That bloke's bat broke

The Wonder Bat cracks
It was the bat with which Adam Gilchrist punished the England attack for 100 off 57 balls at Perth during the 2006-07 Ashes. Sri Lanka also felt its might during the World Cup final when Gilchrist smashed 149 off 104 balls. And with the same bat, Gilchrist became the first batsman to hit 100 sixes in Tests. It was his favourite bat, the best he's ever had.

Batsmen these days carry heavy coffins filled with five to six bats, but Gilchrist needed only three - a practice bat, a spare, and his Wonder Bat. Alas, so often did he use it that depreciation took its toll and the bat eventually cracked during the Twenty20 international against India. "It's beyond fixing; it's been glued up and pinned up and now the handle has sort of gone," Gilchrist told the Australian. "It's sad in a funny way. It's been a good, faithful servant."

Vasbyt, Aanhou, Moedhou
What's Brian McMillan been up to since he retired in 1998? Well, he got himself an MBA at the age of 38, which is impressive in itself - more so when you learn that he studied 30 hours a week for it while working full time. And after having tested himself academically, McMillan is now gearing up for a formidable questioning of his fitness by taking part in a 950km mountain bike race with his son Ryan.

The 2008 Cape Epic is a race that will take its participants through a course that involves about 18,529 metres of climbing through the picturesque mountain ranges of South Africa. McMillan's been training hard, 12 hours a week, but wants to step it up to 15. Where's he getting all this motivation from? "I can't afford having Robbie Kempson [the South African rugby player] finishing and not me," McMillan told IOL. "Also, I'm not getting any younger, so it's the perfect time to set myself a goal like this one. Our motto will have to be 'Vasbyt, aanhou, moedhou' (hang in there, keep on going, keep your chin up)."

"Don't be in my way when I go up or come down the mountain," Macmillan warned. "I'm a loose cannon on the mountain!"

Brecon beckons
While Big Mac prepares for his cycle race, Gloucestershire's cricketers have been building team spirit in the outdoors too. They made a trip to the Brecon Beacons National Park, a lonely and rugged landscape used by the Royal Marines to test their physical prowess. There the squad was broken down into groups and assigned tasks.

The first, as Tom Davies, one of the players on the trip revealed, was to find four checkpoints using maps and collect an odd bit of equipment from each. When they finished trekking through a deep valley and climbed up the steep slope of a mountain, known as Sugar Loaf, with their equipment - piece of guttering pipe, rope, a water bottle, and two bamboo canes - a task out of The Crystal Maze awaited them. They had to get a table-tennis ball out of a pipe set in the middle of a large circle, without setting foot in the circle.

Click here to read how Davies' team fared.

Sidhuisms on celluloid
Since his days of manically charging spinners and lofting them into orbit, Navjot Sidhu has been involved in a myriad of activities. He's been a commentator, a TV expert, and a politician, and now he's enthusiastically looking forward to his first acting stint in a Punjabi film, Mera Pind-My Home. "My role in the movie, which is about a disillusioned youth in Punjab, doesn't require me to be someone else. It suits me beautifully," Sidhu told PTI. "I had almost 200-odd movie offers but nothing in terms of script could touch me." Until this one, clearly.

Fat under fire
Chubby cricket players are an endangered and increasingly unwanted species. So when Jesse Ryder, who has a few pounds to spare, made his international debut in the Twenty20 game against England, he attracted a lot of attention. Adam Parore wrote in the New Zealand Herald that Ryder "is too fat and is in no fit state to play for New Zealand, and if I was still in the national side, I wouldn't want him in my dressing room." Ryder, however, had a decent debut: he caught Phil Mustard, took 1 for 2 off one over and scored 22 off 21 balls. He later shrugged off Parore's comments but admitted the need to get into shape. "I'm not fussed with what he had to say - he wasn't an angel himself, was he?" Ryder said. "It was easy to ignore. I'm a chilled-out sort of guy and not much fazes me. I'm still working hard on the fitness. It is an issue. Getting fitter can't hurt my game."

If you're late, you wait
Thousands of fans in Auckland missed Kevin Pietersen's attacking 43 off 23 balls in the Twenty20 opener at Eden Park because they were stuck outside the ground unable to get in when the match started at 7pm.

"My experience could quite possibly, and sadly, have been my last, at what is supposed to be New Zealand's premier sporting venue," wrote Brady Williams to the New Zealand Herald. Another said, "Quite how the organisers thought that two ticket windows for thousands of cricket fans would be adequate is unfathomable."

The Eden Park Trust Board general manager, Murray Reade, blamed the massive crowd that turned up late. "We had a very, very large walk-up turning up very late," Reade said, and apparently the stadium was still "virtually empty" 20 to 25 minutes before the game started. "Within that period of time you had literally thousands of people converging on Eden Park to try and get in, so it really is a challenge for us and it would be a challenge for any stadium in the world to really deal with that kind of size of crowd arriving that late."

Quote hanger:
"Yeah, I got broken into, That's all right. It happens. If they needed my stuff that badly, they can have it."
Shane Watson tells the Sun-Herald about a burglary at his house, in which thieves made off with a laptop, music player, and A$ 700