The cultural morass we inhabit

Insidiously, unnoticed, something has infiltrated our collective consciousness. I speak, of course, of the word 'awww', in its multifarious, multiple-doubleyoued avatars. It's everywhere, waiting to make you cringe and bemoan the cultural morass we inhabit.

Cricket commentary, I noted happily - apart from Shane Warne's entirely acceptable "Aw, look mate," which possesses none of the fluttery-eyelashed connotations of its more copiously-doubleyoued cousins - was about the only thing in the universe free of its pernicious influence.

Until today, that is, when it emerged without warning from the unexpected lips of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, when Gautam Gambhir drove Muttiah Muralitharan down the ground just after lunch.

Life as we know it will never be the same again.

...and one who loves it passionately

From a lovely Gideon Haigh article that materialised today on Cricinfo :

"Murali's greatness rests only partly on his capacity to set the ball in motion: there is his accuracy, his keen grasp of batting weakness, his encyclopaedic knowledge of opponents, his unflagging love for a game that has on occasion treated him pretty unkindly. In his affable autobiography, Bully For You, Oscar (2000), Ian Austin, provides a lovely vignette of Murali's assimilation at Lancashire.

I've never known anyone who knew so much about cricket - or anyone who could talk about the game for so long. There's a hell of a lot of international cricket being played all year round these days, but Murali knew all about it. He knew more about Lancashire's record than Lancashire players themselves. We'd be sitting in the dressing room or in the bar in the evening at an away game and he'd suddenly start talking about one of our games from years back. He'd know all the facts and figures and couldn't believe that the rest of us didn't remember every last dot and comma of the game he was talking about."