leicsmac

Aussies up for this, leaving a bit in the tackies. Good.

Looking forward to hearing some of the Aussie chants.

But the military are apparently happy to listen to his rhetoric and carry it out if they wish. And some of them certainly appear to be of the same mind. I've grown far too familiar with words of war becoming acts of war over the past few years to simply dismiss what a man like him is saying. Do agree he's rapidly losing friends outside his immediate circle, though.

It really doesn't sound great.

Trying to look up when this England team batted for more than 120 overs.

Ben-Gvir being charming and advocating for thousandfold disproportionate response in Lebanon, then.

The masks have been off for the last few years imo.

It's been thought for at least the last decade that the glaciers of Kashmir are going to become a major vital resource flashpoint.

Yeah, objective moving very quickly from "win match" to "save match". And I'm not sure this group of players have the discipline to bat out 4-5 sessions to do it.

Off to a good start, need to keep creating and taking chances.

Have to get them all out for 250 maximum, then. Possible but tricky.

No idea, if they did it does show why doing it in the first instance isn't a good idea. Great last stand by the tenth wicket pair, this.

It used to be etiquette that you didn't target the head of bowlers batting for the other team in that way because if you did, they would respond in kind. I wonder what Fisher will do if he is bowling to O'Rourke later?

All the scientific knowhow one would expect of this administration.

And it looks like it won't be many.

I'd back this England team to chase anything under 300 and likely half of all things up to 350 in these conditions, so it's just going to come down to how many runs the bowlers will have to play with to keep the target to that amount.

That's a possibility too.

Yep, one thing Trump excels at is finding fall guys to blame, and watching the fallout is going to be funny. An observation on this; if Netanyahu really has some form of compromat on Trump (Epstein related or otherwise), it will be interesting to see how far things may go before he decides he may as well make it public.

In more international news, Vance is now making comment on the Israelis that "you can't kill your way out of every national security issue". That's a bit of a departure from the normally stated theme, I must say. Mind you, Vance has always been a difficult one to pin down exactly. Sometimes there's just the reptile there and sometimes there's something...else.

Interestingly enough, even though polls stated that the combined value of Reform and Restore votes would likely be more than Labour at this one, the actual result had that combined total short by about 6000 votes. Unusual for the pollsters to overvalue Reform's performances, up until now it's been mostly the other way round and they've been underestimated.

...which is the crux of the matter and, of course, what a few people seem to apparently fear. In spite of every viable stated other option at the present time being demonstrably worse. Anyhow, reasonably routine win in the end. Leadership challenge to follow imminently?

Yeah, that is a little odd. My own thoughts is that it's considered a foregone conclusion, so there's not much to discuss until Burnham actually arrives in no.10.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3vy5l62622o Kegsbreath in being hypocritical and condescending on matters of killing people- sorry, "defence" shocker.

Some good news: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c621z28z138o Children vaccinated at age 12–13 against HPV (human papillomavirus) have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, landmark new research reveals. The first study of its kind, external shows deaths have fallen sharply since school-age girls began being offered it in 2008, and around 200 lives have been saved in England so far thanks to the vaccine. Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 - the first time that had happened over a five-year period. Not bad for a vaccine some leading lights in other nations decry as "entirely unsafe".

Brook taking seven balls to get his eye in before going for a haymaker, then. Unusually restrained for the man.