The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

A fading memory: Joe Mennie walks off after being dismissed during day four of the second Test
match between Australia and South Africa in Hobart. Photograph: Robert Prezioso/Cricket
Australia/Getty Images
The Scott Muller sympathy card for being thrown to the wolves
Poor Joe Mennie. He didn’t pick himself, after all, but the South Australian quick timed his run into
the Test side both brilliantly – in that the end of the Rod Marsh selection era put literally anyone in
contention – but also disastrously, in that he should be called up for a debacle like the Hobart Test.
Six team changes and many thousand airings of the David Warner OLED TV commercial later and
poor Mennie is a fading memory, but they can never take that baggy green cap away from him.
The SK Warne pizza voucher for most Shane Warne thing of the
year
This is obviously a foregone conclusion, but boy weren’t there some beauties in 2016? There was
WarnieMojis, the app literally nobody asked for, the Warnie bong, released in honour of 420 Day, and
the various travails of the Shane Warne Foundation (with a guest appearance from Waleed Aly), but in
a packed field the story that stood out for us was Warne’s calm assertion during his stint on I’m a
Celebrity that human beings evolved from … drum roll … aliens.
“If we’ve evolved from monkeys, then why haven’t those ones evolved?” Warne asked the dancer
Bonnie Lythgoe, a fellow contestant, as they lounged on a riverbank in South Africa’s Kruger national
park. “Because, I’m saying, aliens. We started from aliens.”