No matter how hard it is spun, a bad ball is a bad ball in cricket and it is usually punished.
Only the incompetent or forgetful batsmen are troubled by a rank long hop or full toss.
And the stockmarket is too efficient a player to be taken in by the spin from the likes of Telstra yesterday, especially after noticing that the outlook forecast was long on rhetoric and short on substance.
TLS seemed once again to be playing a conservative, backfoot game so as to over-deliver later on in the match.
Not helping was the rich new rewards package CEO Sol Truhillo and his team have negotiated.
That heightened investor scepticism about the quality of the figures.
That was especially so about the coming year where the company's guidance was below forecasts from many analysts.
So 'whack' went investors, belting Telstra, and pushing the shares down by more than $2.2 billion, or 19c to $4.52, on volume of 72.8 million. The partly paid shares fell 20c to $3.03 on almost 121 million units.
It was the biggest fall in the shares for 18 months, in a market up 64 points, despite falls for TLS, Rio and BHP Billiton. That will be tested today in the sell-off following the plunge in world markets.
So the disappointment was palpable, but then it must be remembered that there were buyers on the other side of those sales.
So much for the aggressive, tough talking from CEO Sol Trujillo, his mouthpiece Phil Burgess and Chairman Donald McGauchie whose commentary of late seems to have been written by Sol and Phil.
The company has seemingly spent a lot of time fighting the Federal Government, the ACCC and its competitors over access to new technologies such as broadband and the mooted new Fibre To The Node network and other niggling issues.
Some investors wonder if there has been too much fighting and not enough managing.
Part of the reason for the market's anger was the net profit for 2006-07 of $3.275 billion up just 2.9% per cent on sales that rose 4.2% to $23.7 billion. Expenses rose 3.5% to $18.2 billion.
The company declared a final dividend of 14 cents per share, taking the full-year dividend to 28 cents (as forecast last year).
Analysts had net earnings around $3.286 billion, so the result was a touch light, which normally wouldn't have mattered but for the forecast of a 'slightly negative' first half to 2008.
The market ignored the fact that underlying earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) rose 7.1% to $5.8 billion (which is still huge, more than $111.5 million a week!), which was better than Telstra's guidance for growth of 3% to 5% growth.
CEO Sol Trujillo outlined the company's guidance for this financial year, adding that it still faced significant challenges.
In 2007-08, revenue and earnings before interest, tax, deprecation and amortisation (EBITDA) is tipped to grow 2% – 3% and EBIT by 3% – 5%.
So no real change on the 2007 year except EBIT growth will be slower.
Mr Trujillo said earnings growth in the 2008 financial year would be "back-end weighted", due to spending related to its five-year transformation plan and small one-off factors, with first half EBITDA growth likely to be slightly negative.
And that's where the market lost patience because he was saying there would not be any change on the structure of earnings in 2008 compared to 2007.
The 2007 year saw earnings fall in the first half, but Telstra forecast (after the T3 sales was over) that there would be a second half rebound, which is exactly what happened.
Now investors were being told that another six months of heavy capital spending, would push earnings down in the current half.
"We have restored positive earnings growth, as our strategy of simplification, integration and differentiation begins to translate into value for our customers and shareholders,''CEO Trujillo said in a statement.
"With the transformation remaining on or ahead of plan on virtually all fronts, and the peak transformation spend year now behind us, we expect to continue improving financial and operational performance in fiscal 2008 and beyond.''
Mr Trujillo said the favourable trends that emerged in the first half of last financial year had strengthened in the second, leading to second half EBIT growth of 42%.
"We are prudent in our guidance owing to continued uncertainty around regulatory and government communication policy,'' he said.
The company was "still only 19 months into a five year transformation and continued to face significant challenges, but will meet them head on."
Will Sol still be there at the end?
