INTRODUCTION

I have a couple of cricket related things to share, a few photographs, and solutions to the puzzles I set in the post “Cricket, Photographs and Puzzles”. 

CRICKET

The third round of Championship matches were scheduled to start yesterday, but most did not get underway due to the weather, and those that did get underway were heavily affected by the weather. I have two other things to mention in this section:

WORLD CUP 2019 SCHEDULE

The schedule for the 2019 World Cup is now available to the public (see here for full details). The tournament is as usual spread out over far too long (starting at the end of May but not finishing until mid July) because the organisers will not stand up to the TV people and schedule multiple matches for the same day. In 2015 I put up a post demonstrating how a 16-team tournament could be scheduled to last no more than three and a half weeks, and I reproduce the text from that post below:

THE SUTCLIFFE FORMULA FOR ORGANISING A CRICKET WORLD CUP

There has been much talk at the Cricket World Cup about how the tournament should be formatted, especially given that there are those who would reduce it to a ten team tournament (so utterly harebrained a notion that I do no more than mention it). Several of the associate nations at this world cup have given good accounts of themselves, with Ireland having a strong chance of progressing to the quarter finals.

My formula for a Cricket World Cup would be as follows:

16 teams to play in the tournament. Stage one would involve two groups of eight teams, the top four from each group progressing. Each group would play its matches in sets of four (hence two groups of eight), making seven rounds of matches for each group, to played on alternate days (i.e. this stage would span two weeks, with each side having a day off between matches.

After the group stage would be a three day break before the quarter-finals, which would be played all on one day. After a two day break the semi–finals would take place. Then following another two day break the final would take place. This would mean that the tournament would be played in a period of three and a half weeks (a sensible length for a global tournament).

As for the TV people: If they don’t like it they can lump it.

A SUGGESTED ENGLAND TEAM FOR 1ST TEST MATCH

The early stages of this cricket season have been less than satisfactory, but I have some thoughts about an England team for the first test match nonetheless. In batting order:

1. A Cook
2. H Hameed – Mark Stoneman has had ten test matches without producing a serious score, and the fact that he has reached 50 five times but not gone beyond 60 is enough for me to call time on him. Hameed is restored to full fitness (it was injury that ciost him his place after an encouraging start to his test career) and should be given another chance.
3. J Bairstow, playing as a specialist batsman (he is plenty good enough to do so).
4. J Root (Captain)
5. D Malan – one of the few England test batsmen to be able to claim a successful tour of Australia and New Zealand.
6. B Stokes 
7. M Burgess (wk) – a fine wicketkeeper, and in what is currently a very exclusive club of batsmen who have produced two major scores this season. 
8. S Curran – a left-arm pace bowler who has been knocking on the door. The fact that he bowls with his left-arm will lend variation to the seam attack.
9. J Leach – finally given a chance in the last test of the New Zealand leg of the tour, he bowled well and must surely be persevered with.
10. S Broad
11. J Anderson
12. D Bess – stranger things have happened than an English pitch in May warranting the selection of two spinners, so Bess gets the nod as 12th man. Incidentally, controversial as it would be, the person who would have miss out were I going the two spinners route is Broad, going for a new-ball combo of Curran and Anderson.

Of the three players who went into the Ashes tour as England players and who do not feature above James Vince may yet redeem himself by producing some huge scores for Hampshire, while Stoneman and Ali are as far as I am concerned firmly in the category of ex-England players.

PHOTOGRAPHIC INTERLUDE

We now change focus, and I am marking this with some photographs. There will be more after I have presented solutions to the problems I left you to tackle.

SOLUTIONS

All of these problems were taken from brilliant. The first was:

MATCHSTICKS

First the answer:

Now here is Marvin Kalngan’s published solution:

SOLUTION 2: CLEAR ICE

Here is the problem:

And the answer:

SOLUTION 3: POLYOMINO

The problem:

The answer:

I solved this one the lazy way – I noted that shape B very easily forms a rectangle, and after visualising various assemblages of shape A and noting that none were rectangular I opted for B only given that this is a Basic level problem. Stefan van der Waal published this solution:

SOLUTION 4: CONVERGENCE

The problem:

The answer:

Since the sequence involves numbers between 0 and 1 being multiplied together, and such numbers multiply to produce smaller numbers, the series actually converges on 0.

SOLUTION 5: CUBE

The problem:

The answer: 

I solved this as follows:

1)Because you are specifically allowed to rotate the cube you can see every individual block that appears on the outside…
2)This means that the only blocks that can you cannot see are those wholly inside the cube…
3)…Which since the surface layer is 1 block thick, and occurs twice in each direction amounts to a 4 x 4 x 4 cube…
4)…Therefore 64 blocks are invisible, which means that (216-64) = 152 blocks are visible.

To end this section here is Aaa-Laura Gao Gao’s solution:

FINAL PHOTOGRAPHS

For those of you who have made it to the end: