Fun and games in South Africa
When I was growing up I used to love the game .
You know the one, you have control of four or five cogs and the idea is to get all your little tokens down to the bottom of the game.
The trouble is that your opponent can turn the same cogs from the other side and all your careful plans about getting "this cog to get the next token" go up the spout.
At times planning for this filming trip for has been like Downfall.
As hard as we were trying to line up interviews and filming opportunities in Johnnesburg we always seemes to hit trouble. Yes, of course we can talk a World Cup organiser, but he only gets back to South Africa after we are on the plane home.
The are proving elusive too - it's almost as if they have got more important things to do than have an interview with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳.
What has been great, as ever, has been the process of narrowing a long list of features down to a working list and then down further to an active list. It's probably been three months from talking them through to switching on the camera for the first day of filming on Thursday.
So, now I find myself in a media tent overlooking an idyllic South African cricket pitch watching Afghanistan closing in on yet another victory; this time it's Denmark.
Whilst cricket fever might be at its height in South Africa the scorers have outnumbered the crowd for most of the morning.
This is the first day of the 2011 and it's just one in a long line of Afghan wins, because they've climbed steadily out of various leagues and regional qualifiers.
At the beginning they were almost village cricket material but they are now one (admittedly very large) step from India in 2011.
It's a story and a journey that we hope to do justice to even though we will be back in London by the time this tournament is over.
As it stands the plan remains to spend eight days filming in South Africa and get four pieces out of it for the programme and whilst morale is pretty high right now there's a sneaking feeling that someone else is busy at their cogs.
In a previous life I won four gold medals at the Olympics between 1992 and 2004 and I now work at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. Whilst I was part of the Beijing team for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in the summer of 2008, my primary role is as reporter for . I've been told to expect some slings, arrows and some lively debate - if you'd like to direct the first two to my editor's blog and the last right here.
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