feel very welcome and said that, since her grandson has a thick skin, something unpleasant must have occurred to force him out of the game. It is a series that has been marked by one sledging row after another while the England batsman Jonathan Trott returned home with a stress-related condition.

"There is something gone wrong there and I blame the Australian players. Not all the Australian players, a certain one," Mina Swann told The Journal. "When the team went down to Australia and that young lad came back, there was something going wrong then.

"I do not think they have been [made] very welcome, the team. He is not easily upset, there is something nasty that happened."

Mina Swann said that she was disappointed when she found out from the television that her grandson Graeme had retired.

"He was as happy as Larry. He adored his cricket. It is a damn shame, he has lived for that game, he has done everything for that game," she said. "I am very disappointed because that is one thing I look forward to. I will be very disappointed when he is not there."

Swann announced that he would retire from all forms of cricket with immediate effect over the weekend. He will miss the final two Ashes Tests.

[Buzzo]

Fair comment from Pietersen I reckon. His average backs him up.

England's Kevin Pietersen will not stop attacking


By Tom Fordyce
Chief sports writer in Melbourne
Kevin Pietersen insists he will not change his risk-taking batting style, despite a run of failures resulting in Geoffrey Boycott branding him a "mug".
England's leading batsman by Test average and reputation, 33-year-old Pietersen has struggled badly on this disastrous tour so far, scoring only 165 runs in his six innings.

On five occasions he has been caught on the leg side playing attacking shots, but with the Ashes already lost he says he will play the same way in Melbourne's Boxing Day Test.
Pietersen said: "I don't think I've helped myself. But that's the way I play. I don't know how many articles have been written about the fact that I've got myself out, but I'm there to dominate, I'm there to take risks.
"If I see a ball to hit for six or a ball to hit for four, there's something in my body that tells me to hit it. I'm not the kind of guy who can think about knocking the ball down the ground."
As England were beaten by 150 runs in the third Test in Perth to go 3-0 down in the five Test series, Pietersen was caught on the long-on boundary trying to clear Ryan Harris, who had just been placed there for precisely that shot.
With England fighting to save the Test and Ashes it led many to bemoan the attitude of their star batsman, who had earlier passed 8,000 Test runs in his 102nd Test.
Pietersen told BBC Sport: "The other day was a mistake. Clearly I've made a few mistakes - and that's been highlighted - but I won't change the way I play for anybody because I think I've been pretty successful.
KP's Test numbers
Now aged 33, Kevin Pietersen has played in 102 Tests for England
Since making his Test debut in 2005, he has scored 8,052 Test runs, at an average of 47.64
They include 23 hundreds (three of which were double centuries) and 34 fifties
His highest score was 227 against Australia in Adelaide three years ago
Has hit 80 sixes and 974 fours
"It's not a case of can't, it's just there's something in me that says if there's a ball to hit then you've got to hit it. And it works.
"On the good days, at Adelaide on the last trip down here, I scored 227. On nought, the first ball I hit from Doherty landed just over point's hands, yet everyone says it's one of the greatest innings I've ever played. You take the rough with the smooth. That is what happens.
Pietersen insisted he did not view the shot he got out to in Perth as a risk.
"I should have hit it for six," he said. "As long as I play, I'm going to try to hit sixes."
Pietersen also brushed off the controversy over Graeme Swann's comments following the spinner's retirement, which some misinterpreted as a criticism of the South African-born batsman.
He also insisted that, at just a year younger than the departed Swann, he had no plans of his own to end his international career.
Swann has denied that he was referring to any of his team-mates when he claimed that some cricketers had their heads up their own backsides.
“
I'm fully committed to do my best to help us win in Melbourne and help us win in Sydney
”
Kevin Pietersen
Pietersen said: "I have heard bits and pieces, but my family arrived on Monday and I haven't seen my little boy for two months, so my interest levels in what the media were talking about were less than zero.
"It's fairly weird. In every press conference I do, people ask how long I'm going to play for. I'm fully committed to do my best to help us win in Melbourne and help us win in Sydney.
"The dressing room isn't happy about the results at all. We set higher standards than we have produced on this trip so far.
"With the Ashes now gone, we can hopefully sort ourselves out, reinvent ourselves, do something positive and finish the tour off positively.
"I know a lot of fans come over for the Melbourne and Sydney Test matches. We owe it to everyone and those guys who spend a lot of money coming to watch us to produce something."

[captainfog]

Good on him. You've got to give Australia credit for keeping him quiet this series.