Quid agis, medice?

Hat Tip: Cafe Hayek

It’s Sir Don Bradman’s 100th birth anniversary today. Came across this interesting piece in the New York Times which was published in 2001, just after Sir Don passed away. The piece just shows how great the greatest cricketer of all time was .

“Among world cricketers, Bradman had a career average of 99.94 runs per innings, a level 30 runs higher than that of his nearest rival even today.

In a recent book, ”The Best of the Best,” Charles Davis, a Melbourne sports statistician, rated stars from different sports by measuring champions who were so far ahead of their rivals that they were in a class of their own, then comparing these margins.

By Mr. Davis’s calculations, Bradman led the order of career-long achievement with a 4.4 rating, followed by football’s* Pelé (3.7), baseball’s Ty Cobb (3.6), golf’s Jack Nicklaus (3.5), basketball’s Michael Jordan (3.4) and Joe Montana (3.1).

Mr. Davis calculated that for Cobb to have matched Bradman in dominance, he would have required a career batting average of .392. Cobb’s career average was .366.

He says that to achieve the superiority level of Bradman, Nicklaus would have needed 25 major golf titles (he won 18), and Jordan would have needed to average 43 points a game (he averaged 32). “

* I changed the ’soccer’ to football from the original article. I just can’t bring myself to write that Pele was a ’soccer player’ on my blog.

Manchester United have beaten Portsmouth on penalties to win the Centenary Community shield. The match was decent. Man Utd played a rather curious line up with Carrick on the bench and O’ Shea in midfield. Fletcher screwed up numerous chances of varying difficulty levels . Teves was awesome. Giggs played well . Gary too put in a good 65 minutes. However we just couldn’t find the back of the net despite complete domination for all the 90 minutes and the match ended with the scores ties 0-0 at the end of regulation time.

Penalties were never going to be a problem for United and we brushed aside Portsmouth 3-1 .

In somewhat related news: This is probably the most ludicrous demand ever!

Football 365 reports :

“Inevitably, after Alex Ferguson said on Friday that he wanted to sign a striker before the start of the new season, the paps have gone into overdrive in speculating on who that forward might be.

And most rags seem to think – presumably in the absence of any imagination/fact – that Dimitar Berbatov is the man in question.

In summary, here’s what The Sun and The Daily Mirror have to say on the subject:

‘Alex Ferguson aims to land Dimitar Berbatov…blah blah blah…£25million deal…yadda yadda yadda…will be enough to secure the unsettled striker…rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb…’

Seriously. That’s what it says. Check if you don’t believe us.”

After months of hype and build up the Olympics , the second biggest sporting event in the world , have finally started. The opening ceremony was quite good , though as usual the march past of all the countries was very boring. The fact that the DD commentator kept screwing up the names of the countries and the whole coverage was shabby at best. I particularly liked the part with some guy very loudly telling the commentator that the old guy the cameraman was focusing on was the President of Brazil.

The 100 m dash , tennis  and the football are the only events i plan to watch . Most of the rest is boring. And India  will surely live up to expectations and come up with nothing yet again.

All I’ve read for the last two months in the sports sections of various newspapers tabloids are stories about Cristiano Ronaldo’s imminent departure from the club all supposedly validated by his ‘close friends’ ,’ sources close to Man United’ , ‘his agent’ , ‘his mother’ , ‘advisors’ .

What have you got to say now , Suckers?

Pune Mirror reported recently :

“‘Cristiano Ronaldo has refused to come back and face Sir Alex Ferguson – in a last desperate bid to force Manchester United to sell him to Real Madrid’

“Cristiano is not going back today, tomorrow, or any time soon. Everyone knows what he wants.”

Sad , isn’t it? Two months of effort down the drain. Tch Tch.

I remembered how shocked I was last August when I heard the bad news that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had retired from football. I also remember being super-depressed when it hit me that I had heard the rapturous ‘Ole Ole Ole Ole ‘ from the Old Trafford for the last time , that the last minute goal against Blackburn was the last of the customary late heroics that Ole kept pulling out time after time. The two best memories I have of Ole is those goals against Nottingham and of course the greatest moment in sports history.

Today’s testimonial was Ole’s last appearance on the football field as a player. He didn’t start but came on as a late sub , like he has done over a 150 times for Man United. Man Utd won the match 1-0 with Frazier Campbell scoring in the 81st minute.

Goodbye, Ole. We’ll miss you.