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This was certainly a day for the bowlers, with the likes of Corey Anderson and Daniel Vettori pushing themselves up the individual leaderboards with three wickets each. Josh Davey worked quickly to catch a triple of his own, a minor highlight during a poor showing for the Scots.

Matt Machan’s match-high of 56 runs didn’t see him impact the batting charts on a day where, if you came to see sixes, you would have been disappointed. Just two balls were hoicked over the boundary throughout the encounter which saw New Zealand roll on.

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When it makes its first appearance in the competition at the Manuka Oval in Canberra on Wednesday (February 18), the challenge before Afghanistan is to ensure that it follows Ireland’s path when it comes to World Cup debutants.

Much has been made of its victory over Bangladesh at the last Asia Cup in 2014, but the Afghans will be well aware that their opponent was without Shakib Al Hasan, its best player, and Tamim Iqbal, its most explosive batsman, at the time. Bangladesh may have had an indifferent build-up, but there is plenty of skill in the ranks and an experienced core, which always helps at the big tournaments.

The conditions will also be completely different. The Manuka Oval has hosted just three matches since South Africa and Zimbabwe played there during the 1992 World Cup, but the pitch will certainly offer more by way of pace and bounce than that Asia Cup surface. That should help Afghanistan, who has a pace attack capable of worrying more heralded sides. Hamid Hassan has taken 22 wickets in his last ten ODIs, while the Zadrans – Shapoor and Dawlat – offer a different sort of test. Mirwais Ashraf also bowled tidily in the warm-up against India.

Bangladesh, so used to relying on spin in home conditions, will also go in with three pacers. Mashrafe Mortaza remains the standard-bearer, but Taskin Ahmed is an exciting prospect, and they are likely to be joined by one of the Hossains. The vastly more experienced Rubel should get the nod over Al-Amin.

For spin, Bangladesh will rely on Taijul Islam and Mahmudullah in addition to Shakib, who remains its most reliable player by a distance. Afghanistan struggled against the Indian spinners, and even on a relatively quick pitch, it should surprise no one if Bangladesh opts to try and exploit its spin strengths.

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BEAMER A bean ball, bowled at the batsman’s head.

DIBBLY-DOBBLY A slow, not particularly good bowling effort.

DUCK A score of zero, named thus because a zero is shaped like a duck’s egg. A duck on the first ball is a golden duck. Two ducks in the same game by the same batter are a pair. Two golden ducks are a king pair.

DUCKWORTH-LEWIS An insanely complicated method for determining the winner if a match is stopped by rain. Makes the old Bowl Championship Series rankings seem like simple arithmetic.

FOUR A ball that is batted out of the playing area, worth four runs. If it goes out on the fly, it is a six.
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Mirwais Ashraf of Afghanistan training last month. The country will compete in the World Cup, cricket’s biggest international tournament.
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GOOGLY O.K., pay attention. If a bowler who ordinarily spins the ball toward a right-handed batsman instead spins it away from him (and vice versa for a left-handed batsman), that’s called a googly. And if a bowler who normally spins it away from a right-handed batsman spins it toward him, that’s a doosra.
HANDLED BALL One of the most obscure laws in the cricket rule book. A batsman who deliberately touches the ball with the hand not holding the bat is out. This has happened only nine times in international cricket history, most recently in 2001, when Michael Vaughn of England absent-mindedly brushed a ball that had landed at his feet.

NELSON A score of 111, possibly named because of the belief that Adm. Horatio Nelson had only one eye, one arm and one leg. (Nelson actually had two legs.) Scoring a Nelson is considered unlucky.

NO BALL Sort of like a tennis foot fault, when the bowler steps over the line.

RABBIT The worst batsman on the team. Quite likely to make a duck.

SILLY MID OFF A close-in fielding position. Not to be confused with the dozens of other fielding positions, including fine leg, gully, fly slip, extra cover and cow corner. Definitely don’t confuse it with silly mid on. That’s on the other side.

SITTER An absolutely easy catch. Don’t drop a sitter!

