Profile: Andrew Simons

No player in Australia generates the amount of excitement that Andrew Symonds does when he walks out to bat. In fact, he can't even walk down the street without attracting a crowd, at least in the cricket world.

He rocketed to cult hero status in the one-day form of the game, but 2007-08 was a watershed year as he built on the substantial progress made in late 2006-07 to virtually doubled his Test batting average from 20-40.

With Australian having a rare winter without Test cricket, it did not slow the momentum that Symonds had generated in the final two Tests of the 06-07 Ashes series.

He played his first Test on his home ground at the Gabba against Sri Lanka in November 2007 and caressed a stylish 53 not out off 61 balls in Australia's only innings. He chimed in with 1-10 and 1-21 with limited overs at the bowling crease.

He followed that up with an unbeaten 50 off 71 balls in the second Test in Hobart, but was not required to bowl after injuring himself running between the wickets.

Symonds was fine for the Boxing Day Test against arch rivals India and made a fluent 35, before exploding in Sydney. With Australia in trouble at 6-134, he pummeled 162 not out to help the side to 463.

He courted controversy, however, by admitting in the press conference after the second day of the match that he had edged a catch behind when on 30, the umpire turning down the appeal.

Symonds went on to take three valuable wickets on the final day to finish with 3-51 as Australia conjured victory in the shadows of stumps to take an unbeatable 2-1 series lead.

With the Australian players' antics questioned by many of their own supporters, Symonds was more subdued in Perth, but he still top scored in the first innings with 66.

Symonds finished the series tied in the aggregate on 418 runs with close mate Matthew Hayden, and chipped in with nine handy wickets.

He was not as destructive in the Commonwealth Bank one-day series, which was a relief to India after he slaughtered them on home soil in the seven-match series on the sub-continent in October 2007.

Symonds was dynamite, blasting 87, 89, 75 and 107no in consecutive innings to be the highest runscorer of the tournament.

However, he was again at the centre of controversy after some fiery early exchanges with Sreesanth. In the latter matches Indian crowds were accused of making insulting monkey gestures towards Symonds.

The controversy lingered all summer, with Symonds accusing Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh of calling him a monkey during the Sydney Test.

After Harbhajan was initially suspended by the match referee, he was allowed to play on appeal and was eventually virtually exonerated by a panel that sat after the final Test in Adelaide. The fallout, where the Australian team believed they received a serious lack of support from their own Board, saw a gulf open between the playing group and Cricket Australia management.

There was a gold-plated lining to the end of the 2007-08 season for Symonds, who was 'auctioned' to the Hyderabad-based Deccan Chargers in the Indian Premier League for a staggering $1.4million per season.

It came after a 2006-07 season where Symonds was able to make that final giant leap of faith and establish himself in the Test team.

It took several strokes of fortune for it all to even occur. Firstly, first choice Australian all-rounder and teammate Shane Watson broke down twice with hamstring problems in the lead-up and during the Ashes series, ultimately not being fit to play a game. Then middle order batsman Damien Martyn stunned the country by hurriedly retiring after the Second Test in Adelaide.

With some calling for NSW opener Phil Jaques to be included, and West Australian Adam Voges added to the national squad, Symonds narrowly earned the nod on the selectors' desire to continue to find a quality all-rounder.

Scores of 26 and two in the Perth Test were hardly worldbeaters, but Symonds did take 2-8 from four overs in an impressive short first innings spell. The selectors maintained the faith for the 2006-07 Boxing Day Test in Melbourne and were repaid in full.

With Australia languishing at 5-84 in their first innings, Symonds blasted 156 and compiled a gamebreaking 279-run partnership with Bulls teammate and friend Matthew Hayden. It was easily the biggest partnership at Test level by two Queenslanders.

Symonds batted with great composure throughout the innings, and his whoops of joy and leap into Hayden's arms after powering a towering six over the sightscreen to register his breakthrough century will long be remembered by all those who saw it.

While it was Shane Warne's' farewell 'home' Test, it was very much a welcome to the big time for Symonds.

He struck another composed 48 in the following Test in Sydney to show he has unlocked the door to playing the right game in the cauldron of the Test arena.

