(with apologies to the Gibson Brothers)
When cricket’s governing bodies determined the Twenty20 version of the game would be a good way to bring it into the mainstream, this wasn’t exactly what they had in mind. From the Guardian’s David Hopps.
England’s captain, Paul Collingwood, was forced to make a public apology yesterday for an impromptu visit to a Cape Town lap dancing bar and, to add to his woes, his team-mates were also embarrassed as an equally ill-judged defeat against New Zealand left them on the brink of elimination from Twenty20 World Cup.
Collingwood will definitely captain England in the one-day series in Sri Lanka, with the England and Wales Cricket Board refusing to view his misjudgment with the same gravity as Andrew Flintoff’s drunken pedalo affair in the World Cup, an escapade which was considerably more alcohol-fuelled and cost Flintoff the vice-captaincy.
The board formally pronounced that Collingwood had “been shown an inappropriate area”, which as definitions of lap dancing bars go sounded accurate enough. Last night they fined him some £1,000.
There was no suggestion that Collingwood was drunk, he left soon after midnight and he was playing golf by 7.30am on Saturday, 36 hours before England’s next game against South Africa. He had been socialising with England team-mates in a Cape Town nightclub and had accepted a lift home with people he dubbed as “not massively close friends”.
Nevertheless it was ill considered and some self-recrimination was necessary. “I was taken to an inappropriate bar and I realised that I had to get out of there,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I made a mistake. I have apologised to everybody already. I am disappointed with myself.”
Or as James Dolan might’ve put it, œno, it™s not appropriate, he said. œIt is also not appropriate to murder anyone.” But alas for Collingwood and teammates, South Africa’s decisive win over New Zealand earlier today has elminated England from the tournament.