The Old Batsman

Chucking, deception and Saeed Ajmal

2012-01-18T11:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, try this: grab a cricket ball, or if not a tennis ball, orange, apple or something like that. Space your index, middle and ring fingers across the widest part of its circumference so it fits snugly between them. Hold your arm up straight and look down an imaginary wicket. Rotate your wrist until the back of your hand is facing down the pitch and you can look up at your palm. Try and flick the ball from your fingers as if twisting a doorknob in a clockwise direction. Now imagine doing it all at speed as your arm swings up to the perpendicular as part of a bowling action.

This is the contortion required to produce the doosra, genius invention of Saqlain Mustaq. To deliver it accurately down the cut strip to an international batsman takes skill available only to the very few. Because the wrist is weakened by its rotation, the power to propel the ball at sufficient speed must come from the shoulder and the elbow. The rules allow a fifteen percent flexion to help.

Almost every bowler who has used the doosra has had problems with their action at some point: Shoaib Malik, Harbhajan, Murali, Botha, Ajmal. And almost every bowler who has used it has been thrilling to watch, and has contributed richly to the game. In Dubai, as Saeed Ajmal ran through England with some non-spinning spinners in an act of beauty, smoke and illusion, battle raged once more.

TV evidence was damning, especially in the heightened artificiality of super slo-mo. On Twitter, opinion polarised and there were two views: either Ajmal was chucking some deliveries, or anyone who thought Ajmal was chucking some deliveries was uptight, square, boring, had sour grapes. Both sides had cause for righteous indignation.

Yet there's no reason for the positions to be mutually exclusive. Even the hardline chuckers would not want to see Ajmal's artful brilliance removed from the game [well, Ian Bell might], and equally those being dismissive would not enjoy an unregulated free-for-all in which anyone can deliver the ball however they like.

The current laws have removed the stinging, career-ending public shame that once came with the accusation of throwing. Science has shown that human beings cannot, in fact, deliver a ball with an entirely straight arm, and the 15 degree rule reflects that.

What the tests can't do is make allowances for the nature of being human; the stress, tension, excitement and fear of executing fine motor skills under extreme pressure. Ajmal probably did exceed the limits on a couple of occasions - that's not an egregious sin. But neither was he trying to cheat.

Actions can change and deteriorate over time in the same way that a batsman's technique can alter and warp. There would be nothing wrong with calling in those who bowl that kind of spin every couple of years and testing their degree of flex, rather than waiting for the umpires to report them and becoming indignant over whether they do or whether they don't. That way, all of the rancor and whispers could stop.

Ultimately, spin bowling is about deception. On a first day wicket that wasn't really turning, Ajmal played with minds. The ball fizzed from his wrist with a scrambled seam, and it had done half of its work before it even pitched. That was his true victory, and we wouldn't want it lost to rumour, spite, television replays or anything else.

NB: Yes, spin freaks, there is another doosra method with the hand facing forward. This is not about that.

Filmic

2012-01-16T05:51:00.000-08:00

Making a film isn't easy. It's even tougher when you've got no money. But if anyone can make a film about where Test cricket's at, it's probably a Godzilla obsessive and his pal.

Check out their trailer here.

Brad Haddin and the death of Strine

2012-01-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

In a tour filled so far with nothing but defeat, India can count up one win: Zaheer Khan's victory over Brad Haddin has been absolute. Having slapped him down verbally before the game in Perth, he cleaned him up for nought out in the middle. No send off of recent times has been as richly-earned.

Australia are reviving, moving on, or at least 10 of them are. There is new blood at either end of the team sheet. Now they need some behind the sticks. That there isn't any is Haddin's great good fortune and the seriously injured Tim Paine's vast bad luck. Haddin's first three years of Test cricket returned averages of 38.77, 44.12 and 38.75. Each contained a century. He was no Gilchrist, but then who is? Yet 2011 has been a year of precipitous decline - an average of 20.93 that dips to 17.00 when his top score of 80 is removed. Under Clarke's captaincy it's 19.70, and studded with dismissals that suggest a man mentally shot, a notion reinforced by some comedy keeping. If he drove to the wicket in an exploding car, he couldn't look any more of a clown.

So when Haddin laid into India before the Perth match, he hardly spoke from a position of strength. His was the first name India would have written down for the Aussie squad. Yet here he was: 'India break quicker than anyone in the world. We know this side can be as fragile as anyone in the world. They can turn on each other,' said Haddin, before providing an illuminating discourse on how to dismiss Sachin Tendulkar.

What really jarred was not Haddin's needless disrespect, or even his galumphing lack of self awareness, but just how out of step he felt with the new Australia. The shift has been subtle but distinct, the air of hubris that surrounded the end of empire has dissipated. It's a team that is forming in the image of its captain, less okker, less Strine, more sleekly metrosexual. That's no dig: Clarke has stepped up. He has been a realistic and respectful captain, he has a set a new tone and he has earned the right to express his vision.

In a year's time, it's hard to see him allowing someone like Haddin to make remarks like that [it's hard to see Haddin still being in the side to make them, too]. The thought that Strauss and Flower might let, say, Eoin Morgan do the same thing seems absurd.

The new Australian team, like many new teams, is erratic and prone to collapse, but it would but churlish to deny that there is something there; a new energy, renewed spirit, palpable ambition. It has been well expressed by Clarke's batting. Haddin's remarks, dismissive of men he is fortunate to share a field with, are backward-looking. Clarke could have been forgiven a cheeky smirk at Zak's send-off for his keeper too.

Perimeter Weighted, baby...

2012-01-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

Gray-Nicolls, supplier of bats to Mr WG Grace and other subsequent players of note, have some self-made videos on their site of various pros going into the factory to pick out their glowing, handsomely-stickered blades for the new season.

In serried ranks they lie, pods shaved to exacting requirements, a batter's dream. None of the players approach the task particularly scientifically. They do what everyone else does: pick a bat up, play a few air shots, cast an eye down the line of the willow. They might fuss later with handles and grips, but that initial acquaintance is all about indefinable feel.

The scales have their say. A man who likes a bat of 2lb 8ozs will never be seduced by a 3lb mutha, whatever promise of dominance it offers. Yet, as anyone who has buggered around with the game for long enough will know, weight, once narrowed down, is just a number. Two bats might tip the scales the same, but they will not feel the same, not today, not ever. Some bats of 2lbs 10oz will pick up lighter than others of 2lb 8, and there's not a scientist on earth who can say why, because it's as much to do with the physiology of the batsman as it is with the weight of the blade. That is the only explanation as to why a bat can feel one way one day, and another way the next.

There is a deep psychology at work, because a bat, ultimately, is all a batsman has. In it, he invests his future. It is prey to superstition, ritual, illusion. Ultimately, what matters is belief. If it feels right, then it is right.

Gray-Nicolls have this year [praise be] relaunched their most famous bat, the GN 100 Scoop. It's hard to overstate the rep this blade once had. In a TV era when bats were emerging as marketable objects of desire, the Scoop was revelatory, its spine gouged out and sacrificed for the mysterious promise of 'Perimeter Weighting' a concept so new it got its own sticker on the bat. Counter-intuitive it may have been, but the Scoop roared in the hands of Greg Chappell, Barry Richards, David Gower [who also used the four-scoop version, from memory] and of course Brian Lara.

Other batmakers were forced to respond. Stuart Surridge had the epic Jumbo; Slazenger came out with a V8 [or maybe V12...] which had a sort of shark's fin bump the back; Saint Peter, briefly used by King Viv and Tony Greig, obtained an impossible glamour before vanishing. But the Scoop was the one, a masterpiece of design and allure, an Excalibur among broadswords.

Part of its magic was the sound it made, a great hollow 'whump' that pre-dated the current, plosive crack. You couldn't help but feel a bit superior with a Scoop in the bag, and that was half the battle. I got my first hundred with one, on a distant field long ago, forgotten by all but me.

Its revival appeals to a nostalgic market. Today's player was barely born in its heyday. In the videos, they all get offered one at the end, like a sweet: 'wanna try a Scoop?' To them it seems like an oddity, its conception fatally flawed by the removal of that apparently essential mass on the back of their bat.

The hurdle is psychological. They've grown up looking down at sleek spines and thick edges. It may be a battle for Gray-Nicolls to get one in the hands of a pro on the field. They can't be persuaded by the legend, any more than they would be by the chance of using a bat like Compton's or Bradman's.

But then they have one thrust at them. The reaction is usually one of surprise. 'Picks up really nicely,' they'll say*. Hopefully, they'll chance one in the nets, and the ball will go from it like it always used to, and they'll realise the strange magic that this greatest of all bats possesses. After all, Lara got 375 and 501 with it, so it kind of works...

*That'll be the Perimeter Weighting. Probably.

The Fourth Annual OB Innings Of The Year

2011-12-31T01:22:00.000-08:00

On a dank Chelmsford night back in July, Owais Shah played the shot of the season. Under lights, from the bowling of Charl Langeveld, he picked up his bat, pushed forward and sent an 85mph outswinger over the field, over the boundary, over the stand and out of the ground. It was a shot that was emblematic of the game in 2011, the forward defensive push supercharged by technology and ambition into something extraordinary. It was a shot that said this: anything is possible.

Shah's little masterpiece sat above all of the blasts, flips, scoops, glides and switch-hits; it was simple and beautiful in its way. Batsmanship, though, is more complex than ever, what with its extended repertoire and its multiple formats, with all of its choice. Selecting a single innings that somehow represents the year, or at least more than just the match it was played in, is the task at hand, and as with the three previous editions of this entirely arbitrary and little-known award [2008, 2009 and 2010 here] the criteria for the shimmering gong are as ever: an innings that I've seen, either in the flesh, on the box or down that handy ask-no-questions live stream via India, that upholds the principal that a great knock somehow transcends the numbers in the book. The winner need not trouble themselves with the rented tux and trip to the sponsored green room, because there isn't one: honour is all. And with that, the envelope please...

Jacques Kallis began the year with a hundred in each innings, and ended it with a pair - that's the batsman's life right there in miniature. The second of those tons, compiled in the great tradition of the walking wounded, was a feat of technical endurance and experience that at last, after a statistically epic career, proved Jacques had that more mortal attribute of heart to go with his glorious new head of hair. The Test though will resonate for one epic passage of play between Steyn and Tendulkar. An exquisite exchange of skills that will live forever in the memory was won - just - by Tendulkar, who made a 51st Test century.

Sachin had two more tons in him, both World Cuppers, that would for the 98th and 99th time belie the weight of expectation that has shadowed his life. Amusingly, he was outbatted in the first of those games by Andrew Strauss, whose 158 confirmed England as the 50-over side to follow if you wanted shit and giggles. They greatly enlivened a competition staffed by central casting and scripted by Spielberg. In losing to Ireland, they bowed to the endeavours of Kevin O'Brien, who produced an innings that, come the IPL auction, might yet change his life, and in the tie with India in Bangalore, engaged in the match of the tournament.

When the stage cleared for the big boys in Mumbai, Mahela Jayawardene made an 88-ball hundred silkier than a George Clooney chat-up line, but the force of destiny was ranged against him and Sri Lanka. Enter MS Dhoni, a man whose implacably sunny attitude to cricket deflects pressure of mercurial weight, for a rousing chase that finished with the ball burning through the night skies. It was a Bollywood ending for a tournament that dispelled much of the darkness and farce of the West Indies four years before.

The comedown for India was long and hard, but on what must have seemed like an endless traipse through England's damp green lands, Dhoni's spirits never dipped, and come some limpid one dayers he was once more undismissable. But just one man stood up to England's high summer onslaught, reiterating his quiet greatness. The Wall made three hundreds in four games, carrying his bat at the Oval and then going straight back in again. It was valedictory batting characterised by Ruler's ruthless judgment. To watch him leave the ball remains, in Gideon Haigh's phrase, 'an exchange of advantage so small as to be immeasurable'. You can be sure, though, that Rahul knows its value.

Sehwag was sold badly short by his rushed return to the side after shoulder surgery, but his day lay ahead and what a deathless day it was, a white hot morning in Indore when he made a world record 219 in an ODI against West Indies. The adjective that captures it best is joyous. Sehwag's ability has been eulogised enough. What was really memorable was his spirit. He was reveling in his moment. Who among us would not surrender a fair portion of out worldy goods just to be able to bat for an hour like Viru?

Australia's new role as the comedy entertainers of Test cricket required moments of excellence to set up their punchlines, and Michael Clarke produced two centuries of high class, his 151 at Newlands against the moving ball being the pick for some immaculate driving. 'It'll mean nothing if we don't win the game,' he said afterwards. If you believe that, you'll believe anything. Amla's hundred did win the game, and was just as good.

Before we reach the sharp end of this year's shindig, a word on Chris Gayle's explorations of T20 possibilities. He and David Warner have set the blueprint for scoring hundreds regularly in the format. Gayle's hitting is freakish - no-one strikes the ball harder - but his real value is in the amount of games he wins for his teams, and he does it by judging perfectly the tempo of his innings.

Aside from that electric, anachronistic month or so of the World Cup [50 over cricket remains on death watch], the year belonged to England. Bowlers - those poor saps - win Tests, but England's method is based on the relentless accumulation of runs for them to shy at. It has been a golden time. Cook and Trott had their sessions in the sun and Matt Prior remains the hammer of the declaration, but two players merited further consideration.

Ian Bell evokes rapturous notices for his timing and elegance but to me remains a pond-skater, sliding across the surface tension, afloat on the calm created by other forces. Unfair? Maybe, but that icy chip of indefinable greatness is still not obvious. You would though need a heart of stone not to enjoy his double at the Oval, when, on a glowing August afternoon, England iced their cake.

Kevin Pietersen made 175 that day, an innings that took his Test average back over 50 and ended a lengthy rehabilitation from a slump complex in its nature. Had it happened in an England side of the 1990s it might have been terminal, but both KP and the set-up deserve credit for coming through. His most human innings of the year came at Southampton against Sri Lanka, a knock of 85 in which he employed that huge stride to play massively straight, a homage to orthodoxy that even the wildest players must sometimes make. It was an innings of penance, an acknowledgement that the gods of the game must be respected.

He deserved a hundred that day, but it went to Bell. A month later, at Lord's in the 2000th Test, those gods relented. In return he grafted against the swinging ball, his first 22 runs taking 73 balls, his first fifty 134. But then, the next took 82, the third 75 and his final 50 just 25. He went to his double hundred by smoking Suresh Raina for 4, 6, 2 and 4 from consecutive deliveries as Lord's vibrated with the strange magic that he only can impart. The occasion, the venue and the moment had aligned, and England's best player had stepped up. The series was shaped, and England's upward curve confirmed. KP, the innings of the year is yours.

'I thought I'd been shot': facing Michael Holding

2011-12-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

I've been working on something kind of inspired by this blog, that hopefully will at some point see the light of day via this blog. The opening part of it concerns the late Bob Woolmer, who did the first amazing thing I ever saw on a cricket field.

I'll save that, but in writing about it, I found this. It's Woolmer's own description of his dismissal by Michael Holding at the Oval in 1976. It came on the third morning of the match and the day after his amazing thing:

'Holding's feet barely touched the ground as he ran in. He moved in silkily, and his body swayed like a cobra's: it would have been magnificent if I'd been watching it from the outside. But here I was more intent on watching the ball, moving back and across as Colin Cowdrey had taught me.

'Holding was bowling with only one fielder in front of the wicket at cover point. He bowled, and I moved back and across. I saw that the ball was pitched up, so I moved forward, feet first and then into the shot.

'Before I knew it, the ball had smashed into my pad. Even though I was wearing state-of-the-art buckskin pads, the pain was so incredible I thought I'd been shot. A small explosion of whitening emanated from my pad and a loud appeal from the bowler and fielders. Dickie Bird was not known to give too many lbws. But this time he had no choice: the ball would have broken middle stump'.

Bob Woolmer wrote this 23 years after the Oval match. Some things stick in the memory. Facing Michael Holding in 1976 is evidently one of them.

Farewell then, declaration bowling

2011-12-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

Mark Pettini is a bristling and of late saturnine presence at the top of the Essex order, a county cricketer unremarkable not in the pejorative sense, but in the way that lots of talented and hardworking men ply their trade without their names appearing in newspaper headlines or at the bottom of IPL contracts.

Yet his record contains some of the more arresting statistics in the first-class game. There is his 24-minute, 27 ball hundred against Leicestershire at Leicester in 2006. And then there is his career return as a bowler: 18.5 overs, 191 runs, 0 wickets, at an economy rate of 10.14 per over.

These records are not unconnected. Pettini's century came in the second inning of the last game of the season in Div Two, 2006. Essex batted first and made 486, scored at 3.30 runs per over. Leicester replied with 372-4 at 3.96 per over. Essex went in again, and scored 186-0 from 9.4 overs at a rate of 19.24 per over in an innings that was concluded in under half an hour. Pettini's 114 from 29 balls included 12 fours and 11 sixes. His partner, AN Cook [yes, him] made 66 from 32 balls, and managed a six of his own, too. Pettini's bowling figures were compiled in similar circumstances in other games: he is one of Essex's declaration bowlers, a reliable purveyor of floated flotsam, useless trex, hittable junk. It's a skill of sorts, but as of last week, one that is probably now confined to the past.

Collusion in county cricket has been longstanding, but it is impossible to see it surviving into our new and cynical age, an age in which the domestic fixture is 'at greater risk' than an international game, according to the ECB's Head Of Corruption Chris Watts. The era when one skipper would knock on the other's door and with pen and fag packet scope out an acceptable chase before working backwards to the number of dreck-filled overs required to set it up, must now be gone. For this was a calculation that would quite often be known to the local radio man and the BBC stringer as well as to the players on both sides, and no doubt the members who bothered to ask, none of whom would have dreamt of phoning the local bookie.

These were innocent passages of play regarded by all - except perhaps the fielding side - as a fitfully entertaining requirement of the wider contest. There were deeds both famous and ludicrous: Glen Chapple also made a 27-ball hundred, his in only 21 minutes, against Glamorgan at Old Trafford in 1993. Murray Goodwin got a ton in 25 minutes at Southgate. Andy Afford, the former Notts spinner, recalls a spell early in his career when he and Paul Johnson were required to bowl at Viv Richards while Somerset set up a game: for some reason Richards blocked everything that Johnson sent down but hit Aff for a six that rang the bell in the Trent Bridge pavilion, to great amusement all round. When Pettini got his hundred, Leicester opened the bowling with batsman Darren Robinson, who returned the figures of 4.4-0-117-0. As recently as 2010, Alastair Cook was required to turn his arm over against Bangladesh A, and bowled five overs for 111.