He continued to be a threat in the international one-day game and averaged 43.5 during the Australian summer ODI series against England and New Zealand, before tearing the bicep muscle from the bone on the eve of the finals in January 2007.

His loss certainly contributed to Australia's downfall in the finals against England, and he made a remarkable recovery to play in Australia's third game of the World Cup against South Africa in mid-March.

Symonds finished with 189 runs at 63 in the World Cup, with Australia going through their 11 matches unbeaten. He made 23 not out off 21 balls in the final against Sri Lanka as Australia made 4-281 in Bridgetown, and took 1-6 off two overs bowling in near dark.

As a teenager, Symonds was wildly gifted, but there were fears he would not enjoy fulfillment as there were too many shots and too many options. Carried by the buzz of boundaries, his demise would often come as he attempted to launch another ball into another suburb.

In the past five seasons he has usually chosen the right plan, and it has paid off spectacularly as his muscle has dominated the globe's best teams. Until 2003, Symonds had been in and out of the national one-day side in a similar manner as his State team-mates Michael Kasprowicz and Andy Bichel.

He had played 54 matches for two half-centuries, considered asking Brisbane Broncos coach Wayne Bennett for a shot at rugby league and, following a poor one-day tri-series, did not expect to win a place at the 2003 World Cup.

Again, an injury to Watson, who is still a friend and opponent for the national all-rounder's berth, and a hunch from Ricky Ponting allowed Symonds' passage to South Africa for a tournament that would change his life.

Arriving with Australia 4-86 in their first match against Pakistan, Symonds batted with Ponting, his supportive captain, to stabilise the innings and then battered at a rarely seen level as he toyed with Waqar, Wasim and Shoaib to blast his maiden one-day century. With 18 fours and two sixes, Symonds remained unbeaten on 143 from 125 balls, the highest score by an Australian at a World Cup at that point in time, and Australia reached 310 on the way to a comfortable victory.

He would play crucial roles throughout the tournament, including an unbeaten 91 in the semi-final against Sri Lanka, and was a central figure in the trophy-winning success. Since that final in Johannesburg, Symonds has been a first-choice limited-overs player and the only blemishes have come with a two-game suspension in England in 2005 and a nagging thigh injury in South Africa.

The 2005-06 summer was a huge one for Symonds as he thrashed three centuries his 156 v New Zealand boasted eight sixes; his 151 in the second VB Series Final came from 127 balls; and the unbeaten 103 added Bangladesh to his hit list.

Totaling 864 runs at 50.82 in 2005-06, he also gathered 21 wickets in 22 games. They are figures that show him as arguably the side's most important player, an assessment which comes without a calculation to gauge his fielding and catching.

In 2004-05, he was the Australian One-Day Player of the Year and would have repeated the win in 05-06 if he hadn't ruled himself ineligible for breaching team protocol in Cardiff during the England tour. He responded from the suspension with two Man-of-the-Match efforts in the next couple of contests, including career-best figures of 5-18 against Bangladesh.

Symonds announced himself to the international market during a stint at the English county Gloucestershire when he was 20. Playing against Glamorgan, he thrashed a world-record 16 sixes in his 254 at Abergavenny and added another four in the second innings to set another new mark for sixes in a match. The performance, coupled with the 108 he had taken off the Ashes tourists the previous summer for the Bulls at Toowoomba, began a push for Symonds, who was born in Birmingham, to play for England, but he wanted only to bat for Australia.

He won a one-day debut in Pakistan in 1998 and waited another six years for his first Test, which came as an all-rounder in Sri Lanka. Appearing in two matches without success, he was recalled in 05-06 as the national selectors looked at ways to mirror the brutal 2005 Ashes performances of Andrew Flintoff.

The best of his eight consecutive matches came at the MCG in December 2005 as he fought to prove he could star under the Baggy Green. Walking out with his spot under threat, he planted his first scoring shot for six and posted another four to earn a ground record for maximums on the way to 72 from 54 balls. Another bright half-century was raised in South Africa, where he also received a split lip from a mean Makhaya Ntini bouncer, but Symonds was cut from the Test outfit in Bangladesh.

International commitments restricted him to one Tour match, one Shield game and one Ford Ranger Cup match for the Bulls in 2007-08.

