…who is usually as reliable as that bloke in the green polo shirt down your local in providing some lazy assessment of the day’s most widely discussed sporting matter. Today he manages to cram ten clichés (two, possibly three, of them misapplied) and three uses of the phrase “in terms of” into a half-page article about current England-Australia cricket rivalry, an article my dad could have dictated in fifteen minutes while doing the Guardian crossword and putting out some bedding plants—and at least I’d have considered my dad’s version worthy of some lively disagreement afterwards.
I’m sure Selvey is charming in person, but his written output annoys me so much that, if someone offered me one free custard pie throw and the two smuggest faces on the front of The Guardian‘s sport section today, his and Michael Schumacher’s, then my head would explode.
As you say, it’s probably down to laziness. A couple of years ago I had cause to complain to the Guardian about an article in which Mr Selvey used some statistics which were , to put it mildly, inaccurate, to support one of his arguments. The same figures, incidentally, were used by Radio Five’s Jonathan Agnew, but I’m not sure who used them first. My complaint to the Guardian was met with silence, as was my complaint to Radio Five.
It’s a game of two innings Brian, but it’s still early doors and the boy Hoggard’s got a good engine on him, even though he’s quite literally got a mountain to climb.
“Bill tells me that this is the first time that two, possibly three, clichés have been misapplied on an October Saturday since Peter May did it at the Oval in 1959. More cake Blowers?”