It already seems anachronistic, its astounding figures somewhat compromised by the accelerated glories of the Twenty20 game. The thought that a section of a professional match might be arranged by both sides so that they can compete to an unrehearsed conclusion is surely dead in 2012 under the gimlet eye of Chris Watts. Another connection with a less complex past has been cut.

Ceaseless time

2011-12-15T03:05:00.000-08:00

To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death, last night the BBC screened John Arlott in conversation with Mike Brearley. It was filmed in 1984, four years after Arlott's retirement and the year after Brearley's, at Arlott's home on Alderney.

It took a sentence for Arlott to get to the heart of the matter, the centre of his life. Brearley first asked him why he had chosen Alderney. 'Well,' said Arlott in a voice rising up over the hot coals in his chest, 'the tempo here is magnificent'. Not for him a description of the views or the of the peace and quiet, but instead that connection he felt to the cadences of the place.

That was present in everything Arlott did, in the rhythm of his sentences, both spoken and written; the melancholic beats of his verse, the rise and fall of his commentary. The way that he could almost conduct a passage of Test cricket was Arlott's true talent as a speaker - 'in through the eyes, out through the mouth' as he put it - his internal sense of the rhythm of the over, and the session, and of the day and the match, all building symphonically. He confessed at one point that his favourite moments in Test matches were batting collapses, and again noted the way they produced their own momentum, fed by the noise of the crowd.

Not saying anything helped to produce that rhythm too. When he spoke to Brearley about his parents, or about the son he lost in a car accident, he paused for long periods and the camera held his face, which bore all of the iniquities of age. Its stillness, which he struggled to maintain, conveyed everything that words could not. 'No...' he said eventually. 'Let's talk about something else'.

He told Brealey that he'd had a lucky life, the son of a cemetery keeper who became a poet, author, broadcaster, friend of Dylan Thomas and Betjamin, Hobbs and Botham. 'Well, lucky in some ways...' and the camera held that face again.

They do0n't make 'em like him any more, and they don't make many programmes like this, either. You can see it here on the BBC iplayer, if you're within range. It's worth it.

What John Jacobs could teach Justin Langer about Phil Hughes

2011-12-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

John Jacobs has coached golf to Open champions and desperate hackers for sixty years. He has a wisdom that comes only from decades of observation, and he has distilled that knowledge down to one universal thought: you can learn everything you need to know about a golfer's swing by watching what the ball does once it's been struck. It's fantastically obvious and wonderfully true, and it applies equally well to cricket. All that matters is that moment when bat meets ball. You could discover how to coach anything by talking to John Jacobs.

It's unlikely that anyone will ask Jacobs about Phillip Hughes, but the old master would recognise the unerring predictability with which the ball flew from the edge of Hughes' bat to second slip. After all, it's just happened four times in a row. And yet as Hughes slides sadly out of Test match cricket and into a future as uncertain as it once was gilded, it's Jacobs' thought that reverberates, that holds true.

It's a philosophy of reverse engineering, of learning before teaching. He examines the outcome before he thinks about what caused it. What caused Hughes to keep edging to second slip? Well...

Spring 2009: Phil Hughes comes to England to play for Middlesex on a short-term contract ahead of the Ashes. He has just played his first three Test matches, against South Africa, where he scored 0, 75, 115, 160, 33 and 32. He appears in three first-class games for Middlesex, scores another three hundreds and averages 143.50. It's no surprise. His life has been filled with such success: he scored 141* on his grade debut in Sydney, made 51 and 137 for New South Wales seconds to ensure a first-class debut where he got 51, and then scored a match-winning hundred in his first Pura Cup Final. He plays in the first two Ashes Tests of 2009, makes 36, 4 and 17 and is replaced by Shane Watson. The first coming of Phil Hughes is over.

His dropping was complicated by the way Hughes scored his runs. He was, like Bradman, a country boy coming out of nowhere, defying convention. Where The Don picked the bat up differently, Hughes ignored one of the immutable laws of batting and stayed legside of the ball, from where he carved and sliced through the offside and mowed down the ground like Nadal hitting a low forehand. Even in an age at ease with unorthodoxy Hughes was too much, and yet it was unorthodoxy that made him devastating, that set him apart.

Flintoff and Harmison went hard at him in Cardiff and at Lord's, and he was an appealing target. The great and unmentioned facet of the way he played was that staying legside of the rising ball had always been, in the accomplished batsman, a mark of cowardice. The only reason for not getting into line was a fear of being hit. That wasn't why Hughes did it, but he was fighting a century's worth of conventional wisdom, and almost subconsciously it played into a wider notion that he would have to re-invent his technique if he was to succeed as a Test match player.

The weird magic that Phil Hughes possessed has all but perished in the effort to do so. He is now just another lefty who gets caught at slip a lot. It needn't be that way. Almost universally, by the time a player arrives in Test match cricket, he cannot be radically changed. Coaching at that level is holistic, rather than prescriptive. It's about tuning the engine, not rebuilding it. England have integrated two deeply unorthodox players since 2005, Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan. Both came into the Test match team with the dark thought that they were really one-day players trailing behind them. Pietersen's first Test innings were frenetic and free, quite different to his more measured game now. It's a solution that he arrived at by himself, without altering the essential structure of how he plays. Similarly, Eoin Morgan has not been asked to bat differently in the Test side: he will, you sense, stand or fall as what he is.

England perhaps learned from their experiences with two bowlers, Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar, who were almost ruined by trying to drag their methods too far from the place they had arrived at naturally. It very rarely works.

Phil Hughes went to his first Test hundred with consecutive sixes. Doubt was not in his mind then. John Jacobs would have looked first at where the ball was going and what it was doing before he considered how it was getting there. Where it was going was to and over the boundary, usually at great speed. There was the starting point, the moment that things might have been different.

To a greater or lesser extent, every player gets found out, worked out, worked over. For the best, this happens at Test level because it's the only standard high enough to do it. Nothing unexpected happened to Phil Hughes. What's shocking now is how quickly he was first discarded and how completely his methods were written off. He gets caught at slip as often as he ever did before, and he doesn't score any runs either.

It's hard to go against the knowledge and commitment of someone like Justin Langer, who has been working with Hughes, but it's necessary too. Orthodoxy has laid low something special. The young, fearless Hughes was an extraordinary sight, and that has been lost in a world of doubt and confusion on the part of his coaches as much as himself.

Cricketers aren't like golfers, they don't have the luxury of deciding not to win or earn much money for a couple of years while they completely rebuild their technique [and years, from the examples of Woods and Faldo, is how long it takes]. Just worry about what it does after it comes off the bat, Phil, and good luck.

David Warner, and Virender Sehwag's vision of the future

2011-11-30T12:58:00.000-08:00

Imagine for a moment that you are opening the batting in a one-day international. You step out onto the field, assailed suddenly by the reality of what you are about to do: the heat, the light, the noise, the scale of the field and of the crowd. Your partner takes strike, and gets a single away immediately. Not much chance for you to have a look. What's this wicket like, then, low? Slow? How long is it since you've faced this guy with a white ball - two years? Three? But hang on - the umpire's signalling a no-ball. Your first delivery will be a free hit. All of a sudden, you loosen up, feel a little better. You set yourself deep in the crease, get outside leg stump and free your arms and the ball sails up and over third man. Four. Easy. Thanks. Out with the bad thoughts. In with the good...

Now consider the difference between yourself and Virender Sehwag, to whom this happened the other day in the first ODI against West Indies. Viru stepped back and carved it over third man too - the difference being that he would have done it anyway, regardless of the no-ball and the free hit, and regardless of the fact it was an ODI and not a Test match or any other type of fixture. Because that is Sehwag, the man who gave the world the irreducible 'see ball, hit ball'.

This blog has long seen Sehwag as an avatar, a vision of the future, an outlier. But perhaps he is something else too; mentor, leader, philosopher king. In the modern age, there have always been attacking opening batsman. Gordon Greenidge, no slouch himself, recalled his partnership with Barry Richards at Hampshire: 'it was not unusual for applause to be ringing round the ground for his fifty while I still had single figures'. Richards once made 325 in a day at Perth against Dennis Lillee amongst others. Then came Jayasuriya, Slater, Hayden, Gayle, McCullum.

Yet none are Sehwag. Jayasuriya, Hayden and Gayle have Test match triple hundreds but Sehwag has two, and came within seven runs of a third. They are power players, yet Sehwag strikes at 20 runs per hundred balls better than any of them. Only Hayden can really claim to be in his class - the others all average about 10 less - and yet Hayden cannot be called a genius; the adjective effortless does not attach itself easily to his game.

Viru doesn't have Gayle's shoulders or Jayasuriya's forearms or Haydos' pecs. He has none of the nervous intensity of Slater or the cross-eyed desire of Hayden. He doesn't really have the insouciance of Gayle or Barry Richards. He is instead an almost implacable little Buddha, soft-edged, calmly accepting of the fates, whether they swing for him or against.

If there is one player he is most like, it is Lara, in that he can hit unstoppably not just for hours but for days. It is they who have built monolithic scores most regularly. Yet Lara didn't open, and he often gave the first hour or so of his innings to the bowler. That has not been Sehwag's way.

His technique is not revolutionary, just thrillingly heightened. What is different about Sehwag is his mind, the way he sees the game. Essentially, he is free. Where tradition insists that the new ball and fresh bowlers and aggressive fields are threats, he sees wide open spaces, a hard ball that will fly off the bat.

Sehwag said as much to David Warner a couple of years ago, when the notion of Warner wearing the Baggy Green was inducing not only ridicule but indignance. 'He said to me, 'you'll be a better Test cricketer than you are a twenty20 player',' Warner recalled a few days ago. 'I looked at him and basically said, 'mate I've not even played a first-class game yet'. But he said, 'all the fielders are around the bat. If the ball's there in your zone, you're still going to hit it. You're going to have ample opportunities to score runs. You've always got to respect the good ball, but you've got to punish the ball you always punish'.'

This week, David Warner made his Test debut. Sehwag was more right than most of Australia. Warner does not have Sehwag's talent, but he shares his worldview. There will be many more who do in the years to come, and then it will become the new orthodoxy. That is Sehwag's true legacy. He has shared an era with Lara, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ponting, Kallis, yet he is not one of them. As great as they are and have been, they are the old order, more connected to the past than to the future.

And there is something more important here than just a mindshift, than changes in tactics or techniques. The game must always move forwards and renew itself. Essentially it must accelerate to match the speed of the culture in which it exists. Test cricket of the 1950s is as distant now as the rest of that decade, with its housewives and its radio plays and its music hall conservatism. David Warner may or may not succeed as a Test match opener - do you want to bet against Viru? - but plenty like him will. At some point or other they will be the norm, and they will be standing on Sehwag's shoulders, the shoulders of a giant. If he is not the best batsman of his time (and he might be), he is the most significant; a genius and a visionary with it.

What happened when a team of men with one leg played a team of men with one arm

2011-11-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

There are several candidates for the match of the year 2011 - mad collapses, last-ball draws, you know, the usual - but there can be only one winner of the award for the year of 1848, when, at the Priory Ground in Lewisham, a team of men with one leg played a team of men with one arm.

It is a long reach back in time. 1848 was the summer that Grace was born. Brahms was 15. Tolstoy was 20. Dickens had just written A Christmas Carol. The Crimean war was five years away. America had 30 states. A man called Innocenzo Manzetti had hit on the idea for something that, three decades later, would become the telephone. 1848 is a distant place.

Cricket, though, was in rude health in its first great age, a sport of the people and a gambler's paradise. Two thousand four hundred people went to the Priory Ground to watch Eleven One Armed Men v Eleven With One Leg. The game lives on through a glorious match report in an Australian paper published six months later. ''Novelty was the ruling passion," it runs, "nine tenths went merely for the say of the thing".

The principal of the fixture was well-established; a similar game had been played for a thousand guineas in 1796, and this was a rematch of sorts of a fixture played in 1841, although, "during this long recess, the great leveller had bowled a large proportion of those who figured on that occasion out." The betting, "what little there was," went in favour of the men with "two living legs".

The players from both teams were Greenwich Pensioners, navy men who had been injured in service and now lived at the Royal Hospital. What a sight it was: "The singularity of the Greenwich dress combined with the ludicrous positions of the fielders, their antique physiognomies and the general clumsiness of both parties at the game produced a match that was grotesque in the extreme".

Lest anyone think political correctness was being invented at the boundary edge that day, a riotous time was had by all. A clue as to why the players were keen enough came from the description of their "substantial luncheon before each day's play" and "for their dinner there was a profusion of roast and boiled beef, and lamb, accompanied by plenty of heavy".

Thus, in their veteran's uniforms, full of grub and with a night's-worth of ale in them, did the One Arm XI make 50 in their first innings, which featured a top score of 8 not out. The One Legged XI replied with 32, The One Arm XI extended their lead with 41, leaving the One Legged XI 60 to win. They were dismissed for 44, a gallant effort that included the highest score of the match, 15, from their number five, Sears. The greatest contributor to both totals was extras. The One Legged XI conceded 30, the One Arm XI 43, all of which were wides. Across the match, 21 players were dismissed without scoring in one innings or the other, and the One Legged XI featured five batsmen who made pairs, including the unfortunate number eleven Baldrick, who was run out twice.

"The bowling on both sides was generally very wide," wrote our man [Mitch wasn't playing was he...?] "and the One Legs, in endeavouring to take advantage of it but in the majority of cases missing the object, span round like the final revolutions of an expiring teetotum, and frequently got out".

Then, in strange triumph, both teams "marched to the Bull Inn, headed by an excellent band who had been engaged throughout the match. Each man had free passage to and from the Royal Hospital, a glass of grog to drink to Her Majesty's health and ten shillings for his two days' exertions".

It was a distant match from a distant time, played in a world that is unknowable now. The lives of the players had not been easy, and yet their oddly uplifting spirit endures and flourishes. Any cricketer can relate to how they felt - especially that Baldrick. Here are the names of the men that played. Gentlemen, we salute you:

One Arm XI: Guay, Wiley, Morley, Johnson*, Burns, Sissoms, Broom, Newsom, Seale, Jeffreys, Sowden.

One Legged XI: Wetherhead, Ryan, Scot, Brown, Sears, Albar, Polston, West, Drew, Browne, Baldrick.

* Not that one.

NB: Thanks to the great Jonathon Green for passing along the report.

Jacques Kallis: the love that dare not speak its name

2011-11-19T10:48:00.000-08:00

Last January, when Jacques Kallis was averaging 166 in a series against India, Kevin Pietersen tweeted that Kallis 'must be the best player ever'. You wot KP? The tweet drew some obvious jibes, but it didn't generate much consideration as to its truth. Because, you know, Jacques Kallis just isn't, is he?

It's facile - not to mention impossible - to offer an answer to that, about Kallis or anyone else. But it is worth thinking about why the question seems so unlikely, because it sort of strikes at the heart of what we think greatness in cricket looks like. Billy Beane - him again - called it 'the tyranny of what you see'.

Kallis has gone past 12,000 Test runs, just the fourth man to do so. He has more than Lara now, is 500-odd behind Ponting, and he is scoring at least as heavily as Dravid and Tendulkar, so who knows where he'll end up. That series against India was his sixth in which he'd averaged more than 100; Bangladesh and Zimbabwe couldn't get him out, so in two more he finished averageless, or rather, beyond average.

In the era of batting giants, Kallis has been the most consistent. For his first 22 Tests he barely averaged 30. In the years since he has topped 60. He is the most successful Test batsman this century. He is also the best second innings player around - he averages five runs more than anyone else, and of players who have made more than 2,500 second innings runs, he has the best average not just of his era, but ever.

That last stat may raise a smirk; Jacques loves a red inker, the world knows that. The suspicion that he bats for himself might never be extinguished, yet that is what the best do. They need the icy chip of ego in their hearts that tells them they are no use in the pavilion. But Kallis cannot be bracketed with Boycott or other ruthless accumulators; his technique has the depth to make him an essential Twenty20 cricketer, too, and even in that form, he seems to have an innate inner pace that attunes itself to the rhythms of the game he's playing.

When Bob Woolmer needed a batsman to pose for the photographs in his matchless book on playing the game, The Art And Science Of Cricket, he chose Kallis. His technique is utterly orthodox, and more than that, it makes the argument for orthodoxy. He can do pretty much anything, and he can bat in all circumstances. His first innings 50 against Australia in the Test just concluded came off 36 balls, a knock that ran against type, but the ball was swinging, the field was up, the outfield slicker than an ice-rink. Kallis barely took a backlift and he creamed it through the covers again and again, the ball ringing from his bat. With Amla doing the same at the other end, it was almost symphonic.

But forget his batting: Kallis the bowler has 270 Test wickets, more than Joel Garner, Michael Holding, Dale Steyn, Bishen Bedi, Andy Roberts and Jeff Thomson. If he was English, he would have more wickets than anyone currently playing, and would be fifth on the all-time list behind Underwood, Trueman, Willis and Botham.

As an all-rounder, he has a batting average that dwarfs Flintoff's, along with 46 more wickets at the same price. Hadlee, Botham, Imran and Kapil have outbowled him, but Kallis has 10 more hundreds than all of them put together. And Sobers? Well Sobers can match that average, but nothing else. Kallis has sustained it for another 4,000 runs, has scored 14 more centuries and has 35 more wickets at cheaper cost.

So what is it about Jacques that leaves him so ill-considered by the wider world? Botham, Imran and Kapil lifted their countries, raised them up. They have been loved. Hadlee may not have been, but he was deeply admired, and feared too. Flintoff inspired an uncomplicated affection. Kallis has been less overtly heroic. The South African methods of winning have been to grind relentlessly from a position of advantage. Kallis is not a victory from the jaws of defeat merchant; the greatest deeds of Botham, Imran and Kapil had a context that Kallis's often don't.

Then there is his sheer consistency. Failure has never dogged him, no-one's asked him to captain a rag-bag outfit. He doesn't bear Sachin's burden of expectation, he wasn't asked to manage his country's decline like Ponting. His life lacks the epic curve of Boycott's. Instead he has his machine-like grace. There is an impression that his relentless excellence allows him to dictate to South Africa how he plays, and he is, of course, undroppable, so his story lacks jeopardy.

Most of all, as Billy Beane observed, aesthetics hold sway. He has the physique of a mobile fridge. Aside from when he's bowling or in his pads, it's impossible to imagine him running. His hair transplant has been comically successful - its current style is the most Botham-esque thing about him. His physicality just adds to the air of superiority his technique gives him. He's never an underdog in the way that the smaller Tendulkar or Lara were against some bowlers, and for all the classical brilliance of his batting, it doesn't quite have the sudden, illogical and otherworldly lurches into genius that Lara or Sehwag or even Pietersen can provide.

