Herschelle Gibbs in the Sunday Times: Full Coverage including an Excerpt from his book To the Point

South African cricketer Herschelle Gibbs’ new autobiography, To the Point, made the biggest splash of all at the weekend, dominating the Sunday Times’ headlines.

Excerpts from To the Point:
" I could couch this chapter in a whole bunch of safe-sounding euphemisms, but given the book’s title, I’ll get straight to the point, shall I? Two words: “women” and “booze”.
Whatever else has happened in my life, I can say one thing for sure: I have had a huge amount of fun in my cricket career. Three things have undoubtedly contributed to this: 1) I’m a friendly and outgoing guy who’s comfortable in anyone’s company; 2) I have the gift of the gab, which I get from my dad, and clearly women love it. My open demeanour often comes across as flirting, but that’s just the way I am. I guess you could say I am charming and, as I said, chicks dig it; 3) And this is the double-edged sword – I like to drink, and alcohol has only exacerbated points 1 and 2. It has lubricated some of the best evenings of my life, but it also nearly ended my international career in 2008."
Read the complete article

Next, a few notes on “sex, drugs and match fixing”:
"Herschelle Gibbs has exposed the dark side of South African cricket, including sexual orgies, marijuana smoking and how the Proteas are controlled by a “clique”, in an autobiography that is set to rock the cricket world.
The book, To The Point, includes descriptions of sexual encounters in which Gibbs and other players took part, including one with a young girl attending a matric dance and a hotel-room orgy involving three girls.
Gibbs writes: “Two beds, two cricketers and three women. One of them wasn’t all that keen, though; she just lay on the bed. Which was fine – there was enough for everyone. The other two girls, however, more than made a go of it".

Read the complete article

Read about how Hansie Cronje lured Gibbs into cheating:
" “Okay, cool.” A decision and two words Gibbs would come to “bitterly regret” as he agreed to his captain Hansie Cronjé’s proposal to score fewer than 20 runs in a game in exchange for $15000.
The late cricket captain had come to Gibbs’s hotel room early that morning in March 2000, prior to the one-day international against India at Nagpur, to discuss the proposal with him.
Read the complete articleFinally, Gibbs on his troublesome marriage to Tenielle:
What started out as a fun night at a cousin’s wedding ended with a “pissed” Herschelle Gibbs pulling out his wife Tenielle’s hair on their way home.
“We were physically fighting while I was driving. I was trying to prevent her from grabbing the steering wheel and hitting me … and in the process I managed to pull some of her hair out,” he writes in his autobiography, To the Point.
Read the complete article

Gibbs Autobiography exposes the dark side

Herschelle Gibbs has exposed the dark side of South African cricket, including sexual orgies, marijuana smoking and how the Proteas are controlled by a "clique", in an autobiography that is set to rock the cricket world.

The book, To The Point, includes descriptions of sexual encounters in which Gibbs and other players took part, including one with a young girl attending a matric dance and a hotel-room orgy involving three girls.

Gibbs writes: "Two beds, two cricketers and three women. One of them wasn't all that keen, though; she just lay on the bed. Which was fine - there was enough for everyone. The other two girls, however, more than made a go of it.

"I got the ball rolling, but then I noticed that my mate was feeling a little left out. Now he's lying on the other bed, so, big-hearted chap that I am, I say, 'Well, you can't leave my mate all alone there.' And fortunately one of them was only too happy to transfer ship."

There were always women: "They came hunting in packs, and if they liked what they saw, you were in for the ride of your life."

During the same tour, he writes about bumping into a girl on her way to a matric dance: "I spotted one particularly gorgeous girl, obviously dressed to the nines, walking around the hotel lobby. After a few drinks and a few words, she came upstairs with me to my room and gave me a little dance of another kind. She then left and went back to the dance proper."

Then, during one of their warm-up games on the 1997-98 Australia tour, Gibbs and some of the guys noticed a "pretty girl" and asked her to join them that evening. They started drinking and she mentioned she was a stripper.

"Things loosened up a lot more after that. Various items of clothing were removed in an eyebrow-raising kind of way, and one thing invariably led to another."

The book, to which the Sunday Times has been given full access ahead of its release Monday, also reveals how the Proteas are dominated by a clique of older players.

"The team has been criticised for being run by a group of senior players - Graeme Smith, Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher and, more recently, AB de Villiers - and this inner circle splits the team in two and makes any chance of developing true team spirit among the Proteas impossible," says Gibbs.

Former coach Mickey Arthur tried to take on the senior players, but often bowed to them.

"Simply put, without Graeme's backing, Mickey didn't have much influence over the guys. In the end, Graeme was simply too powerful."

He reveals how the team never regained its spirit after former captain Hansie Cronjé was dismissed for match fixing.

"Things were never the same ... I sympathised with Shaun Pollock - he had a tough time filling Hansie's shoes and gluing the team back together. But the Proteas never had that same togetherness under Polly. He never socialised with the boys too much.

"I think if we're honest with ourselves ... we've got to admit that the Proteas have underachieved in international cricket over the past decade."

The book also lays bare Gibbs's legendary propensity for getting himself into trouble.

"As you now know, I've managed to land myself in the kak with alarming regularity right from the start of my cricket career.

"A stint in rehab for alcohol abuse and a messy divorce would be more than enough controversy for most professional athletes, but, with me, that wasn't the half of it."

His marriage to Tenielle Povey ended in 2008, but not before his drunken ways got really nasty.

"We were physically fighting while I was driving ... I managed to pull some of her hair out. As explosive as my batting can be, it hasn't quite matched the pyrotechnics of my life off the field."

Anecdotes from cricket tours include how:

* He regarded tours to Australia as shopping expeditions for "eager young Aussie lasses";
* Some of his teammates flew out waitresses from the infamous Port Elizabeth restaurant The Ranch to join them on tour; and
* He spent the night with two "hotties" with a reputation for making their way through cricketing nations.

