Diluviar – Hard Rain - March 2010

In Argentina the cricket season is divided in two halves with a mid season break of a month. I have never seen the benefits of a mid season break especially in football when those tight games in the holiday period between Christmas and New Year can define a season.  But now I am converted because the whole of Buenos Aires goes on holiday during this time and it is so ridiculously hot no one would want to play cricket anyway.

Paul Muchall, me and Tom Lewis

We started the season again at the beginning of February with a series of 10 games, playing different formats designed to bring the best 22 players in Argentina together so the standard of the fixtures would be higher. To help the series the MCC very kindly sent two MCC Young Cricketers, Paul Muchall and Tom Lewis, over for the month to help with this process.

After a roasting hot January nobody could foresee what was to be the wettest February for one hundred and forty nine years in Buenos Aires with 80mm falling in a three hour period happening. The locals said that Tom and Paul brought the weather with them from England, but I can safely say that the weather was not from England but another planet. 

Fighting a losing battle

In Argentina there  are levels for the rain from 0 – 10 on the weather channel and looking in my faithful Spanish Dictionary I found two words for rain, lluvia meaning rain and diluviar meaning hard rain. However, after hearing the word diluvar on the weather and being unfortunate enough to experience this I feel the translation is slightly misleading.  diluvar would be better translated as - Get home soon or you will have to take cover, if no cover is found from diluvar in the first three seconds you will be soaked through.

Argentina U19s - Champions of Americas Division 2

Unfortunately we lost two weekends cricket and the Americas U19s tournament was also disrupted by diluviar but we managed to play six games including two day night Twenty20 games.  Paul and Tom from the MCC raised the standard of cricket during the month, helped develop other players by playing and training with them. They also helped enormously with coaching the Under 19s who managed to gain promotion by winning the Americas Division Two. I am sure they are both going to have fantastic careers in the future. We hope to see more pros come over to Buenos Aires in the future.