…on new league
By the time you read this musing by your Eyewitness, we’d know whether our Amazon Warriors made it into the finals of the inaugural season of the new XoM Global Super League T20 tournament. As your Eyewitness pecks away at his laptop, he’s digesting the loss his boys suffered on Wednesday night at the hands of the Rangpur Riders from Bangladesh. It was a very low-scoring game, and he had expected the Warriors to knock off the 117 they were set without too much bother. But bother it was, and, at the end, they fell 15 runs short, with 5 balls remaining.
So, yesterday, Aussie leaders Victoria would’ve faced Hampshire Hawks (England) in the day game, while Bangladesh’s Rangpur Riders would’ve squared off against Pakistan’s Lahore Qalandars at night. If Hampshire beat Victoria and Rangpur beat the Qalandars, then we sneaked in!! Hope this is what happened!!
Now, honestly, your Eyewitness had figured his Warriors woulda done better, since they were at home – and were playing in front of their “12th man” vociferous home crowd!! But like they’ve been saying for centuries, cricket’s a game of glorious uncertainties – and we’ve discovered this even in its “Slam! Bam! Thank you, ma’am!” T20 version!!
So, how did the GSL fare?? Like all new ventures, it’s a work in progress, and the organisers have gotta straighten out whatever kinks that developed. Your Eyewitness thinks the pitch gotta be prepared so all the games be scoring. Let’s face it, T20 ain’t Test cricket – and deliberately so!! Folks don’t come out after work – and knowing they have to show up at the office the next day – to look at fellas grafting for runs. It’s blasting for runs all day and night long, baby!! With Christmas in the offing, there’s gotta be a heck of a lot of fireworks between bat and ball to get them out to Providence!!
But your Eyewitness also notes how far some would go to put down the new league. There was this snarky piece, “Welcome to the GSL T20 in Guyana where big oil, geopolitics and cricket collide”, in the Guardian (England, not TT) that put the best conspiracy theorists to shame!! The newspaper sniffed snootily, “the GSL isn’t really a cricket tournament at all. It’s Potemkin cricket, cricket-flavoured content, cricket as the honey trap in a much wider plot of geopolitics, Russia and India, hard power and big oil.”
In case you missed the allusion, “Potemkin” refers to “something that is fraudulent or counterfeit”!! So, how’s the GSL “fraudulent and counterfeit”?? Well, we’re told it’s really about our oil! “Before the oil, Guyanese cricket was basically stagnant”!! So, our CPL games and finals since 2013 – producing some of the most exciting cricket to bring out the fans – were “stagnant”!! The writer concludes that Guyana is “a tiny oil-rich state of less than a million people, with a huge Kremlin-backed dictator (Mad Maduro) at your border rattling pots and pans. You need friends, fast. And above all, you need to make a noise for yourself, get seen and heard in the corridors of power”!!
And GSL will provide that??!! Gwan da side!!
…on gold
There’s that old line from a poem going back to when your Eyewitness was a knock-kneed bruiser in short pants: “Water, water everywhere – but not a drop to drink!!” The thought came to his mind as he read about yet another long-drawn-out report from the furriners who returned to the old Omai Gold Mines.
They emphasized in mind-numbing technical detail how their drilling since 2020 has been confirming massive deposits of gold under their licensed lands. What the heck does this mean:- “The Dike Corridor comprises a series of felsic and diorite dikes intruded into the volcanic sequence with variable shearing, alteration and stockworks of quartz veining within the felsic dikes, and hosting significant gold mineralization”?
Where’s the gold to generate royalties for us??
…for Macron
The French Government lost a no-confidence vote in their National Assembly and fell. Didn’t dispute the meaning of “majority”!!
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