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| Alfa Romeo ends Wild Oats's reign • Alfa Romeo cruises home 16 miles ahead of long-standing rival• Neville Crichton celebrates second race victory as skipperThe New Zealand super-maxi Alfa Romeo put an end to Wild Oats XI's four-year reign on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race by taking line honours in spectacular fashion.Neville Crichton's Alfa Romeo cruised home in the final stretch of the 628 nautical mile course after opening up a 20-mile lead on the Australian maxi Wild Oats XI and the British supermaxi ICAP Leopard on Sunday.When the 100-foot yacht crossed the finish line opposite Castray Esplanade on the Derwent River, Wild Oats XI still had 16 miles to go with ICAP Leopard a further 24 miles astern, according to the race's official website (rolexsydneyhobart.com).One of the biggest spectator fleets accompanied Alfa Romeo up the final few miles as Crichton recorded a second line honours victory with a seasoned crew of 22 Australian, New Zealand and British round-the-world and America's Cup sailors.Crichton won the 2002 ocean race with a previous Alfa Romeo and lost in a dramatic duel to Wild Oats XI in the 2005 race.A huge crowd gathered along the shore to welcome the victorious crew, the success capping a tally of 143 line-honours wins worldwide for the supermaxi.Sailingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Barney Ronay: Is New Slowness the future for cricket? Playing slow-baked cricket generates drama ripe with internal resonances and glacial sub-plotsThis week England's cricketers continued their campaign to promote the previously unfashionable five-day draw as the acme of sporting achievement, as they saved the third Test in Cape Town with another thrillingly nurdled, buoyantly taciturn, extravagantly introspective rearguard. This was an epically resigned and stoical quest for the non-result and, while in the immediate aftermath it was tempting to focus on the drama of the last-ball escape, there was something cheap and showy about that final twist.England's real progress on this tour lies elsewhere. In the last decade there was a lot of talk about Steve Waugh's Australia revolutionising Test cricket by fearlessly upping the tempo of the game. With their filibustering over rates in the field and constipated new puritanism with the bat, England are currently introducing a new tempo of their own. A slack one. A woozy one. An indolent one. And a tempo that South Africa, at least, are already finding it hard to "live with". For England this is an era of New Slowness.This is an unexpected turn of events. The received wisdom has been that England's batting would come to be dominated by the caffeine-rush stroke play of Kevin Pietersen, caught up in jittery, muscle-bound extroversion. This was the new orthodoxy: the switch-dabbed scoop-six bravado implosion. But rather than careering forward into a cloudless, frightening new future, England have instead gone home and sat in the shed, with Paul Collingwood now the central figure, a man with a forward prod so flamboyantly inert it seems almost sarcastic.The tone in South Africa was set by Alastair Cook, with his revamped batting style based around a Gandhi-like process of self-denial outside off-stump. How long can Cook go on like this? Fifty more Tests? Ten million furiously watchful crab-like leaves? It's all very gripping and I notice also that Cook now mouths "watch the fucking ball" to himself through gritted teeth, as Mark Ramprakash used to, something I also copied when Ramps was my adolescent hero (although people would sometimes stare unkindly or even get off at the next stop and wait for another bus).Ian Bell has also reinvented himself. Bell now snarls at the crease. Perhaps this is a necessary reaction to his demotion from ginger-haloed prodigy. The snarl seems to say he wishes to be seen as just another gun for hire, a grizzled mercenary of the peachy cover drive. Where once Bell wanted to be an Australian, now he looks like he wants to be a Kolpak, or, even better, an ageing sun-baked Zimbabwean.The best thing about playing slow, though, is the drama it generates. This series has emerged as a succession of slow-baked five-day sleepers, arthouse cricket ripe with internal resonances and glacial sub-plots. Plus, it's also a reminder that no other team sport offers such stillness or such fine detail. At Cape Town Jonathan Trott was booed for taking his guard too slowly, surely the first ever case of a man drawing angry jeers as a result of a slightly quirky method of scratching a line in the ground with a bit of wood.It's also worth noting the positive effects of England playing Test cricket in a way that's more like Test cricket, rather than less like Test cricket and more like basketball, or football, or watching a wild-eyed, crack-smoking pinch-flailer fly-swat a match-winning 14 for the Wellington Fishcakes. It has been fashionable to say that Test cricket is dying but, watching the last Test and looking forward to next week's irresistible decider, it feels like Test cricket is a small window of vitality and stalwart tumescence. I don't smell death here, just the invigorating, hair-shirt revivalism of England's defiantly retrograde New Slowness.England Cricket TeamSouth Africa cricket teamEngland in South Africa 2009-2010CricketBarney Ronayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Togo were shot at, three men died – and now they have been ‘disqualified’ The lights were dimmed in Cabinda’s new Chiazi National Stadium and almost 600 stewards melted away into the night as the ring of steel erected to guarantee security was dismantled. feeds.timesonline.co.uk |
2,000-acre central Oregon golf resort files bankruptcy Remington Ranch LLC, developers of a 2,000-acre golf resort in Powell Butte filed for protection from creditors in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Oregon on Thursday. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Zhang, Cal's 7-3 Chinese center, finds room to grow in Berkeley Max Zhang, the tallest player ever for the University of California's basketball team, has spent the last four years since coming from China ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |