Punter's hair and punters' despair

Yeah yeah, where'd you get the hair?
Four months away from cricket might be enough to mess with Ricky Ponting's head, and it appears that during his time off someone was doing just that. When he fronted up at the ICC Awards last week, Ponting looked a tad hairier than when we last saw him.

Last year Shane Warne gave Ponting the friendly advice that a certain hair-replacement company could fix his thinning pate. Now the question is being asked: has Ponting given in to the pressure? According to Max Markson, the mastermind behind Advanced Hair's "Yeah yeah" advertisements, the answer is clearly a resounding, well, yeah yeah. "It certainly looks as though he has more hair," Markson told the Daily Telegraph. "If he has had anything done, it's laser therapy, which means re-growing his own hair." Check out the photos at right - the top one is from February, the bottom one from last week - and decide for yourself.

His trip was hairy, too
If there was any doubt that Ponting was going to clean up at the ICC Awards, the South African constabulary did enough to dispel it. Ponting flew into Johannesburg on Monday after staying home to care for his ill wife Rianna, and when he arrived he was whisked away before he could say "passport control".

"We were bundled into a van on arrival in Johannesburg with a four-car police escort to the awards night in double-quick time," Ponting wrote in his column in the Australian. "It was a pretty hairy ride on occasions, with speeds of up to 160kph all the way from the airport as traffic was stopped to allow us through. It was all a bit bizarre." He probably knew then that there was a fair chance he was going home with a few trophies.

A night to remember
The ICC must have been pleased its Cricketer of the Year was on hand, as his absence would have really capped off a night of mishaps. Things started on a wobbly note when the first batch of awards - including Shaun Tait's Emerging Player title - was shown in the media centre without live sound, just extended versions of pop songs playing in the background. Later there was a power failure on the big screen and the background vanished as Mahela Jayawardene accepted Sri Lanka's Spirit of Cricket Award. Graeme Pollock, one of the special guests, missed his cue by five minutes and another guest presenter, Brian Lara, told the assembled media how great the Indian Cricket League (ICL) was, even though it is not sanctioned by the ICC. Another of the ICL's star recruits, Mohammad Yousuf, wasn't there but the ICC wished he was - he was named Test Player of the Year. And according to a report in the Australian, the icing on the cake was when the ICC used footage of apartheid-era South Africa. "The present South African administration is strongly opposed to any recognition for apartheid-era cricket to the point where Cricket South Africa listed it as an agenda item for the two-day ICC meeting of chief executives," the paper said. "Apparently, it was withdrawn from the agenda during the first day on Monday."

Backing the unbackables
Batting first against Zimbabwe on a pitch that helped the seamers might have been a questionable decision by Ricky Ponting but he wasn't the only punter who got it wrong that day. Bookmakers had Australia at $1.01 - that would typically be called unbackable favouritism - but still there were gamblers who thought it was the easiest money they would ever make. To make it worthwhile, of course, the outlay would need to be substantial.

"It was a phenomenal night of betting," Betfair's Hugh Taggart said in the Herald Sun. "Almost all of the betting centred around Australia at ludicrously short prices. We matched $27,679,906 on the match, amazing figures for an opening round Twenty20 game like that, and $24 million of it was traded on Australia." It was incredible enough that they matched $400,000 when Australia were $1.01, but $2.8 million was matched at $1.02. A bad night for Punter became a bad night for punters.

A teacher to look up to
Grown men found Colin Croft scary enough back in the 1970s, so how will children react to him bossing them around? He's about to find out, having just taken up a position as a maths and sport teacher at the Lambrook Haileybury School in Berkshire.

Croft has had an interesting career post-cricket, becoming a qualified airline pilot, teaching English as a foreign language to Latin American and Haitian immigrants in the United States, and retaining an interest in the sport as a commentator and writer. He maintains the eight- to 13-year-olds he will teach have nothing to fear, despite his 6' 6" frame and fiery reputation.

"I am a big teddy bear," he said on icberkshire.co.uk. "Kids might not agree, but I am someone they could put around their little finger." They'll just have to hope Mr Croft watches their lunchtime cricket matches from the sidelines because as one of his former team-mates once said, Croft would "bounce his grandmother if he thought there was a wicket in it".

Quotehanger
"Roger earns a lot more money than I do."
Simon Taufel doubts that his fourth straight Umpire of the Year title puts him in the same league as another four-in-a-row specialist, Roger Federer