Yay Sportsball! Do the Thing, Win the Points!

Ha! I was so sure there was going to be some kind of mathematical answer :).

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I do leave myself on 63 far too often.

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I’m going to be playing darts for Mandatory Work Team-Building Fun soon. I’ve thrown darts maybe… twice before? We did just do Axe-throwing though, so I’ll take darts instead.

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I just watched the first T20 cricket match between NZ and the touring West Indies side.

With 3 overs remaining, NZ were 9 down and 55 runs behind, and it seemed like the game was very much a done deal.

Santner and Duffy then put on NZ’s highest 10th wicket partnership for T20s, and my goodness that made for an exciting finish. We still lost – but only by 7 runs.

I’m sure Duffy must be incredibly bemused to be a part of that partnership statistic, because in his innings he faced 1 ball and scored 1 run :). Santner faced every ball of those last 3 overs, and hit 4, 6, 4, 4, 4, 1; 4, 4, 4, 0, 0, 1; 0, 0, 6, 2, 0 4. Not the usual fireworks for the 5th of November, but some fireworks nonetheless!

I have to note that the penultimate dot ball was one of the most egregious failures of an umpire to call wide for height that I can ever remember seeing, meaning that in the last over we really should have had one more ball to face with 6 runs needed to win!

The Windies deserved their win – they defended a low total, with only 6 of the NZ batsmen making double-figures – but they will be breathing a big sigh of relief that they actually hung onto it. I’m just glad I was still watching after it all seemed done and dusted!

I also learned that, in ODIs, NZ has a crazy home-win rate over the past several years. I think it was 24 ODIs played in NZ since 2020, with 22 wins and 2 losses. I saw a table comparing this with other countries, and no one else came close to that proportion. Maybe it’s the jet-lag? :sweat_smile:

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I once watched NZ play England in 20 20. NZ played a really bad innings and there were a lot of gloomy NZ faces. I reassured them that they haven’t seen nothing yet. England played SO badly and of course played an even worse innings. Cue lots of cheering Kiwis…

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Good grief, the same thing just happened in reverse in the second match a day later.

NZ batted first and scored 207 (including a 78 from 28 balls) which looked like a winning total, and had the West Indies falling behind the curve for the first half of their innings; but then their lower order went crazy with constant boundaries (including a 45 from 16, a 34 from 16, and 29 from 13), and they ended just 3 runs short!

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I used to hear the bbc cricket reports on the overnight world service broadcast. I was always struck by how sensible it sounded, even though it is clearly just word salad designed to confuse Americans.

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