hamish marshall - beige legendWell, we’ll be head­ing off to NZ v. OZ one-day crick­et match tomor­row not only to see (hope­ful­ly) a hard-fought con­test between the two best one day crick­et sides in the world at the moment, but also to see how much of the facial hair and lock-teas­ing action that graced last night’s fes­tive twenty20 game sur­vives until the week­end.

Most of the kiwi lads had gone to some effort to get into the retro look, and it would be a waste to chop it. Par­tic­u­lar­ly note­wor­thy were Cairn­sy’s ‘I‑am-my-old-man’ style mo, Flem’s mo (and the white tow­el­ing hat! mag­ic), Craig McMil­lan & Matt Sin­clairs’ dev­il­ish han­dle­bars, and the non-play­ing Dan Vet­tori, who got a huge round of applause every time the cam­era cut to him on the side­line, look­ing resplen­dent with his lam­b­chop sidies and yet anoth­er han­dle­bar mous­tache.

Despite the fact the Aussies smashed us out of the game, we hold out bet­ter hopes for the ‘elon­gat­ed’ ver­sion of the game. And please keep the hair lads — if we can’t win, at least we can look good los­ing. And it must be dis­tract­ing to the Aussies, sure­ly? Espe­cial­ly that ‘fro — I mean, has any­one tak­en to the field in a pro­fes­sion­al sports game with a more out­ra­geous hair-cut in the his­to­ry of sport? Sug­ges­tions in the com­ments box please.