SLEDGING Trash talking. Despite cricket’s polite reputation, quite a lot of sledging goes on, sometimes picked up by on-field microphones.

SLOG SWEEP A flamboyant shot in which the batsman goes down to one knee and hammers the ball essentially behind himself in a bid for a six.

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In spite of its many follies, it’s the rare sports game that lures you into the zone of thinking “just one more over” and then you find yourself in front of your TV half awake at six in the morning. It expertly traps you into this cycle, tempting you into just a little more, until you sacrifice any semblance of a life outside it.
How does it manage all this? By being unpredictable. Most cricket games that have followed Codemasters’ excellent Brian Lara Cricket ’96 have used the same basic control scheme. Bowlers and batsmen both have a limited selection of strokes to choose from – the system is more fluid than menu based combat in Japanese role-playing games, but it still boils down to a scientific game of picking moves and counter-moves. These games get predictable all too quickly, and because of this, they get boring quickly too.

That is not to say Don Bradman lacks a set of rules. But here, they’re camouflaged thanks to the game’s controls. In most cricket games, the controls are made explicit, and this reduces the game to just a few options, and a kind of rock-paper-scissors battle between the batsmen and bowlers as you try and pick the correct counter to trump the opposition. What Don Bradman Cricket does is hide the controls, and make the game feel more organic.

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The No. 3 scorer in NBA history will make his decision after another consultation with a team doctor Monday, the Lakers announced Friday. For The Win spoke with Subir Jossan, a Virginia-based sports medicine surgeon focused on the upper body and treasurer for The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics, about Bryant’s injury and options.

How bad is a rotator cuff tear?

“The rotator cuff is comprised of several muscles that allow you to move your shoulder in different directions. Tearing the tendon attached to those muscles means … you won’t be able to move your shoulder without pain or dysfunction.

“Normally if the tendon is torn completely, they need surgery. But sometimes the tendon is partially torn from the bone or frayed. … I kind of describe this to patients as the rotator cuff is like a bed sheet fitted to a mattress. If the bed sheet is tucked well, you’ll lift the mattress. … If you untuck the rotator cuff, the bed sheet, it won’t lift up the mattress (arm) properly.”

What is surgery like, and how long is the rehab?

“If he has a full tear, it’s a long rehabilitation and he is out for the season. There’s the initial surgery, the post-op phase doing just motion exercise with a therapist, where you have someone else moving your arms to keep you limber for six weeks. Usually for overhead athletes, it’s a minimum of six months before you can return to your sport, and that’s not even the top level of your sport. It may take a little bit longer. … But with pro athletes, the rehabilitation can be accelerated (because they do more rehab every day).”
How would you advise him?

“It really comes down to, can you perform with a rotator cuff tear at that level? The pain is going to force him to do something, surgery or not. … With competitive athletes, they’re nuts and they’re driven. I would expect him, even if it’s surgically, to fix it and try to perform again. The psyche of an elite athlete, they’re warriors. They jump back into battle.”

Could he play without surgery?

“The real question is, what does the MRI show in how significant it is? … He would basically have to have conditioning exercises, extra care for the muscles, anti-inflammatory medicine and maybe cortisone shots to help with the pain. But to perform at that level, even a partial tear may sideline him.

“We operate on partial tears, too. Go in, clean things up. … At that elite level, it’s six weeks till you’re doing major weight training, and at three months, you could be back playing basketball. It’s a much shorter rehab, and that’s a big deal.”

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Whereupon Bickford said he hung up the phone, because it was a package deal.
Bickford knew Gordon and Evernham already had great chemistry and would be successful together. He didn’t want Gordon to have to start over with a new crew chief.
Roush called back and said there must have been a problem with the phone and Bickford said, no, he had hung up on Roush deliberately.
Upon hearing that, Roush went on to explain that if he was making the expensive and potentially risky investment in a promising, but unproven young talent, he had to have the comfort level of hiring the crew chief himself. That was the way Roush always worked in the past and the way he was going to work in the future.

