Neil "Alligators" Lovatt is beside himself with excitement as the bookies finally prove their predictive brilliance

After the disappointment of the rugby, my mind started turning to Scotland's upcoming appearance in the Cricket World Cup.  OK, we're unlikely to get much joy there either, but I think there's something rather pleasing about Scotland's existence as a country being affirmed in a quintessentially English sport - particularly one in which we were technically "represented" by the England team until 1992.  As an added bonus, I saw national anthems being played before the Australia v England match the other night, so if that happens before every game Flower of Scotland will presumably be getting quite a few outings in a very unlikely setting.

I decided to have a little peek at the Betfair odds for the Scotland v New Zealand match, just to see how impossible the task is rated as being, and sure enough the disparity in the odds is mildly embarrassing.  But you'll be happy to hear that Scotland are much more highly fancied on one crucial measure, namely the outcome of the coin toss.

To win toss?

Scotland 10/11

New Zealand 10/11

IMPLIED PROBABILITY OF SCOTLAND WINNING THE COIN TOSS : 50%

IMPLIED PROBABILITY OF NEW ZEALAND WINNING THE COIN TOSS : 50%

I must say that sounds more or less right to me.  It's absolutely uncanny.

Huzzah for the bookies!

Huzzah for the Wisdom of Crowds!

I can't think of any other way I would ever have worked out that there is a 50% chance of winning a coin toss.  My doubts have lifted at last - from now on, I'll definitely be joining Neil "Alligators" Lovatt and his fan club in ignoring scientifically-conducted opinion polls, and instead assuming that the best way of predicting election results is to look at spread-sheets examining the behaviour of wealthy Tory gamblers in minute detail.

(PS.  Do you reckon this post is worth another "Eet Vos A Pleasure To Shrrrrred Eet, James"?)

England Ashes debacle - another blow for McDougall?

Believe it or not, I do genuinely have a passing interest in cricket, so I decided to have a little peek at the final Ashes test on Sky.  As I write this, England have collapsed to 14-3, and doubtless it will be 17-7 by the time I finish.  Now obviously this is a national sporting tragedy, but does it have wider ramifications?  The headline on this post was intended as a joke, but if our friends in the London media truly believe that absolutely everything that happened during the London Olympics was a "disaster for Alex Salmond" (another one?!), that Andy Murray winning Wimbledon was a "good day for the union" (surely every day is a good day for the union?), and that Murray's SPOTY triumph was somehow "good for the No campaign" (yes, Mike "can't be arsed" Smithson really did say that), then I'm afraid the logic is inescapable.  According to media mythology, the recent success of the England cricket team is supposed to be one of the sporting factors that have bound the UK together, in spite of the minor detail that Scotland hasn't actually been represented by that team since 1992 (before then the cricket authorities were arrogant enough to use the name 'England' for a team representing the whole of Great Britain).  So, unavoidably, as the England team are now toiling badly and heading for a 5-0 drubbing by the Aussies, it must be considered something of a calamity for Blair McDougall and the No camp.

If that claim strikes you as being a tad silly, then it probably says something rather profound about the unionist media's past attempts to exploit our athletes' sporting successes.  But stand by for more of the same if Eve Muirhead and co strike gold in Sochi on February 21st.  After all, there isn't a Scot alive who wouldn't much prefer that an all-Scottish team's Olympic triumph be placed in the "Great Britain" column, is there?  It's rather like the cricket philosophy of old, but inverted.

The current voting system just isn't cricket

I see that the No to AV campaign wheeled out cricket stars Darren Gough and David Gower a few days ago as their latest converts. Which is intriguing, given that the No side have had such a predilection for sporting analogies about 'losers winning' and so on. Perhaps, given the circumstances, they'd care to explain how the following things can - and regularly do - happen in cricket...

1) The team that scores far fewer runs over a five-day Test Match 'draws' the game.

2) The team that scores fewer runs in a one-day international or Twenty20 match actually wins the game, courtesy of the Duckworth-Lewis method.

Does this mean that the game of cricket itself is not a "level playing field", to use Gough's own words? Quite the reverse. It would be utterly insane to automatically award a win in a rain-interrupted one-day international match to the side with most runs, regardless of whether they had also batted for more overs. It would be an incomplete picture. Just like the current voting system for Westminster uses an incomplete picture to award a win to a candidate with as little as 26% of the vote, taking no account of whether the majority of the electorate would have much preferred a different candidate. A vivid example of this problem is the Belfast South result in the 2005 election -

Unionist vote (DUP/UUP) - 51.1%
Nationalist vote (SDLP/Sinn Féin) - 41.3%

Under the current system, a nationalist won. Under AV (or indeed under any run-off system), a unionist would have won. Which would have been fairer? In what sense did the nationalist who was elected truly have a mandate?