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123 Jan 15 '19
Its easy to picture Kane Williamson as a school head boy. Nike Sb Promo . Like the best of them, he is extremely talented, has a fine work ethic and seen to be an all-round good bloke.As with all good head boys, Williamson finds himself at the nervecentre of every activity. Team meeting? Call Williamson. Press conference? Williamson will tackle it.There is also the inevitable comparison with his predecessor - Brendon McCullum - to contend with. While McCullum had the class of 2015 rapping to the tune of fearless, attacking cricket, Williamsons imprint is still work in progress.The class of 2016 does not comprise slackers - most of McCullums merry men continue with the good work - but the India tour has proved to be overwhelming for many of them. Martin Guptill has resembled an agonised drifter, while Ross Taylor seems to have gone uncomfortably numb. After the Test series whitewash, the free fall continued in the first ODI in Dharamsala. Who do they call on to arrest it? You hear a chorus, Captain Kane!It is not like Williamson has had it all worked out himself. While he has looked good on different occasions during the tour - never mind the bullying by R Ashwin - he had not managed a century. That is a good place to start, Mike Hesson, the headmaster, may possibly have told Williamson on the eve of the game. And, for heavens sake, win the toss. No pressure, Kane.Hours later, Williamson loses another toss. Minutes later, he watches Guptills bat stay away from the balls path. Seconds later, Williamson walks out. Indias new-ball pair of Umesh Yadav and Hardik Pandya has a skinny leg-side field, and they keep the off side interested by bowling well outside off. Further, the slip goes out to short cover, and a gully is in place to shut down the dab to third man, one of Williamsons strong scoring zones.Williamson, standing on middle and leg stump, moves closer to the off stump. The counter-strategy is to enable him to connect deliveries outside off better, and also create an angle favourable for leg-side play. And so, Williamson flicks and tucks balls that remotely veer towards middle and leg, while flaunting his cover drive when the bowler overcorrects and goes too wide outside off.MS Dhoni is doing everything to seal the off side, especially in front of square on a dull track, but there is the left-hand solidity of Tom Latham to contend with as well. Like many head boys, Williamson has a geeky, loyal sidekick in Latham, who refused to abandon the crease in Dharamsala even as the rest of his mates loped off.The pitch has by now begun misbehaving, and the balls keep low as promised. But Latham is driving and pulling smoothly, as is Williamson, who does so by going down on his knee. At the start of the 13th over, he stays low and bashes Axar Patel through midwicket, and two balls later steps out to loft him over mid-on for six. The next delivery is flat and fast. Williamson lets the ball go past him and taps it on its head past gully. When Wiliamson is not playing these strokes, he is sweeping firmly and wristily. He has scored a half-century, but there is no theatre. The celebrations can wait. New Zealand, though, are breathing more easily at 115 for 1 in 20 overs.That soon changes as Kedar Jadhav dismisses Latham with his Virender Sehwag-esque offbreaks. Jadhavs larger contribution, however, is drawing Taylor out of the dressing room. For the next 10 overs, Taylor is swiping at everything, but mostly air. Attempted cuts are inside-edged and slower ones are missed. The bowlers are now bowling further away from off stump. When one of Taylors desperate swishes lands into the fielders hands, New Zealand have scored only 38 runs in the 10.3 overs since Lathams dismissal.Williamson knows the momentum has been snatched away. The bowling side is on top. He merely looks downwards with one hand on his waist. There is no discernible emotion otherwise. There is Corey Anderson on the comeback trail, and together they attempt to rebuild, brick by brick. As Williamson nears his hundred, the exertions are showing. On a day of unusual injuries - Rohit Sharma later seems to have a bicep cramp - Williamsons forearms are cramping. Massages are given and fluids are administered, literally, as he is not able to hold the bottle.But, Williamson gets back to work, drives crisply to gather the two runs needed for his century. The bat is held up momentarily and the helmet is off, more as a polite thank you than in any sense of accomplishment. Soon, he watches Anderson depart. Not long after, he departs, too, after battling three flanks - Indias tactics, his team-mates inadequacies and his own body.New Zealands last ten overs are a laborious blur and they only just manage a par score. But, as the night comes to a close, the head boy is making his victory speech. Unlike whatever he has done on the field, it is vanilla and free of passion. The good head boy is glad to keep it this way. Basket Nike Sb Pas Cher . Their experience showed Tuesday as the No. 10 Badgers blunted a Saint Louis surge to win 63-57 and advance to face West Virginia in Wednesdays finals of the Cancun Challenge. Nike Sb Pas Cher . MLS Commissioner Don Garber and Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez also will attend the session, which was announced Monday. The league has discussed placing its next two expansion teams in Miami and Atlanta. http://www.paschernikesb.fr/ . By having