Feb 14: The Queen Victoria Market and Cricket!!!

In the morning we took the bus to tram 19 and rode into Queen Victoria. Here you can buy everything the sun from meat and produce to opals and clothing.  Where else but Australia can you find a butcher shop selling fresh beef, lamb, sausage, humbugger, goat and kangaroo?

Then off to the cricket match.  The was the marquee matchup of Australia vs England and the opening match for both in the 2015 World Cup of cricket.

http://www.icc-cricket.com/cricket-world-cup

14 teams are in the tournament, all from former English colonies.  The only two former colonies not involved were of course the US and Canada.

So who was in the tournament?  England, Scotland, Ireland, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh, West Indies, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, along with New Zealand and Australia.  This serves as a small reminder of the former size of the British Empire.

The stadium is one of the most iconic in the work, the MCG (the Melbourne Cricket Grounds).  It dates back to 1853, although the seating areas have been updated many times, including for the opening and closing ceremonies and many track and field events of the 1956 summer Olympics.  It holds 100,000.  Attendance for this match was announced at 86000.

http://www.mcg.org.au

As luck would have it, we sat next to a very nice man and his family.  He had emigrated to Australia from Holland (where he played baseball as a youth), met and Aussie lass who loved cricket, and the rest was history. But he said he understood our predicament as he was just like us at his first cricket match in 1999.  So we asked him a thousand questions…and after 5 ½ hours of watching (the game lasted another 2 ½ hours), we now understand the basics and even some of the language.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPXAzgwwo0A

Far too complicated to explain here, let me sum up by saying the Aussies “smashed” (the headline in the Melbourne Herald Sun this morning) the English. The score was 342-231, the Aussies batsmen having suffered only 9 wickets in their 50 overs, while the English were “run out “ (10 wickets) in only 41.3 overs!  The star of the game was Aaron Finch who scored 135 runs, hitting 3 sixers (home runs).  Linda loved it and said it was more interesting than baseball as something was always happening, and the 5½ hours went fast!

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2015/feb/14/australia-england-cricket-world-cup-2015-live

John Hurlburt, it is time to form a league!