Jarvo: Sentencing options
I don’t want to talk. About bloody Jarvo. Though it’s ennui. He’s in custody.
So that does add a bit of a sour coda to things. And you can now at least speculate what punishment would best suit the most self-regarding mammoth to set foot on a cricket field since Trump popped over to Ahmedabad. Legally Jarvo remains an innocent man. But in the court of public opinion, where due process can be cast aside like it’s made of carrom balls, he’s guilty as charged. If the charge is being a relentless tit. So here are the options for how justice could be meted out.
1) Made to wear a Rory Burns pony tail
There are, admittedly, more serious issues to worry about for Burns than his hair foibles. Namely that he’s currently entering the ninth dimension whenever he goes to field at second slip. He’s lost all sense of everything. Edges are there but not. His hands are bemusing vortexes. Objects are gas. Perhaps he is just the ghost of a dead pirate after all.
Luckily for an England opener, at the crease or in the cordon, you can just get Joe Root to sort things out instead, though not even the best in the world can tidy up every time. On Thursday Burns left a nick from Kohli well alone, his skipper then landing a painful blow on his finger as he flailed at the chance from first slip. Burns, and this was a nice touch, then sheepishly offered the wincing Root a hand warmer as he was shaking his stinging digit. Although the catch, particularly with its post-batsman hooping, probably was actually Root’s, Burns still rightly came under suspicion during the analysis.
I say rightly because you can’t expect not to come under suspicion when you sport the sort of ponytail normally only seen on sunburnt, balding men in their fifties being arrested for paedophilia somewhere in Southeast Asia. It’s just not decent and, if Jarvo does somehow escape the life sentence he deserves, this wispy hair cock should be surgically removed (by this I mean with scissors) from Burns’ head and superglued to the flubbery, sweaty nape of the tedious square botherer as an alternative sanction. It won’t be so easy for Jarvo to escape the gaze of cricket ground security with that nonsense poking out above his collar. Unless they think he’s Rory Burns, obviously.
2) Tied to one of those stupid planes
Those planes with banners never lead to any good. Obviously ones with “All Lives Matter” behind them should be shot down by the military, but even ones with vaguely sane words in tow, such as that recently seen at Headingley which chided the ECB, tend to just look a bit, well, pisspoor once they’ve done their first circuit overhead. Meh-sserschmidts, if you will.
To save everyone’s awkwardness such a banner could instead serve the needs of justice and be knotted around, say, the knackers of Jarvo so he could be towed across the sky above The Oval all of Saturday afternoon. He would initially love the attention but that would soon dissipate into extreme terror and vast testicular agony. Slightly medieval in terms of the retributive element of the punishment, but if you are going to be a monstrous nincompoop then combining the collective pain of both Alex Hales’ balls with the sort of thing Pablo Escobar might do to a moral and obstinate local official seems a perfectly fair penalty overall.
3) Head weigh-off against Cameron Bancroft - loser greeted by Bairstow in a local nightspot
After Andrew Symonds, Jonny Bairstow would probably be my choice of worst cricketer to bump into when invading a pitch. He’s one of the great stomper-hunchers of the age, his head often tucked so far between his shoulders as he stalks the crease he looks like a turtle so grouchy not even Warner could love it. He also has a history of violence. Not quite in the Viggo Mortensen sense, but he did once supposedly headbutt Cameron Bancroft when the two crossed paths in a Perth nightclub. Bancroft, back when press conferences for him were a time for cracking up rather than breaking down, revealed he’d been left unscathed due to the humungous nature of his head. He claimed it was the “heaviest in the Western Australia squad”. You’d imagine Jarvo’s bonce, full of shite as it is, comes in at a fair few kilograms, but he should be left to the mercy of Bairstow’s if he can’t beat the official weight of Bancroft’s.
So there’s the options, all fitting in their own way. The ABBA bit at the top was purely to shoehorn in a photo of the promo shot for their new album in which they all look like they’re about to journey through space in search of Glenn Maxwell, the one man who can save their planet.
He’s another that should have been on a Test pitch more often. Poor Glenn. Poor Ashwin. Poor Bancroft in some respects. Seems a bit melancholy that footage of him laughing next to Smith. All of them left on the sidelines while pillocks like Jarvo get to tread the hallowed turf.