He scored a first ball duck and took 0-41 off eight overs against SA in the one-dayer at the Gabba in December, but made a solid contribution with 44 and 57 at the SCG in October 2007 against a Test strength NSW attack.

His figures for the Bulls in 2006-07 were not quite as impressive as 05-06, when he scored an equal Bulls career best 163 against South Australia and took four wickets, but he was just as effective.

Symonds' 3-18 and 2-96 against WA at the WACA were all key wickets that contributed heavily to the Bulls' first win of the summer, and his first innings 62 against Victoria on a difficult wicket helped rescue the Bulls from a seemingly impossible position.

He debuted for Queensland in the 1994-95 season, playing four Shield matches before heading to England and blasting almost 1500 runs in a County season.

After three seasons of inconsistency, his fourth Australian summer brought four centuries and 809 runs and the attention of the Australian selectors. It was his most bountiful summer for the Bulls, although he continued to score heavily in England during the Australian off-season..

Symonds has now scored 5528 runs from 94 first class matches for Queensland, with 14 centuries. He has also taken 113 wickets.

In 2004-05 he produced four half-centuries in six innings in the one-day domestic competition and averaged 84.7. His 31-ball half century against Tasmania is the second quickest for a Queenslander and his 33-delivery effort of 2001-02 comes in fourth. With 1830 runs in 78 matches, he is sixth on the Bulls table of one-day run-scorers.

Symonds also lives at a high-energy pace off the field and lists his favourite hobbies as hunting and fishing. His preferred reading is the magazine Bacon Busters. "The thrill of the chase got me hooked," he said in 2004. "I'd be living in the country, hunting and fishing all the time if it was not for cricket." Sometimes the two lifestyles cross over, like they did when he turned up for contract talks with the former Cricket Australia chief executive Malcolm Speed in a cowboy hat and bare feet.

On and off the field, Symonds is full of entertaining surprises.

He released an autobiography in association with Queensland Cricket media manager Stephen Gray in October 2006 and has turned into a bestseller, with three re-runs.

If he keeps going like he is, there will be plenty more cricket to write about in the sequel.

Profile: Stacey Porter

The right-handed slugger played college ball in the U.S. and made Olympic history in 2004.

Porter made her Olympic debut in Athens in 2004, hitting .250 (7-for-28) with two home runs and a team-leading six RBIs for the silver medal-winning Australian squad. She was also a member of the bronze medal-winning Australian team at the 2006 World Championship, hitting .364 (8-for-22) with team highs of eight runs and three home runs to go with five RBIs.

Porter, who played club field hockey while she was growing up, comes from an Aboriginal family. In 2004, she became the first indigenous Australian to play softball for the country at the Olympics.

Porter played three seasons at the University of Hawaii, where as a junior in 2003, she was named the Western Athletic Conference Player of the Year and a First Team All-American. That year, she hit a WAC-leading .479, broke Hawaii single-season records in batting average (.479), doubles (18), home runs (17) and walks (38). She finished the season as the school's all-time leader in home runs, with 38.

Profile: Mark Sorenson

Mark was the captain of the New Zealand Men's Softball Team, the Black Sox, from 1989 until the beginning of 2001 and led his team to victory at the world championships in 1996 and 2000. He returned to the team in 2004 when they became the first team ever to win three consecutive Softball World Championships.
He was named Wellington Sportsman of the Year in 1989, 1997 and 2001 and three times NZ Softball player of the year. In 1997 he was named as Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
He has been selected 12 times to the “All World Team” by the International Softball Congress (this is a world record, no-one has ever played for this team for over 11 years) and selected six times consecutively to the “All American Team” at the USA Nationals and voted the tournament’s Most Valuable Player in 1990 and 1992.

