conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Game for Anything about Bella, York, Times with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Women's Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: New York Times bestselling author the author is known for sensual, empowered stories enveloped in heady romance ( Publishers Weekly ). Winner of the Award of Excellence, the Washington Post has called her one of the top digital writers in America. Married with two children, Bella splits her time between Northern California and the Adirondacks. You can visit Bella online at Bellathe author.com.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Technikon, Botswana, Kruger with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Memoirs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Game for Anything'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Game for Anything
  England, too, is where traditions took hold that have never been departed from. It was here, rather than in Australia, that the idea of a green and gold raiment took root. Joe Darling's 1899 tourists were the first to sport it, even flying a green and gold standard over their Holborn hostelry, the Inns of Court Hotel. Famously attached to their headgear, Steve Waugh and Justin Langer have a spiritual antecedent in Victor Trumper. 'Trumper always wore an old Australian XI cap,' reminisced his team-mate Clem Hill. 'It was bottle green, but nevertheless he stuck to it to the end, and there was no end of bother if Duff or some of the other humorists of the side got hold of the cap and hid it.'
  In days of yore, from 1886 to the Second World War, Australian teams in England were accompanied by an honorary medical officer, Dr Rowley Pope. An eccentric ophthalmic surgeon from Sydney, he accompanied the tour at his own expense, doling out cures, keeping records, filling in as a fielder, and generally advising graceless antipodeans about English etiquette, like bowing a black tie, and recognising a fish knife; Arthur Mailey remembered him as 'a good Australian and, like all good Australians a good Britisher'. The team physiotherapist today performs services more scientific and specialised; no need to recognise a fish knife in an age when the use of cutlery often seems entirely optional.
  Another instance of going back to the future is in the attitude to wives and children. In the days when players ran their own tours, spouses were not uncommon: five members of the 1902 party, for instance, made the journey thus accompanied, Trumble taking the tour as his honeymoon. Not everyone approved – Monty Noble, Australia's captain in 1909, thought wives responsible for 'uneasiness and disquietude of mind in the team's family circle' – and there was satisfaction as well as chagrin when the Board stamped the practice out. A member of Bill Woodfull's 1930 Australians told journalist Geoffrey Tebbut: 'You can't beat women when it comes to starting trouble... No, it's bad luck for the wives, but it has either got to be a cricket tour or a large-scale tea-party, and you know the kind of trouble that is brewed over cups of tea.'
  One team member at least would have demurred from that judgement. Donald Bradman found the separations from his wife Jessie in 1934 and 1938 so trying that he threatened to retire on the latter tour unless the Board granted her permission to join him at that trip's completion. Policies of varying liberality over the past twenty years have now finally turned the clock back a century. Under the terms of a four-year memorandum of understanding between the Board and the Australian Cricketers' Association reached in May, members of Steve Waugh's side will be entitled to bring their partners at any time. Those there for more than fifty days will have airfares and a fortnight's accommodation paid for. The captain – with two children and a third on the way – is the instigator: he believes 'that's the way it should be'.
  Again, nonetheless, certain common recreations remain unaltered. This being an Australian team, a degree of drinking is to be expected in 2001: more than in 1930, when twelve of the team were abstainers and the feats of Bradman, Bill Woodfull and Clarrie Grimmett were celebrated by temperance movements, though less than in 1893, when a drunken brawl among players left blood all over a railway compartment, and in 1912, when raucous Australians were refused service by stewards on a voyage to Ireland.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Game for Anything
  England, too, is where traditions took hold that have never been departed from. It was here, rather than in Australia, that the idea of a green and gold raiment took root. Joe Darling's 1899 tourists were the first to sport it, even flying a green and gold standard over their Holborn hostelry, the Inns of Court Hotel. Famously attached to their headgear, Steve Waugh and Justin Langer have a spiritual antecedent in Victor Trumper. 'Trumper always wore an old Australian XI cap,' reminisced his team-mate Clem Hill. 'It was bottle green, but nevertheless he stuck to it to the end, and there was no end of bother if Duff or some of the other humorists of the side got hold of the cap and hid it.'
  In days of yore, from 1886 to the Second World War, Australian teams in England were accompanied by an honorary medical officer, Dr Rowley Pope. An eccentric ophthalmic surgeon from Sydney, he accompanied the tour at his own expense, doling out cures, keeping records, filling in as a fielder, and generally advising graceless antipodeans about English etiquette, like bowing a black tie, and recognising a fish knife; Arthur Mailey remembered him as 'a good Australian and, like all good Australians a good Britisher'. The team physiotherapist today performs services more scientific and specialised; no need to recognise a fish knife in an age when the use of cutlery often seems entirely optional.
  Another instance of going back to the future is in the attitude to wives and children. In the days when players ran their own tours, spouses were not uncommon: five members of the 1902 party, for instance, made the journey thus accompanied, Trumble taking the tour as his honeymoon. Not everyone approved – Monty Noble, Australia's captain in 1909, thought wives responsible for 'uneasiness and disquietude of mind in the team's family circle' – and there was satisfaction as well as chagrin when the Board stamped the practice out. A member of Bill Woodfull's 1930 Australians told journalist Geoffrey Tebbut: 'You can't beat women when it comes to starting trouble... No, it's bad luck for the wives, but it has either got to be a cricket tour or a large-scale tea-party, and you know the kind of trouble that is brewed over cups of tea.'
