merry xmas from mystic glenn

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Yuletide logs, nicknames and gifts for all.

What a week it's been. The boys have been as happy as Shane Warne at an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet in an nursing college. We've thoroughly enjoyed our win over the Poms - nearly as much as Punter and I enjoyed menacing Ali Cook out of his dinner money when we ran into him behind the pav.

But although the series is won, I'm not resting on my laurels just yet (partly because they dig into the old back something chronic and play up the lumbago). There's still a lot of predicting to be done before the series is over, and I'm foreseeing a very unpleasant Christmas for the Poms.

As a gesture of seasonal goodwill, our resident masterchef Matty Hayden kindly left one of his famous Yuletide Logs in their dressing room.

Apparently it took Geraint Jones an hour and half with a coathanger to get it round the u-bend. Still, at least he's finally made a useful contribution to their team, I suppose.

But while the Poms look forward to a Christmas of regret and self-loathing and the full horror of what's happened sinks in (like a bloke waking up after a night on the pop to find his neck being nuzzled by the magnificent, bristly moustache of Mervyn Gregory Hughes), we're absolutely ripper.

The only slightly sour note this week was a bust-up between Matty Hayden and young Brett. They were paired off in the Secret Santa but it seems that Brett got the wrong end of the stick and thought it was something to do with devil worship. Haydo's face when Brett gave him the book on Satanism and the plastic horns was a picture. I think it's fair to say that he wasn't a happy God-botherer.

Poor Brett: he tries, but he's as thick as a kangaroo's ballbag. One young man, though, who I reckon is a proper brainbox is our Western Australian batting genius Mike Hussey. Now, you're not a proper Australian cricketer unless you've got a nickname, but Huss didn't have one when he first got into the side.

Mike loves his cricket, and he plays cricket professionally, so he thought long and hard about it and came up with a absolute cracker - Mr Cricket.

Now you show me a Pommie who can match that sort of mental agility. Is it any wonder we're beating them off the park?

Alan Tyers