The History of Baseball

While the exact origins of baseball are unknown, most historians agree that it is based on the English game of rounders. A game which began to become quite popular in this country in the early 19th century, and many sources report the growing popularity of a game called "townball", "base", or "baseball".
Throughout the early part of the 19th century, small towns formed teams, and baseball clubs were formed in larger cities. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright wanted to formalize a list of rules by which all teams could play. Much of that original code is still in place today. Although popular legend says that the game was invented by Abner Doubleday, baseball's true father was Cartwright.
Rules of the Game
The first recorded baseball contest took place a year later, in 1846. Cartwright and his Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York City lost to the New York Baseball Club in a game at the Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. These amateur games became more frequent and more popular. In 1857, a convention of amateur teams was called to discuss rules and other issues. Twenty five teams from the northeast sent delegates. The following year, they formed the National Association of Base Ball Players, the first organized baseball league. In its first year of operation, the league supported itself by occasionally charging fans for admission. The future looked very bright.
Baseball being played during the Civil War
The early 1860s, however were a time of great turmoil in the United States. In those years of the Civil War, the number of baseball clubs dropped dramatically. But interest in baseball was carried to other parts of the country by Union soldiers, and when the war ended there were more people playing baseball than ever before. The league’s annual convention in 1868 drew delegates from over 100 clubs. As the league grew, so did the expenses of playing. Charging admission to games started to become more common, and teams often had to seek out donations or sponsors to make trips. In order for teams to get the financial support they needed, winning became very important.
1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings
Although the league was supposed to be comprised of amateurs, many players were secretly paid. Some were given jobs by sponsors, and some were secretly paid a salary just for playing. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings decided to become a completely professional team. Brothers Harry and George Wright recruited the best players from around the country, and beat all comers. The Cincinnati team won sixty-five games and lost none. The idea of paid players quickly caught on. Some wanted baseball to remain an amateur endeavor, but there was no way they could compete with the professional teams. The amateur teams began to fade away as the best players became professionals. In 1871, the National Association became the first professional baseball league.

The History of Cricket

The game of cricket is the second most popular game in the world, second only to soccer. Cricket appears to have an eventful and colorful history, although the exact origins of the game are unknown. As far back as the 1300's, a mention of the game "creag" is found. However it is unclear whether this is the beginnings of modern-day cricket. The name "cricket" may have come from the word "cric". The word cric stood for the hooked staffs carried by Shepards. These may have been the first cricket bats. Cricket in its early days in England was considered a child's game, not to be played by serious adults.
In 1598 there was a written record of a game called "creckett" or "crickett". This may be the first recorded mention of the game that is played today. By 1611 cricket had become an adult game. Considered illegal and immoral, two men were arrested for playing the game rather than going to church. More and more arrests were made as the game grew in popularity.
window.google_render_ad();
At the end of the English Civil War in 1648, the new government clamped down on recreational cricket that was played on Sundays. In these days cricket was played mostly by the working class and Sunday was their only opportunity to play. Interest in the sport
seemed to diminish. As the years progressed, cricket once again regained popularity as a betting game. In the year 1688 the Puritan government of England was gone and the Monarchy was in power again. Cricket was favored by the government and regained some respectability. There were still huge problems in the world of cricket however. Betting and rioting marred the game. Around the year 1784 a London magistrate deemed cricket to be "respectable" even though there were still problems with wagering.
Finally in the year 1788 the "Laws of Cricket" were born. The Laws were written by the Marylebone Cricket Club. Except for some minor revisions, these laws are still adhered to in present day cricket. One notable change was in 1864 when over arm bowling was first used legally. Cricket is the only sport today that has laws instead of rules. Gaining even more respectability in the late 1700s, cricket became the game of "gentlemen". The Laws of Cricket were used for play in England and the Eastern United States. These laws covered the length of the pitch, the distance from the pitching crease to the bowling crease, wicket size, and ball weight.
The cricket fields were leveled and manicured in the 1800's. Up until this time the fields were rough and bumpy. South Africa and Australia began to play cricket seriously during this time. In the year 1844 the first international game of cricket was played in the state of New York in the United States. This match was played between the United States and Canada. Later, in 1877, England traveled to Australia for the first international test match. The match was played in Melbourne Australia. The Australians won the match by 45 runs.
A few years later in 1882, Australia again beat England. It was a close match with Australia winning by 8 runs. This prompted an English writer to publish an obituary for English cricket. The obituary pronounced it "dead". It went on to say that the body would be cremated and that the ashes would be spread over Australia. The next summer England played another series against Australia. This was dubbed by the press as an English endeavor to "reclaim the ashes". A small trophy filled with ashes was made and given to the British Captain. To this day, all test matches between England and Australia are said to be played "for the ashes".
In the year 1900 cricket made its first and only appearance in the Olympics. The match was between France and Britain. Most of the French players came from the British Embassy in France, so mostly British players played the match. Britain won the match and the gold medal. Today there is a renewed interest in cricket becoming an Olympic game.
The ICC was formed in 1909. The Imperial Cricket Conference was formed to govern the laws of cricket. The ICC is known today as the International Cricket Conference. The founding countries of the ICC were England, South Africa, and Australia.
The years 1932 and 1933 saw the laws of cricket being tightened. English players were throwing short-pitched balls at the Australian batters in an attempt at intimidation. England won this series, but ill feelings still exist between Australian and English players because of this series.
In the 1960's some English teams began playing a shortened version of cricket that allowed a match to be completed in only one day. Up until this time the average cricket match could last up to five days. Some fans and players felt this shortened form of cricket to be an insult to the game, so it was not widely accepted by traditional cricket fans. The first one-day international match was played in Melbourne, Australia in 1971. This match prompted the ICC to organize the "Cricket World Cup" to be played every four years. These matches are strictly one-day matches.
In 1981 the ICC banned underarm bowling as a result of a match between New Zealand and Australia. Australian captain Greg Chappell ordered his brother Trevor to use the underarm bowling technique to stop New Zealand from winning a match. Greg's actions angered many in the cricketing community prompting the change.
Today cricket remains a well-loved sport. Some young men in Australia and England grow up hoping to one day "play for the ashes". It is a sport steeped in tradition and its fans are loyal. Although the history of cricket was rocky at times, it's a solid sport that will be around for years to come.

