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John Stern: PR gone mad amid Ashes fever

July 10th, 2009 by John Stern in Miscellaneous, The Ashes

The consensus is that Glamorgan have pulled off a major – and successful – charm offensive with the staging of this Test match. Friendly welcomes and close-harmony singing everywhere.

But spelling might be an area they want to address next time and I don’t mean the bilingual signage that greets visitors from across the Severn Bridge. In one of the thousand or so banal press releases that litter cyberspace around this time, Glamorgan managed to mis-spell the name of their favourite daughter Katherine (or Kathryn according to Glamorgan) Jenkins, the singer who belted out the Welsh national anthem before the start of play on Wednesday.

The two-line missive telling the world how Miss Jenkins thought it “lovely to be back home in Wales” wins shortest press release of the week. But there are plenty of other candidates vying for some prestigious other accolades:

Rip-off of the week goes to the Royal Mint who announced that they had crafted a gold medal (rather than a coin) for Andrew Strauss to toss with on Wednesday. Of course, they didn’t produce just one though. Better safe than sorry so they minted 150 of them which can be purchase at a mere £1,595 each. If you’re too tight to match that reasonable asking price there are 50,000 cheapo nickel-bronze versions for a tenner. Did they say toss?

Tenuous link of the Test goes to the revelation that three of England’s “football-mad” players (Collingwood, Anderson and Bell) were backing the 2018 football World Cup bid, based on the fact that “all the lads enjoy a kick about during training”, according to Sunderland fan and Alan Shearer soundalike Colly.

Stating the bleedin’ obvious award was the extraordinary claim by Freddie Flintoff that “the Aussies are notorious for sledging” as told to Tim Lovejoy’s channelbee.com.

And finally, the Bandwagon Jumping Hasn’t Fred Got Better Things To Do With This Time – a press release from Red Bull about Flintoff playing table football (?!) against Aussie F1 driver Mark Webber. If I played Scrabble against Gideon Haigh, would that count?

John Stern is editor of The Wisden Cricketer

Posted in Miscellaneous, The Ashes |



3 Responses to “John Stern: PR gone mad amid Ashes fever”

  1.   jrod says:

    Sorry John, I want to back you, but Gideon said Mutuality on sky, that is a kabillion point score.

  2.   The Village Cricketer says:

    Not enough spin on show if you ask me, well not enough effective spin. Plenty of positives to take out of the game so far for Team England. The bowlers have bowled excellent areas.

  3.   Paddy Briggs says:

    “Whilst it was disappointing that having scored 435 in our first innings we fell to an innings defeat we still take lots of positives from the match” said England captain Andrew Strauss after the match. “We managed to stop Paul Collingwood ansering every question with the word “Absolutely” and at times Fred looked almost athletic when he lumbered round the boundary. Young Tom Maynard fielded very well when he came on.” Asked about Kevin Pietersen’s first ball second innings dismissal when trying to play Dilshan’s scoop shot off Strauss said insightfully “That’s the way he plays”. Asked about Lord’s Strauss said “We expect to be able to get the ball into the corridor much more at Lord’s and we will definitely be singing the National Anthem this time.” Would he change the team? “No I think that the boys applied themselves really well and they’ve all got newspaper columns to write so we wouldn’t want to disrupt that.”

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