Yet this is the tyranny that clouds judgement. Kallis's genius is empirical, provable. He may be hard to love, but he's pretty easy to pick. KP may not be right, but he had a point.

Mr Roebuck's books

2011-11-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

In front of me is It Never Rains, Peter Roebuck's diary of his 1983 season with Somerset. It's waterstained and foxed, the page edges an uneasy shade of yellow on account of it spending a couple of years in the bottom of my cricket bag. It was there because he wrote it around the time I was playing semi-seriously. A while later, another of Roebuck's books, Tangled Up In White, was in there too, and I used to take plenty of stick for reading them in the dressing room.

Tangled Up In White contained an epic piece about Dean Jones' 210 in Madras, an innings that Roebuck sketched, unforgettably, through the conditions [a nuclear sun, its microwave heat], fragments of dialogue [Border: 'quit if you want, we'll get a Queenslander out here'] and harrowing notes on Jones' physical and mental deterioration [dry heaves, urinating at the crease, hallucinating in the shower, on a drip at the hospital]. It was impossible to read without being stirred for your inconsequential club game, your appointment with the local quicks...

It Never Rains played a wholly different role. It was the first book I'd read that was equivocal about the game, that made it okay to feel ambiguous about something that dominated your life. It was self-aware, knowing, courageous in its way. Roebuck found cricket and his efforts at playing it funny, ridiculous, poignant, hubristic, bathetic in the sense that it switched from the everyday to the unrepeatable, and slightly, darkly heroic, too.

The start of the season is beset by rain, endless and total, that sends him indoors for hours and hours on the bowling machine. Roebuck's confidence grows and grows until he strides out for his first innings of the year and lasts one ball. As the summer reaches its height, he's in the grip of a six-week depression that concludes on the first day of August with the simple words, 'no entry'. It's a book full of such cadences, the rhythms of real life. There are the identikit ring-roads and fuming pub grub of the touring pro, the grinding tyranny of the fixture list, the recognition of unfathomable talent far out of reach [Botham, Richards and Garner are perched in their corners of the Somerset dressing room], and the comforting quirkiness of any team, anywhere [Colin Dredge, the Demon of Frome, Dasher Denning, the manic opener]. Any cricketer will read it and just know.

What I remember most though is the passage where Roebuck hears that he might be considered for England, and realises, down in his heart, that he doesn't really want to be, or at least that he is profoundly uncertain about it. That admission, and his honesty in revealing it, rounded the game out for me, completed it in my head. This was why it was great - because it was not easy. Somehow, the joy of it was increased by this. Whether you played cricket, wrote about it, thought about it, lived it or watched the odd highlights programme when there was nothing else on, you could never exhaust it. It was, and always would be, too rich, too human and complex, for that.

Roebuck knew it, too. As obituaries often do, his have turned up some tremendous stories. When he went for his interview for Millfield school his parents went as well, and were both offered jobs. According to Wisden, he was just four feet two inches tall when he debuted for Somerset seconds as a thirteen year old. He once wrote a newspaper piece about the decline of Richard Hadlee and then had to bat against him at Trent Bridge - he made a double hundred, that was, the Notts spinner Andy Afford tweeted, 'scored entirely off his gloves'. Mark Nicholas once sidled up to Roebuck and said that the pair of them were the two best cricket writers around. 'Who told you that,' snorted Roebuck, 'your mother?'

He was an anachronistic man, which probably cost him. He should have lived in the 1950s, not now. Off the field, he had a rock-solid intellectual confidence that enabled him to lead the sacking of Richards and Garner in favour of Martin Crowe - Botham pasted the famous 'Judas' sign over his dressing room peg. On it, the same intellect smothered his instinct. Someone described his stooped stance as being 'like a question mark'. How perfectly appropriate that was.

Roebuck's 'conversion' to being Australian was always amusing; he was the least Australian man on earth, and yet he found acceptance there after his conviction for assault. The great conflicts in his personality, expressed so well in It Never Rains, leaves an ambiguity over his death too. There is a [mostly] unwritten fear over what its circumstances will expose. Yet his books remain fundamentally true - and they remain in my bag, too.

The death of momentum

2011-11-10T11:20:00.001-08:00

As Ian Dury once said, there ain't half been some clever bastards, and one of them is Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, even though he's not an economist, he's a psychologist.

Kahneman is the star of Michael Lewis's piece in the new issue of Vanity Fair, a story that fills in a little hole drilled by Lewis's book Moneyball. Kahneman, as you might expect of a man who knocked off a Nobel in his spare time, had the answer to a question that Moneyball left hanging, namely, why, if baseball coaches had spent their entire lives watching baseball, had they got player selection wrong so often, and by so much?

The solution lay in cognitive psychology and something Kahneman called 'the availability heuristic', which was the notion that human judgement is often based on the most easily recalled information. He explained this by means of one of his experiments: a roulette wheel was rigged to stop on one of two numbers, 10 or 65. Kahneman asked the groups he assembled in front of the wheel to write down the number they saw. He then asked them an unrelated question: 'What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN?'

The average answer of the groups whose wheel landed on 10 was 25 per cent, and of the groups who landed on 65 was 45 per cent. In other words, the unrelated number affected their guess.

Kahneman called this 'the anchoring effect'. He conducted lots of other strange experiments too, like creating a character called Linda, who 'was bright, majored in philosophy and who was deeply concerned with discrimination and social justice'. He asked his subjects which statement was more true: i] Linda is a bank teller ii] Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five per cent of people opted for number ii even though it is logically impossible [if number ii is true, then number i must be equally true].

Daniel Kahneman developed all of this stuff into 'prospect theory' which was about economics and ultimately, many years later, won him the big one. A Harvard undergraduate called Paul DePodesta, who had been hired by Billy Beane at the Oakland As, became interested in it. Along with Bill James, their maverick statistician, they exploited the 'willful ignorance' of the baseball player market, and revolutionised the way the game was measured.

Michael Lewis thought of all of this when he stumbled on a letter written to him in 1985 by Bill James. 'Baseball men have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings,' James wrote. 'It includes momentum, confidence, seeing the ball well, slumps, guts, clutch ability, being hot and my all-time favourite, intangibles'.

Kahneman's work seemed to answer Bill James's question. Baseball coaches often based their judgement on nebulous concepts and 'instincts' rather than empirical evidence of the kind rooted out by Bill James.

Cricket does it too. Australia dropped Simon Katich for being too old in the face of all available evidence: in the previous three years, he was the only Australian batsman to average over 50, had scored more runs, home and away, than anyone else, and two payers who kept their places, Ponting and Hussey, were older than Katich. There are plenty of other examples: how long did Steve Harmison's 7-12 affect opinion of his game?

During an insane day at Newlands yesterday, when Australia were bowled out for 284 and then South Africa were bowled out for 96 and Australia's second innings score stood at 21-9, Robin Jackman asserted on commentary that 'South Africa have the momentum here'.

How did Jackman make that judgement? Probably because, in his mind, South Africa taking 9-21 was further forward than the knowledge that Australia were 209 runs ahead on a day when 20 wickets had fallen for 128 runs.

Momentum is king of those nebulous concepts affected by the availability heuristic. In truth, not even Daniel Kahneman could tell you what's going to happen at Newlands today, other than that someone's going to win, because there's almost nothing to compare it with. Try one for yourself: Next time Australia bat, which will be in Johannesburg, how many do you reckon they'll score? Not that easy is it, when your availability heuristic is all over the place.

Could pattern recognition be a key to the fix?

2011-11-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

Monumental wides, balls sprayed illogically either side of the wicket, unfathomable passages of play, experts shaking their heads... but enough about Mitchell Johnson, what about that spot-fixing, eh?

Okay, that's a cheap shot at Mitch, but in sentencing Butt, Asif and Amir [three names that will now forever be bracketed together, no pun intended] Mr Justice Cooke pointed to the 'insidious nature' of what they had done. He was right, because what they have done is cast doubt, suspicion and fear where there was none: Edgbaston '05, Australia's second innings, Shane Warne steps too far back in his crease and knocks off a bail with his heel; Trent Bridge 2010, County Championship final day, Notts win the title on countback after taking the three Lancashire wickets they needed for a bonus point in 4.4 overs of the final session; Edgbaston 2011, spinner Amit Mishra bowls nine no-balls in England's only innings; Cardiff 2011, Sri Lanka lose eight wickets for 49 runs in the last session of the match; Sabina Park 2009, England second innings, 51 all out in 33.2 overs...

All of these events were straight up. They were unusual, but in the way that we want sport to be unusual, and they happened within the broad paradigm of credibility, they weren't without precedent. But as Cooke noted, insidious cheating turns the eye inwards. Ultimately, how do you tell?

The ineptitude of Butt's fixing ring does not help any, either. The loud-mouthed, loose-lipped, vainglorious Mazhar Majeed was an accident waiting to happen. In turn, Butt and Mazhar were so unsure of Asif's loyalty they were paying way over the odds for his over-stepping, and Amir provided joke no-balls that couldn't do anything but arouse suspicion. No international cricketer is that bad [and yes, you can insert your own Mitch or Harmi joke here]. We can probably assume that there are or have been more sophisticated, less porous, more professional operations going down.

It still took a sting as well-financed and sharply executed as the News Of The World's to produce a strong enough case to convict. It's notable that the Crown Prosecution Service decided to focus their case on the no-balls rather than other evidence offered by the ICC's Anti- Corruption Unit in the wake of the story's publication, because it was really only the no-balls that proferred a provable moment.

The News Of The World has gone, and the likelihood of another sting is remote. The Anti-Corruption Unit certainly could not undertake one. The game will continue to throw up its occasional collapses and catastrophes, its offbeat outcomes. Well-meaning commentators and ex-pros may speculate about them. but there's little more they can do. So the question grows: how does cricket protect itself?

Perhaps one key lies in the desire of the best teams to improve. Andy Flower's stats department at Loughborough has watched and logged every ball bowled in international cricket in the last five years. Other sides are doing the same. From that information, they're looking to extract patterns, to identify and recognise both the obvious and the unique about teams and individuals. That data offers some kind of baseline of performance that might be adapted when looking for the kind of events used by spot-fixers and gamblers. An obvious example would be scoring patterns produced in 'brackets', which, by the nature of them being set out before the game starts, might lie at odds with the rest of the play around them. Statistical analysis is, in a way, the ultimate in vigilance.

Most fixing demands the involvement of the captain, and there are a finite number of those. If they can be made part of the process - an ICC quorum that brings them together and offers them the chance to meet and talk and establish common cultures within their teams - might offer a stronger grasp on control of the game.

These are small things. The best protection is for the broad internal culture of international cricket to provide its own defence. Mohammad Amir, 18 years old, from a background beyond the experience of most English or Australian players, walked into a nightmare. His captain was corrupt, so were his team-mates, and his family were being threatened by bookmakers' heavies. It's asking a lot of a kid to make a stand against all of that, even if knew how to do so.

It has been a personal tragedy for him, and the laws of natural justice need to apply. Prison is probably not the place for Amir, at least not for long. In mainstream society, once a man has served his punishment he's free to resume his life, his debt paid. Amir must be allowed to do the same within cricket once his ban is served. Rehabilitating him into a game that has found new ways to police itself would be the ultimate victory over what has happened.

There may not be an answer to the question of Jonathan Trott

2011-10-27T10:13:00.001-07:00

Andy Flower's face doesn't do happy very happily, but displeasure writes itself eloquently across it. After England's final defeat in Kolkata he looked like a man extracting a wasp from a loose filling with his tongue. In his 50 over team, there aren't just questions over the so-so players, there are questions over the successful ones, too. If he was to list, in order, the batsmen over whom there is no quibble, it would start and end with Eoin Morgan. Next - equivocal only in the minds of the press - would come Pietersen, then the made bed we must lie in, Alastair Cook. And then it's the ICC cricketer of the year, Jonathan Trott.

Trott occupies that category of batsman for whom flair is another country [current proprietor S. Chanderpaul, notable residents Simon Katich, Paul Collingwood, Graeme Smith]. There may be little aesthetic pleasure to his game, but there are consolations, and not just in the scorebook. Behind Trott trails the obsessive-compulsive's checklist of ticks and rituals, the mad-ass rundown of scrapes and sidesteps of a man who must impose clarity and order. Once he has done, he is set. His mental landscape is entirely different to Lara's or Pietersen's or Ponting's, players who need the challenge to escalate as they bat, and who will escalate it themselves if the bowlers won't.

There is something ineffably English about debating the merit of a man who has the best record in the team, is the cricketer of the year and has, with 1,310 ODI runs, 172 more than anyone else in 2011, yet that is his lot, because he is a man out of time. Had he played ten years ago in the pre-T20 era, when the possible was comfy and predictable, he would appear without argument. But the possible is no longer comfy and anyone can score anything; limited overs batting is now the art of vicious, unpredictable acceleration set around periods of accumulation. These are the surges that will define games.

The broad, non-penetrative measures of average and strike rate cannot and do not tell the story of those surges. In a small room in Loughborough, England's analysts have recorded every ball delivered in international cricket in the last five years. While Flower does not talk publicly about what they've found, you can be sure that he will pondering stats like those in Mohali, when Trott made 26 from 25 deliveries in the last 10 overs of England's innings, and the numbers that tell him that Trott has scored at better than a run a ball in three of his 38 ODIs.

Put simply, Trott's runs are useful at certain points of the innings and less so at others. They suit games that have middling totals of 250-280. This is what makes him a percentage selection. The choice of Cook as captain and by default, opener, has also compromised Trott's value as the man to bat around.

The rest of the order needs to coalesce before Trott's position becomes clearer. It's not inconceivable that the answer is for him and Cook to open together, and for batting below them to be supercharged by Bell, Pietersen, Morgan and Patel, with Keiswetter or Bairstow keeping wicket and batting deep, plus the option of Bopara and the versatility his bowling brings.

Trott's game may not have fully flowered. His success so far has lain in ruthless elimination of error and risk. Collingwood introduced his thump over cow corner and, allied to his scampering, his fielding and the odd inspired spell of bowling, it made him the essential selection that Trott is not. Even Chanderpaul can and has destroyed teams in short bursts. Trott has bullishly claimed he can hit sixes, so maybe he should try. It's no longer a luxury, a skill like that.

Flower is trying to overcome a notoriously cautious culture, and one scarred not just by failure but by humiliation and embarrassment. This is the nation that opened in a World Cup final with Brearley and Boycott; that for a decades would have loved to have enough talent at its disposal to just get into position to choke. The really adventurous long-term selection as 50-over captain was Eoin Morgan, which strangely, would have shored-up Trott's position. With Cook, they have hedged to some degree. Whether he or Trott make it to the 2015 World Cup is a question that at the moment has no right answer.

Butt, Amir, Asif and the News Of The World's Last Stand

2011-10-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

There's an old story, usually attributed to Mark Twain or Churchill, of a man who gets talking to an attractive woman on a train. After a while he asks, 'madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?' The woman tells him that she would.

'Well then, would you sleep with me for a shilling?'

'Sir! What kind of woman do you think I am?'

'We've already established what kind of a woman you are. We're just haggling over the price'.

This anecdote of woolly provenance is as good a description as any of the methods of Mazher Mahmood, aka the Fake Sheikh, star witness at Southwark Crown Court in the spot-fixing trial of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir.

For a time, Mahmood, for all of the mystery that surrounds his physical appearance, was the most famous journalist in the country. Yet one of the ironies of the trial is that he gave his evidence in a media landscape that had altered irrevocably in the months between the publication of his story and the commencement of proceedings. The paper for whom Mahmood wrote his piece no longer exists, and neither, arguably, does the appetite for his stock in trade, the celebrity sting.

The News Of The World's defence of Mahmood's methods was generally that his investigations had led to 250 criminals being brought to justice. But it's also true that some of the crimes he reported would never have occurred without his involvement. In 2006, the media commentator and former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade wrote a piece for the Independent entitled 'Why I'm Out To Nail Mazher Mahmood'. He said: 'Mahmood's methods debase journalism. They often amount to entrapment, and on occasion, appear to involve the methods of agents provocateurs. People have been encouraged to commit crimes that they would not otherwise have conceived'.

Mahmood's rap sheet in that regard is long. Most notorious is his 2002 'world exclusive' story of a plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham. The reason it was a world exclusive is because there was no plot. After the men accused by Mahmood had spent seven months in prison on remand, the trial collapsed over the unreliability of the main witness – and Mahmood's major source – Florim Gashi. The News Of The World's role was referred to the attorney general, and it transpired that Gashi had been paid £10,000 by the newspaper, and had played a role in four other of Mahmood's stories.

In 1999, Mahmood's investigation led to the conviction of Joseph Yorke and another man on drugs charges, yet the jury sent the judge a note explaining that had they been able to take into account the 'extreme provocation' to which Yorke was subjected, they would have issued a verdict of not guilty. The judge agreed and passed only a suspended sentence. And in the conviction of the actor John Alford for supplying cocaine, also in 1999, the judge said that 'entrapment had played a significant part, but so had greed'.

There were more. In 2005, a man was jailed after he admitted selling Mahmood and the News Of The World a fake story that he was 'the fifth London bomber' in the 7/7 attacks. The police wasted more than 4000 hours of time investigating the claim after the paper splashed on the story. The man, Imran Patel, said that had been promised £5000 by the News Of The World. In 2006, three men, Dominick Martins, Abdurahaman Kanyare and Roque Fernandez, were acquitted of plotting to buy a substance that could be used to make a 'dirty' bomb, and Mahmood's methods were again questioned, this time by the BBC.

In 2010 Mahmood exposed the world snooker champion John Higgins over plans to fix frames in four tournaments across Europe. After an investigation, Higgins was banned from competition for six months for failing to report an illegal approach and discussing betting, and yet his acquittal on match-fixing charges came in part after Mahmood himself gave a full statement to the inquiry and turned over his unedited videotapes and transcripts.

The Higgins case perhaps best of all illustrates the ambiguities of these kind of stories. There is an excellent summary of it at the Sporting Intelligence site, including an interview with the man who investigated Higgins, former metropolitan police detective David Douglas, who says, 'The News Of The World are very clever at what they do, very clever indeed'.

Well not any more they're not. The paper has gone, closed for its involvement in the phone hacking scandal that might yet cost Rupert Murdoch control of his business. In retrospect, Mahmood's best stories were his more harmless ones - the shagging footballers and feckless club directors who insulted their own fans under the Fake Sheikh's wily prompting.

