I love the way that with sport, everyone claims certain victory before the game even begins. Take the cricket for example, not only is England playing its first test match of this series against Australia in a foreign country, but in reality we are as bad as the Americans. Now you may wonder what the Americans have to do with cricket and to be honest the answer to that would be, not a lot! However, we laugh that they can have competitions in North America and call them ‘The World Series’ but when England plays Australia we do the same sort of thing. If we beat them, we think that makes us the best in the world. Now let’s be honest, we don’t beat them all that often and when we do, we have been known to cling to those victories for many successive years of crushing defeats and say ‘Oh, but do you remember the series of xxxx? We beat them then in such style.’ Ok, so they’ve been known to whitewash us since then, but for some reason those incidents didn’t count. We say things like, ‘We fielded a young team that year. It was part of our development.’ Or ‘Their pitches weren’t up to it.’ What we never say is, ‘Let’s be honest, they’re better than us.’ I have now, no doubt, brought down the wrath of all cricket fans throughout the country, including the ones in my own home, but you have to remember that I am a dog and we aren’t allowed to play in the team. We occasionally are observed on the outfield, cocking our legs in protest, but never are we allowed to play this hallowed game. Ok, so I can’t see how I’d hold a bat and my bowling isn’t up to much, either over-paw or under-paw, but I can run between the wickets and Shadow has offered to run off with the bails. We could at least be the team mascot. If you can play the England match in Wales, then you could at least have a Swiss Mountain Dog that was born in Belgium as the mascot!