I’ve just added a bunch of new things to the blog, such as a page that tracks live visitors, the ability for commenters to receive an email when a reply is posted to their comment, and a Gallery which contains all the images I’ve used since switching to wordpress.

I was curious as to which terms people are searching to end up here, funnily enough 13 people have found their way here looking for “cameron white cry”, the same number who have come in search of “jessica bratich”.

So, cheers to all my readers for popping around. If you’d like to receive Beer and Sport in your email then use the subscribe option on the right. And please, leave some comments!

Shane Warne - BnS Legend

I have spent the bulk of my cricket watching years observing Warne take apart all and sundry. His deception and mystery with the ball always amused me, his mastery of control both in the air and off the pitch, his ability to invent a new name for an old delivery every series, the mind games.. ah the mind games.

The man is so much more than the sum of his wickets. He polarises popular opinion in Australia, generally along the lines of gender. Womens magazines feed on his indiscretions, and I’ve boycotted many as a result. Here’s a comprehensive list of his misdemeanour’s including a Top 10.

Warney’s greatest achievement and one that all straight men aspire to, was getting a threesome with two hot chicks in the middle of a 1st class match, and going on to take 7/99. They even let him film it, then sold the footage to News of the World for cash and to promote their careers as Pommy and Kiwi slappers. Still, Warney in his playboy undies is a great image and one I’m sure he’ll be proud to show his grandson one day. It’s now immortalised in the Beer and Sport Banner.

While a test match century forever eluded him he could at times be brutal with the bat. I was at the Newport Arms when he got 99 against New Zealand and in typical Warney style wanted to bring up his maiden 100 with a 6. He holed out down cow corner to Daniel Vettori which surprised absolutely no-one. Turns out it was a front foot no-ball, though I have no doubt he would have found another way to miss the maiden ton regardless.

The 2005 Ashes for Shane Warne would have to go down as the greatest performance in a series of any cricketer in my lifetime. He took an incredible 40 Wickets at 19.92 which was 16 more than the next best bowler. What’s more he scored 249 runs at 27.66, and many of these came when all the batsmen failed. “His deliveries to remove Andrew Strauss at Edgbaston and Marcus Trescothick at The Oval defied logic and he can surely now make a justifiable claim to being the greatest bowler that has ever played the game.” [BBC]

Some inspirational words from the greatest site on the Internet, Nosedog’s Top Aussie Guide:

Shane Warne is a top Aussie. He is also a massive pisstank yobbo with a beer-gut who dyes his hair blonde and drives a red convertible. Warney has done some bad things. He once got paid 100 grand by Nicabate to give up durries for a year but he lit up heaps when he was pissed. Then he took money from some Indian bookmakers for pre-match information. He once smashed a camera cause a kiddy took a photo of his beer gut. Then he got toey on the phone and dirty-talked an English girly who wasn’t his wife. However, all Australians agree that Warney can be excused for doing these things cause he spin bowls like a genius and makes England look completely shíthouse. Warney could drink all our beer and then spew on our carpet and we wouldn’t care as long as he keeps taking wickets.
Warney is a top Aussie.

My best man took the piss out of me at my wedding as my Wireless router is called “Warney for King”, and my cat is named Warney. When it’s time for dinner and I call the cats in there’s no room for high pitched kitty kitty crap… instead it’s the familiar and drawn out “Waaarrrrnnnnnneeeeeyyyyy… Waaarrrrnnnnnneeeeeyyyyy…”

My mission that I’ve chosen to accept when there’s no cricket or rugby on is to blog on each member of the BnS Legends banner and explain my personal connection with each legend.

Most of them are obviously from New South Wales, since we’re the only state breeding the big names. Many others have some sort of tenuous connection to the premier state, such that I’ve claimed them for the good ship NSW.

There is one and only one exception per state or territory, ever. I’m currently seeking applications from SA, the NT and the ACT.

I’ll be building an image-map on the banner, so you can click any of the heads and go straight to the blog post on that legend. Could take a while.

Smackdown

So instead, we’re sticking editorial humiliation on the line. The wager, in MC Gregor’s own words

If Australia wins. I’ll write a mea culpa, heartbroken, humble match report for your blog. It will be white hot with pain and regret. If the Blacks win, you can do the same on the Balls?

I reckon there’s a fair chance we can get Leg Break and Matt to man up, which would make it two Aussies (one in exile) and two Kiwi’s (one in exile) ready to pen the artcile.

On a side note, I’ve got a bloody wedding this weekend and if the unthinkable happens my review of the match will be a few days late till I find an Internet Cafe…

Today I’ve been playing around with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and finding a bunch of features that were never there in Blogger. It’s all about Google PageRank, so I’ve added the little pagerank checker over the right there. Sure it’s saying my PR is currently 0, I’m hoping this is due to the recently registered domain and google is yet to glorify me.

I’ve now got META tags going thanks to a plugin called Headspace that give search engines a one line description of an article so those words rate heavier than the blog title or the first sentence, cause my titles are generally puns anyway.

Another plugin I’ve cranked up is do-follow so now if you were to leave a comment at Beer and Sport, google will follow your website URL, and it’ll help increase your ranking in google. Not very much, cause Beer and Sport is PANTS in the eyes of google…… for now…

Turns out this do follow thingamy is part of a blogging movement to turn off the rel=”nofollow” in links left in comments. So to show off my bandwagon jumping I’ve stuck their logo up too.
. How web 2.0 am I? Don’t answer that…

MOHALI: A bomb scare Monday at a factory near the Punjab Cricket Association (PCA) stadium where the second cricket Test between India and Australia is being played prompted the police to thoroughly search the stadium as a precautionary measure but nothing untoward was found, the authorities said.

An all-clear was sounded after the police searched the factory, located four km from the stadium.

The police also traced and arrested the man who made the hoax call and he said he did it for a lark.

“We called additional police force and searched every nook and corner of the stadium with the help of sniffer dogs and the bomb disposal squad. However, we took special care to ensure that the search operation did not hamper the match and create panic among the spectators,” Mohali police chief Jatinder Singh Aulakh told IANS.

True Story

Firstly there’s the shiny new domain: www.beerandsport.net . If you get a chance please update your links

Next, I put together a banner for the site which showcases many of my personal sporting heroes, in carefully selected shots that show them in a manner that I like to remember.

Richie Benaud for me is a commentating hero, and while he did a lot with the bat and ball in the 50′s, for me he’s a hero as a commentator. Darryl Hair makes an appearance as I’ve always respected his integrity and stuborness as great qualities for an umpire to possess. There’s even a Queenslander in John Eales, and a great NSW Rugby Player Chris Latham who unfortunately spent much of his career in exile.

Roy and HG are a huge influence and just had to make an appearence on the banner of fame.

And thanks to Warney and his 3 foot inflateable googly, according to Gagger, I “might have the only sports blog with a famous sportsmans erection on it?”. What a claim to fame that is!

And what a year it’s been in my sporting world. The Waratahs beat all Aussie competition and came second in the Super 14 so I followed them to Christchurch. The Wallabies came within a Kaplan of clinching the Tri-Nations, the Baggy Greens won all their Test series, the NSW Bluetongues won the Pura Cup, and Manly won the NRL! (Go Beaver!)

Sounds like as good an excuse as any to blow one’s own trumpet, so here’s the highlights package of the 111 blog posts I’ve delivered in my time at the crease. While I seemed to go several weeks with barely an update, my average is 2 posts per week which I’m fairly happy with.

It all began with my first post that had my mission statement and a list of interests that I may or may not write about. True to my work I have put shit on Queenslanders and Vegetarians, though I’ve let men who wear pink shirts off pretty lightly so far so will have to address this as I kick on towards the double century.

My most popular entry of the year was this one where I compiled a few clips of the spirit in which Inida play their cricket. A massive 14 comments were well received, though nothing on the thousands of racially motivated comments on youtube. I thought Western Force supporters were fickle but the Indian’s are truly world class in the dummy spitting department.

So, one year down, hopefully many more to go. I intend to keep up the style of polarising opinion with my unique spin on the sporting and drinking worlds, and look forward to comments and involvement from you, my readers. And feedburner says I’ve got 17 subscribers so it’s not falling on deaf ears!

Cheers,
Moses.

I’ve taken on the long overdue task of updating the B&S Blogroll, actually choosing to be a part of the blogging community by exchanging links and stuff! If I’ve missed you please post in the comments and if your blog isn’t completely shite I’ll throw you a link.

As many of the B&S readers are interested in either Cricket or Rugby but not both, I’ve set up individual feeds for these two main topics of discussion. So now you can either subscribe to all of Beer and Sport (highly recommended), just the Cricket, or just the Rugby.

Lastly, Blogger have finally made available a way to export and import blogs and comments (you have to log into Blogger Draft wtf!), so this also marks the end of the oxenshizer as no-one could remember this obscure reference to a card game a mate and I played in a german beer hall one night – trying to translate bullshit into Deutcsh we found oxen to mean cow with balls. Anyways, all those posts and comments have now been migrated so I’ll turn off the old blog now.

The future? Well hopefully I’ll make some semi-regular posts. I’ve had some recent technology upgrades at home so it’s quite likely I’ll be packaging some video highlights from the upcoming test series for your pleasure.

Keep fighting the good fight and if you see one, Kick a Vic. And always leave a comment in the blog!

I’ve finally found out how to consolidate my two google accounts so have moved all blogging activities BACK to Beer and Sport.

Apologies for any confusion…