None of which is intended as a defence of Butt, Asif and Amir - especially the first two, Butt with his mug-purchase watches and ice-cream parlour deals; Asif with his schoolboy excuses and previous as long as your arm. It's just that this is another case that wouldn't have unfolded in the way it has without the presence of Mahmood and his robes and his bag of money – this time £140,000. You somehow wish for something as odious and damaging as spot-fixing to have been exposed by an organisation a little more noble. It's not exactly Watergate, is it... and it is probably the last of its kind.

Take this one on the chin, Swanny...

2011-10-13T11:06:00.001-07:00

A passage in Graeme Swann's book - which bears a title so punsomely dreadful that it wouldn't make a caption in the back of Nuts magazine - has poked life into an old story.

He writes: There was a strange dynamic between Andy Caddick and Darren Gough. I found it really weird. They absolutely hated each other but pretended to get on in this pseudo friendship. Their jealousy towards each others success made me feel uneasy.

On hearing of it, Gough, already stoked up by an allegation elsewhere in the book that he'd sucker-punched Swann while he was standing at a urinal - you'll have gathered by now that The Breaks Are Off might not take its place next to Cardus on Cricket in the pantheon - used his radio show on Talksport to rip a few snorters into Swanny's rib-cage. Paraphrased, his response was something like: 'It's absolute rubbish. Me and Andy were competitive, but we were friends too. Before every game together we'd do something like go to the cinema or have a meal or play golf. We're playing golf in a couple of weeks actually. Caddy's one of the few players I've stayed in touch with. I've stayed at his house for a week. I texted him the other day. Why would I do that if it were a pseudo friendship?

'There was a bit of jealousy because I was the golden boy and I got all the contracts, and that might have been a bit because I were a proper Englishman and he were a Kiwi, and we were competitive. If you look at how close were were in the wickets we got, of course we were. But to say there were cliques in the team and we weren't friends is rubbish. That team under Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher and Lord MacLaurin started the process of where we are today.

'You're always better friends with some people in the team than others, but that's not a clique. Vaughan and Collingwood and Giles were always together. Freddie and Steve Harmison were inseparable. At the end of my time, I was always with KP. In this team now, Swanny's always with Jimmy Anderson and Bressie, they spend all day on Twitter winding each other up. Is that a clique?'

It took him less time to say than it does to read, and he seemed far more exercised by it than he had been by the punch allegation, which had come the day before and over which he'd rung Swann direct. Perhaps it's because the story has been so persistent over the years, and it rankles.

In truth there was an almost symbiotic link between the two, in that they unconsciously echoed one another's performances. Gough played 58 Tests and took 229 wickets at 28.39 at a strike rate of 51.6, a best of 6/42 and 14 five wicket hauls. Caddick played 63, taking 234 wickets at 29.91 at a strike rate of 57.9, a best of 7/46 and 13 five-wicket bags. Gough had the edge as a limited overs bowler, Caddick took 1,180 first-class wickets to Goughie's 855.

They played 25 Tests together and were mostly formidable, except in the Ashes of 2001. England's comparative mediocrity during their era can be blamed on many things - three batsman who played more than 100 Tests and averaged less than 40, the failure to develop Hick and Ramprakash, a chaotic selection policy, the lack of central contracts, all of the usual - but not on players with records like Gough and Caddick, who, statistically at least, outbowled Flintoff and Harmison.

You can imagine both having their moments. You might think Gough had a heart like a dustbin lid and Caddick maybe less so, but then look at their numbers. That can't be true, although Gough's bravery in the face of his terminal knee injury pre-dated Flintoff's Leviathan efforts when faced with the same. Caddick by all accounts could be quirky. David Lloyd even called him nerdy, and maybe he was sensitive and inconsistent, but again, the stats say not that often. Anyway, which fast bowler is entirely sane?

Swann's recollection appears coloured by the myth, by the story. He has carefully constructed a personal mythology of his own, and his book will reinforce it. He's in a glass house throwing stones with this one.

Vale Graham Dilley

2011-10-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Cricket has too many metaphors for the end. Like the song says, when an old cricketer leaves the crease it's sad enough, and when it's someone not yet old it's sadder, and crueller, than that. Lots of people in the game have spoken warmly of Graham Dilley, who died today. To those of us a little further on the outside, whose memory of the man was suspended in about 1986 when he was still an affable and diffident giant, part Viking, part REO Speedwagon bassist, his passing seems even more abrupt. Not him, surely, and not now.

Of course he had coached, with great success, and had lived his life in the game, but in his diffident way, he was out of the spotlight and so, perversely, he remained trapped by his brief moments in it. He only played in two Test match victories [despite appearing in 41 games - how very English that is] but the first of those is probably the most famous win of all, at Headingley in 1981, and even then he is famous within it for an innings and a catch, rather than for his bowling. Indeed, so far had he fallen at that point, he found himself, a week later, playing for Kent seconds against the Army.

His other win came on that happy tour of 1986-7, when he was part of the team that couldn't bat, couldn't bowl and couldn't field and that beat Australia 2-1. It was the tour on which the famous wicket, Lillee ct Willey b Dilley, was willed into existence. According to the testaments, he was the kind of man you needed to know before his true personality came out; Pat Murphy, the BBC radio journalist who wrote a book about a season at Worcester with Dilley and Graeme Hick, recalled late nights putting the world to rights over a few beers and a packet of fags - the book's title, Hick And Dilley's Circus, was surely cooked up then.

Two more diffident - that word again - destroyers you could not find. If ever you wanted to study savage talent wrapped in a pacifist's temperament, look at Hick and Dilley. Like Hick, Dilley had all of the physical gifts. He approached the crease on the angle from a run that sometimes seemed to take about five minutes, so long and curved was it, and yet the delivery stride was a thing of beauty, the front leg extended high while the whole body appeared balanced on the one dragging toe of his back foot, the javelin sweep of the arm delayed until the final second when it unfolded in a whir of long levers. Dilley was quick, sometimes brutally so, and that action let him swing the ball away very late, the batsman's nightmare. Had he possessed Botham's uncomplicated ego, he might have had another 150 Test wickets. As it was, he was way too good for most county players, as 648 first-class notches at 26.84 suggests.

It's strange how many of those Headingley men were on a last chance. Botham of course had been removed as captain, and was selected at Brearley's insistence. Willis, in his own mind at least, was bowling for his career, and Dilley was dropped after the game. How unjust that was; he had shown as much of the right stuff as anyone. His death somehow sends that match further into an ephemeral past.

Dilley may have prospered more in the scientific now, like his contemporary equivalent Chris Tremlett, another unassuming big fella. Instead he played through tumultuous times yet remained a gentle presence in them. It serves his memory well.

NB: thanks to Tony for pointing out the error above - Lillee ct Willey b Dilley came in '81 not '86. In the mind's eye, Willey was at either third slip or gully, but I could be wrong about that too...

March of the Andrew Symonds zombies

2011-10-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

About ten years ago at the Gabba, I watched a ghost walk into bat. It was Vivian Richards, and he was unmistakable, still taking an eternity to reach the crease, nothing more than a cap on his head, those middleweight's shoulders rolling as he sauntered out under the late-season sun.

The resemblance ended there. This wasn't the Viv Richards of memory or dreams, it was Viv as he approached 50, a long-retired cricketer playing with his friends in a charity match. He still looked the same, still moved in the same way, but it had been a long time, and he could barely hit the ball off the square.

There was a sigh as he got out, but it was a sigh of relief almost, because no-one wants to watch their gods become mortal with age, and anyway, Goochie was blasting away at the other end and it was a terrific afternoon. The match offered something that only those sort of matches used to be able to do.

Not any more. One of the less remarked upon aspects of T20 cricket has been the rise of these simulcrums. There was one on the field yesterday by the name of Andrew Symonds. It looked like Symonds from a distance, but when the camera honed in, the face was lined and weathered, the waist had thickened, the hamstrings had tightened. It moved like Symonds used to move, only more stiffly, more slowly. There was another one on the other side, too, a version of Justin Kemp that just seemed to have staggered, unshaven and pawky, out of the nearest pub.

It's pretty obvious why Symonds wants to play for the Mumbai Indians [a team name that is increasingly loaded with sardonic humour], and why Shane Warne and Matthew Hayden want to play in the Big Bash. But why do the teams want them?

It's a strange and telling phenomenon. The thought that any of those players could, for example, appear in next year's T20 World Cup is so distant as to be laughable. Even Australia aren't that desperate. It's pretty unlikely that a stretched county side would lay out their hard-earned on them when young and hungry muscle is available on the cheap. But the IPL and its little me-too the Big Bash don't run entirely on excellence; performance is not their sole criteria. They need to keep the tills ringing with a little bit of showbiz too, so the appearance of the undead cricketer in their elasticated kit serves its purpose. You wouldn't have wanted to watch King Viv doing it though...

Should Shane Watson still be opening for Australia: a nation wonders

2011-09-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

Post-empire, Australia's self-examination was more lacerating than anything that came from the outside, and now Shane Watson has written an autobiography. It is titled, numbingly, 'Watto'. There's plenty of stuff in it about bowlers who were 'shitting themselves' during the Ashes, but does the book address a more central question: should Shane Watson be opening for Australia?

There is an easy answer for white-ball cricket: he is a man who can induce a queasy kind of awe. But as a Test match batsman, he moved there out of expediency and his decline has been camouflaged by the entropy all around him. Australia's future definition may be hazy at its edges, but focus should sharpen at the top. Shane is just not cutting it.

Watson's batting is a kind of brutalist modernism, as heavy as concrete and about as subtle. In the Summer of 2010, during the warm-ups before an ODI at the Rose Bowl, he came to the boundary edge for some throw-downs, wearing a single pad and a pair of gloves. He began belting the ball back past the coach like the school bully slapping a fat kid's neck. It was impressive, superficially, until Ricky Ponting came over to do the same thing. Ponting didn't strike the ball quite as hard, but he played each shot differently, angling the blade of his bat in such a way that a graph of his shots would have looked like the lines drawn on a protractor. It was the difference between putting a wrecking ball through a wall and undermining its foundations.

Incrementally, Watson's methods have failed him. His Test average is declining and is now below 40. He has made two hundreds in 54 innings. Phil Hughes, his much-maligned partner, averages half a run more - 39.73 to 39.43 - and his average is climbing. He has three centuries from 24 innings.

Those stats are blunt yet revealing, and need digging into. Watson's last Test before he began opening was at Brisbane against New Zealand in November 2008. He went in at number seven behind Hayden, Katich, Ponting, Hussey, Clarke and Symonds. He scored one and five, and his average hit its lowest point, 19.76. He had made one half-century in 13 innings.

He opened for the first time at Edgbaston in the third Ashes Test of 2009. He averaged 48 in that series, with three half-centuries, did even better against West Indies and Pakistan the following Australian summer, averaging 52.60 and 69.20 and making his maiden hundred. He slipped in New Zealand, averaging 38.50 in a single Test, then again against Pakistan in England, averaging 16.00, before playing wonderfully in India, with a second hundred and an average of 67.75 in two Tests. He averaged 48.33 in the Ashes of 2010-11 but with no century, and then made 87 runs at 17.40 in Sri Lanka. His overall average peaked at 42.11 against England in December 2010, and has slipped away since then.

Of his 2040 Test match runs, 1164 have come in boundaries, and he has been dismissed between 50 and a hundred 14 times in 49 innings. These are the stats of a player who has been worked out. When the field is up, he can score in boundaries. Once he is set, and teams are less attacking, he struggles to work the ball around and becomes frustrated.

Australia, with two openers averaging under 40 and with five hundreds between them, compare badly to the sides ranked ahead of them. India have Sehwag - 52.26/22 100s, and Gambhir - 48.34/nine 100s; South Africa have Smith - 49.71/22, albeit paired of late with the mystifying Peterson - 33.64/1; and England have Andrew Strauss - 41.98/19 and Alastair Cook - 49.72/19. And Australia, let's remember, dropped Simon Katich - 45.03/10 and who as an opener alone averaged 50.48 with eight centuries - figures better than Watson and Hughes combined.

Not every great opener qualifies as a great batsman, but every truly great team has had a great opening partnership. Hughes has the capacity to score big hundreds and bats unfathomably; he is an outlier in terms of technique, and there is an X-factor about him. Watson carries none of that, and yet he is a potentially devastating all-rounder if deployed more conventionally.

It may dent his ego to move, as he spends a lot of his time talking about how much he wants to open, but at heart he is a beta-male, deferential, scared of ghosts. Pitched as a Gilchrist figure who bowls instead of keeps wicket, all of that can be dealt with, and as a cricketer he can be fulfilled. At the top of the order, by the highest standards, he is an also-ran.

How easy is it to get Jacques out, and other stats...

2011-09-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

When Rahul Dravid set the record for the most deliveries faced in Test cricket this summer, it brought to mind a quote from Bob Woolmer's majesterial The Art And Science Of Cricket.

'To review the split-second data of what happens when a batter executes a shot,' he wrote, 'is to wonder how any batsman survives more than one delivery'. Woolmer was considering the complex physiological process that the body goes through when facing an individual ball, but it did pose a simple question: what is the percentage chance of any one delivery dismissing a great player?

It's a blunt stat, as blunt as a batting average, but it is revealing too. By adding together the number of deliveries faced in Tests and ODIs, and then subtracting the number of completed innings, it's possible to produce a percentage figure.

Jacques Kallis balls faced: 41,664 dis'd: 455 % chance per ball: 1.09

Rahul Dravid b/f: 45,374 dis: 519 % chance: 1.14

Sachin Tendulkar b/f: 48559 dis: 667 % chance: 1.37

Ricky Ponting b/f: 37,966 dis: 553 % chance: 1.46

Brian Lara b/f: 32,839 dis: 483 % chance: 1.47

The number of not outs offer another expression of the value a batter might put on his wicket:

Jacques Kallis inns: 546 not outs: 91 % chance of a not out: 16.6

Rahul Dravid: inns: 591 not outs: 72 % chance: 12.18

Ricky Ponting: inns: 620 not outs: 67 % chance: 10.80

Sachin Tendulkar: inns: 740 not outs: 73 % chance: 9.86

Brian Lara inns: 521 not outs 38 % chance: 7.29

Jacques still king of the red-inkers, then...

'This is it, then'... The sense of an ending

2011-09-15T03:57:00.000-07:00

It’s the last day of the first-class season, and for a few it will be the last day as a professional cricketer. Some will go willingly, some even gladly, most less so. More will be sensing that the end is not yet, but is not far away; the fine edge is ebbing from their game, sliding away bit by bit.

I’ve just re-read the pages on Geoffrey Boycott’s final seasons in Leo McKinstry’s tour-de-force biography, Boycs. The fading of Boycott’s power manifested itself in a particular way: he became almost strokeless even by his standards. In 1984, as McKinstry records, he made 60 in 52 overs against Somerset, 53 in 51 overs versus Derbyshire, 17 in 26 overs against Leicestershire, 77 in 67 overs against Sussex, 33 in 32 against Northamptonshire, and perhaps most grievously, 25 in 27 in a one-day game against Shropshire that Yorkshire lost. In all he made 1567 runs that summer at 62 per innings, but it took him 1200 overs.

Astonishingly, the following season, aged almost 45, he made another 1657 runs at 75.31, leaving him second to Viv Richards in the averages. Playing against Hampshire at Middlesbrough, facing his old friend and rival Malcolm Marshall – Macco loved to bowl at Geoffrey – he made 115 even as Marshall took 5-48 to rout the remaining Yorkshire batting.

It was still going though, and he could probably feel it. In his final season, in his last match, he needed 69 runs to make a thousand, something he’d done every year since 1962. He was playing against Northants at Scarborough. Jim Love ran him out for 61 in the first innings, and after Boycott had advised his skipper to enforce the follow-on, Northants survived and timed their second-innings declaration in such a way that he was not able to go in again.

More than a decade later, he remembered the day in an interview with the Telegraph: ‘Something had come to an end, something wonderful. I just thought, this is it then. I waited for the ground to clear. Then I wondered around on my own, among all the newspapers and food wrappers and tin cans’.

That’s how things ended for Geoffrey, because that’s how things end sometimes, alone, among the wrappers and the tin cans. It’s no less glorious in its way.

Summer of four captains v Summer of five captains

2011-09-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

It was Gore Vidal, I think, who said that satire died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. If it didn't then perhaps it waited until Mitchell Johnson was voted ICC Cricketer of the Year in 2009. Yet for sheer unlikeliness the story of England's summer goes beyond both.

Jonathan Trott is the new ICC Cricketer of the Year, Alastair Cook the Test Player of the Year, England are on the verge of a clean sweep against India, and their fifth captain of the season will take charge in a couple of Twenty20 games that didn't even exist when the fixture list came out.

Yet such is the upward curve of England's reversal of fortune, the awards are deserved and hard-won; the captaincy issue has been resolved with such force of logic that continuity and victory have become seamless. It's all so un-England, isn't it...?

The summer of 1988 was the last when the captaincy changed hands as regularly, and it's a story worth retelling, because it sets in context the happy daze that now surrounds long-time England followers.

They were playing West Indies at the time, a team entering the last moments of their glory era but that still bristled with big guns: Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, Marshall, Ambrose, Walsh and Patterson.

England were captained by Mike Gatting, who, the previous winter, had the on-field spat with Shakoor Rana. The first Test was a draw, with Gooch and Gower batting well to save it. Before the second, Gatting was sacked following an alleged fumble with a barmaid in a hotel room, an incident generally regarded as flimsy cover for revenge over the Pakistan debacle. Such was the small-mindedness of the time, Gatting's autobiography was banned from sale at cricket grounds.

John Emburey took over for the second Test. Gatting was dropped and replaced by Martyn Moxon. Phil DeFreitas was replaced by Gladstone Small. West Indies won by 134 runs. Emburey remained in charge for the third match, for which Gatting and DeFreitas were recalled, and John Childs, who was 36, and David Capel, given debuts. Derek Pringle, Paul Jarvis and Chris Broad were dropped. West Indies won by an innings and 156 runs.

Emburey was sacked and dropped. The new captain was Chris Cowdrey, who had played briefly for England in India three years previously. Cowdrey, who was as surprised as anyone, was the son of Sir Colin, a man England often turned to in times of crisis, and the godson of the chairman of selectors, Peter May. May had been on the selection panel that chose three captains for the West Indies series of 1966, one of whom was Colin Cowdrey. Paul Downton, Martyn Moxon, Mike Gatting, David Capel, Phil DeFreitas and John Childs were dropped. Derek Pringle, Neil Foster, Bill Athey and Jack Richards were recalled, and Robin Smith and Tim Curtis made their debuts. Cowdrey got nought and five and didn't take a wicket. England lost by 10 wickets.

