Absence makes the heart grow fonder and a little bit morose

I know, I’ve been absent a lot. Have you missed me?

Things aren’t very happy right now at Dustbin Towers and that could go one of two ways – I could end up with plenty of time to write on the Dustbin during county cricket season 2014 or I could end up with a hell of a lot less time. We’ll have to wait and see, I’m afraid.

But what’s happening in cricket?

The CLT20 came and went, barely noticed by anyone. I didn’t even see much tweeting about it, but that could’ve been post LVCC exhaustion. The lovely Dave Bird couldn’t even name the English county cricket teams involved. Imagine his surprise when I told him there weren’t any. That’s post county season overload for you.

Brisbane Heat, for all their bravado during the BBL (how dare that Joey Burns kick our a*** in the final?) slumped out of the Champions’ league without a win to their name and must now suffer the crass mockery of the bitter non-Queenslander. I’d be first in line if only the Scorchers hadn’t done just as bad. A couple of losses and a washout and, sadly, no substance abuse parties. Disappointing.

Afghanistan has done something that has made cricket fans the world over go “Aw, isn’t that nice?” the way you do when your friend has just facebooked the 50th photo in a row of their kid with his merit certificate. Some are currently debating the quality of Afghanistan’s cricket team over that of Ireland’s.

I’m just debating tea, coffee or cocktail and ignoring them all. All I can think is that Australia is so s***, Afghanistan can probably beat them as well.

And so, we’ve lost the Ashes and in a few weeks time we’ll be getting ready to watch, well, the Ashes. Again. Remember the Dustbin in the run up to the 2010/11 Ashes?

I was so excited. There was a countdown thing on the blog, there was general p***taking of Stuart Broad and lots of posts about how we were going to get the urn back and I actually posted something for every day of the series. If you think you’ll get any of that this time, think again.

Let’s be real – we stink. We’ll lose again. We have an injured James Pattinson, a fragile Ryan Harris, batters that can’t bat and Mitchell Johnson. And does anyone really believe Michael Clarke isn’t fit? I reckon he’s taken another look at that lot and thought “f*** it, I’m chucking a sickie.”

Wouldn’t you?