The US presidential elections will throw up a surprise, with a gun crazed, conservative, evangelical Christian – who believes the world was created in 1954 to coincide with the rise of Elvis Presley – elected to the position of the second most powerful figure on Earth (after Verinder Sehwag). California will leave the Union in embarrassment.

England will win their first Test series in the sub-continent (with the exception of Bangladesh) since 2001. Perhaps not.

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will be a huge cringe-fest, featuring dance troupe ‘Diversity’ dancing on top of red double-decker buses. The small annoying one will accidentally be thrown off to be run over by a Mini display team, to huge cheers from the crowd.

Another cricketer will be arrested for spot-fixing, to which former Australia captain Ricky Ponting will announce, ‘I can’t understand why anyone would cheat in order to lose, we only cheat in order to win.’ He is dropped shortly after this.

England will have a good summer in Test matches, but a woeful one in one days, the same old people will talk about the same old problem of too much cricket being scheduled.

The Cavendish Cavaliers will have a record-breaking season, drink lots of beer and have lots of fun.

California will declare allegiance the Chinese government, increasing tensions between the US and China. Everyone will start to panic about an imminent war, but then, in December the world ends, so none of it really matters.

Best off just having a really good final year alive aren’t we?

Happy (slightly old now) New Year!

JM

Swann’s book is a good read, the fun loving England spinner has a fantastic sense of humour and some great stories to tell. I’m already well into it and enjoying what Swann has to say about his early experiences with the England team, his move from his beloved Northamptonshire to Nottinghamshire and how it greatly improved his career. Swann also shares some fantastic stories about his alcohol fuelled exploits with other players, including Flintoff. Any fan of Swann’s video diaries from last years Ashes in Australia, will enjoy the book, so I recommend it.

The second book, Australian Autopsy, is by Australian cricket journalist, blogger and Sehwagologist Jrod. His blog cricketwithballs, offers a rather comic look at cricketing news. It’s interesting to read about the 2010/11 Ashes from an Australian perspective, but especially a perspective as unique as Jrod’s. He begins by comparing the series to an imagined ‘Melrose Place’ storyline, where an older brother is constantly beating his young brother all shades of black and blue, before the young brother goes away, shaves his head, joins the marines, toughens up and comes back out for revenge. One night, he confronts his brother, whose muscle has mostly turned to flab, in a bar, and beats him to a pulp, which he beats into a fine dust. He then gets up and does the sprinkler…

If you are after a cricketing read, something that is both interesting and amusing, then I definitely recommend these two books and I’d like to thank my parents and my cousin for buying them for me. Another good cricketing read is Trescothick’s Coming Back to Me, which includes a description of the circumstances that led to him pulling out of the 06/07 Ashes series with depression and his later retirement from international cricket. Jonathan Agnew’s tribute to the late TMS commentator Brian Johnston, Thanks Johnners, is also an entertaining and interesting read.

As the New Year dawns and I begin work on my dissertation I doubt I will have much time over the next few months for cricket related reading. Instead I will focus on my New Years resolution of ‘learn to bat’, which will hopefully take off soon when nets begin. I don’t think reading will help me that much with that one… Not sure there’s a power in the ‘verse that can help me with that one…

Trout is a true Cavalier, the sort of bloke who’d chuck a ball around in the yard with the kids all day. The story of how he became one is too long and odd to even be able to explain properly, but it’s enough to know that if it weren’t such a bloody long way he’d turn out for us every game. So, just to say ‘cheers cobber’, I sent him a Cavaliers shirt so he’d always be one of us. And, in the true spirit of the Cavaliers, he’s only gone and worn it to the Gabba:

And just to put the cherry on the cake, not only has he got a photo of the famous shirt at the Gabba, he’s got a photo with Nathan Hauritz hovering in the background!

It’s very appropriate timing, because as I write this it’s already New Year over there. Hopefully Trout will be dribbling into a cold bottle of VB even as I type, and hopefully he’ll take a moment to raise it to the Cavaliers before he passes out in a celebratory stupor.

And with that, I’d like to wish you all a happy New Year and let’s hope for another great year in 2012.

This recipe is for an ale I made for my brother for Christmas. It’s a very dark ruby beer, very malty and just a little sweet, but with a really nice bite from the hops too.