Chris Cowdrey incurred a slight injury in a county game and was quietly moved aside. He never played for England again. Graham Gooch was appointed captain for the final Test. Allan Lamb was also injured and was replaced by Rob Bailey. Cowdrey's place went to Phil DeFreitas, and David Gower was dropped and replaced by Matthew Maynard. West Indies won by eight wickets.

The Almanack thundered: 'The morale and reputation of English cricket has seldom been as severely bruised'. But then even Wisden can't predict the future. 1988 was just the foundation for the entropic decade to come.

Mike Gatting now works for the ECB and Graham Gooch is England's batting coach and a mentor to Alastair Cook. Last week, Chris Cowdrey had a heart attack whilst in hospital to have some stitches in his knee. 'People always said I was lucky player – well, if you're going to have a heart attack anywhere the middle of a hospital is probably it,' he said.

Get well soon, Chris. Perhaps you were lucky after all. His is an odd role in England's history, but four captains or five, he knows life's not so bad.

Would David Gower get in this England team, and other arguments

2011-09-03T04:19:00.001-07:00

David Gower is, I think, the first cricketer whose entire international career I was able to watch. I don't quite recall Botham's debut, but I do Gower's, which began, as no-one needs reminding, with a first ball pull for four off a bowler called Liaqat Ali, whose sole contribution to cricket history this seems to be - an unfortunate quiz-question of a career, that.

All of the rest of that era - Willis, Gooch, Boycott, Knott etc - were already playing, but Gower, yup, I was there for the lot. It came to mind when reading Andrew Miller's piece at cricinfo on how good the current England side are. The general feeling seemed to be that this is a workmanlike team profiting in an era of flat tracks and non-lethal bowling, and it's a valid view to have. How many of those Indian pies would Goochie have gorged himself on? Loads, probably, if he could have got the strike off of Geoffrey and his stick of rhubarb.

But whenever these arguments emerge, two things happen, one obvious and one not quite so. The first is that we are remembering men in their prime, at their best, and sometimes with that lovely, melancholic air of what the Portuguese call 'saudade', which is a kind of nostalgia for something that never really happened. The second is that the older set of men have the advantage of being judged on the whole of their time, rather than the cross-section of the current team.

So taking a kind of composite, early 80s England XI that may never have actually taken the field together [I would check, but, you know...] which of them would have got into the current team? Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield to Graeme Swann; Geoff Miller would make it only as a selector [at which he is very good] and Phil Edmonds could tough it out with Monty Panesar for the non-playing spinner's role. Mike Hendrick, who never took a Test five-fer despite his niggardly ways, and Chris Old, with his legendary propensity for an injury, could not survive in this day of bowling units. Alan Knott and Bob Taylor were sublime glovemen, but this is the modern era, and Matthew Prior is a far superior batsman to both, even Knotty, with his pre-Chanderpaul, crab-like efforts.

Which leaves Willis, Gooch and Gower. The Goose had the one thing that the current attack lacks - out and out pace, and so could displace Bresnan. And Gooch and Gower would walk in, right...?

Er, well... Gooch is a leviathan of English batting, remembered as much for the first-class runs he scored - a figure no current player will approach - as anything else. But his Test match career was one of two halves, and we don't yet have the benefit of Alastair Cook's second half. Cook has played 72 Tests, scoring 5868 runs at 49.72, with 19 hundreds and 26 fifties. After 72 matches, Gooch had 4714 at 37.41 with eight hundreds and 29 fifties.

And would Gower bat at four or five? At four is KP, with 6361 runs from 78 matches at 50.48, with 19 hundreds and 25 fifties. after 78 games, Gower had 5523 runs at 45.27 with 12 hundreds and 26 fifties. Pietersen already has more hundreds than Gower would go on and make.

At five is Ian Bell, with 5027 runs from 69 matches at 49.28 with 16 hundreds and 28 fifties. At a similar moment, Gower had 4543 runs at 42.06 with nine hundreds and 23 fifties.

These are not definitive comparisons but are more even than looking at the completed careers of one set of players against the incomplete records of others. Now the main argument for the records of the older players being reassessed: the quality of bowling. Gooch and Gower, you can argue, faced one of the most daunting attacks of all-time in West Indies. Here, Gooch is impressive, with an average of 44.83 as opposed to his overall mark of 42.58. Gower though averaged considerably less - 32.82 against a career 44.25. Gooch's weak point was against Australia, where he averaged 33.31, having encountered Lillie and Thomson early on.

Now consider Kevin Pietersen, who has played against one of the great Australian sides, plus in Warne and Murali, the two most productive bowlers ever. Against Australia he averages 52.71. His low comes against South Africa, at 'just' 42.71.

Cook and Bell can't claim to have competed as well against the very best around, yet their records are both on a sharp upward curve, and their scoring of hundreds is relentless.

Ultimately, if you're choosing on aesthetics, Gooch would come in for Cook, and Gower for Pietersen. However, Pietersen is, I think, better than Gower, and the rest of his career will prove it. An aesthetic choice between Gower and Bell is tougher, but I would suggest that Gower is the more hardened player. His ratio of hundreds to fifties though, 18 to 39, would weigh against him in the mind of a pragmatist like Andy Flower.

It's a daft argument in the end, but here's another: the real choice should perhaps be between the sides of 2005 and 2011. That would be a far closer contest.

Being hit in the face, and other good times...

2011-09-01T11:50:00.001-07:00

It's funny how a small and insignificant incident in a game can send you off into a reverie, a time-trip back into the long-lost, half-forgotten past to a moment when something similar happened, a distant event that somehow triggers another sense-memory which surfaces from that place in the brain where it has lingered and never quite left...

There I was watching Kevin Pietersen bat in the Twenty20 when he wandered off to the edge of the pitch, outside the line of the ball, and managed to top-edge it into the grill of his helmet, a sort of vertical flip-sweep that would have cost him his pearly-whites had it not been for the lid, and I felt a little tingle in my bottom lip, where there is an inch-long, pale-white scar from many years ago when the same thing happened to me... It wasn't exactly the same sort of shot - how could it be - but it was a sweep, played to a gentle off-spinner who I didn't think could get me out, so I got down on one knee and swept hard, but the ball must have just popped a little from the dry midsummer wicket and taken the edge of the bat before flying up into my mouth...

...There was a bit of gash, but it didn't seem like much and it didn't really hurt, just stung a little, so I carried on... I have no memory now of how long, or how I got out or how many I scored or whether we won, or any of those things... what I remember is getting home and trying to eat a chinese but giving up because by then it felt like I had a tennis ball in my mouth, and of the next time I played when I noticed that there were some bloodstains on the inside of one of my pads that stayed there for years [loved those pads, had to retire them gently in the end, like laying down a favourite shield]...

...That sent me off to another match on the same ground, fielding at slip to another off-spinner and watching the batsman go for a cut and then coming round on the ground because a top edge had flown up and hit me in the forehead, to the great hilarity of everyone that saw it - no health and safety in those days - oh, the embarrassment of that... and then another game, again on the same ground, where I got done by an outrageous slower ball that seemed to take forever to get down the pitch and bowled me - another laugh then, that time from their wicket-keeper - and then yet another game when I almost got shown up by a dolly catch at mid-off that I got too far underneath but just managed to grab with a jump and a fingertip...

All things that I'd forgotten, or thought I'd forgotten, but that came back in an instant after KP flicked that ball into his face, and then he laughed and the bowler laughed too, and we all thought yes.... this is the game... this is the game...

Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card

2011-08-27T02:47:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail.

Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which worked because he realised that traditional baseball stats like Runs Batted In weren't particularly effective in measuring performance, even though everyone in the game used them and had done for a century. Some fans of fantasy baseball found better ones to run their teams, and Beane employed them to analyse players for him.

Ever since Lewis's book, every sport has tried to find its version of Moneyball. Andy Flower found Nathan Leamon, a mathematician from Cambridge University who was also a qualified coach, and provided a well-funded black-ops stats department at the ECB for him to use [it's easy to imagine A-Flo wrapping an arm around Nathan's shoulders and telling him to 'think the unthinkable...']. Flower has been even more guarded than usual when he's been asked about the numbers being run, saying only that the work was 'very interesting' - at least until last weekend, and piece by Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times.

Wilde's story [unfortunately behind the humble Rupert's paywall] revealed something of Leamon's methods. The boy's gone to town and then some. England's enthusiasm for Hawkeye extends way beyond the DRS - they've used to it log and analyse every ball delivered in Test match cricket around the world in the last five years.

With access to such vast data they now run simulations of every Test match they play, taking into account venue, conditions, selection and pitch. Leamon reckons that such 'games', when he checks them against the actual matches, 'are accurate to within four or five percent'.

Other work has been in breaking down pitches in areas for bowlers to aim at: Leamon claims England's palpable success against Sachin Tendulkar was due in part to statistical analysis that showed Sachin made the bulk of his runs on the leg side until he reached fifty.

'It's all about asking the right questions,' Leamon told Wilde, 'which can be the short cut to six months of work. A lot of the old ways of looking at the technique of opponents leads to guesswork - feet position, how they hold the bat. Hawkeye enables you to come up with answers'.

Unlikely though it is that Flower and Leamon would reveal much of what they know to a newspaper, it is nonetheless strangely comforting that five years of work has simply produced a shortcut to knowledge rather than anything more revelatory, because if the numbers had unpicked the game, had stripped it back to a simple series of probabilities, some of its deep and human mysteries would have been lost.

Moneyball worked for Billy Beane in part because every franchise plays hundreds of games per season and the vast majority aren't watched by the other coaches and teams. Test matches are much rarer things, and are more closely observed. And Moneyball only really worked until all of the other teams knew about it and started using the same information. Once they did, the variables of power and money that Beane had overcome reasserted themselves.

Baseball is also a more mechanical game than cricket. The batter only really has one swing, so his ability to adapt is compromised to a far greater degree than, say, Tendulkar's who, lest we forget, once made a double hundred in Australia without hitting a single cover drive - on purpose. The numbers are beautiful and fascinating, but as Rahul Dravid said last week, cricket is a game 'played in the space of the mind', and that is more fascinating and beautiful still.

KP: Lap of the gods

2011-08-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

'The wheel has to turn,' Kevin Pietersen said simply, and it has. In the 15 innings he's played since the 227 in Adelaide, he has made three of his four highest Test scores and his average is back above 50. His knock yesterday summoned all of his quirky brilliance, and also the pernicious nature of cricket's gods.

There really is no other way to think about the game sometimes. No-one works harder than KP, and to overcome his long drought, he went back to the book. Both of his double hundreds, plus his 85 at the Rose Bowl against Sri Lanka [an equally high-quality innings], were most notable for the way he determined to hit everything down the ground. There is no better principal to abide by, and none better to watch.

With his swagger back, he spent the first part of his innings yesterday determined to ignore it. Ishant Sharma almost bowled him round his legs several times. Last ball before lunch he blundered into the most obvious leg slip trap ever set. On 88 he screwed a hoick just wide of mid-off. He hit the second ball after tea straight up in the air, having gone to hundred from the first. At times Bell made him look like an oaf.

Any and all of these incidents would have done for him when his luck was down and the wheel was yet to turn. What was intriguing about this almost endlessly fascinating player was his willingness to ride his luck, almost to trust it. There's a part of batting that is about fatalism, about the nature of chance, and Pietersen more than most seems willing to allow it to be part of his game. He really is extraordinary.

The missing

2011-08-18T01:27:00.000-07:00

Injury aside, who was the last batsman dropped by England? It was Ravi Bopara, who remains, at least for the moment, next man back in. Before that? Ian Bell.

Stability is an inevitable consequence of success, as well as a contributor to it. For every era-defining side, there is a generation of players who miss out and spend the rest of their lives hearing people say: 'you'd walk into that team now...' Such has been the fate of Stuart Law, Darren Lehmann, Ian Harvey, Brad Hodge, Martin Love and other Australians. You could argue that Stuart MacGill might have played 100 Tests, or that Gilchrist could have played 60 more. West Indies would probably be pretty happy to open their bowling with Wayne Daniel and Sylvester Clarke at the moment. Who knows, in a few years, India might be looking at the Test match batting of Yuvraj Singh with longing in their hearts.

So it is with England right now. Strauss, who is 34 and has the burden of captaincy to shorten his lifespan aside, Cook is 26, Bell 29, KP 31, Prior 29, Trott 30, Morgan 24. Strauss's spot might come up after the back-to-back Ashes series. As for the others - in four years? Five? Longer?

Already there are casualties. Who can imagine Joe Denly getting back in? If Bopara doesn't get a spot as the spare man on tour, what is his future at 26? And Owais Shah? James Hildreth? What about the wonderkids of a couple of years ago - Billy Godleman, Sam Northeast - now that all of the fuss is about Jonny Bairstow, James Taylor, Ben Stokes, James Vince, Alex Hales?

Surrey and Somerset have, between them, Jason Roy, Steve Davies, Tom Maynard, Zafar Ansari, Stuart Meaker, Jos Buttler, Craig Meschede, Craig Kieswetter, Lewis Gregory. The bowlers have more chance, but there are plenty of them, too.

And what of Rory Hamilton-Brown? He's only 23, and a county captain. Had he been around 15 years ago, he would have played for England by now. As it is, he's never mentioned.

There is no answer to this strange combination of generational talent, serendipity and organisation. All that can be guaranteed is that one day England, like the rest, will drift back into entropy and dream of the promise that slipped them by.

NB: Australia will publish the Team Performance Review, aka the far catchier 'Ashes Autopsy' on Friday. Wonder how much store it will set by the flukes of time?

Geoffrey's anniversary

2011-08-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

Today, as England ground India into what passes for dust in the northern summer, Geoffrey Boycott himself had to be reminded that it was the 34th anniversary of his one hundredth first class hundred, scored in an Ashes Test against Australia on his home ground at Headingley in 1977. He remains the only man to reach the mark in a Test match, a record that will probably now stand forever.

Memory jogged by Aggers on Test Match Special, he didn't need much prompting to reminisce: 'I can't say I wasn't nervous that morning, because I was, and nerves can do strange things. It took me half an hour to settle down'.

The context of that innings has been written about so often it doesn't really need rehashing here, except to say Boycott was a prodigal, returning to the side on his own terms, batting for history on his own ground in front of his own people and with the greatest mark in batsmanship staring him square in the face. The ground was over-run when he drove Greg Chappell to the long-on boundary about 20 minutes before the close.

But it was 34 years ago. Boycott the player is receding into the past. Many people who've heard him talk may not have seen him bat. I was just a kid but I remember that innings, and the last part of his career. I saw him play in a John Player Sunday League match at my old home ground at May's Bounty. He opened and got about 20 before he was caught at cover, trying to force a boundary down the hill towards the school wall. I remember he wore a cap rather than a helmet, because one of the odd rules in the John Player League was that bowlers could only have a limited run-up - I think it was eight yards, marked with a chalk line on the outfield.

I was a kid, with a kid's attention span, but I was urged to watch Boycott bat by my dad. Geoffrey was his hero on account of his impeccable technique. I had a book called Boycott On Batting, an instructional manual which, up the side of each page, had a series of pictures that worked like a flicker book and let you see Geoffrey performing several shots. That's what life was like before youtube.

But there was more to watching Boycott bat than that. The days on which he scored hundreds, which around that time were frequent, fell into a seemingly inevitable pattern. He would open, often with Mike Brearley, who you got the feeling he resented. Brearley would edge to slip, usually removing his bottom hand from the bat. You could almost feel Boycott tutt from the other end.

Before lunch he had few scoring shots. He was about defence and establishing himself at the crease. He was utterly solid, especially when playing forward, and he rarely played and missed - probably because he rarely played at anything not on the line of the stumps. His total by the break was usually somewhere between twenty and thirty.

In the afternoon session, he would cut and drive the bad ball and score with nudges off his legs from anything offline. His cover drive was struck late and with a checked follow-through, and his cut was forced off the back foot with the elbow still high. He would pass fifty after three hours or so, and by tea he might have seventy runs.

After that, with the change bowlers and the spinners on now, he would hit more bad balls. He was a master of farming the strike as he edged towards a hundred. Once he got to eighty, there was an inevitability about things, and the hundred always seemed to come in the half an hour or so before the close, whereupon he'd start planning for the next day and retreat once again. He was voracious, not so much for runs, but for time at the crease. A lot of his running was obviously selfish, and predicated on whether he wanted to face or not.

As Botham and Gower and Gooch came into the side, he became more of a figure of fun. Yet the other day, I was flipping through an old book I stumbled across, Bob Willis's Diary Of A Season, from 1978. It was the year after Boycott's triumphs against Australia, and he missed a few games against Pakistan ostensibly with an injured thumb. There was speculation as to whether he really wanted to play or not. Yet what came across clearly from Willis and the rest was that Boycott was regarded by his peers as the best batsman in England, and by some distance.

He was 36 when he made his hundredth hundred, and he went on to make another 51. Fifty one! To contextualise that figure, Mike Atherton made 54 first class hundreds in his career. Kevin Pietersen has 40. Boycott was ruthless in his way.

John Arlott, as he often would, made a telling and melancholic point about Geoffrey. 'He had,' Arlott said, 'a lonely career'. That is true, but in essence the great batsmen are alone, or at least they are when they bat. He is, in his quirky way, less alone now. I'm glad I saw him play.

Matthew Hayden Encompasses His Core Philosophies Of Crictainment

2011-08-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, Matthew Hayden, you mad old robot, you... At some point since you last walked from the crease, that big iron face of yours screwed into its familiar emoticon of furious bafflement that the oppo have had the wherewithal to dismiss the great Haydos; since the Baggy Green lid was prized off for the final time, something has happened, and it is not something expected, or something good...

A virus has been imported, the Haydos hard drive has been wiped and replaced by a Trojan Horse. The mouth that once opened only to emit variations of the phrase 'fuck off' from first slip has been reprogrammed by a mid-90s management guru. He is now the proprietor of something called The Hayden Way.

'As I encompass my core philosophies, it is with the creation of The Hayden Way...' the Bot said. 'we have been developing projects to engage people on a multitude of levels. Through branded media, bespoke events, community projects, education and activities that encourage everyone to enjoy the benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle.'

A tour of its website reveals The Hayden Way to be nothing more sinister than an optimistic mish-mash of college-course brand-building, corporate pluggery ['Jet! Matthew Hayden's Number One airline choice!'] and reality TV shows starring Matthew Hayden.

Yet, as any Hollywood movie about rogue computerised life-forms will tell you, there is a grand scheme behind the rebranding of the Haydos robot. The Hayden Way wants to own a slice of something that it - and no doubt soon the rest of mankind - is calling 'crictainment'.

