IN: Ravinder Singh "Ravi" Bopara (born 4 May 1985) is an English cricketer who plays for Essex and England. Originally a top-order batsman, his developing medium pace bowling has made him an all-rounder and he has the best bowling figures for England in a Twenty20 International. Bopara has also played for Karachi Kings in the Pakistan Super League, Kings XI Punjab in the Indian Premier League, Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash League and Chittagong Vikings in the Bangladesh Premier League. Bopara was first called up to the England One Day International team in 2007, before a difficult Test debut in Sri Lanka saw him dropped in early 2008 after a string of three ducks.

On 18 February 2009, Bopara, along with Amjad Khan, was invited to join the England Test squad on their tour of the West Indies as cover for Andrew Flintoff who was struggling with a hip injury. He scored 124 not out in a warm up match, earning him a place in the 4th Test against the West Indies. In the first innings he scored his maiden Test century with 104 off 143 balls before being caught. He was dropped for the next Test of the series, however he was re-selected for the first Test of the home series against the West Indies on 6 May. There he scored his second consecutive Test century, scoring 143 runs from 186 balls. He then scored another century in the second Test, becoming only the fifth England player to score three consecutive centuries. He credited his success to his coaching by Graham Gooch at Essex.  Bopara played well in England's opening game of the T20 World Cup, hitting 46 against the Netherlands. He made 37 against India before 55 against the West Indies, although England lost the match by 5 wickets. This meant that England progress no further in the competition despite being on home soil.  Australians Mitchell Johnson and Ricky Ponting stated to local media that during the upcoming 2009 Ashes series they were going to target Bopara in particular.  On 22 June, the England selectors announced a sixteen-man preliminary Ashes squad for that summer's series; it included Bopara. Cricinfo staff wrote that "Bopara's stock could not be higher". He found success in a warm-up match against Warwickshire, however, scoring 104 while opening with Andrew Strauss.  Bopara struggled during the series, however, with scores of 35, one, 18, 27, 23, one and a duck. He was dismissed by Ben Hilfenhaus in five of his seven innings. Speculation grew about his position for the final Test, where England required a win to regain the Ashes, and it was announced on 16 August that Bopara had been dropped in favour of uncapped Jonathan Trott, who went on to score a century on debut. Bopara returned to Essex and scored 201 against Surrey, and despite being replaced in the Test team remained in England's squads for the ODI series against Australia and the Champions Trophy in September. On 11 September 2009 it was announced that Bopara had been awarded an "incremental contract" with England, as had Trott. However, after the Champions Trophy Bopara did not play ODI cricket for ten months.

Did he do well with that team?

OUT: He found success in a warm-up match against Warwickshire, however, scoring 104 while opening with Andrew Strauss.


IN: Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 - 29 September 1973) was an English-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. He is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues", poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles", poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae." He was born in York, grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family.

Auden attended St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist. At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk; there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realised his vocation was to be a poet. Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) lost his faith" (through a gradual realisation that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views). In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922, and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's. His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923. Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).  In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology; he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford include Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.  Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student A. S. T. Fisher. For the next few years Auden sent poems to Isherwood for comments and criticism; the two maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935-39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.  From his Oxford years onward, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.

Did he get good grades?

OUT:
he had lost interest