Cricketer, newsmaker and backpacker hater D Tuffey
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Jewel thief Guzman-Betancourt
The Beige Brigade is pleased to announce a new competition for club cricketers throughout the Land of the Long White Cloud. This competition is open to all club cricketers around the country – the chaps who get up on Saturday mornings and eat their Weetbix, grab their kitbag out of the spare bedroom, and wish they hadn’t had those six beers the night before. It’s also open to the serious players on each team.
The new competition will be known as “Famous in Font 6″ – a reference to the tiny writing that appears in the Sunday papers every weekend of the club cricket season around New Zealand. Using completely unscientific methods The Beige Brigade will keep a running tally of the number of times each club cricketer is mentioned in the tiny club cricket wrap-ups which appear in the Sunday Star-Times (all of NZ except Auckland) and the Herald on Sunday (Auckland only) in size 6 font.
The player who receives the most mentions throughout the season will be the winner – G Stewart from Te Awamutu in the Waikato Valley club cricket competition is the leader after Week 1. Congratulations G!
Beige Brigade co-founder Mike Lane said the idea of the competition was to bring club cricketers together and have a laugh. “It’s a tribute to those blokes who sacrifice their summer Saturdays when they could be at the beach – the guys who abstain from getting blind on Friday nights just to turn out with pride for their cricket clubs week after week. Bless them.”
Fellow co-founder Paul Ford said Famous in Font 6 was going to require some heavy reading on Sundays. “It’s probably going to take a good morning session to get through the papers, but we’ll just be taking it one page at a time. There’ll be a platoon of Beige Brigadiers assigned to this duty.”
He said one thing to remember is that players are mentioned for doing both good and evil deeds. “You get in there for smacking a fifty or getting a bag of wickets – but also for less dignified feats such as sustaining a groin injury or being too lippy.” Lane agreed. “We will make no distinction between the two – we encourage players to stand out however they can.”
The running tally of the top ten club cricketers in terms of media mentions will be listed here, on the Beige Brigade website, and will be updated periodically throughout the season.
In March or whenever the last club cricket report appears, the Beige Brigade will announce the winner of the competition to a global audience. That club cricketer will receive a prize which will be lots of beer, flavoured by Lion Brown. They will be expected to share that prize with their team-mates.
Some of the chaps who are based over in the Uk are going to be heading to the footy in Dublin - we have just alnded some tickets to the All Blacks v Ireland match over there on 12 November. It should be sensational. Apparently the ground (Lansdowne Road - above) is terribly old and decrepit but the Gaelic sports nutters refuse to let union be played at their super duper flash stadium, Croke Park (below). The Beige Brigade info on the Dublin assault is here.
Larry is wearing black today after hearing of the sensless violence in the Manawatu. Stuff reports Small Horses Under Threat.
We are officially the most popular - if not the only - beige thing on the planet. if you go to Google these days, (and who doesn’t?), slap in “beige” and do a search…voila! It’s us. Pleasant.
We were quite pleased about this NZPA report:
Cricketers may be playing at Hamilton’s Seddon Park this season after Westpac decided not to renew a 15-year naming rights agreement. Seddon Park became Trustbank Park in 1990 — a deal that caused outcry among fans — then WestpacTrust and finally Westpac Park. But it may revert to its original name now. Sources close to the bank say the Seddon Park decision was a foregone conclusion after a series of blunders resulted from a $2.5 million upgrade in 2002…
This is what we told the Waikato Times back in December:
No matter what a sponsor calls it, people are always going to refer to it as Seddon Park.
- We’re not really into politics. King Dick Seddon holds a special place in NZ history, but we’re not sure what sort of a cricketer he was
- The ground has a place in the cricketing heart - it’s where many of us went to our first games of “real” cricket - watching blokes like Barry Cooper, Shane Thomson and Lindsay Crocker plying their trade out in the middle.
- We like the idea of calling it Seddon Park, but if that means the council loses out on bucketloads of money which would otherwise be used to make the fans more comfy and the cricket of a better standard and crater-free, then that would be madness.
- If getting some dosh is critical to ensuring that cricket continues to be played there, then that’s what we want to happen - along with the Basin Reserve it’s the best ground in NZ to watch cricket at, and long may it continue to be played there.
- There’s a couple of options we can see:
1. Sponsor gets the rights to name the ground but doesn’t exercise that right - the ground is called Seddon Park and the company with those rights would become a champion in the eyes of all cricket supporters in the Waikato (and NZ);
2. Sponsor gets rights and renames the ground but incorporates the “Seddon” name - e.g. Telecom Seddon Park;
3. Our personal favourite is that the Park gets renamed to honour one of NZ’s great 1980s medium-pace bowling icons by inserting an “n” and an “e” into the name - e.g. Snedden Park.
- Word is that Surrey CC in the UK gets half a million pounds a year from their sponsor and the right to call their ground (The Oval) “The Brit Oval”. Thinking ahead, f500k a year to spend on redeveloping Seddon Park would see the fans sitting on LazyBoys with in-seat beer coolers and handheld TV replay screens. That would be very pleasant.
What?! Why aren’t New Zealand in the Hong Kong Sixes this year? Maybe the prize money is too crappy - oh hang on it’s US$280,000 with a hundred grand to the winning team. In 2003 we went pretty well and finished third (M Sinclair, M Walker, M Horne, A Adams, J Yovich and A Barnes).
The Aussie players who got demoted after the Ashes are still having a crap time playing cricket - not many runs or wickets over the weekend in the unfamiliar surroundings of club cricket. AAP reports:
…just as they did in England, below par batting, few wickets and injury plagued many of the Australians’ return to their cricket roots. Dumped Australian batsman Damien Martyn [pictured above after just washing his hair many moons ago], playing for South Perth, did his chances of a Test recall no favours, caught at mid on for 4 against University.
Dropped paceman Michael Kasprowicz limped off with a hamstring injury having taken 1-19 off 10.3 overs for University of Queensland while South Australian Jason Gillespie failed to grab a scalp in Adelaide’s loss. Under fire opener Matthew Hayden also struggled with the bat, dismissed for just four runs in his match for Valley.
Nice to see Ponting’s club stripped him down and auctioned his club kit and the bat he used for $2000 as well - and they got 3000 ‘punters’ along to watch his unglamorous Mowbray side play a twenty20 in Tasmanian club cricket.
