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Listed below are comments made by Flippedout between Friday, 27th June 2008 and Thursday, 6th November 2008.

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Hey Microsoft, Yahoo thinks you should buy it 5:35pm on 06 Nov 2008 Mr Yang looks like Moss from the Graham Lineham sitcom The IT Crowd, as played by Richard Ayoade: perhaps that might cheer him a little.
ICC looks to build consensus on Zimbabwe 12:43pm on 27 Jun 2008 As sports fans (or journalists) diplomacy and international politics are perhaps not our forte, but there is a consensus emerging.

We put daily challenges or troubles aside to share in a joyous unreality that what matters in the moment is the grace, guile, skill or gritty determination of 22 players. We admire great play and see in its exponents’ endeavours a guiding metaphor for our selves individually and as nations.

On the pitch, at its best, cricket demonstrates values — in its fair play, equality of opportunity, and collective effort toward a common end — and qualities that at times can be elusive in our daily lives.

Sporting contact between peoples helps us learn about each other, and learn to respect and admire the nuances of different cultural characters through its players. Even in troubled times a nation can set aside its own problems to pull together a representative team who may briefly stand for the best qualities of its peoples. These players can, perhaps unwittingly, reflect their peoples’ aspirations for a calm equitable stasis that allows reasonable freedom of self-expression. They can also help nations meet to start to reconcile their differences; that said there needs to be some stable common ground upon which relationships can be built. Regrettably, the lack of political order in Zimbabwe has left it in such an appalling mess that even the cultural diplomacy benefits of cricket are negated.

It is useful to have a nation independent organisation to protect and promote the spirit of the game, but they have to exercise this responsibility. Teams should be suspended if its clear that their nation cannot produce a representative team that might preserve the spirit of the game or offer its peoples opportunities to participate at grass-roots level and to develop and progress on merit. Zimbabwe has reached this point, and its got nothing to do with its national teams’ ability to compete.

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