The natural order reasserts itself.

Firstly, blogging has been a little light. I started writing a follow up piece on the Terminator 3 review I quoted, discussing (mainly) the differences between the sensibilities of traditional written science fiction and Hollywood science fiction. However, after writing a thousand words or so, I accidentally deleted it. For once, it was not Blogger's fault, byt my screw up entirely. I have one or two criticisms of Microsoft Windows, because errors of the kind that I made should be recoverable but are not. However, the fault was mainly mine. I might rewrite the article later, and I also might not.

Anyway, in the ongoing one day cricket series in England, Zimbabwe were last week playing a lot better in the one day series than they did in the test series against England. Many of us were hoping that they could pull off another win or two and hopefully make the final.

This was always a tall order, as became apparent over the weekend. Zimbabwe South Africa in Cardiff on Saturday and England in Bristol on Sunday, and they suffered two heavy defeats and there is now no way they can make the final. On Saturday, Zimbabwe could only manage 8/174 off their 50 overs, and South Africa breezed past this with the loss of only one wicket and with more than 15 overs to spare. South African star of the series so far Jacques Kallis did not even need to bat. Gibbs was the star with 93 not out.

Sunday was even worse for the Zimbabweans. They batted first and were bowled out for only 92. That was about that really, although Zimbabwean captain Heath Streak bowled well, and reduced England to 4/25. (He personally ended up with 4/21 off 9 overs. However, it only required a vaguely decent innings from someone for England to get the pathetically puny target. As it was Flintoff scored 47 not out with seven fours and two sixes and that was that. England finished with 4/95 off 17.5 overs to easily win the match. I suppose it is possible to make some comment about Streak being the only good bowler in the Zimbabwean side. This is true, but it didn't matter. You can't defend a target of 93 successfully.

There are still two preliminary matches to go in this series. South Africa play England in Birmingham tomorrow, and Zimbabwe in Southampton on Thursday. Whatever the result of these games, England play South Africa in the final at Lord's on Sunday.