In the Dark

I’ve done quite a few posts recently about the ending of summer – the Autumnal Equinox, the resumption of teaching, the start of a new season at the National Concert Hall are three indicators – but now we really have reached which I regard as the definite conclusion. Yesterday saw the last day of the last round of matches in cricket’s County Championship.

I haven’t followed cricket very closely since I moved to Ireland, but I do look and see how Glamorgan are getting on. The County Championship started very poorly for them, with a thrashing by Middlesex, but they improved substantially and went into the last round of matches secure in 2nd place of Division 2. They lost their last match in Cardiff against a team from the Midlands, by 7 wickets – a game that actually ended on Friday – but they still finished second. That means that they get promoted to Division 1 for the first time in 21 years.

I wouldn’t bet against them being relegated straight away, though. Last time they got promoted (in 2004) they played just one season (2005) in the First Division, during which they lost 14 of their 16 matches, and dropped back down. They almost got promoted in 2010 but were pipped for second place by Worchestershire, who were the beneficiaries of an exceedingly generous – let’s put it that way – declaration by Sussex that allowed them to win their last match. Anyway, to avoid the drop next season Glamorgan need to improve their pace attack considerably. I wonder who, if anyone, they’ll sign?

Glamorgan plays an important role in the international cricket ecosystem, especially with the Ashes coming up. Many of Australia’s star players – including Marnus Labuschagne, Michael Neser, and Usman Khawaja – only came to prominence after stepping up to the big time to play for Glamorgan.

Knowing that the cricket season was almost over, on Friday I decided to give my front lawn one last mow too. The mower is now in the shed until next spring. Leaves have been falling for some time already, so I swept up what I could after cutting the grass. That reminds me to share this, which I found on Bluesky:

I really hate those things…

Anyway, we have completed one week of teaching at Maynooth University which passed off reasonably smoothly. I only had one timetabling glitch, but that was resolved trivially by just swapping two sessions. This year the Department of Physics has quite a lot of students in the final-year on the Physics with Astrophysics programme, run before the merger by the Department of Experimental Physics. Now we’re combined we can share the load and I’ll be supervising a couple of students on an astrophysics project, which will be a new experience. I haven’t really taught much astrophysics since coming here nearly eight years ago, so this will make a nice change.

This entry was posted on September 28, 2025 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Biographical, Cricket, Maynooth with tags County Championship Division 2, cricket, Glamorgan County Cricket Club, Maynooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.