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The headline in today's Daily Telegraph reads OUR ASHES HEROES'. Apparently the Australian cricket team have regained the Ashes, a minute trophy held in high esteem by those who crave it.
Faan-tastic that cricket rates right up there with watching paint dry is neither here nor there. Fact is, I would really like to know exactly what it is that makes a team of grown men playing sport, (a sport may I add, that has virtually no risk of even remotely close to serious injury), heroes.

I'm getting really tired at the frequency with which the word hero' is tossed around these days. And it's not just cricket. From all sportsmen (and women) to bloody cooks almost everyone's a hero. Hero this and hero that. Is there an ordinary Joe around anymore? Not if you listen to the media nowdays.
Football heroes' was the term when Australia reached the third round of the World Cup to face Italy. Lucas Neill, an Australian team member was one such hero'. Lauded he was. Until he threw himself in front of an opposing player in the penalty box. And as is the rule, a penalty was awarded, Italy scored, and Australia went out.
Oh, how the masses objected. Cheats! They cried. Unfair! They shouted.
What was overlooked, though, was the fact that Neill was directly and exclusively responsible for their swift exit from the competition when he facilitated the award of the killing stroke in the form of that penalty. Only he will ever know if there was any intention in it or a benign mistake.
Doesn't matter the result was the same. It was, in fact, a clear and valid penalty and bloody Mr Neill, should have, as a professional footballer (allegedly), known better than to throw himself around the legs of the opposing player, in the penalty area. You'll go a long way in Australia to find someone who'll agree with that but those who know football, know it is exactly the case.
Radio stations in the constant quest for listeners, therefore money, whipped the dopey public, not for the first time, into a frenzy of patriotic fervour (meantime the sneaky government of the day make use of such patriotism to the full, and screw them a little more).
Y'see, while the public are concentrating on flag-waving, rah-rahing and ooh-ahhing, they're less likely to notice if a little more of their freedom is quietly snatched. But I'm drifting

Let me tell you about heroes:

Late in the afternoon of Sunday the third of October, 1993, Mike Durant, an US Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot lay in his crashed bird on the streets of Mogadishu,

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