Why it’s not easy being an Oz cricketer

Because one fine morning, your boss may feel it's not enough to have just Darrel Hair and demand facial hair!

Reason?

A fathead, disheveled boffin – jumping up and down Jolimont Street claiming to be Archimedes 2.0 – has concocted the outrageous hypothesis that .22 yard of undergrowth beneath your nose guarantees success on the 22 yards!

And it's just the tip of the iceberg. Shane Watsons and Mitchell Johnsons would vouch, worse can happen to you.

For instance, you can jolly well be plucked out of the nets and planted in dingy studios to strip down to the bare minimum and allow strange people scrub you and rub smelly ointments.

Enough to sow the seed of doubt that you are actually a 40-over old cherry, being polished for that dirty trick of reverse swing!

And the worst is not over yet.

Your boss then decides to immortalize your dishevelment and market the remnants of your modesty, capturing your embarrassment into calendars that would soon adorn the walls of girls' hostel and shady gay clubs across the nation.

So where were we? Yes, it's not easy being an Oz cricketer. Especially when your boss had attended the same morality school frequented by sleaze racketeers.

(Buy Men of Cricket Calendar 2010 here).

Slinga Malinga, the Hair Apparent!

As I said in one of my earlier posts, I still believe hair...err... here you have cricket’s second most outrageous hair ever spotted anywhere near a stadium (for those who came in late, Darrel, the Oz Man in White remains the first in my list). And it's really difficult to say which is weirder, Lasith Malinga's round-arm action or the hairdo he sports.

However I may pooh-pooh it but hairdresser Nishantha Jayasekera reveals it took him two days of painstaking efforts to finally come up with the style of his famous client's liking and hair... err...here you have Malinga.

Jayasekera runs the Le Paris salon in Panadura near Colombo and counts Tillakaratne Dilshan, Chamara Silva, Malinga Bandara and Hashan Tilakaratne among his clients. But when it comes to hairstyle, he has to spare most time with "Slinga Malinga".

"Malinga has his own hair ideas and he is not afraid to try out anything new. It took me two days to get the look," said Jayasekera.

Coach Tom Moody too has lost count how many hair cut Malinga had since he took over.

"He has had many hairstyles over the past 12 months and you never know what it will be tomorrow," Moody added.