Part of the Sports Relief show on Saturday night was a sketch done by James Corden, where he is pretending to be “Smithy”, who receives the Coach of the Year Award at Sports Personality. This then turns into a rant at the nations best athletes, well mainly rant, except for the flirting with Victoria Pendleton.

Some of them took it a lot better than others, Dame Kelly Holmes and Paula Radcliffe looked like they were going to cry / kill him. Freddie (I mean Andrew, but who cares?) Flintoff had a similar reaction, but from the work they have been doing together recently on Sky One he is either in on the gag and knew it was coming, or can’t have minded that much.

Nice timing on the Pendleton piece, she currently has a spot on our living room wall, she is the FHM calendar girl for March.

Thoughts?

Firstly let me introduce Darren Pattinson, born in Grimsby he soon moved to Australia when just aged 6. Of course not his own doing (at a guess). He then spent the next twenty odd years down under having BBQs and eating Kangaroo’s. My reaction to his call up was similar to that of Beefy and The Village Cricketer, little knowledge of who this guy was. A little research later and I found a lovely post by Jrod, who refers to him as Eyelids, and mentions, sarcastically, that he would be playing for England soon.

So why was he selected? Basically with the suspected injury of Jimmy Anderson and Ryan Sidebottom it was necessary to call up a second potential replacement bowler, Tremlett was already on the side lines to fill in if Sidebottom was injured. Strangely it turned out that Sidebottom wasn’t fit to play, so you would think Tremlett would fit in nicely. Nope, the nod went to Pattinson. Now I have no problem with bringing new players in, but I wonder why? The best logic I’ve heard so far is from Micky Vaughan who stated that his suspicions on the Headingley pitch was that he would need bowlers to pitch the ball up. Something I guess Tremlett has not made a career of doing, neither has Harmison or Jones (two other names who probably should be considered in any bowling discussion). Leaving one name, Hoggard, yeah the guy who has played at Headingley, for Yorkshire for god knows how many years. Surely he should have been the first name back on the team sheet? The utter madness seems shared by the Third Umpre, in this uber kudos post about all the problems the England team face.

I guess more ranting / confusion to come after the next test…