Harry Brook. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
Hitting the mark
Harry Brook. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
The Hawke Cup gets under way this weekend.
Southland are hosting Mid Canterbury in Invercargill.
North Otago travel north to Timaru to play South Canterbury the following weekend, and Otago Country launch their campaign with a home fixture against South Canterbury at Molyneux in mid-January.
Hawke’s Bay are the current holders.
■ Harry Brook has overtaken team-mate Joe Root at the top of the men’s test batter rankings following scores of 123 and 55 in England’s 323-run victory over New Zealand in Wellington.
The 25-year-old is the youngest batter to top the table since Kane Williamson at the end of 2015.
Crease bound
Ball tracking. It is like going to church when you don’t believe in Jesus.
Do we trust it or not? If we trust it then why are batters not out when the ball is just clipping the stumps?
Who are we giving the benefit of doubt to here — the umpires?
Who else is a little fed up with the umpire’s call saving a batter from an lbw?
It seems cricket has a bob each way.
They want to trust the technology but they don’t want to completely hand over the decisions to some boffin in a truck out the back.
Time to either embrace ball tracking completely, or do away with it.
Clubbing it
Arrrgh. PlayHQ. Those premier club scorecards still contain a lot of "Fill In" references.
Just a reminder to the Dunedin clubs that we will not publish a scoreboard that includes a Fill In rather than the player’s name.
We understand this is happens because of the way the platform has been formatted.
We have been ringing around to find out who the players are, but it is time-consuming and we are putting the onus back on the clubs to supply the names.
CDK have been proactive in contacting us, so please follow their lead and send in the names to sport@odt.co.nz
The declaration
A couple of readers spotted an error this week.
I called the Black Caps the Black Sticks and got a "tut tut".
Who knows how many times I’ve made the same error but the other way around?
This evens the score a little. It is also a reminder of our obsession with nicknames which all follow a very similar theme.
Think black. Think ferns.