'Crictainment' is a revolutionary compounding of 'cricket' and 'entertainment' that involves privately-owned big city franchise teams playing each other in an annual T20 competition. But before you start, this one's in Australia. Hayden is the first investor in Brisbane Heat, a team for which he will also play.

'I have had little interest in the T20 format domestically whilst it remained a state based format, which to me, was a pathway or development program to National interests. A system, I hasten to add, that I received the benefit of as a player,' the Bot went on.

'But an eight-team Big Bash League structure – involving separate organisations running these entities with Private Equity stakeholders in the future – has launched the 'Business of Cricket' and relaunched my interest as a highly viable business decision, adding value both to The Hayden Way, and also to me personally on the field.'

A veteran of 103 Tests, the reprogrammed Haydos no longer sees value in series against any teams other than England or India. 'I love the baggy green, I love what it stands for,' he droned. 'However short of the Ashes, and potentially the Indian summer, I've said for a long time that I'm largely un-invested in that particular competition'

So bad luck South Africa, catch you later Sri Lanka. No-one wants to see you beating Australia any more. West Indies, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Pakistan... well, wouldn't want to be you guys.

Like the Terminator, The Haydos bot ended its statement by foreshadowing its own destruction: 'John Buchanan said when he was coach of Australia and Queensland that his ideal scenario was to become redundant in that role, and he did that by lifting up the younger players into the more iconic positions. I think I can add that value to the dressing room as well.'

In other words.... Er Matty... fuck off, mate.

MS Dhoni: Alpha Male

2011-08-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

When the golfer Bobby Jones was congratulated for calling a foul on himself in a tournament long ago, he replied, 'you might as well praise me for not robbing a bank'. The Corinthian Casuals football team would instruct their goalkeeper to vacate the six yard box if they conceded a penalty on the grounds that the other side had already been denied a goal by their foul. Mark Taylor declared on himself when he was level with Bradman's then-record Australian score of 334.

Sportsmanship in sport has always been coded by the times in which it happens. Jones admitted that he never played what he called 'friendly golf' even when he went out with his friends. Football's professional foul occupies a respectful category of its own. Matthew Hayden remained qualm-less as he muscled past Taylor and the Don against the mighty Zimbabwe.

The point being that acceptability is a movable feast, the product of complex interpretations that change with the years. Bodyline almost started a war; the West Indies quicks who did the same thing are the subject of awe and rose-tinted documentaries. WG regarded the umpire's decision as optional. Andy Flower and Henry Olonga risked their lives to wear black armbands. Things are equivocal.

MS Dhoni's act was about more than just sportsmanship, although it was an act of sportsmanship and should be remembered as one. Yet it was also an act of leadership, and one that explained a lot about why India are successful. It was the decision of an alpha-male with a sense of perspective.

It was noticeable, during the Sky coverage, that one of the commentators most convinced that Bell should be dismissed was Nasser Hussain. His England side would have done so, because they were not a great team and he was trying to install in them a notion that no-one should give an inch on the field. Shane Warne, a player far more accustomed to winning and the winner's mentality, said that he would have recalled Bell.

Ultimately, it's a decision based on confidence. Dhoni is confident in himself and his team. If he allowed himself to be consumed by the pressure of captaining India, he would implode. The same quality that allowed him to saunter to the crease in the World Cup final and win the game was the one that allowed him to withdraw his appeal. The truly secure man knows that his time will come again; he's not obsessed with small-picture detail.

England would do well not to get ahead of themselves. India have been asked to win a World Cup, stage the IPL, achieve number one status in Test cricket, play out a series of shimmering brilliance in South Africa, appear in front of empty stadiums in West Indies and then take on England with a main bowler and talismanic batsman missing.

Andrew Strauss said that he 'liked to think' he'd do the same as Dhoni. It will be a signal of his strength if he does.

Why Andy Flower got it wrong with Monty

2011-07-28T01:58:00.000-07:00

Monty Panesar's career has been haunted by Shane Warne's one-liner: 'He's not played 30 Tests, he's played the same Test 30 times'. It was a piece of dressing room wisdom that capped Monty's destructive reputation for guilelessness, the Frank Spencer of left-arm spin.

It somehow seems more than five years ago that Panesar took the first of his 126 Test wickets - Sachin Tendulkar was his duck-breaker, Rahul Dravid his third. Inzamam ul-Haq, Mohammad Yousuf and Younis Khan followed the next summer. Monty was good enough for the best.

Since his move to Sussex, he's been doing pretty much everything right, trying to reconcile the need to grow his game while remaining in touch with the innate skill he produced so naturally at first.

When he had the chance to go and bowl at the world's premier batsman in the nets a few weeks ago, he took the initiative, just as everyone kept telling him he needed to do. He jumped in his car, got himself down to Lord's and turned his arm over for Sachin Tendulkar.

'I thought it would be a chance to get some tips for my bowling,' he said. 'These things are great opportunities and it gave me the chance to add further development to my game'.

Andy Flower took a different view. Flower called Monty 'naive'. Monty, being Monty, will probably roll over and agree. He shouldn't. He is not contracted to England, just to Sussex. He's 29 years old and has responsibility for his own career. If he thinks that bowling at Tendulkar will help him, he has every right to do so.

Flower has been revelatory in his time with England. He is a hugely impressive man, deserving of respect. He is wrong in this instance, though. His concern should not be Sachin Tendulkar, who, let's face it, after 14,000 runs is probably going to get a few more at some point regardless of who bowls at him in the nets or in the Test matches. His concern should be for Monty, who is the sort of man who will take being called 'naive' by the England Team Director to heart.

Even if Flower was able to make his case for Panesar bowling to Tendulkar as being detrimental to England, this was an issue best handled with a quiet word in private. Monty deserved better than a public slapping down in a way that reinforces a perceived weakness in his make-up.

Steve, Sachin and the foibles of great men

2011-07-25T00:59:00.000-07:00

The deeper states of mind of batsmen remain essentially mysterious. You'd have to search for a long time to find two players mentally stronger than Steve Waugh and Sachin Tendulkar, but they have their foibles too.

Even the Texas courts will not accept polygraph evidence, and yet Steve Waugh wants to see it in cricket [South Korea are said to use it on their football team - any player passing doubles their wages]. The lie detector's natural arena, though, is the piss-artists and pub stuntmen of the Jeremy Kyle Show, where his motley collection of gormless shaggers line up daily to try and beat it, no doubt armed with some facile tip or trick that they think will save their lying asses.

The reason that courts don't accept lie detectors is that they don't work on liars, especially liars who don't believe that they are lying, or that do it so often it's almost a version of their truth. Steve Waugh took a polygraph test and was impressed by the pressure it exerted on him, but that is because he's an honest man responding as an honest man does to the polygraph's psychology.

Waugh is typical of a particular kind of sportsman, one who loves empirical evidence. His belief built as he proved things to himself, as he worked his mind and his game out. Once he believed he didn't look back, as the curve of his cumulative average shows. He might have proved to himself that the lie detector works, but it's not the ICC's get out of jail card, nor is it the match-fixers' get into jail one.

Steve appeared to yield to one talisman as he grew older - that red cloth that rarely left his back pocket. Sachin Tendulkar has one too - his bat. After he'd departed Lord's with a viral infection of day four of the Test, Sky's cameras showed him returning the ground, in civvies but, as Nasser Hussain observed: 'Still carrying his bat with him. It never leaves his side - he won't leave it in the dressing room'.

Admittedly, Sachin's bat would be a grand prize for anyone, but he is a batter who invests emotion in the ones he likes. Many players are far less talented and far more pragmatic about the tool of their trade. Tendulkar of all men could probably make runs with Geoffrey's mother's stick of rhubarb, yet he wields the same bat until it packs up [his last probably made more Test hundreds than any bat ever shaved from the tree] and he still uses buckle-up pads. The great man has some mental props of his own. He is all too human, and all the more glorious for it.

Sachin tomorrow

2011-07-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

So, it looks like Sachin Tendulkar will walk out to bat at Lord's tomorrow. The numbers are aligned, as everyone knows. Here's something I posted a while ago that I think holds true:

Sachin Tendulkar stands on the edge of the greatest feat of batting in the history of the game. When he registers the 100th hundred of his international career, he will achieve something that, like Bradman's average, will never be superseded.

It's human nature to try and measure achievement and to be driven to close to madness when it proves impossible. Time and its changes usually mean that it is. But Tendulkar's argument as the best ever is gaining weight.

It's a question of degree of course. Bradman's is measurable. He is, statistically, more than 30 per cent better than anyone else who has played. That's a stat that makes him not just the greatest cricketer of all time, but by the gap that he created, the greatest sportsman of all time. To draw facile comparison, Usain Bolt would have to run the 100 metres in six seconds to equal him; Tiger Woods would have to win another ten Major Championships.

Yet Tendulkar edges closer. One hundred international hundreds will put him more than 30 per cent clear of the next best, Ricky Ponting who has 68. Only one other player has 40 Test hundreds [SRT has 51] and that's Jacques Kallis. Yet Kallis has 'only' 17 ODI tons. There is Tendulkar and then there is daylight.

The Don of course scored with greater mass. If he had continued at his career rate, he would have made 100 Test hundreds in roughly 250 innings [Tendulkar has batted 290 times for his 51] but that presumes Bradman would have been able to continue. All of sport's geniuses, from Ali to Woods, have been slowed down and altered by life. No, what separates Sachin even from the Don is endurance.

Tendulkar has spent more than a year of his life playing ODI cricket, and a lot more than that in Tests. He has played the game internationally from the age of 16, and he's now 37. That's 57 per cent of his time on earth. He has played 626 Tests and ODIs in that time. Bradman played for 20 years, for a combined 234 Test and first-class games. The pace of life and the pace of the game is irrevocably different.

Efforts have been made to calculate what Bradman's average might have been had he played today, given the differences in bowling and especially fielding, and it comes out to around 77. What's unknowable is how modern life and the demands of the game would have impacted upon him. There is empirical evidence of Sachin's apparently unquenchable desire.

You'll get no argument from me if you want to surmise that Bradman could have scored a hundred international hundreds. But Sachin is actually going to do it, and given the likelihood of ODI cricket [and perhaps even Tests] surviving for long enough to prove that anyone can outstrip him, his record will stand forever, as distant and unreachable as anything of the Don's and as worthy of consideration as the greatest ever. It's hard to imagine that Bradman was better.

Owais Shah plays the shot of the season

2011-07-17T04:07:00.001-07:00

The other night at Chelmsford, Owais Shah played the shot of the season. It should not pass unacknowledged. It wasn't a new invention, not a flip or a scoop or a glide; it wasn't a power-mow, a skimming bomb, a cultured hoik. It wasn't from the MCC manual either, not because it lacked orthodoxy, but because it was simply unavailable to most players. It was a piece of skill so pure that very, very few people on earth could have executed it.

I doubt that even Shah expected the result he got. He'd just come to the crease with Essex chasing Kent's 183. The score was 9-1 after a couple of overs. The lights were on, the ball was swinging a little, Essex had to win to qualify from the group. Shah is skittish at the best of times, a fragile, scarred talent, and he began uneasily. Charl Langeveldt and Azhar Mahmood were bowling, taking the ball mostly away from the right-handers. Langeveldt sent one down on a good length, tailing out at about 85mph. Shah picked his bat up, stepped across his crease and shaped to push forwards. In essence that was all he did. As he finished the shot he accelerated a little into the briefest of follow-throughs.

At first, the ball looked to have popped up towards mid-off; maybe Shah had been done a little by the bounce and offered a simple catch. Yet instead it continued to climb. Shah watched it open-eyed. It went up and onwards into the evening sky, cleared the boundary and then carried the two-tier stand and departed the ground altogether. Shah looked down at the wicket. A few of the other players glanced at one another. The ball had to be replaced.

The pace of the game, and its importance, didn't really leave much time for reflection, but that shot was a small miracle of timing and striking. It didn't really help Shah, or Essex, either. He made 27 from 20 balls, and Essex lost by 15 runs. The main talking point afterwards was a catch Scott Styris claimed and had disallowed, yet Shah's shot will stay in the memory for longer than any of that.

Owais's racehorse temperament has cost him with England, but this was a glimpse of the possible. Perhaps only Sehwag could play a shot like it - Shah's was that good.

Guest post with the Bored ones...

2011-07-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

Have done a little thing with the BCCI boys, thanks to Naked Cricket...:

As Rahul Dravid was adding the last few of his 12, 314 Test match runs over in West Indies, it was interesting to watch the volume of ‘advice’ from Indian fans that came streaming through the Twitter feed.

If you’d never seen Dravid bat and instead formed an opinion of him from these screams from cyberspace, you might have pictured a timid schoolboy who’d been dragged unwillingly to the crease, where he was now cowering somewhere between the stumps and square leg bent only on surviving the remorseless onslaught of Darren Sammy, rather than the imposing, infinitely skilled player that he is.

Read the rest here

What Mike Atherton has in common with Mick Mars

2011-07-12T01:18:00.000-07:00

One played 115 times for his country and is the cricket correspondent of The Times. The other is a member of Motley Crue and once accidentally shot his own girlfriend. One published an autobiography in which he revealed that he didn't like Raymond Illingworth. The other published an autobiography in which he revealed that he believed in aliens. One has a child named after a guitar, Les Paul. It's unlikely that the other has a son called Gray-Nicolls.

There is however some common ground between Michael Andrew Atherton, 43, of Failsworth, Lancashire, and Robert Alan Deal [no, Mick Mars is not his real name], 60, of Los Angeles California. When the histories of their respective occupations are written, neither will quite inhabit the upper echelons frequented by great men, yet both have had their moments too. Athers, for example, resisted Alan Donald for 12 hours in Johannesburg. And Mick Mars wrote Girls, Girls, Girls.

And then there is ankylosing spondylitis, an auto-immune form of arthritis that affects the spine. Yesterday it was announced that researchers have isolated the genetic mutation that causes the disease, which has impacted the lives and careers of both Athers and Mick Mars.

Atherton wrote in yesterday's Times about the discovery [unfortunately it's behind lovely Rupert's paywall] and about how the condition imposed itself on his game. By the age of twenty he was suffering badly enough for him to undergo special exercise and treatment, and he played with it throughout his career. It was usually referred to as 'a bad back', which is somewhat understating the case. Athers is one of life's stoics, but in addition to putting up with Ray Illingworth, Glenn McGrath, Wasim and Waqar, Brian Lara, the press and just 31 wins in those 115 games, it's no surprise that his increasingly hunched, purse-lipped, white-faced presence at the crease appeared to offer him so little pleasure.

Mick Mars' suffering was somewhat overwhelmed by the gargantuan feats of debauchery that Motley Crue fessed up to in their book The Dirt, but in one memorable passage he refers to ankylosing spondylitis as 'a grey ghost' that he he imagined hovering over his body, causing it to gradually lock up. His spine has fused and he is now three inches shorter than he was as a young man. He has had a double hip replacement, which has eased pain so debilitating he once tried to kill himself by walking out into the sea.

After Athers was caught rubbing dirt on the ball in 1995, the The Times accused their future correspondent of 'failing to uphold the values to which his society aspires'. He had to endure Jimmy Tarbuck calling for his resignation. In his next innings he made 99, and in his press conference quoted Roosevelt: 'It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled ... The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena; whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood.'

Both Atherton and Mick Mars have managed that, although Athers would probably accept that a little mild ribbing is due given that he has jumped the fence and become an occasionally caustic critic himself. He wrote yesterday that he hoped the new research meant future generations of Athertons would not have to go through the same thing. Let's hope they can bat though. Or write Girls, Girls, Girls.

Kumar, cricket, life

2011-07-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

Next week, the Beeb start a four-part serial on the weather, and how it has shaped British history and culture in big ways and in small. To a long, long list, add the unforgiving rainclouds that dogged Sri Lanka's tour, because it was during those interminable breaks that Kumar Sangakkara wrote his Spirit of Cricket lecture.

It was a lecture delivered in the manner of his batting, with a sure and certain lightness that disguises the treatment being meted out. It was immaculate stuff, sometimes magical, always resolute. The headlines have flowed from it; Peter Roebuck has called it 'the most important speech in cricket history' [a piece of hype it didn't need]; a Sri Lankan minister's initial response was a threat [always the first refuge of the despot, not to mention of the tosspot too].

Yet what was really lovely and resonant about it, and what will ensure that it remains a glowing memory long after the wrangling over board politics are done, was the way it showed cricket and life as symbiotic and intertwined. For Kumar, for Sri Lanka, for many other of us too, one cannot be unwound from the other.

First there was Kumar the kid, six years old, delighted to have his house filled with 35 Tamil friends his father was hiding during race riots, innocently oblivious to 'the terrible consequences' should they be discovered. A few years later, a communist insurgency meant that: 'the sight of charred bodies on the roadsides and floating corpses in the river was terrifyingly commonplace.'

His first cricket coach, rather charmingly still known to Kumar as 'Mr DH De Silva', was ambushed and shot on a tennis court, only surviving because the gun pointed at his head jammed. Then came civil war and suicide bombs, more darkness and more terror. What Sri Lankans yearned for was 'a miracle that would lift the pallid gloom and show us what we as a country were capable of if united'.

It came, the miracle, at the 1996 World Cup, where a disparate, almost rag-bag collective led by 'an overweight, unfit southpaw' became a team that not only won the World Cup but that redefined the way the game is played. 'It inspired people to look at the country differently... it helped normal people get through their lives'.

The team came together and then the country too. And what brought the team together? Well, good old Darrell Hair and his no-balling of Murali in Melbourne in '95: 'few realised it at the time, but the no balling of Murali for alleged chucking had far-reaching consequences. The issue raised the ire of the entire Sri Lankan nation. Murali was no longer alone. His pain, embarrassment and anger were shared by all. No matter what critics say, the manner in which Arjuna and team stood behind Murali made an entire nation proud.'

Cricket and life, life and cricket. After all of the death, all of the riots, the exploding bombs, the non-firing guns, one man no-balls another in Australia at Christmas and a change comes along.

It's not that simple of course, and Sangakkara does not suggest it was, but its impact is undeniable, indelible. After '96, cricketers occupied a new, higher place in Sri Lanka. With power and money came responsibility.

Sanga recounts well the first text message, received by Sanath Jayasuriya in a dressing room in New Zealand, describing 'waves from the sea' flooding in to coastal towns. Back home days later, the players visited the hastily established camps. 'In each camp we saw the effects of the tragedy written upon the faces of the young and old. Vacant and empty eyes filled with a sorrow and longing for homes and loved ones and livelihoods lost to the terrible waves. Yet for us, their cricketers, they managed a smile.'