Ingredients:

• Tin of Cooper’s dark malt extract
• 500g dark spraymalt
• 150g dried elderberries
• 150g sloes (I used dried – if you use fresh double this quantity)
• 50g fuggles hops
• 1kg sugar

Dissolve the sugar in 2 pints of boiling water, add the malt extract and dissolve this in the sugary water. Use a couple of pints of boiling water to wash out the last bits from the tin, then add the spraymalt and mix all into a thick syrup. Top up the vessel to a temperature of 25°.

Stir in your yeast, then add the elderberries, sloes and hops to a muslin bag and either float this in the top like a big teabag or stretch it over your fermentation vessel.

You’ll probably find that because this is quite a heavy beer fermentation will be complete as bit sooner than you’d expect – around 1.010 or so, in fact. Despite this your beer should still be in the range 5.0 to 5.0% using the quantities above.

Enjoy!

He already has his first book, the Ladybird Story of Cricket (thanks to Graeme and Sara), and his first bat (signed by Trescothick, Langer and Caddick):

Needless to say we are absolutely delighted and hopefully we’ll have him opening the batting very soon.

Rich Blagden is my Captain; I shall not dissent.
He maketh me to bowl down green wickets: he guideth me towards the off stump.
He endeth my spell: he sendeth me into the field of deep midwicket for the Cavalier’s sake.
Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of defeat, I will fear no bouncer: for thou art with me; thy bat and thy pads they comfort me.
Thou savest a seat for me in the pavillion of mine enemies: thou rewardest my catch with beer; my cup runneth over!
Surely good lengths and middling shall be with me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the bar of the club for ever.

Amen.

Jon

For those of you who don’t really care how a website works as long as it looks good, WordPress is the engine behind this and many other sites. It’s free, open-source, and there are all kinds of themes plug-ins you can add to your site to make it look good and do clever things (for example, the Met Office and social media stuff you see on this very site). For creating and updating websites, it’s unbeatable and one of my absolute favourite things. What it doesn’t support very well is photos.

As blogging software, it’s mainly designed to do words with the odd image thrown in and, usually, this is fine. Match reports rarely feature more than one or two pictures, and I guess four out of every five words I’ve written here are post-match summaries. On occasion, though, I want to display a whole load of photos, for example after the end of season awards. And the fact is that none of the plug-ins out there are customisable enough, or reliable enough, or look good enough for me to be happy with them on the site. It’s a hell of a lot of work to write a good photo plug-in, and hell to keep it up to date as it has to link in to so many other WordPress features, and the good ones seem to fall by the wayside as amateur developers run out of time to provide support and updates.

So much as it pains me to say it, after five hours of tinkering tonight I gave in to the devil within and uploaded all our images to Facebook. I found a handy little plug-in called Facebook Page Photo Gallery, which pulls photos from our Facebook page and displays them. It isn’t perfect and I don’t end up with an online achive of images as I want and I lose a bit of functionality, but what the hell – it’s simple and anyone in the group can add photos to the albums I create there, and it looks pretty damn good too.

I feel a bit of a failure having given in to the big Facebook beast, though, so if any devs know of a better way that won’t lose me whole evenings trying to do simple tasks I’d love to hear from you.

Tea is very serious business, those clubs that do not take tea seriously are unlikely to get return visits. It is not just the Cavaliers who take tea so seriously, like the game of cricket, tea is governed by a variety of complex and at times baffling laws, which I just made up, a sample of which are included here, for your entertainment.

The rules of tea:

Law 1.1. The tea will be ready when the teams arrive at the pavilion for tea.
Law 1.2. A short wait for tea is acceptable in the event of a surprise batting collapse which leads to a premature end of the first innings.

Law 7.1 The away team will help themselves to tea first.
Law 7.2. The home team hospitality team will not bring the best food out after the away team have already helped themselves.

Law 9.1. Not too much spread on the sandwiches, please.
Law 9.2. If there is too much spread on the sandwiches a member of the home team is to cry out ‘Who made these?’ and complain about the spread. The individual responsible for the excessive spread is then ‘out’ until further notice.
Law 9.3. If a member of the away team cries out ‘Who made these?’ they will be considered rude and will be ‘out’ until further notice.

