That reprobate of Australian cricket, the disgraced and now banned former test captain Steve Smith, has returned to Australia from a stint of T20 cricket in Canada. He's back here now that the heat has blown over a little, and as the local cricket season gets under way to play for his Sydney-based club, Sutherland. He's still under suspension from national duties of course, but free to play in the domestic competition.

His return quite naturally sparked a good deal of interest. The player dropped from the club's A-grade eleven to make way for the former superstar was said to be 'disappointed', but the operators of the kiosk at the Glenn McGrath Oval where Smith played said that sales went 'through the roof' when word got around that Smith was 'in' and doing well. Sales nearly tripled the usual Saturday takings, with 200 steak sandwiches and over 600 sausages sold in the course of the afternoon as hungry onlookers watched Smith ply his trade.

While Smith piled on a useful 85 runs, over in another part of town the other disgraced and also banned former opening batsman for Australia, Dave Warner, also fronted up for his club side, Randwick-Petersham. His return to the club was even more successful, with a brilliant century coming from 98 balls. Sales of snags and steak sangas, however, were not recorded.

If you detect a note of cynicism in my reporting of this, it is of course mainly because I have lost all interest in cricket since the Smith/Warner/Bancroft disgraceful act of cheating in the Cape Town test match last March. Followed quickly by the Al Jazeera revelations of rampant match-fixing by Indian bookmakers in all forms of cricket around the globe, the beauty and gloss of cricket has finally faded for me; quite probably for good.

I mention this only because it struck me as I was reading about Smith and Warner that there were two parallels with my own situation as regards my return to the running community. Admittedly, these parallels are agonisingly thin and weak, but it's all I have to work with at the moment, there being no actual running to report. 

The first is that I've also been in the sporting wilderness, though for reasons other than cheating and banishment, and whilst I haven't yet returned from the backwaters to restart my running career, it is (I trust) not so far away. The second, and even weaker parallel, is that I too, like the spectators at Glenn McGrath Oval, have been eating rather too many sausages.

With many of the impediments to my running in recent weeks now out of the way, the only one remaining is this more-than-a-little annoying bout of plantar fasciitis. At first I thought it was responding well to old rolling the foot on a frozen water bottle trick, but in reality once the cold-induced numbness wore off, the pain was no better. So I have added stretching and more specific massage (of the talus, somewhat oddly) to the treatment and will persist. I need to beat this and get back to logging a few kilometres each week before I become old and fat. Well, I can't reverse the ageing process, but I can shed a few kilos and restore some general aerobic good health.

Yes, let's do that, then.