Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Faulty Memory -> Spot-on Foreshadowing

Caught the second innings of today's one-dayer between New Zealand and England at Napier, with the Black Caps needing 341 to win. As far as I can remember, I've had a sharp memory for inconsequential trivia, and I normally don't mess up a recollection. As I was watching the game, I seemed to recall that Napier had hosted 2 tied games in the past (For those who know what happened in today's game: at this point NZ were 230-odd for 2 and cruising), NZ tying with England and Zimbabwe. Out of curiosity, I dug up the list of tied games on Cricinfo , and found that there had been 22 tied games in history, but only one in Napier (26 Feb 97). Admittedly, I was not too happy about that, but hell, it's not the first thing I've forgotten or remembered wrong anyway :P

As it turned out, Napier DID become only the second venue to appear twice on that list tonight, nearly 11 years to the day after the same two teams had tied! Today's game was also the highest scoring tie in history, and to convey an idea of how rare it is, only 23 out of 2682 one-dayers played have ended with scores level; that is 1 in every 117 games. And even though what I remembered was wrong, it didn't take too long for that to be set right :D

Great game, BTW, and do catch the highlights if you get a chance. Super bowling at the death by Sidebottom, Anderson and Wright negated the amazing innings of How, who made a dominating 139 off 116 balls.