Incredibly, there was more. Next came Lahore, which Sanga recalled with such poise and humour in his speech that the words lose some of their effect on the page alone, but even here, when death was as close as the bullet that ripped into a seat where his head had just been, Sanga's reaction, on seeing Tharanga Paranvithana stand up after being shot, was: 'I see him and I think: “Oh my God, you were out first ball, run out the next innings and now you have been shot. What a terrible first tour.” Life and cricket again, a smile in the dark.

A few weeks later, Kumar encountered a soldier, a man who experienced situations like Lahore many times. 'That soldier looked me in the eye and replied: “It is OK if I die because it is my job and I am ready for it. But you are a hero and if you were to die it would be a great loss for our country.” I was taken aback. How can this man value his life less than mine? His sincerity was overwhelming. I felt humbled. This is the passion that cricket and cricketers evoke in Sri Lankans. This is the love that I strive every day of my career to be worthy of.'

Kumar Sangakkara is the man who has expressed this, but Sri Lanka has many more remarkable cricketers, both on and off the field. They don't teach you the kind of stuff they know in a centre of excellence. To them, cricket means everything and, in the right way, nothing. There's an old maxim that usually holds true: if you can play like it means nothing when it means everything, then you will be okay.

King Kumar averages 56 in Test cricket for a reason, and it's not just because he has a good eye. The cricket boards can politik away; Sangakkara's speech was about much more than that. It was about cricket, and about life.

Scale and the women's game

2011-06-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

I thought quite hard before posting this [yes, a rarity I know], because it is not intended as criticism, and it's about women's cricket. But having watched quite a lot of the recent quadrangular series here in England, I believe it's a point worth making, because no part of the game, men's or women's, can afford to stand still.

A couple of years ago I fluked my way into the chance of facing England's opening bowlers, Katherine Brunt and Anya Shrubsole, in the nets at Loughborough. Reading it back now, it's a pretty fair reflection of what it was like, and it was a nice experience to have. But it's not an experience that can be easily translated into the middle, under match conditions on an outdoor pitch, and those are the ones that count.

The staging of international games before men's matches is an excellent idea in terms of exposing the women's game to the market, both live and on TV. But it also exposes the differences between them, and more importantly, the differences in scale that are affecting the chances that the women's game has to develop into something that can stand up in the way that women's tennis or women's golf can.

And it is a question of scale, not skill. There is lots of subtle skill in the women's game, but in the modern era the appeal of a well-placed, hard run three, for example, is limited. The women play in arenas designed for men, and it's the arenas that need to change in order to let the game evolve. Elite women golfers are given courses set up for the dynamics of their game, and the cricketers should be too.

I think they should experiment with a 20-yard pitch, as well as a smaller playing area. A shorter pitch would address the balance between bat and ball. A delivery of 75mph travelling 20 yards asks more serious questions of the batter than one travelling 22. Once the quicker bowlers have come and gone, the change bowling - which is horribly exposed at the moment, especially on television - would be sharper too. Batting and bowling would be toughened up, and it's no real problem to re-mark wickets to make the change.

Limited overs cricket gets people through the gate because there are lots of big hits. Just as Tiger Woods can strike a golf ball a hundred yards further than the top women players, so men can clear longer boundaries in cricket. Again, it's a question of scale. The women's game deserves to have its own version of big hitting. It should be able to accommodate the female Gayle or Sehwag, as well as the more classical players that it currently does. The ropes just need to come in a few yards.

At Bristol last week, both women and men's sides used the same boundaries, and by happy chance, England's men and women both made 136. The women's total included eight fours and no sixes, the men's - in a sub-par performance where Bopara and his chums managed to dry up almost completely - also hit eight fours, but five sixes too. Sri Lanka knocked those off in 17 overs, with 14 fours and a six. In reply to England's women, Australia made 114, with seven fours.

The women's game deserves its chance - perhaps the playing field should now be made level.

NB: Scale can go the other way too: I blogged on the problems of Will Jefferson here.

Cricket versus nature versus nurture

2011-06-27T03:33:00.000-07:00

So England take their counter-intuitive leap into the dark with Alastair Cook at the Oval tomorrow. A man with an ODI strike rate of 71 will be opening the batting for the foreseeable future. Just like Oscar Wilde's wallpaper, either that strike rate will have to go, or he will.

Cook will be asked to play against nature in ratcheting up his hitting. The question is, by how much? It's an odd and indefinable one to answer, but it is a question that cricket asks all the time because, as the old cliche goes, it's the sort of sport that reveals character as often as it builds it.

Samit Patel is another man fighting his nature. The state of the fat professional cricketer is probably more complex than it's given credit for. It's pretty simple to get in the gym and re-engineer yourself if you want to, with all of the help that's on tap, so when it doesn't happen there have to be reasons why. On saturday, Patel, who has achieved some sort of arbitrary minimum standard that doesn't seem to have included losing much timber, was run out not attempting a run.

It was a slack dismissal for a slack cricketer. There are guys like Patel all across sport, guys whose efforts are approximate, who seem ambivalent to their talents and opportunities. They're almost there but not quite. Beneath the self-deprecating grins and all the rest of the image projection is something fragile, something fearful, something preventing them from taking that final step through the door. It can be tough to contemplate finding out what lies at the end of yourself.

Patel appears to be fighting a battle like that one; perhaps it's easier for him at the moment to have people say 'if only' than it is to find out. Bring in the shrinks. Not far from Bristol, scene of Samit's latest stand, an even more majestically-upholstered enigma has appeared like a galleon in full sail.

Clad in always flattering red spandex, hair teased into a mad omelette of tints and highlights, Mark Cosgrove opens the batting for Glamorgan, geographically and figuratively separated from the players he outshone as a kid - he was the Bradman Young Cricketer Of The Year in 2005. He's now about as popular with Cricket Australia as Simon Katich is, and they don't seem as inclined to unravel his mystery as England are with Patel's.

It's a mystery of a different kind, because Cosgrove seems at one with his nature. He is a supremely gifted batsman in all formats, easily as good as Usman Khawaja, far superior to David Warner, and with a touch of X-factor about him. He may not be an athlete, but his hands and eye are lethally fast. He parted company with South Australia last year at their behest ['we were unable to help him fulfill his full potential'] and then went to Tasmania to score a shedload of runs as they won the Sheffield Shield ['at times it looked like he was batting on a different wicket to the rest,' said his coach].

No, Cosgrove's problem is one of image - external rather than self. Quite patently he is worth the few extra runs he may give away in the field. It's just that Australia, in a rebuilding phase, can't be seen to be sanctioning a free-spirited attitude like his, which is ironic, given that his attitude is very Australian in its way. Cosgrove's self-image, unlike Patel's, doesn't need breaking down. I'd bet he'd be a lesser player without the excess pounds, because those pounds are expressing his need to be different and free.

There are no pat answers; a man's nature is complex, for all the nurturing it gets.

Freeing up the free hit

2011-06-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

Back in 2006, when we were messing about with Merlyn, I remember a conversation with a coach about the need for a shot that got the ball past the wicketkeeper, as it was the one bit of the park that was guaranteed not to have a fielder on it. Then came Dilshan.

The new-tech game was here, and it continues to dazzle with the breadth of its invention: relay fielding, slower-ball bouncers, switch-hitting - all were in their infancy then. It goes on: Jade Dernbach, just called into the England squad, has different three slower balls. Fifty from the last five overs is considered a simple chase. The idea of the specialist four-over quick bowler has arrived.

Not everything has been thought of yet, though, the free hit being the most glaring example. While it always creates a stir in the crowd, it very rarely produces a major penalty for the fielding side. Bowlers know how to bowl it, but batters have yet to work out how to do it best.

Yet the batsman has one piece of knowledge that should be exploited: he knows, beyond doubt, that he is going to try and hit the ball. That knowledge needs to feed down into technique, just as the knowledge that there was no fielder behind the wicketkeeper did.

So if he knows for sure he's going to hit the ball, why take a normal stance which has been designed for all eventualities? In baseball, for example, the slugger must swing hard, and stands with the bat already drawn back. His feet are set to move less, but to give a huge striking arc. There might be a lesson there, because the bowlers are ahead of the batsmen on this one, and we can't have that, can we...

Leave it, Stuart son...

2011-06-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

In Gideon Haigh's book Inside Out there's an essay called Fabian Batsmanship, a lovely, subtle piece about the subtlest of arts: leaving the ball. It is, he writes, 'the exchange of an advantage so small as to be in most cases almost immeasurable'. This is brilliant, and true.

That advantage was more palpable than usual on saturday at the Rose Bowl when Kevin Pietersen left the ball with disdainful mastery. Then Kumar Sangakkara stayed inside the line of the swinging delivery so perfectly most of the crowd thought that he was playing and missing until they got home and turned on their televisions for the highlights.

But what is the bowling equivalent of the leave? How do they establish the same kind of tiny but incremental gain over a batsman? It's a pertinent question, especially for Stuart Broad, who is losing some torque on his Test career.

The blunt diagnosis is that he is not taking wickets. Yet unlike a batsman who is not getting runs, a bowler can still have a useful function while they wait for the gods to turn towards them again. They can block up an end, shut up shop and wait - or at least the best of them can. Think of Walsh, or Pollock, or McGrath. When they weren't running through teams - and they didn't always - they ratcheted down into a state of bloody-minded parsimony. They wouldn't have wrung their socks out over you at the end of play, let alone give away a run they didn't have to. They understood that this was their 'leave' - the exchange of an advantage so small as to be immeasurable, and one that would eventually alter the equation back their way.

Stuart Broad, like Steve Harmison before him, lacks that fallback position. When they're getting clouted, they can't seem to stop it happening. Harmi is a speck in the rear view mirror now, and Broad is approaching a crossroads. There are a lot of other quick bowlers coming up behind him. He has already been usurped by Tremlett, and if Onions had stayed fit and in form, Broad may not even be in the side right now.

The rhetoric from Dean Saker is not encouraging. The other day he called Broad 'a warrior'. It suggests that the team management want to massage his ego and still view him as the impact bowler that it's apparent he's not. England really don't need another Harmison. A Shaun Pollock would be infinitely preferable, because Broad has the potential. He just doesn't seem to know where his off stump is at the moment...

The not-unappealing flair vortex of Alastair Cook

2011-06-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

The other day I noted down the order in which I enjoyed watching the England top seven bat, taking them each at their best. It went: Pietersen, Morgan, Bell, Strauss, Prior, Trott, Cook. Then I began wondering why.

The first three are pretty obvious. Pietersen remains the most extraordinary batsman to have played for England in twenty years. Morgan is an avatar - the first player of the T20 era to track those skills upwards into Test cricket. He's got the same ice-bound persona as Steve Waugh too. And although the ghost of the Sherminator still shines above him like an aura, Bell has the chronometer timing of Alec Stewart and a technique more classical than Vaughan.

Then Strauss. You've gotta love Strausser. Matt Prior, the closest thing the team has to a village blacksmith, duffing teams up either side of tea. Plus the vast and perverse pleasure of watching Trott - obsessive compulsions, rituals, rehearsals, prods, thuds and pushes forever and ever amen.

Which leaves Cook. The two single most euphoric moments of the last Ashes series for me were waking up and logging on to cricinfo [ritualistic superstition of my own, had to be done before the TV was switched on] at the end of day four at Brisbane [309-1] and day one at Melbourne [157-0], and those were both down in no small part to his relentless accumulation. And yet, and yet...

Cook is certainly a throwback to the age of Boycott, a grinder who will break a bowler on the wheel if he can. There's something even earlier about his anodyne good looks, pre-war maybe in their absolute Englishness, and also in his deeply-concealed inner life. Everything he lets slip about his time outside of the game - the long-term sweetheart, the joys of the family farm - is simple, yet batting is complex. There must be something more.

To compare him with Boycott is not really apt, but there is a comparison there. Cook's runs are bloody-minded, disciplined, concentrated. He and Geoffrey are, if not the slowest, then among the slowest players in the team. Yet around Boycott, war raged. It was an almost permanent state, too, a deep and scarring psychodrama that seethed through his career. It was riveting.

Leo Mckinstry wrote a superlative and riotous biography about Geoffrey called Boycs. It has story after story, anecdote after anecdote, moment after moment that rarely fail to astonish. It's impossible to imagine a similar book about Cook. When I think about Boycott batting, I remember most the cover drive with the checked follow-through, and of course that impenetrable forward push. Cook is harder to grasp. He has one really thrilling shot, his throat-high pull-hook [how Cook-like that it falls between the two]. Beyond that, there's a telling square cut, and a checked cover drive of his own, plus the push off the legs. It's hard to keep any of it in the memory.

So Cook is an enigma, but a silent one. I'm glad he's there but I don't yearn for him to stay. He's a very hard player to get a hold on, a vortex, but one we can stare into with a strange kind of pleasure that can't yet be defined as enjoyment.

Abdul Razzaq flies in

2011-06-09T03:57:00.000-07:00

Under Manchester's glowering June sky, Abdul Razzaq arrived to play for Leicestershire at Old Trafford last night. He'd been in the country for less than a day and it showed. He wore a shirt with a large piece of white tape obscuring someone else's name, and when he went out to bat he had on his Pakistan team helmet. In his post-match interview, he acknowledged 'my colleague, Mr White', a man he'd evidently not spent a whole lot of time with before they met out in the middle.

That Razzaq belted one ball into a part of Old Trafford levelled by the builders, and the cameras tracked its progress through the mud and under a parked car, just added to the overall feeling of a game surrendering to its blur of fixtures and desperation for money.

Leicestershire endured their odd little civil war last winter, and they are one of the counties usually referred to when stories of those staring into the abyss are written. They are not alone. Rob Key said earlier in the season something along the lines of - and I'm paraphrasing here - 'you used to be able to get a good overseas for about 60k a year. Now they want that for the Twenty20'.

Hence Leicestershire's anxiety to get Razzaq from the airport and onto the pitch. And Razzaq is just one of the players carving a new kind of career as an international gun for hire. He has already played for Hampshire, Middlesex, Surrey and Worcestershire, and who can blame him? His game is ideal for T20, he gives value for money and he endures the chaos and uncertainty of playing for Pakistan. Soon his kind of peripatetic professional life will be the norm for men of his calibre.

Even the most determined of county-goers are hard-pressed to name who might be playing for them in the T20. It makes the game more difficult to market and it's a game that has to be marketed. To deserved hilarity, Surrey wanted to walk batsmen out like darts players, yet their urge for a gimmick is understandable. The Oval is a big place.

Razzaq was brilliant last night. Leicester needed 63 from four overs and he made it look easy. With Paul Nixon and Matthew Hoggard, men who understand what has been invested in Razzaq, looking on, at first twitchily and then with broadening smiles, it was superb theatre in a ground that was either half-full or half-empty, depending on how you look at it.

There always has to be a story

2011-06-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Something strange happened when Kevin Pietersen walked out to bat on Monday evening - at least it would have been strange had you been reading the papers. He was applauded, warmly, all the way to the crease, and then cheered equally warmly as he played out the final hour or so to set up his innings today.

It was strange, because if you took your perception of the fans' opinion of KP from the media, you might have been surprised at this unequivocal support. You may also have been under the impression that Pietersen was under pressure for his place, because again, this was the media line.

There has to be a story, because this is how the media works. It's interesting that the most intuitive piece on KP was a simpatico analysis from Mike Brearley in the Observer. This was the story that tuned in best to both the public's and the dressing room's view of KP, and yet it stood alone. Brearley, of course, is not a member of the regular press pack.

There is a question worth asking about the press position on KP: who was the last batsman to be dropped from the England Test team? The answer, excluding injury replacements, is Ravi Bopara in the Ashes of 2009. Before that, it was probably Ian Bell, who pushed selectorial patience beyond the limit in Jamaica. Andrew Strauss, Alastair Cook, Paul Collingwood and Jonathan Trott [in South Africa] were all nursed through lengthy droughts, as Pietersen would have been. His drought, comparatively, has been less severe, yet this point was rarely made.

So did the media want Pietersen to be dropped? As individuals, probably not. But as a story, it would have gone big and KP felt its weight. Like football, the media agenda for cricket is now short-term, even as the England team's strategy stretches the other way.

If Pietersen continues to revive, he will leave a vacuum behind him. It may be filled, even more remarkably, by Andrew Strauss. For the media, his retirement from short-form cricket loosens his grip on power. Now, his dismissals by left-arm bowlers are lining up behind him as more ammunition. A full two Test matches after an Ashes win for the ages, whispers are beginning.

Strauss has got out to a lot of left-arm over bowlers, and like Pietersen, he has a technical issue to address. But batting is a process not a destination, and things change all the time. A generation ago Strauss would have faced Wasim Akram and very few others. In the last year he has encountered Bollinger, Johnson, Amir and Welegedera with Zaheer Khan to come. He is an opener, and openers get out to opening bowlers.

This short-termism is not so much the fault of the journalists as the the wider media, which has increased in speed to keep pace with life. The culture in general is more disposable and it burns through information in its many forms. The England Test team does not run at sufficient speed for its purposes, and a gap between the story and reality is emerging. There always has to be a story, but increasingly, it's created by the authors rather than their subjects.

Melancholy and the infinite sadness of Ian Bell

2011-06-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

So, England came close to declaring on Ian Bell when he was 98 not out. What stopped them was Andrew Strauss's argument that a mood of 'melancholy' might be created around the team. As melancholy is an important emotion in life and one woven into the fabric of the game, it was good to see Strauss's England respect its influence and get their unlikely reward.

There's an obvious parallel with Sydney 1995, when Mike Atherton pulled the plug on England's second dig with Graeme Hick on the same score. That was an extraordinary, weather-affected game too, eventually drawn after first Australia looked like they'd chase England down and then fell in a heap before clinging on. 'Atherton lost patience and ungenerously declared,' the Almanack thundered. 'He had batted far more slowly himself'.

There was plenty of support for Atherton's decision at the time, though. There was a view that the England team needed steel, a kind of Australian-style macho, no-bullshit, no-frills, low indulgence of the individual which in turn would make the unit stronger.

It did not allow a lot of room for melancholy, although there was always plenty around Hick, and around Atherton, too. It's a worldview that seems very 90s now. In cricket, more than almost any other team game, it is about the individual. It has to be. There's no point pretending that individual achievement doesn't matter, or that the team must always take precedence. Instinctively, Strauss, with the team in mind, invested in Ian Bell's happiness. It was a decision that might not have paid off in the short term, but it was guaranteed to at some point, because as Strauss understood, it would have made every individual in the team feel good.

Sometimes, you just get back what you give out. Athers and Strauss did when they made their different calls.

Meet the new boss, not quite the same as the old boss

2011-05-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

There is an underbelly to the county championship. For all of its romantic evocations of the turning of England's seasons, it has been a place where men's dreams have died, where their image of themselves has been reshaped, where thwarted ambition has blackened. It has its dark side.