  One team member at least would have demurred from that judgement. Donald Bradman found the separations from his wife Jessie in 1934 and 1938 so trying that he threatened to retire on the latter tour unless the Board granted her permission to join him at that trip's completion. Policies of varying liberality over the past twenty years have now finally turned the clock back a century. Under the terms of a four-year memorandum of understanding between the Board and the Australian Cricketers' Association reached in May, members of Steve Waugh's side will be entitled to bring their partners at any time. Those there for more than fifty days will have airfares and a fortnight's accommodation paid for. The captain – with two children and a third on the way – is the instigator: he believes 'that's the way it should be'.
  Again, nonetheless, certain common recreations remain unaltered.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: For this is what truly distinguishes fielding's past and present: not so much the rise of the fielding superstar, but the demise of the duffer. The general raising of the bar even incorporated such unlikely improvers as Geoff Boycott. On his first tour of Australia in 1965–66, Boycott was regarded as one of the poorest fielders in the game: clumsy, myopic and lethargic. On his last tour in 1979–80, he darted in from mid-off to execute a direct hit run-out. Not only that, but the dour Yorkshireman startled team-mates by running in to the celebratory huddle shouting: 'I did it! I did it!' Thirty years ago, a fast bowler like Glenn McGrath would probably have fielded predominantly with his feet, and seldom chased a ball in the same postcode as another fielder. Nowadays, he not only cannot, because a slight misfield could cost his team a whole tournament, but need not, for a sizeable ration of fielding will have been part of his practice routine since he tackled the game seriously.
  With the chance to rehearse and to perfect came innovation. Fielding seems a natural activity, but now has techniques as evolved as any in batting and bowling: the boundary slide, the underarm flick, the relay throw, the bounce throw. Positions in the circle in one-day cricket have become as specialised as those in the catching cordon.
  The great innovator over the past decade has been another South African, Jonty Rhodes, recently retired from Test cricket but an indispensable member of his country's one-day side. There have been better throws, and deader eyes, but probably never a superior stopper. Self-deprecatingly, Rhodes calls himself a 'glorified goalkeeper': glorified because, theoretically, it's simpler to stop volleys coming always from the same place.
  Rhodes' technique is actually unorthodox. Where the standard manuals insist that a fielder should walk in with the bowler, Rhodes comes almost to a halt with both feet on the ground at the point of delivery, ready to dive either way. His practice takes the form of a batsman belting the ball at a fifteen-metre zone defined by witches hats that he tries to protect. A short man with a low centre of gravity, his great skill is quicksilver recovery: from a prone or semi-prone position he is as good a throw as most men on two feet.
  Rhodes likes to quote Colin Bland, who once philosophised that good fielders were 'part of the attack'. A key ingredient of the South African game plan during the last decade has, in fact, been to guarantee that Rhodes does more fielding than anyone: with Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock attacking off stump, he is stationed at point; when the burly Afrikaner offie Pat Symcox pegs away at leg stump, he patrols mid-wicket. If he doesn't add a batsman to his Jonty's Greatest Direct Hits collection, he frequently saves runs merely by his presence.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The general raising of the bar even incorporated such unlikely improvers as Geoff Boycott. On his first tour of Australia in 1965–66, Boycott was regarded as one of the poorest fielders in the game: clumsy, myopic and lethargic. On his last tour in 1979–80, he darted in from mid-off to execute a direct hit run-out. Not only that, but the dour Yorkshireman startled team-mates by running in to the celebratory huddle shouting: 'I did it! I did it!' Thirty years ago, a fast bowler like Glenn McGrath would probably have fielded predominantly with his feet, and seldom chased a ball in the same postcode as another fielder. Nowadays, he not only cannot, because a slight misfield could cost his team a whole tournament, but need not, for a sizeable ration of fielding will have been part of his practice routine since he tackled the game seriously.
  With the chance to rehearse and to perfect came innovation. Fielding seems a natural activity, but now has techniques as evolved as any in batting and bowling: the boundary slide, the underarm flick, the relay throw, the bounce throw. Positions in the circle in one-day cricket have become as specialised as those in the catching cordon.
  The great innovator over the past decade has been another South African, Jonty Rhodes, recently retired from Test cricket but an indispensable member of his country's one-day side. There have been better throws, and deader eyes, but probably never a superior stopper. Self-deprecatingly, Rhodes calls himself a 'glorified goalkeeper': glorified because, theoretically, it's simpler to stop volleys coming always from the same place.
  Rhodes' technique is actually unorthodox. Where the standard manuals insist that a fielder should walk in with the bowler, Rhodes comes almost to a halt with both feet on the ground at the point of delivery, ready to dive either way. His practice takes the form of a batsman belting the ball at a fifteen-metre zone defined by witches hats that he tries to protect. A short man with a low centre of gravity, his great skill is quicksilver recovery: from a prone or semi-prone position he is as good a throw as most men on two feet.