The History of Softball

History Of Softball

Softball was invented inside the Farragut Boat Club on a blustery, winter day in November, 1887, in Chicago, IL. A bunch of Yale and Harvard alumni anxiously awaited the results of the Harvard-Yale football game, and when the news came that Yale had defeated Harvard, 17-8, one Yale supporter, overcome with enthusiasm, picked up an old boxing glove and threw it at a nearby Harvard alumni, who promptly tried to hit it back with a stick. This gave George Hancock, a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, an idea. He suggested a game of indoor baseball. Naturally, Hancock's friends thought he was talking about playing a game outdoors, not indoors.
Hancock wasn't kidding, however. Using what was available, he tied together the laces of the boxing glove for a ball. Using a piece of chalk, Hancock marked off a home plate, bases and a pitcher's box inside the Farragut Boat Club gym, with the two groups divided into teams. The final score of the game was 41-40, but what was significant was that Hancock and his friends had invented a sport that would continue to grow in popularity to where today more than 40 million people enjoy playing it each summer, making softball the No. 1 team participant sport in the United States. Hancock's invention eventually caught on in Chicago with the Farragut team challenging other gyms to games. In the spring, Hancock took his game outdoors and played it on fields not large enough for baseball. It was called indoor-outdoor and Hancock emerged as the recognized authority in the 19th century.
Hancock appended 19 special rules to adapt the outdoor game to the indoor game, and the rules were officially adopted by the Mid Winter Indoor Baseball League of Chicago in 1889. Hancock's game gradually spread throughout the country and ultimately flourished in Minneapolis, thanks to the efforts and ingenuity of Lewis Rober, a Minneapolis Fire Department lieutenant, who wanted a game to keep his firemen fit during their idle time. Using a vacant lot adjacent to the firehouse, Rober laid out bases with a pitching distance of 35 feet. His ball was a small sized medicine ball with the bat two inches in diameter. The game became popular overnight and other fire companies began to play. In 1895, Rober transferred to another fire company and organized a team he called the Kittens. George Kehoe, captain of Truck Company No. 1, named Rober's version of softball "Kitten League Ball" in the summer of 1900. It was later shortened to "Kitten Ball."
Rober's game was known as Kitten Ball until 1925, when the Minneapolis Park Board changed it to Diamond Ball, one of a half dozen names used during this time for softball. The name softball didn't come about until 1926 when Walter Hakanson, a Denver YMCA official suggested it to the International Joint Rules Committee. Hakanson had come up with the name in 1926. Efforts to organize softball on a national basis didn't materialize until 1933, when Leo Fischer and Michael J. Pauley, a Chicago Sporting goods salesman, conceived the idea of organizing thousands of local softball teams in America into cohesive state organizations, and state organizations into a national organization.
To bring the teams together, Fischer and Pauley invited them to participate in a tournament in conjunction with the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago. With the backing of the Chicago American newspaper, Pauley and Fischer invited 55 teams to participate in the tournament. Teams were divided into three classes - fastballers, slow pitch and women. A 14-inch ball was used during the single-elimination event.
During the 1934 National Recreation Congress, membership on the Joint Rules Committee was expanded to add the Amateur Softball Association (ASA). Until the formation of the ASA, softball was in a state of confusion, especially in the rules area where the length of the bases and pitcher's box were constantly being changed.
