The Cricket

After a smashing of the Poms in the Ashes cricket (that's five test matches, five days long each - Australia shut them out), I was really looking forward to going to my first live match - a day/night (read: 8 hours) final of the one-day series among Australia, England and NZ. The match ended up being between Australia (of course) and England, and the result was unexpected and depressing. And it rained a few times in the late afternoon and evening, which would have been fine if we'd won...

But even with all that it was a great time! Got to wear the hat I got on Australia Day (read as "Strayaday") and my new green and gold shirt.

And there were lots of characters in the crowd. Evidently melon-heads are common enough at such events (click on the picture to see it full size and check these guys out). I'm still laughing at this one.

I suppose in response to alcohol-fueled misbehaving in the past, they only serve light beer in the stadium. So people go for quantity over quality. This cup-snake is probably only a few overs' worth of cups for our section... The guy in green is a security guy - I don't think any of these people were thrown out, but plenty others were during the day. In the first hour a group in front of us was ejected for drinking bottles of "coke." Yes, security came around and sniffed bottles - perhaps they were tipped off by the unusual amount of passing around of soft drinks.
Alex in our group was more sneaky. His "sunscreen" was 100 proof