  Rhodes likes to quote Colin Bland, who once philosophised that good fielders were 'part of the attack'. A key ingredient of the South African game plan during the last decade has, in fact, been to guarantee that Rhodes does more fielding than anyone: with Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock attacking off stump, he is stationed at point; when the burly Afrikaner offie Pat Symcox pegs away at leg stump, he patrols mid-wicket. If he doesn't add a batsman to his Jonty's Greatest Direct Hits collection, he frequently saves runs merely by his presence.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Having shrugged off its amateur past, of course, cricket must bear a certain burden of professionalised tedium. It has spent its inheritance of great players who learned their cricket the old-fashioned way, rising through the established grades, and playing at state, county and provincial level before higher honours. The generation that succeeded them, streamed into youth teams and academies as well as the first-class game, have been raised with different expectations: knowing that cricket could be their living, they've never needed to live for cricket. If the game today seems more routine, perhaps that should not surprise us. Has anyone paid money to watch you work lately?
  What can we say, then, about a quarter century of professional international cricket? The trade-off was a necessary and unavoidable one: cricket could not withstand the tide of sporting commercialism. Television and sponsors had re-priced all games, and the remuneration of cricketers could not stand still. But, for players, it was only a partial emancipation. The attitude of boards of control since Packer has been unconsciously obedient of Alfred Hitchcock's advice regarding actors: 'Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle.' And some heaps have been taller than others.
  It was this climate of mistrust and cynicism that smoothed the path to malpractice. When Sir Paul Condon's anti-corruption unit reported to the ICC on match-fixing in May 2001, it noted that players were 'not sufficiently involved in the administration of the game and ownership of the problems'. While the ICC doesn't have a great record taking advice from others, one might have thought it could take its own. Administrators have fared badly believing in cricketers' worst instincts; it might be more fruitful appealing to their better natures.
  One would be even more emphatic about this had 'professional' not become so pregnant with meaning. It suggests diligence, dedication, attention to detail, as in 'professional qualification', but it also implies contrivance, conspiracy and sleazy expedient, as in 'professional foul'. Cricket is witnessing both: we have what might be called 'professional appeals', displays of calculated intimidation and petulance bearing no relation to the matter for adjudication, even 'professional catches', like the one for which Sourav Ganguly remarkably escaped censure during the World Cup final. These displays aren't evidence of an overabundance of high spirits, or of being supremely tough and competitive: they're just cheating. To make the most of the dividends of professionalism, cricketers themselves must confront some of its less appetising manifestations. It will not only be beneficial for the game; it will make the case for their influence in it unassailable.
  We're at a hinge moment in cricket's history – a tipping point, to use the expression beloved of marketers and military men alike. A new age beckons; the trappings of the old are slipping away. But while cricket shouldn't walk backwards into the future, the occasional glance over its shoulder might still be useful.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Having shrugged off its amateur past, of course, cricket must bear a certain burden of professionalised tedium. It has spent its inheritance of great players who learned their cricket the old-fashioned way, rising through the established grades, and playing at state, county and provincial level before higher honours. The generation that succeeded them, streamed into youth teams and academies as well as the first-class game, have been raised with different expectations: knowing that cricket could be their living, they've never needed to live for cricket. If the game today seems more routine, perhaps that should not surprise us. Has anyone paid money to watch you work lately?
  What can we say, then, about a quarter century of professional international cricket? The trade-off was a necessary and unavoidable one: cricket could not withstand the tide of sporting commercialism. Television and sponsors had re-priced all games, and the remuneration of cricketers could not stand still. But, for players, it was only a partial emancipation. The attitude of boards of control since Packer has been unconsciously obedient of Alfred Hitchcock's advice regarding actors: 'Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle.' And some heaps have been taller than others.
  It was this climate of mistrust and cynicism that smoothed the path to malpractice. When Sir Paul Condon's anti-corruption unit reported to the ICC on match-fixing in May 2001, it noted that players were 'not sufficiently involved in the administration of the game and ownership of the problems'. While the ICC doesn't have a great record taking advice from others, one might have thought it could take its own. Administrators have fared badly believing in cricketers' worst instincts; it might be more fruitful appealing to their better natures.
  One would be even more emphatic about this had 'professional' not become so pregnant with meaning. It suggests diligence, dedication, attention to detail, as in 'professional qualification', but it also implies contrivance, conspiracy and sleazy expedient, as in 'professional foul'. Cricket is witnessing both: we have what might be called 'professional appeals', displays of calculated intimidation and petulance bearing no relation to the matter for adjudication, even 'professional catches', like the one for which Sourav Ganguly remarkably escaped censure during the World Cup final. These displays aren't evidence of an overabundance of high spirits, or of being supremely tough and competitive: they're just cheating. To make the most of the dividends of professionalism, cricketers themselves must confront some of its less appetising manifestations. It will not only be beneficial for the game; it will make the case for their influence in it unassailable.
  We're at a hinge moment in cricket's history – a tipping point, to use the expression beloved of marketers and military men alike. A new age beckons; the trappings of the old are slipping away.