11 years ago, I had the privilege of teaching a huge number of Indian and Bangladeshi students in their late teens and early 20s. Almost all of whom lived and breathed cricket in a manner I'd never come across before.

They all played cricket during lunch and in late afternoon.
I organised a live stream of the India-Pakistan and India-Sri Lanka World Cup semi and final, and a match between the Indian and Bangladeshi students.

Which I umpired and made a bit of a mess of.😳 Some of my decisions were so bad, the Indians were accusing me of matchfixing 🤣
The whole experience left me with a heck of a lot more respect for officials in all sports: it's a bloody hard job, believe me.

When you get a call wrong and KNOW you've got it wrong, then unless you're a narcissist, you start second guessing yourself. Which leads to chaos.
But I digress. All these students were humble, but the Bangladeshis consistently most of all.

Many of them faced extreme hardship back home: probably the most densely overpopulated country on the planet, which floods so horrendously often, destroying so many lives.
Their parents (the father of one of them, for example, had lost his business, and forbade his son from coming home to nothing) were desperate for them to make their futures in Europe, which several of them went on to do.
One in Italy, another in Spain, while another actually works for the Bangladeshi Cricket Board back home now.

All of them overcame enormous, mighty odds, the details of which I won't go into but horrified and moved me greatly, in order to succeed.
So when I saw Bangladesh had beaten New Zealand, it was them I thought of. Some of the best people I've ever met.

Who lived in tiny flats in Oxford, six to a room; invited me to tea or to end the Ramadan fast with them, and who all loved their poor, benighted country.
Blood doesn't run through Bangladeshis' veins. Cricket does, in a manner scarcely paralleled anywhere else.

I'm toasting all those students this morning. The adversity they'd experienced and grace and humility they showed put most Westerners completely to shame.
And the next time I'm in Europe, I'll be visiting one of them for sure.

He has a wife and son now, is one of the strongest humans I've ever known, and I couldn't be more proud of him. 🙏
Never underestimate what sport can do in giving people a sense of purpose and hope.

The achievements of the Bangladeshi cricket team lift their people up. I know how trite that might sound - but sport has the power to unite, inspire, and help people believe in something better.

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More from @shaunjlawson

5 Jan
Do you know whose sanity I question Kelvin?

The unbelievably sick bastard who blamed Liverpool fans for Hillsborough.

What kind of country allows lying scum like you to get rich off the back of vile slander?

What kind of country keeps buying that disgusting newspaper?
Congratulations to the protesters, who should never have been prosecuted to begin with, Mr "terrorists hate our freedoms but I want protesters locked up".

Down with slavery apologists and down with those who've been rewriting history for centuries.

People like YOU.
Kelvin MacKenzie, by way of reminder:

- Cheerlead Thatcher's devastation of communities throughout the UK

- Cheerled the Iraq war

- Cheerled austerity

- Cheerled Brexit

- Turned the Sun into a comic for yobs and thugs
Read 5 tweets
5 Jan
I was looking at my pigeons earlier, and I was thinking:

- You don't go around trying to get other pigeons cancelled for having a different opinion on something

- You don't go around demonising other pigeons: you depend upon each other

- You don't start wars with other pigeons
- You don't hang around in gangs terrorising other pigeons

- You don't spend each and every day on this planet desperate to get offended by another pigeon

- You don't go around killing other animals for 'sport'

- You don't sentence other pigeons to death
- You don't rape female pigeons when they tell you to get lost and stop bothering them

- You haven't created a whole new language and forced it down all the other pigeons' throats

- You're not destroying your own habitat and that of all other living creatures
Read 6 tweets
5 Jan
The idea that JK Rowling is in any way an antisemite is offensive, preposterous, disgraceful nonsense.

But the idea that Jeremy Corbyn is in any way an antisemite was also offensive, preposterous, disgraceful nonsense, and she joined in with that.

Witchhunts are NEVER OK.
"Burn the witch! Burn the witch!" From a frothing, shameless mob in both cases.

Memo to everyone: someone is not an antisemite because of what happens to be YOUR political position and opinions. And if you had real humanity, you'd say so. In both cases and that of others too.
Do you know what Joanne and Jeremy have in common? They've both done a quite massive amount for vulnerable people.

For some reason, this never gets reported by their myriad haters: many of whom have never done a thing for vulnerable people in their entire lives.
Read 8 tweets
5 Jan
With the fourth ritual humiliation - ahem, I mean Fourth Test - just getting underway, here's a rundown of my ideal cricket team since I started following the game in the late 1980s.

It may contain one or two surprises.

#Ashes #Ashes2021 #AshesTest #SCG #Sydney #AUSvENG
CG Greenidge (West Indies)
MJ Slater (Australia)
IVA Richards (West Indies) (capt)
SR Tendulkar (India)
R Dravid (India)
SR Waugh (Australia)
AC Gilchrist (Australia) (wkt)
SK Warne (Australia)
MD Marshall (West Indies)
CEL Ambrose (West Indies)
W Younis (Pakistan)
2nd XI:

GA Gooch (England)
ST Jayasuriya (Sri Lanka)
RT Ponting (Australia)
KC Sangakkara (Sri Lanka) (capt) (wkt)
PA de Silva (Sri Lanka)
AL Logie (West Indies)
A Flintoff (England)
W Akram (Pakistan)
M Muralitharan (Sri Lanka)
AA Donald (South Africa)
GD McGrath (Australia)
Read 9 tweets
4 Jan
This is Khadijah Farmer. In 2008, she was ejected from a woman's toilet in New York because "she looked like a man".

Khadijah Farmer is not trans. She's a woman. I'm just wondering how people on my TL explain what happened to her.
This is Eloise Stonborough. She's not trans either. She's a woman. She's been 'confronted tens of times in public toilets'.

Including by a woman as she stood quietly in line to use a toilet in a park. “She stormed off in a huff when I refused to leave".
“One of the worst times was in an art gallery. A man started screaming that there was ‘a f**king man going into the toilet’ at the top of his voice, and started following me around the gallery once I’d left the toilet. I had to tell security so he could be escorted out".
Read 12 tweets
4 Jan
See also, the loony right in Argentina. Which to its eternal shame, urged people not to take the vaccine because they were being "experimented on" - then harangued the government when the rollout and uptake weren't fast enough. 🙄🙄

These people are always either stupid or bad.
The Argentina comparison is apposite here because the problem there - for 70 years now! - is that politics has been treated like a war.

- Rich v poor
- Winners v losers
- We won you lost get over it
- Let's grind the losers into the dust, and only govern for our own voters
That's been paralleled all over South America - with added whites v non-whites in places like Venezuela, Chile, Peru or Paraguay.

Political parties are basically treated like football teams in many of these places. 'My tribe, right or wrong'. There's even football-style chants.
Read 23 tweets

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