Law 19.3. There must always be sausage rolls.
Law 19.4. And scotch eggs.
Law 19.5. And cake.
Law 19.6. Lots and lots of cake.

Law 24.1. Cream then jam.
Law 24.2. This law is often broken in Cornwall and other, less civilised, counties and is unfortunately falling out of use.

Law 29.4. If there is chicken, there must be serviettes.

Law 34.1. All players are to, at least pretend to, drink at least one drink other than alcohol during tea. This exists to give some vague impression of taking the game at least slightly seriously.
Law 34.2. The previous law may be broken if it is someone’s birthday.

Jon

It hasn’t until recently, with the addition of billy-goats Jon and Chris, that we’ve sprouted much unusual facial hair, but that seems set to change as the Cavaliers get ready for Movember 2012.

If you haven’t heard of Movember, it’s a charity with an unusual tick. Whereas many charities ask their supporters to wear a ribbon or coloured badge to help promote their cause, Movember is different. ‘Mo Bros’ start the month of November clean-shaven and grow their moustache through the month to raise money and awareness of men’s health – particularly cancers such as prostate or testicular cancer. It’s a noble and fun cause with a serious aim, and one that deserves your support.

I took part last year and had modest success: a reasonably thick, luxuriant ‘tache that went a bit ginger in the sun:

I’m sure we can do better than that, so we have started a Cavaliers team for 2012. If you’d like to join:

1. Go to http://uk.movember.com/
2. Click Register, then Register under New to Movember
3. Choose Join a Team and fill in the rest of the registration form
4. Enter team name Cavendish Cavaliers then Join
5. That’s it, you can add pictures to your MoSpace or whatever if you want.

Hope to see you all there and, if not, please sponsor us and help us raise money for this fantastic cause.

We started off with a good spring in the nets which promised much for the summer ahead. In all we played twenty games and won five, two of the wins coming against good Cockington and Barton teams. We also should have beaten Shaldon on at least one occasion and could have beaten Marldon and Milton-On-Stour with a bit more graft. By the end of the season the likes of Nick and Jon we doing enough to give us encouragement for next season. It’s going to take some work, but if we can keep this top five or six together we can do even better next year.

At the top of the order I felt like I was batting like the skipper should. Not only did I wrest the club record back but I scored over 400 runs at a good average of 24 and was the first past the landmark of 1000 runs for the club. My regular opening partner Mr Chalk had his best year yet with the bat in scoring 222 runs and top-scoring with 48, while Aaron continued his improvement with a marginally better 250 runs at almost 28, with a top score of 52. Karl’s 49 against Cockington remains one of the knocks of the season. Let’s also spare a thought for Meds, whose shoulder problems limited him to half-a-dozen games this year.

Fourth and fifth on the list of runmakers this year were Si (173) and Chris (105) and both were also excellent with the ball. Chris found a new pace and bounce and his 14 wickets were scant return for his efforts, invariably troubling opening batsmen ball after ball. The nine maidens he sent down tell their own story. Si took an astonishing 28 wickets this year, passing his 50 wickets for the club and taking 5-7 against Two Degrees, and was always the bowler I could rely on when things were going wrong. Chip also bowled well in a season disrupted by injury and the arrival of baby Florence, and in among his 14 wickets was the club’s first hat-trick. Kev was exceptionally tidy and like Chris would have probably taken more wickets had he not usually bowled against the top order.

Moreover, however 2012, was the year of the newcomer, and we had plenty of them. Jon Matthews came in and showed potential with bat and ball and is also someone who talks a good game – a spring in the nets and he will be quite an asset. As it was Jon was engaged in a season-long battle with Chris Allen to see who could avoid being out for the most ducks; Chris himself certainly has the right idea, is working on his technique and will hopefully get in among the runs next year. Nick Harrison did well and started to show some batting skill towards the end of the year, and Mick Hinton bowled superbly as well as hitting a few lusty blows down the order. Dave Barlow showed plenty of potential in the few games he played for us.

All in all then, another year of development both as individuals and as a team. Experience and a more settled, committed team have given us confidence. Enjoy the winter and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say nets (starting in February) can’t come round soon enough!