Saturday, December 16, 2006

Birmingham Born, but not a Hero

Listening to the Ashes is truly depressing (especially on Radio 4 LW where they keep interupting it at 9am every day to bore us with the "highlights" from the previous day at Westminster). There is however some delight in seeing Birmingham-born Andrew Symonds turned-convict giving his wicket away on a regular basis for the Aussies.

Andy Symonds turned down the chance to play for England A so he could be selected for Australia. To show that he is a fair dinkum Aussie he says.

"I had the Baggy Green in my hand a few days ago and smelt it. I love the smell - it smells of sweat and beer."

And traitors.

2 comments:

TitanThirteen said...

Australia are doing remarkably well!
After the tri-nations defeat, the poms had something to hang on to..untill now.
One of Englands players turned convict? I've noticed on a few blogs that the english refer to Australians as "convict desendants". But that's a pretty dumb thing to say considering most of the original white settlers in Australia were free settlers. I thought the english were a little more educated than that.

Anonymous said...

I think "convict" here is meant in the jealous-they-stuffed-us-at-cricket sense, rather than the slightly-racist-and-uneducated sense, though I have heard a bit too much of the latter recently.

Besides, I thought most Australians had embraced this heritage these days. Being able to trace your ancestors to a guy who was shipped 12,000 miles for stealing a loaf of bread should give you a feeling of pride or mild amusement rather than shame.