Sometimes irony can come in the most surprising form. The picture above is a delicious example. You can see a huge playing field on which not one but two cricket matches are being played. OK, you might mutter and suggest that it is somewhere in England or Oz, perhaps, but you would be wrong. It is Germany and, to add that last mouth-watering dollop of irony that only us true aficionados can appreciate - er, that's irony aficionados not cricket ones - it is the very same field where the late and utterly unlamented Herr Hitler held his ghastly, tasteless mass rallies for the dimwitted dummkopfs of the German population. How one wishes it were possible to bring him back from the dead in order to show him that if, in that bunker in Berlin, he wasn't quite convinced that he really had lost the war then cricket being played on the same fields where his nazi jackboots had marched was the clincher. 'For you, zee var iss over, Herr Hitler!'
All this nonsense is provoked by an article in The Telegraph by Renuka Rayasam who describes the renaissance of cricket inside Germany. It was originally introduced by the British army but following their withdrawal the game, which never caught on with the Germans (can't think why!), gradually withered away. But now the Germans are suffering, if that is quite the word, with yet another invasion, this time from Indian and Pakistani immigrants who have brought their bats and balls and stumps with them, and the game of cricket is flourishing again in the Fatherland. The rumble you can hear is Hitler spinning in his grave!