The formation of the ASA gave softball the solidarity and foundation it needed to grow and develop throughout the U.S. under the network of associations proposed by Fischer and Pauley. Pauley and Fischer visited many of the states, inviting teams to participate in the tournament. Fischer and his sports promotion director, Harry Wilson, sold the Century of Progress Exposition on the idea of sponsoring the tournament and providing a field inside the Fair Grounds. The American's sports pages promoted the tournament daily and Chicago businessmen raised $500 to finance the event.
On the opening day of the 1933 tournament, the Chicago American said, "it is the largest and most comprehensive tournament ever held in the sport which has swept the country like wildfire." With admission free, 70,000 people saw the first round of play. Chicago teams won the three divisions of play with Softball Hall of Famer Harry (Coon) Rosen leading the J.L. Friedman Boosters to the men's title, one-hitting Briggs Beautyware of Detroit, MI, in the finals. It was the first loss of the season for Briggs after 41 consecutive wins.
It was evident that softball finally had a foundation from which to grow, and, in 1935, the Playground Association Softball Guide, wrote: "the years of persistent effort, constant promotion and unchanging faith of believers in softball proved to have not been in vain, for in 1934 softball came into its own.
The International Softball World Championships in 1965 developed women's softball by making it an international game, a step towards the Pan-American Games and the Olympics. Eleven years later, women softball players were given the closest equivalent to Major League Baseball with the 1976 formation of the International Women's Professional Softball League. Player contracts ranged from $1,000 to $3,000 per year, but the league disbanded in 1980 because of financial ruin.
The popularity of women's fastpitch softball has grown steadily since the professional league's end in 1980. In fact, once again, there is another professional fastpitch league called the NPF (National Pro Fastpitch League). The Amateur Softball Association reports that it "annually registers over 260,000 teams combining to form a membership of more than 4.5 million" (About the ASA). These numbers do not all apply to fastpitch, yet it is consistently growing along with slowpitch. All over America hundreds of leagues and thousands of players enthusiastically accepted this major team game and Softball became one of America's favorite sports.

Is Don Bradman the best batter ever?

Rightly or wrongly, batsmen are the glamour boys of cricket.
Although the input of bowlers is just as important as the guys higher up the order, the big names of the sport, with a few exceptions, are the ones who are proficient at wielding the willow.
Amongst this group are some of the legends of the game. Names like Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting and Brian Lara from the recent crop. Going back further we have Viv Richards, Graeme Pollock, Greg Chappell, Sunil Gavaskar, George Headley and Victor Trumper.
'Bradman’s bat was an ordinary lump of wood, not a highly sculpted and compressed weapon that is available today'
As good as this lot are, and there are a number of other names who deserve to be on this list, the very best that any one of them could hope to achieve is to be considered the second best batsman ever.
The reason that these stellar players are reduced to also-rans is, of course, the man known simply as The Don – Sir Donald Bradman. He is the yardstick against whom all others are measured – invariably unfavourably – and whose record will never be equalled.
For the statistically minded, no-one else comes close. Bradman’s average of 99.94 will never be bettered by anyone with any kind of serious Test career. His 6996 test runs in 52 Tests included 29 centuries with a record 12 double centuries and two triple centuries.

By Craig Hackney