INFO » been spared the Friday game of cat and mouse with the

Arizonas loss to Butler on Friday night revealed some of the flaws hidden when playing against inferior opponents.The Wildcats opened the season with a victory over short-handed and youthful Michigan State, but the Bulldogs are a bigger, deeper and more-veteran team. Butler beat Arizona 69-65 in a hard-fought game in the Las Vegas Invitational, which dropped the Wildcats (5-1) from eighth to 16th in the AP poll.Were a work in progress, Arizona coach Sean Miller said.The Wildcats will try to make progress when they faces Texas Southern on Wednesday in Tucson, Ariz. (9 p.m. ET, Pac 12 Network). The Tigers (4-2) were predicted to win the Southwestern Athletic Conference in a preseason vote of league coaches and sports information directors.This will be the seventh of 16 road games to start the season for the Tigers, who are coming off an 84-73 loss at Louisiana-Lafayette on Sunday. They are coached by Mike Davis, the former head man at Indiana and UAB.He directed Texas Southern into the NCAA Tournament in 2014 and 2015, the latter appearance resulting in a 93-72 opening-round loss to Arizona in Portland, Ore. That is the only previous matchup between the programs.The Wildcats return only two players from that team -- point guard Parker Jackson-Cartwright and center Dusan Ristic, both juniors. That helps tell the tale of a young team still finding its way this season.Because of injuries and guard Allonzo Triers unexplained absence, Miller is working with eight scholarship players. Three are freshman, another is a junior college transfer.We lost to a very good basketball team, Miller said Friday night. Butler will be a team in the NCAA Tournament. They have a lot of experience. They are a little further along at this point than we are with that experience.We played through foul trouble. We had to play through some adversity. We didnt play well at times, but our effort was outstanding. That was the most important thing. When you do that, you learn from it.Trier, who averaged 14.8 points per game as a freshman last season, has not played this season. The school has not commented amid rumors of eligibility issues.Freshman 7-foot forward Lauri Markkanen has emerged as the teams leading scorer (18.2 points per game), but he was limited by foul trouble against Butler, scoring 15 points in 21 minutes before fouling out.He was not able to assert himself, Miller said. A couple of fouls he probably could have controlled by being where he was supposed to be.Freshman guard Kobi Simmons (12.7 ppg) and freshman wing Rawle Alkins (10.3 ppg) are the next two top scorers for the Wildcats.Texas Southern is led in scoring by junior guard Zach Lofton, who has spent time at Illinois State and Minnesota. He is averaging 20.5 points per game. Another transfer guard, Dulani Robinson from Pacific, is averaging 14.5 points per game.Derrick Griffin, a 6-7 power forward who won last seasons SWAC Player of the Year award, is averaging 12.2 points and 8.8 rebounds. He has been selected All-SWAC in basketball and football (2015, as a receiver), though he was dismissed from the football team this September.Theyre a very good team that can shoot the basketball, Louisiana-Lafayette coach Bob Marlin said of Texas Southern. They have great players in Lofton and Robinson, and Griffin is an outstanding athlete. Custom New York Rangers Jerseys . NBA officials ruled the court unplayable in the Bucks final exhibition game on Oct. 25 because players were slipping, and the game was cancelled midway through the first period. Tie Domi Rangers Jersey . White came in fourth place in the event. He was the two-time defending gold medallist. The gold medal went to Swiss snowboarder Iouri Podladtchikov. http://www.rangershockeyonlineshop.com/ron-greschner-hockey-jersey/ . Fred Couples, captain of the U.S. side, put it all into perspective. "We know whos in charge," he said. Brendan Smith Rangers Jersey . Vokoun departed practice on Saturday morning after discovering swelling in his thigh. He was taken to a local hospital where the clot was revealed. The club announced the surgery following a 5-3 exhibition loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets. Walt Tkaczuk Jersey .J. -- Josh Cribbs was in the Pro Bowl in February and out of a job six months later. Faced with uncertainty, the human mind devises narratives to feign predictability. Uncertainty comes in various forms - from fundamental questions such as Why are we here? to more humdrum ones - Will I get wet later?Humdrum it may be but, dealt a 13-week season, impinged upon by football, school trips and family holidays, knowing whether it will rain later has become one of the determining considerations of my life as a junior cricket organiser. Yesteryear, when the weather was really significant, we would consult seaweed, or the posture of cattle. Nowadays, theres a very modern indicator of coming rain: text messages.It starts in the late morning. Parents: Will tonights game be rained off? Im out of town, so would be good to know. I understand the need to drive out uncertainty, the modern middle-class parents desire for the one quiet evening at home that a cancellation