Gibbs admits that his "most expensive shag" set him back R5000 in a fine for poor performance on the field the next day.

In a chapter titled 'The Proteas and Me', Gibbs says: "Some people aren't going to like this chapter, but I've always believed you have to call it like you see it. Given the talent we have had at our disposal, we should have won at least one World Cup and been consistently challenging the Aussies as the top Test team in the world. But a fear of failure, reinforced by an essentially conservative approach to the game, was the team's "Achilles heel".

He loved and loathed some of his colleagues. He says he "could never figure out" Daryll Cullinan, who told him to "f** k off" on his maiden tour.

Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds, whom he befriended while playing for the IPL team Deccan Chargers, had "a great sense of humour", but was "not such an easy guy to be around" after a few drinks. "He is genuinely scary when he's pissed."

Regarding Cronjé, he says despite "the cloud that hangs over his legacy, I can tell you that I've never played with anyone who possessed such a die-hard attitude to winning".

The book deals with other "controversies", including match fixing and weed smoking by some of the players.

"I went through a lot in life and I want people to read my side of the story," he told the Sunday Times in an interview this week.

Gibbs, who has played in three World Cups and is contracted to the Proteas until April next year, still hopes to make the team at least one more time.

Investors offered stake in Aussie T20 teams

Private investors will be allowed to buy a 33% stake in eight city-based franchises that will form Australia's Big Bash League in 2011-12.

Cricket Australia's board gave approval for the Twenty20 expansion in Melbourne today and the organisation will own and control the competition.

Reports this week said Indian corporations had already bought shares of around A$60m in some of the proposed franchises.

However, Cricket Australia believes the value of the teams will rival the biggest sporting clubs in the country.

The Brisbane Broncos rugby league team was priced at A$36m this year.

James Sutherland, the Cricket Australia chief executive, said private investment would be allowed from minority stakeholders, but the individual teams would be owned by the state associations.

"The board has taken a position that it will be less than 49% [minority share], probably more likely to be 33%," Sutherland said.

"We're very excited and optimistic of the existing interest in these teams and the Big Bash League.

Some of the valuations we have done recently put these teams immediately into the upper echelons of Australian sport in terms of value in sporting teams." The idea is unashamedly based on the India Premier League, but Cricket Australia is determined not to make the same mistakes over ownership that have plagued the competition this year.

Two franchises, Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab, have been struck out following broken agreements, while Kochi, one of the expansion teams, is on the verge of being dumped due to issues with investors.

When asked whether fit and proper testing of owners would occur, like what happens in the English Premier League, Sutherland said, "Under the licensing agreement, which each of the states and teams will be bound by, there will be a process of Cricket Australia maintaining the rights to vet or approve any investors in any of these teams." Sutherland said there was a lot to be learned from the IPL.

"I mean that in a positive and negative sense," he said.

"There is a model there that exists that has been incredibly successful.

"It's important to reflect that part of the reason this competition is already attracting investors here and abroad is the fact that it is extremely high profile, by virtue of Big Bash teams having qualified for the Champions League, and been very successful.

It's also because the game of Twenty20 is popular around the world, and it's a unique opportunity for cricket." An IPL-style auction is not an option to distribute the playing talent but there will be a strict salary cap and a draft will be considered.

There are hopes for a January window to ensure Australia's international players and big-name overseas stars are available for the entire tournament, but that will not happen at least until the current TV rights deals run out in 2012-13.

"We see great merit in having Australian players playing in this competition but obviously that needs to be balanced with our commitments to international cricket," Sutherland said.

"We want Twenty20 to complement, not compromise, international cricket.

Finding that balance is important." Six of the sides will come from the cities that already host domestic cricket, but the state concept will be abolished for the Twenty20 tournament.

Expressions of interest will be taken from other areas of the country over the next couple of months and a decision on the final two teams will be made in February.

The inaugural tournament will be held in December and January 2011-12.

Crowd numbers for the Big Bash, which started in 2005-06, increased by 80% last year to average more than 18,000 per game.

Cricket Australia was initially reluctant to join the Twenty20 revolution when it began in England, but quickly swung behind it when realising how popular and lucrative it could be.

Cricket Australia has done modelling 20 years into the future and Sutherland is convinced the tournament will be a massive success.

"It gives us a huge amount of confidence in how this competition is going to grow," he said.

"In the first couple of years, the cash flows are somewhat handicapped by existing media rights deals, so the marginal revenues may not be quite as large, but we would expect those to kick in from year three and beyond." While there are expectations the other two domestic competitions will be cut back, Sutherland said the Boxing Day Test was "safe".

"From an international programming point of view, our priority rests with international cricket," he said.

"But all of the research we have done very strongly indicates that the enjoyment that people get from the game of cricket can be spread over the three formats, or discreetly held with one format of the game."

courtesy: yahoo

Crickets Clean up campaign

The Kerala High Court’s recent ruling that cricket administration officials are public servants and are liable to be investigated by the vigilance department should be see as a significant leap forward in the sport feels noted columnist Peter Roebuck. In a syndicated column for the Sydney Morning Herald, Roebuck says that in the past Indian courts have shown a readiness to step in to prevent cricket administrators from fanning corrupt practices.

“That thought alone will help to keep them on their toes. It will also force them to publish accounts. Boards tend to forget that the game belongs to the public. Not long ago a Cricket Australia official remarked that they had every right to control all proprietary interests in ‘our game’''. He had to be reminded that it was actually Australia''s game, yours and mine. Cricket officials are servants not masters. Honesty is the least that can be expected from them. If they cannot abide by those standards, let them join the honest thieves.

Courtesy: indian express

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