April 18, 2007
Hapless cricket teams
Sports that do poorly in cricket are often called "hapless." My hypothesis was that this would be mostly associated with the English cricket team. In the interests of the social studies of sport I did a Google search of +"hapless <country>" +cricket today and these were the results. I think they speak for themselves ... or they speak for themselves, if you follow international cricket ... Crucial qualification. Might I remind my American readers, cricket's about as popular as baseball worldwide, and they both look funny and have funny rules.
No doubt more sophisticated "analyses" could be done, perhaps adjusting for the population speaking English in each country. Now while it's a little surprising to see Bangladesh and Zimbabwe getting more "hapless" mentions than England, those countries have better excuses than England for not fielding a good cricket team. I threw Canada--yes, they were playing in the World Cup--into the mix as a "control" group.
Try England + 'abject'. We've gone way beyond hapless.
Posted by: sharon at April 18, 2007 04:00 PMI think the rating reflects the "expectation gap". For example, the Indian cricket team is much better than the Canada cricket team, but they didn't perform to expectations. Whereas nobody expected anything from the Canadian team.
There's probably an additional variable which is the media culture. My guess is it's not the done thing in Canada for the press to sledge a national team no matter how badly they do, whilst I can just imagine "HAPLESS" splashed in huge letters across the front page of the Sun when England fail!
Posted by: Dan Hill at April 18, 2007 04:20 PMIndian team was the number one contender for this WC but team like Bangladesh kicked out men in blues from the world cup humiliatingly annoying millions of fans across all over the world. Within 8 days India tour of West Indies was over. Let's forget what happened in the past and watch todays match the second semi-final match between Aussies vs SA.