can deliver. The thing is, Im out of town as well.Six years into this role and I am also very clear that if we decided whether matches in Englands north-west should be played based on weather conditions at 11am and forecasts for the early evening, our youngsters would play very little cricket at all. The UKs temperate maritime climate, with very few climatic extremes, means that the weather is a state of mind as much as it is an objective fact. For cricket enthusiasts in this damp region, there is a pragmatism about conditions: Well start if its not raining (hard) and carry on if its not pouring.Recently, I drove through heavy traffic and heavier rain to a friendly local club. As I pulled onto the driveway that skirts the grounds southern boundary, I saw a heron wading on the outfield. But the rain had stopped. Our hosts put the kettle on, joined me in conference with the neutral umpire and agreed wed give it half an hour - but would mark the boundary anyway (cordoning off the wading bird reserve at wide long-on).Thanks to the practicality of our hosts and the shared view that its only a game that nobody gains from cancelling, our teens played on. Two-hundred-and-seventy runs in 34 overs showed it was a batters night and that weather is, within parameters, a state of mind.To agree that its only a game may be a luxury thats being depleted. Umpires have a responsibility for ensuring the safety of playing conditions. Thats well understood. An opposition first team player umpiring an Under-13 game once tried to bring the teams off in light rain. His legitimate concern was that the boys didnt have spikes and were slipping. The opposition coach and I walked out to the middle to assess conditions. The boys were loving it, performing sliding stops and soft-landing dives. No more long run-ups, the other coach and I decreed before returning to the scorebox, out of sight of the parents fretting over laundry.With that responsibility placed on the umpires comes an opportunity for litigation. A case has already reached court (Bartlett v ECB Coaches Association, 2015). A fielder was injured on a wet outfield after having argued with the umpire that the game shouldnt take place. The court, in this example, dismisssed the claim against the umpire, perhaps noting that the fielder, concerned about the conditions, had nonetheless attempted a sliding stop.dddddddddddd The very fact of this legal case, though, will cause a ripple through our recreational umpires, like a cricket bag dragged through a carpark puddle.Theres another impediment to a laissez-faire approach to the weather and junior cricket. Its the hierarchy of needs within the club. Ten-year-olds share the same square as the clubs senior teams. Allowing an Under-11 match to go ahead and damage the first XI track is heresy. The balance is tightest on a Friday night, when the pitch will have little time to recover before the weekends big fixture.On many a Friday afternoon, watching drizzles pathetic, stubborn dampening of the street outside my office window, my duty to play and play on, has shunted up against a wish for it to just rain properly and put us out of this misery. I check my iPhone weather app with the compulsion normally reserved for the Test score. The teasing of rain specks on the windscreen continues on the drive to the ground. The texts are coming in thick and fast. Were on, I announce with fingers on keypad when I get to the ground and find the moisture hanging in the air, making the grass greasy, the square so inviting for a young cricketer to skid across and wreck tomorrows track.As long as it doesnt get any heavier, I explain to opposition, umpire, parents. We dig out bar towels for the fielding team to dry the ball that will still swell like a raisin in a Moroccan stew. Bats left carelessly on the grass will lose their sharp report. The fielders hair, that started in a variety of self-conscious shapes, becomes uniformly flattened on their scalps. Meanwhile, the pitch for our first teams match takes on more water. Should I or shouldnt I just call the game off? I can cope with the rain; its the drizzle I cant stand.This season, Ive been spared the Friday game of cat and mouse with the elements, with the matches I organise occurring on Wednesday evenings. But back in May, we played at home on the eve of a county second XI match at our ground. This was a prestigious fixture, for which we wanted the ground and in particular the square, looking its best. We got under way with grey clouds occluding the sun in the west. Club officials, looking more often at the sky than the play, stood on the boundary. Soon after the second innings started, the clouds began to leak and the covers made it to the pitch before the players reached the pavilion. Three of us stood sentry in the middle, heads cocked upwards like men have done for millennia. Then each of us 21st century men would look down and consult our smart phones, two of which told us it was raining and one claimed sunshine. Meanwhile, the square, the covers, the outfield, our heads and shoulders were rapidly filling in white as snow fell.Want to be featured on Inbox? Send your articles to us here, with Inbox in the subject line. ' ' '