ERST LESEN! » ischief, there is no evidence of it. Cricket fan

Sauber boss Monisha Kaltenborn says the teams vital result at the Brazilian Grand Prix proved it is moving in the right direction.Felipe Nasr finished ninth in Brazil for a valuable two points, moving Sauber above Manor for tenth position in the multi-million dollar battle for 10th in the championship. Manor had occupied that position since Pascal Wehrlein snatched a point at the Austrian Grand Prix in July.Sauber has undergone some radical changes since being acquired by Longbow Finance before the summer break, with the recent signing of technical chief Jorg Zander one of a number of personnel additions in recent months. Kaltenborn thinks the Brazil result proves those changes are having the right impact on the team.We know theres one more race, a lot can happen so theres no need to take it that easy [in Abu Dhabi], Kaltenborn told Sky Sports. Yes this is a very important race for us, it proves the direction we are going is right and sometimes you just needed that little bit of luck as well.We did everything right, the driver did a fantastic job, the team was right in their decisions and then we had that little bit of luck as well and managed to get these points.It proved to be a nervy race for Sauber, with Felipe Nasr sat as high as sixth early in the race, with both Manor drivers also lower down in the points at the time of the final race stoppage. Eventually Nasr did what he needed to claim a result he later claimed was like a victory for the team.Kaltenborn admits it made for a nervy afternoon on the pit wall. [It was] very tense because you never knew what was going to happen and we didnt want to get involved in anything. For us it was just hanging on in there, being there, and making sure that if anything comes or happens, we are in that race. Manor was taking exactly that kind of approach and they were not far behind. There was pressure from all sides.Jarrod Dyson Jersey . Hey!" The lower tier of the School End of Queens Park Rangers Loftus Road was packed solid with a very festive-sounding Chelsea choral section in this particular part of South Africa Road London, W12. Wilmer Flores Diamondbacks Jersey . Burke is expected to miss two to three months after breaking a finger in the teams third preseason game. Tinsley, a 10-year veteran, spent the last two seasons in Utah, where the point guard averaged 3. http://www.diamondbackssale.com/diamondbacks-alex-avila-jersey/ . Fellow centre Pavel Datsyuk remains out because of a concussion. Zetterberg has 11 goals and 19 assists for a team-high 30 points, and Datsyuk has a team-high 12 goals and 11 assists. Steven Souza Diamondbacks Jersey .ca looks back at the stories and moments that made the year memorable. Robbie Ray Jersey . -- Matt Ryan needed one of the best games of his career to lead the Falcons and their depleted offence out of their three-game losing streak last week.When I was a boy my parents told me the first cricket match I ever attended - between two English villages in Kent - was interrupted by a dogfight between Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe aircraft during the Battle of Britain. Later, when a college student in Baroda in Gujarat, I was told by my old teacher Chanchi Mehta that the first cricket played in India was along the shoreline near Surat.Cricket has a store of stories, some told and retold, others never told. I am probably one of those who has spent a lifetime scribbling because as a boy it became clear I was incompetent at pretty well everything I tried: to adapt the old adage, those who can, do; those who cant, write.Cricket, for example. I loved cricket but was so shortsighted I could not see the ball, my sole batting stroke a forward poke. At least using a pen I can manage a few late cuts. I had a good education in literary and historical studies, and those studies had originally been incorporated into the educational system at the same time as the rise of the detective story: Sherlock Holmes has a lot to answer for; even the Dr Watsons such as I cannot resist following the clues and trying to solve the putative mysteries.So what about those two cricketings my elders told me about? What happened when the Luftwaffe interrupted the village match? Where was the first cricket played in India and by whom? My research into that 1721 game was by way of tribute to my old teacher in Baroda, and that into the 1940 match a similar tribute to my journalist father - as well, possibly, as a search for a fragment of my own irrecoverable childhood, being then little more than a small creature on my parents shoulders.Kent, 1940 At any time during my parents lifetimes I could have asked them and many others about the match our village, Farningham, played at Shoreham in the Darent valley in August 1940, but 70 years on, all of them were dead. The story was lost. Almost.My first piece of luck was finding the scorebook. Years before, I had seen it in the pub at Shoreham kept by four generations of a cricketing family named (happily) Summerfield. But they were long gone, somewhere down on the Weald, the original home of cricket. Several numbers into Summerfields in the telephone book, I found the fifth generation: they still had the scorebook.Scores: Farningham (playing one short) 80 for 5 with one opening batsman retired. Shoreham, 106 for 9. The invaluable ball-by-ball record of the match included a unique thickly scored pencil line in the home side bowling analysis, denoting the air-raid interruption to the match, but there was no mention of a declaration to account for Farninghams foreshortened innings.This curiosity of the scoresheet was explained by an item my cousin luckily discovered in the local newspaper for the following week. Under the heading Raid Stopped Play there was an anonymous censored report (all names eliminated) but clearly written by my father about this match.The players, intent on the game, had not heard the air-raid siren nor the sounds of an aerial battle to the north that caused an umpire to halt proceedings at the end of an over. Retiring to the pavilion, four of the visiting Farningham players, including the captain, who was batting, declared that, as members of the newly formed Home Guard, they should return home to deal with the (usually incendiary) fallout from the raid. Shoreham lost only one player, a special constable.Having failed to invade England that summer, the Nazis were about to begin the Blitz of London. A fine day for cricket was also a fine day for 300 German planes to launch a raid up the Thames. Although Kent was littered with discarded bombs and crippled aircraft after such raids, the remainder of the depleted Farningham team obviously decided it was at least as important to see off Shoreham as the Germans. My fathers article blamed Hitler for their eventual defeat.Cambay, 1721 Details of a cricket match in 1940 are still within reach: to discover anything about cricket in India in 1721 is more difficult. No scorebook, no newspaper reports. No maps, few documents. The cricket receives only a mere mention in a book written by a rather unreliable able seaman, Clement Downing.While Downing says nothing about the actual cricket in his book, A History of the Indian Wars - which details naval life on the west coast of India while the Marathas challenge Mughal power and the East India Company clings on to little Bombay - he says a lot about the circumstances of it.Downing tells of a naval expedition in the Gulf of Cambay that, having missed the spring tides that would have taken them into Cambay, was forced to lay up for nearly a fortnight at a place whhere they diverted themselves with cricket and other exercises.dddddddddddd. Downing got many Indian names wrong and threw historians with his reference to a non-existent Gujarati place called Chimnah/w, about 30 miles from Cambay. The details of its hydrography, combined with two other references he makes to the place, determine that he can only be talking about the cotton-producing Jambusar pargana (sub-division) with its port at the Tankari bunder on the Dhadhar river.Two country-built ships, the Company sloop the Emilia, on which Downing was serving as a lieutenant, and the Hunter galley, were sent in December 1721 to protect small merchant vessels from further attack by pirates - Kolis from Sultanpur and other local Kathiawar navies. The East India Company records from Surat (though incomplete) and Bombay support our guesswork.But who was playing? We know from Company records the Emilia had a complement of 20, of which Downing tells us three were white men. The Hunter had a complement of 80, and we might again expect a common ratio on the country craft of seven Indians to one European. Given that the two captains took some men up to Cambay in a gallivat, we might guess there remained on the riverside some 20 or so Europeans and 40 or more Indians.All this information is necessary because historians have assumed only English sailors played in this instance. It may be so. Or it may not. Apart from the overwhelming number of Indians, consider for a moment Downings remark that the cricket was part of a whole series of exercises and that these went on for nearly a fortnight.Although the game of cricket was only just emerging from the shadows in England at this time - as the gentry started to lay bets on individual matches - the earliest references to it have it as the leading part of other plays. This is true too of country fairs like that at Meopham in Kent. Kents first big aristocratic patron, Lord John Sackville, not only promoted individual matches but also cricketalia (cricket and other things).On the banks of the Dhadhar, cricket was apparently the leading one of many exercises. Were the exercises drill or recreation? All Indians residing in Bombay at this time were required to do bi-monthly drills - unless, as conscientious objectors, they paid a hefty indemnity. Paid servants in the Companys marine would surely be required to take part in all the exercises.How formal was the cricket? The earliest surviving records of Company cricket (dating from a full century later) show Indians and Brits playing cricket together in teams captained by junior officers, but while it is possible that the Dhadhar saw Lieut. Rathbones XI v Lieut. Stevens XI, it was probably a great deal more informal. Cricket, though already played in teams of 11, was a matter, as a Swiss traveller to England put it in 1728, of men going into a large open field (without boundaries) and knocking a small ball about with a piece of (curved) wood.The Companys men fully expected a raid to stop play. Instead the Kolis, and no doubt other communities as well, came down every day to watch. At a time when, as Downing shows, the Kolis invariably figured as the object of punitive expeditions, the cricketing proved so disarming that the Companys men (including their own Kolis) set off in search of Christmas provisions and treat and trade to everyones satisfaction.Although one of the interpreters (perhaps officiously) warned that several Kolis wielding swords meant them mischief, there is no evidence of it. Cricket fans might be tempted to believe that the Kolis, like their near-namesake Virat Kohli, were simply practising the sweeping strokes they had been observing all fortnight. The link There may even be a link between our two cricketings. Dartford, the town at the end of the Darent valley where the 1940 match was played, was said in 1723 to have the best cricketers in England. It is also the town where the Darent runs into the Thames and it was along this Kent shore that crews were recruited for the East Indiamen: cricket on the Dhadhar could well have originated with men from these parts.Shoreham itself appears among the earliest references to cricket, in court records: in the 17th century the only notice taken of the peoples game is when the Law (concerning trespass, rape or the sabbath) is broken. Matches such as ours provide glimpses of the lost history of ordinary people, whether Kentishmen or Kolis. As it happens, on both these occasions the cricket presents itself as a preferable alternative to war, the staple of official history. ' ' '