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Lynch kept his references vague, not even using the words “NFL” or “league,” and he certainly didn’t say who the teammate was. Most people, however, have deduced Lynch is referring to wide receiver Chris Matthews, who indeed touched hands with Lynch after the running back scored in the fourth quarter.

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The junior portion of the championships wrapped up on what was Day 7 in Greensboro, North Carolina, with winners declared in the junior men’s, dance and ladies’ competitions.

After building a nearly 11-point lead following the short programs, Andrew Torgashev didn’t rest on his laurels and instead lapped the competition with a brilliant 149.63 in his free skate. He finished with a final score of 225.24, which set a record, per U.S. Figure Skating:

“I was a bit surprised myself, but then I thought, why do I have to be surprised?” said Torgashev after his victory, per Craig Davis of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I’ve been doing that in practice for the last four weeks.”

The battle for second place was rather close, with Kevin Shum beating out Paolo Borromeo and Aleksei Krasnozhon by 3.06 and 3.14 points, respectively.

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Twenty-three years ago, when the then-reigning national champion attempted to defend her title, she performed to a baffling mix of the Robin Hood score, jazz saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Europa,” and “Sleeping Bag” by ZZ Top. It wouldn’t be the grandest imbroglio of the skater’s career – what with the later whack attack on Nancy Kerrigan – but at the time, with Harding’s teased tuft of bangs flopping in the wind, a torso’s worth of gold-sequin snowflake appliqués flying over the ice and ZZ Top crackling from a faltering sound system, her performance was transfixing, if not dazzling.

The year before, Harding had also skated to a peculiar cut that veered anarchically between snatches of musical genres, and part of the excitement of watching her compete derived from this mysterious incoherency. One moment, Harding might be plowing down the ice toward a triple Axel, a blonde, badass chevalier, the next, working her neck to the call of early Nineties percussion. A Harding program was something like a malfunctioning iPod Shuffle, and it was thrilling. Today, its wild card musical styling remains a rarity in the skating world, with skaters favoring reiterations of Swan Lake, Carmen and, perhaps lacking prescience, “Nessun Dorma” (“None Shall Sleep”). Hence: lyrics.

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Fog on the upper part of the course forced organizers to delay the race by two hours, and then significantly lower the start gate as conditions failed to improve.

In the shortest downhill in World Cup history, Jansrud clocked 58.16 seconds — half the time usually needed on the 3.3-kilometer (2-mile) course — to edge Dominik Paris by 0.02. The Italian won the super-G on the same course Friday.

Guillermo Fayed of France came 0.21 behind in third.

“‘Kitzbuehel champion’ sounds really cool,” Jansrud said. “I wasn’t happy that we started from the Seidlalm as my best part is the upper part of the hill. It’s an amazing day, a huge victory for me.”

With this third downhill win of the season, Jansrud became the first Norwegian winner on the Streif since Lasse Kjus 11 years ago.

The Norwegian closed the gap on overall World Cup leader Marcel Hirscher, who doesn’t compete in downhill, to 82 points. However, the Austrian has two slaloms coming up — in Kitzbuehel on Sunday and nearby Schladming on Tuesday — to extend his lead.

Paris came just short of his second win in two days.

“Those two-hundredths annoy me a bit,” said the Italian, who won the downhill two years ago. “But it’s great to be on the podium. The race was great. Even with the shorter run, it was a fair race.”

American Steven Nyman, who won the downhill in Val Gardena last month, was 0.41 back in fifth, and Olympic champion Matthias Mayer of Austria trailed Jansrud by 0.47 in 10th.

Last year’s winner Hannes Reichelt of Austria finished 1.23 off the lead and shared 34th with Swiss skiers Mauro Caviezel and 2009 winner and 2010 Olympic champion, Didier Defago, who raced the Streif for the last time before retiring at the end of the season.

Foggy clouds hanging over the top section of the course limited visibility, making it potentially dangerous for skiers who reach speeds of up to 140 kph (90 mph).

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