more great seasons. Manning was the only unanimous choice for the 2013 Associated Press NFL All-Pro team Friday. Increasingly, cricket seems to have just one subject, the subject of time. Cricket fights time, struggles with its changes, but in other ways embraces time, puts time at the heart of its drama. As the autumnal sun, soft and fragile, fell down on Lords at the end of this years County Championship, time in all of these aspects was refracted.The match had finished in the way it might in a kids back-garden imagination: three teams in the fight, two engaged in the battle at crickets HQ, the other watching anxiously on television 170 miles away (and lucky that Sky decided at the last minute to show the game, otherwise theyd have been clustered around a radio…). Within two hours the game moved from the farce of lob-up bowling to a desperate race against the clock and the light, settled at the death by a nerve-rattling hat-trick from an unsung hero. It was particularly, peculiarly English: nostalgic, anachronistic, dreamy, and almost impossible to explain properly to outsiders.The drama had built not just on the last afternoon or during the final round of matches, but across a season that began under iron skies on April 10. Behind that lay history, of Yorkshire, the defending champions; of Middlesex, who had not won the title since 1993, when their current director of cricket was still chuntering in, through wind and rain, from the Nursery End; and of Somerset, who have not held the gold trophy at all since the County Championship was constituted at Lords on December 10, 1889, when the Marquis of Salisbury was prime minister and the Wisden Almanack named six bowlers as its first Cricketers of the Year, among them George Lohmann and Bobby Peel.To compete in the County Championship is to join this great history, this vast story, to feel the weight of Yorkshires 32 titles, Phil Meads 46,268 runs, Tich Freemans 3151 wickets, to stand alongside the deeds of Grace and Hutton and Ramprakash, of King Viv and Big Bird and Dasher Denning, of Clive Radley, Mike Gatting, Vince Van der Bijl; of Imran and Sarfraz and Malcolm Marshall and the thousands of other cricketers who have played across the summers. Its a rich and rare place, and its not too fanciful to suggest that all of those summers played into this one, and offered it meaning and power.Time is sometimes an enemy. The Championship does not fit with modern life. If cricket were being conceived now, it would be in its three-hour form of boozy Friday night crowds and heightened, manic action. The Championship began in the era of steam and has survived until steam punk. It has endured through gllobal schisms and wars from which its players did not return. Nike SB France. . It is cast as crickets crazy old uncle who insists on turning up at the party each year, even though accommodating him and his 18 mates is becoming increasingly inconvenient. This is the story anyway, the one we all know, about county crickets great irrelevance. But as time accelerates and attention spans shorten to mouse-clicks, the internet age has offered something strange and new. A visit to the Championship may be impossible physically, but it is now happening virtually, and it is happening a lot. On digital radio, the BBC broadcast 3889 hours of coverage. Live blogs, including the popular one right here on this site, were read frantically in workplaces and on mobiles. Twitter offers a constant presence. And Lords announced on Sunday that 21,595 people managed to escape their lives and watch the four days of Middlesex versus Yorkshire, making it the biggest crowd for a single Championship game there since May 1966, a time before England won the football World Cup.It is a modern riddle, a metaphor for where were going: the Championship now exists for those who cant watch it but would like to. It retains a purity of competition precisely because it is unfashionable, takes its own sweet time and is not loaded down by the requirements of television and sponsors. Most of its players labour knowing that they have reached the heights that they are going to reach, and that one day they will have to rejoin the real world, for which their current lives cannot prepare them. Its real and human and touching, a quotidian kind of sporting heroism.As each season folds into autumn, some of them ride into the sunset, and they only need look at Twitter or the live blogs to see what they have meant and what they leave behind. Each goes out with a story, be they beloved old warhorses like David Masters and Graham Napier at Essex, or young men who have been granted fleeting careers, like Sussexs remarkable Lewis Hatchett. Others sweat on contract renewals and hunt for gigs in club cricket somewhere in the southern-hemisphere sun to kill another winter.This bittersweetness underpins cricket in England. The County Championship understands time and its challenges, and it has weathered them all. Once youve seen enough summers pass, you come to realise how transient they are and how quickly they come and go. What once seemed endless is over too soon. Wholesale China Jerseys Wholesale Jerseys Wholesale Authentic Jerseys Nike NFL Jerseys China Wholesale Nike Basketball Jerseys Hockey Jerseys China Supply Baseball Jerseys Football Jerseys Sale Authentic College Jerseys MLB Jerseys China Stitched Soccer Jerseys Cheap Jerseys From China Cheap Nike Jerseys ' ' ' 
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