In that regard it always has its symbols, its totems, too. For a decade, it was Barry Richards at Hampshire, a man whose talent engaged in a long and sometimes futile battle with his ennui. There was the brooding, brutal presence of Sylvester Clarke at the Oval, a putative king in exile. Mike Proctor at Gloucester wheeled in endlessly in lieu of having anyplace else to do it. There were others too, and all were players who found it a place of last resort.

For Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash it was something different, a way of slaking a thirst perhaps. For seasons now, Ramprakash has been its premier player. It has probably been a long time since May has come and gone without a hundred from him in the books, but he is over 40 now and what could once be summoned at will doesn't arrive so easily now. It could be his final year.

So who will succeed him? The answer is simple: it can only be Marcus Trescothick. The vagaries of the modern calendar have denied him a thousand runs by the end of May. He has piled up 978 already. His exile to county cricket is of a different sort, and he'll be a different kind of king. There is still a sense of what might have been about him, but he wears it more lightly. The competition needs someone like him at the top as its symbol of excellence. While he's there, as with Ramps, it's in safe hands.

Facing 'Warne' - one last time for Shane

2011-05-20T05:36:00.000-07:00

Warnie bowls his final four overs today. The eulogies have already been written, so no need for another. Instead, here's what it was like to face him, or at least to face Merlyn, the bowling machine which was programmed to replicate him. England used Merlyn in 2005. This happened a year later down in Wales, in a sports hall, with Merlyn's creator, Henry Pryor, and his son, Matt at the controls...

Facing Warne

[With apologies to those who slogged through it when it first went up].

Tavare: the legend lives

2011-05-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

There are some names that, as a young cricketer, you do not want. They are usually familial. The surnames of Botham and Richards were hard to climb out from under for Liam and Mali, because they stand not just for cricketers of note, but for something bigger: a way of playing the game.

Imagine then, that you are William Tavare, who made his highest first class score yesterday for Loughborough MCCU against Kent, a very respectable 53 out of 127 all out. Because as surely as Botham, Richards or Lara are names that come freighted with meaning, then so does Tavare. William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare.

No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. Tall, angular and splayfooted, a thin moustache sketched on his top lip, he would walk to the crease like a stork approaching a watering hole full of crocs. Once there though, he began not to bat but to set, concrete drying under the sun. His principal movement was between the stumps and square leg, to where he would walk, gingerly, after every ball. If John Le Measurier had played Test cricket, he would have played it like Chris Tavare.

Tavare's feats remain the stuff of legend. His five and half hour fifty against Pakistan in 1982 was the second slowest half-century in the history of the game, and yet even that paled in comparison to the six and a half hour 35 against India in Madras the following winter. In a team that contained Botham, Gatting, Lamb and Gower, Tavare truly stood out. The mighty ballast which he provided against the Australians in '81 played a part in that famous win, albeit a part that never quite makes the highlights reels.

Like a lot of slow players, stories abounded that Tavare was a wolf in sheep's clothing, capable of pillaging county attacks on quiet Canterbury afternoons. If it happened, no-one remembers it now.

And so into a game that Tavare - now rather marvellously a biology teacher - would not recognise steps William. He got his fifty yesterday at a decent rate in the circumstances, but even if he turns out to be the next Chris Gayle, the Tavare name will plod after him - gently, and from a distance of course. Good luck, my friend.

Ramps: More Die Of Heartbreak

2011-05-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

There's a nice piece with Mark Ramprakash in the new All Out Cricket. It's a simple idea: he was asked for 10 definitive moments from his career, and the results are short but sweet, or rather bittersweet, as things with Ramps usually are.

His final choice is his hundredth hundred, in 2008 against Yorkshire. 'There was a Test match on at the time and we were batting out a draw, so it was pretty low-key,' he says. 'Having said that, I was captain, Goughie was captain of Yorkshire and my parents came to watch, which was nice in terms of emotion. I'm in no way complacent about the achievement; I'm chuffed to bits and incredibly grateful to have had a long career but I know that only two of those hundreds are Test hundreds. When you look at the other players on that list, they're all great international players so my emotions relating to this achievement are qualified'.

He catches, in that brief paragraph, almost everything that make make him the figure that he is, the brooding symbol of an era. How much remorse echoes behind the words 'there was a Test match on at the time' - with its unspoken implication that he wasn't playing in it. Then the achknowlegement of a small group of people present who'd grasp exactly what he was feeling.

There's a tremendous wistfulness to his ambivalence, and it's gently heartbreaking that he doesn't feel worthy of his place on the list. He is. There may be only two Test hundreds, but they were high-quality ones, and there are few bowlers in the game that he hasn't bested sometime, somewhere. To put the achievement in context, Andrew Strauss made a hundred against Sri Lanka at the weekend. It was the 36th of his career. Ramprakash has been a phenomenon, and the rest is just life and its way.

NB: He also tells a good story about Dominic Cork selling him a bat for fifty quid. He got almost two thousand runs in a season with it. Corky's probably still got the fifty sheets, too...

Cool Chris and Bad Bas

2011-05-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

An average of 99 - there's only one adjective for that, isn't there? But Bradman-esque is never going to work for Chris Gayle. The Don wouldn't have sat at home watching him cream 39 off an over and said, 'yes, of all modern players, Chris Gayle is the one who reminds me most of myself,' not least because he probably wouldn't have liked the idea of the IPL very much.

But there is an adjective that fits for Chris, and it's Richards-esque - not Viv, but Barry. When Bad Bas was in his pomp, his aptitude for casual, off the cuff carnage was the equivalent of Gayle's. He made 325 in a day, for example, against a West Australia attack that featured DK Lillee, and a former-pro once told me the story of a bowler who displeased the great man by dismissing him in front of his parents, who had flown in to watch him bat. Richards told him in words of few syllables that he would be humiliating him in the second innings, and he did, almost cruelly. Richards was perceived, much like Gayle, as a mercenary who turned it on when he felt like it.

And Richards, like Gayle, possessed another, less definable quality, in that there was something extra about the way he struck the ball. In Richards' case, it was the way the ball seemed to gather pace as it went towards the boundary, or how it hung in the air as it cleared it. Gayle too has this. Lots of players hit the ball hard and a long way, but not like he does. Virat Kohli said today that he had 'the best and most dangerous' seat in the house to watch him. Dilshan admitted he was scared by the power with which Gayle strikes it.

Richards was better than Gayle, so Chris can be pleased with his adjective. Richards-esque it is. Famously, Bad Bas once turned his bat sideways during an exhibition match and made fifty using the edge in the days when the edge was the width of a slim volume of poetry. With the edge on Chris Gayle's bat he'd have made a double hundred.

Accidental heroes

2011-05-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

Well, you leave the country for a couple of days* and come back to three new captains. Well, that's the line in the paper away, although one of them doesn't look that new to me. New to not having two jobs, I suppose.

So, at risk of banging on about old news, here's something about the situation that doesn't seem to have been analysed to death: it's the only obvious response to the future that is rushing towards us. It may have been a decision forced by circumstance, but it is one that acknowledges the increasing improbability of one captain being able to fulfill the role format-in, format-out, year-in, year-out without becoming a basket case after a few seasons.

England, Australia, South Africa and India in particular will never, while it's commercially viable, get that reduction of the calendar that the players talk about all year round [except when the IPL is on]. The sensible response for nations with the money and resources to do so is to develop their Test, 50-over and T20 teams as separate units with some interchangable components.

Most of the arguments here seem to have been about the components rather than the structure. That structure appears to be the only logical one in the face of the remorseless, relentless international game.

* In France. How can somewhere so close be so utterly cricket-free? They've not even heard of it.

D is for Danny

2011-05-01T04:01:00.000-07:00

It's perfectly apparent that Danny Morrison is not all there. Or maybe he is all there, but there's just not a lot of it there in the first place. Either way, listening to him commentate on the IPL is like sitting next to the harmless fellow in the mad clobber on the bus as he tells you something you already know. It's slightly embarrassing and you kind of wish he'd stop, but it's nothing terminal.

Some people - men, mostly - exist quite happily without any kind of critical faculty. Everything they like is just great. I know a guy who is a fan of heavy metal [nothing wrong with that, I'm partial to a bit myself, especially just before batting...]. He has thousands of records and he likes all of them. He likes some more than others, but there aren't any that he doesn't like. You can mention any one of them, and he'll tell you it's great, because he likes heavy metal.

Danny Morrison likes the IPL. There aren't any bits of it that he doesn't like. He likes the way he can turn a company name into a verb ['He's DLF-ed him']; he likes shouting stuff like 'A is for Awesome' at the top of his voice; he likes it when anyone does anything on the field or in the crowd. He likes the sponsors, he likes the players, he likes the money, he likes the outfits.

It's inane and annoying but it's not cynical, or at least not as cynical as some people think. He's just, you know, one of those blokes...

Lathers, still going...

2011-05-01T03:10:00.000-07:00

Further to the post below, good to hear from Brian Carpenter that Mark Lathwell is still playing, for Braunton CC in Devon.

And hopefully he still has one of these, too.

Billy Shaf And The Top Of The Mountain

2011-04-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

Andy Bull has written a lovely piece on Bilal Shafayat, who has been released by Notts and is turning out for a club side in the Birmingham league. It's a story that's been written before about different players from other eras and other countries. It's common to all sports and to most other areas of life, too, because it's a story about young talent brought to earth, about the souring of promise.

Billy Shaf was, as Bull points out, the star of an England U19 team that also featured Alastair Cook, Ravi Bopara, Samit Patel, Luke Wright, Tim Bresnan and Liam Plunkett. 'He stood head and shoulders above his team-mates' noted Wisden. 'I had always been the first pick of every side from a very young age,' Billy acknowledged.

It's easy to see Shafayat as a talent unfulfilled, but to do so says something about how we view talent. Billy Beane, the baseball coach who is the subject of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, says 'don't be victim to what you see'. It's a very human trait to be seduced by aesthetic beauty - it's why we think of David Gower as more talented player than Geoffrey Boycott, even though Boycott's career is superior. The players themselves subscribe to similar definitions, and yet to see talent in this way is to take a narrow view of what it actually is. Beane's theory, borne out by his assembly of over-achieving teams, ignored aesthetics and worked entirely on empirical evidence of ability.

Shafayat's career, though, has not been built entirely on aesthetics. His numbers, as a youngster, stacked up. And he is not the archetype George Best-style waster. As Notts coach Mick Newell, who let him go, said, 'his attitude and approach have been exemplary'. It's just that as Billy rose higher in the game, he began to reach his ceiling.

'I'm still figuring out what I struggled with,' he told Andy Bull. 'From what I can gather at the moment, it was doing it over and over again under the immense pressure that I felt was on myself in every game. That was it more than anything. It felt as if every game was so important, and as though I was playing for my spot. When you're young you compete with others without knowing it, but you're certainly not put under any extra pressure by the management or by people around you. But the expectations grow as you get older. People expect you to perform day-in, day-out.'

Well of course they do. Talent is not just a measure of physical ability, otherwise many more of the human race would be involved. If you view the game of professional cricket as a pyramid built on merit with Bradman and Tendulkar, Warne and Murali at its apex, Billy Shafayat is somewhere towards the top, above all of the good juniors who never made it and on a level with some of the solid county pros who look more prosaic when doing their job, but do it just as well.

Ultimately, talent as described in the case of Billy is taken to mean the ease with which they appeared to play. Ease in any physical activity is deceptive, a trick of the genes. Perhaps Billy Shafayat will come back with another county [I hope that he does], but ultimately the numbers tell his story. He has played 119 games and averages 30. That is how good he is.

NB: Billy's record is almost identical to Mark Lathwell's - of whom an identical piece could be written.

Don't bother having a look, lad...

2011-04-22T05:20:00.000-07:00

At the end of the sixth over in their game against Rajasthan yesterday, Kings XI were 77-1. It would be easy to pass this off as symptomatic of one of the many warping forces T20 is applying in its first era.

Yet it hints at something more fundamental. In distilling the game down to an extreme form, conventional wisdoms will be challenged. Just as it won't be long until the very fastest spells of bowling come routinely in T20, so the paradigms that have contained the way batsmen bat will shift.

One of the most beloved of those wisdoms, passed down through generations, is to 'play yourself in, son. Have look'. Lara always said, 'the first hour belongs to the bowler'. The first hour? When Sehwag bats, the first ball doesn't always belong to the bowler.

Playing yourself in is a convention from time past, when the game was slower and longer, when conditions and expectations were different. It's also a psychological state: the nerves and fear dissipate once you've batted for a while and have a few runs on the board.

What there isn't, though, is a physical reason why you should have to play defensively when you first bat. If you have the skill and training to hit a ball, there's no limit on when you're able to do it. The brain and eye are more than capable of assessing external conditions immediately, otherwise you wouldn't be able to make the fine motor adjustments needed to play defensively, either.

What's coming is a generation of players with a new skill set and a different expectation of the possible. If they have a look in any format, it probably won't be in the way we know it now.

Duckworth, Lewis and The New Information

2011-04-18T12:59:00.001-07:00

In Smart Mart Amis's The Information, his protagonist Richard Tull writes a literary novel so boring that it induces migraines and nausea in all of the agents and publishers who have to read it. He ends up dragging a sackful of the finished product around America on his back [this sackful turns out to be the total number of printed copies, save for one, which goes on sale in a bookshop but is returned by its purchaser].

Last week saw the publication of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's posthumous unfinished novel that also sets out to deal with the notion of boredom [some pages of it are - apparently intentionally - so boring they induce much the same reaction as Richard Tull's...]

Also arriving in bookstores [and - full disclosure - free, gratis and for nothing on my desk] is Duckworth Lewis, The Method And The Men Behind It, by [obviously] Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis. Like The Information and The Pale King, it deals with envy, ennui and boredom, although not for the same reasons. And like them too, it is a deeply pleasurable little classic, albeit in a slightly different way.

The collision of theoretical mathematics and cricket is not always a happy one. Both rely on numbers, but similarities end there. The information that throbs behind and between every line in Duckworth Lewis, The Method And The Men Behind It is that the didactic, pedantic, logical mind required by maths is quite different to the less certain, more emotional sporting one.

In this realm of pure logic, in this land of numbers, Frank and Tony's solution to the problem of rain-affected matches is elegant, almost perfect. It's the humans that fuck it up, with their intuition, with their experience and their guesswork. 'Whereas we like to think that the current formula could be written on tablets of stone and left for perpetuity, the truth is that while the game continues to change the formula will always need continual adjustment,' D&L confess stoically.

The method is explained at greater length than the the average reader will ever require, yet the real joy in this book come from its voice, which emerges, brilliantly deadpan, from a prep school essay of the 1950s, and from its anecdotes, which peter out to glorious effect.

The sentence 'Clive Hitchcock's secretary, a young woman called Izzy, came out of the meeting room and gave us a piece of paper with the agenda, showing our slot at 11am' is typical and it's almost genius: with a tweak it could have come from Graham Greene; as it is, it's more like Monty Python. The book is full of them. The anecdotes reach their peak with the tale of the time when Tony Lewis is mistaken for his namesake, AR Lewis the former England captain and MCC president, and receives an invitation to Lord MacLaurin's country estate: 'Usually both of us were invited,' sniffs the text, 'we even discussed whether Tony should turn down the invitation if only he of the two of us was on the guest list'.

Potential schism is avoided when 'Tony quietly informed Lord MacLaurin's PA of the gaffe', and this gentlest of yarns concludes with the note that 'Tony still occasionally receives ARL's communications from the MCC. One envelope contained the agenda papers for a meeting that was due to discipline a well-known player - we shan't name him of course!' Englishness at its most pure.

In its way, Duckworth Lewis, The Method And The Men Behind It is revelatory, its pleasures subtle and all the better for it. I still don't understand the method, despite the pages of patient lecturing, and I misread the charts detailing it at the end. Me and Shaun Pollock have that in common, but I suspect neither of us - nor anyone else - holds it against them.

Michael Clarke and the New Hyperbole

2011-04-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

It has always been one of the pleasures of cricket that it is a sport with a written literary history. It is a game with a cerebral, emotional and aesthetic hinterland; it has depth and soul. It eschews hype, partly because it unwinds slowly. Its greatest and most resonant deeds take time. This is important because it gives the game a context, a frame into which everything can fit.

It's not as simple as the distinction between an explosive, short-duration sport and a lengthier, more complex one. Boxing and football fall into the former category and yet one has a noble literary lineage and the other has The Sun. The relentless hyping of football has been to its detriment; the game lacks a language with which to describe itself properly. Within its narrow paradigms, the players and commentators flounder. None seem capable of uttering a useful thought. They communicate in bursts of hysterical cliches which narrow their worldview. In a place with no nuance, everything happens at fever pitch.

Cricket's most reductive form, T20, attracts hype, but it's ringfenced by the rest of the game, from the meanderings of county cricket to the ferocity and indelible greatness of Tests.

It's probably appropriate that Australia's much-hyped 'modern' captain, Michael Clarke, hit the slippery slope when he described Shane Watson's slogathon as 'probably the best innings I've ever seen'. Not seen a lot of cricket then, Michael?

Watson's skill can't be denied, and yet, thuddingly, it lacks any context, coming in a meaningless ODI against a weak attack, a few days after a limited overs tournament of genuine grandeur was settled by an innings of substance from MS Dhoni. Cricinfo had it exactly right when they aligned Watson's knock with Jason Gillespie's double-hundred against the same opposition. Watson's deed is only diminished by Clarke's offhand hype.

Clarke, as he well knows, has probably seen scores of better innings. This one was an inevitable product of the new age and it will be repeated soon enough, something that truly great innings can never be.

The Glorious Day

2011-04-08T00:15:00.001-07:00

'You can tell the cricket season has started when you hear the sound of leather on Brian Close'...
Eric Morcambe

Old but still gold...

Objects of Fetish IV: Bigger, harder, Thicker

2011-04-07T02:24:00.000-07:00

Like a Steven Seagal revenge-fantasy franchise, each edition more fevered, more heightened, more alluring and more ridiculous than the last, so the new season brings its new weapons, its ammo, its bats.

Yes, it's bat catalogue time for the manufacturers, it's gear-test time for the mags, it's time-to-dream time for the buying public. This blog has been following the moment for the past two seasons [the first here, the second here] and reading back on them, the ramping up of commerce, the refinement of the sales pitch, become obvious. Bats are boys toys, like cars, like guitars, like bikes, like all that stuff, and men are simple to sell to: it's about machismo, it's about lust, it's about power. Cricket took a while to catch on, but now, the language is in place to frame it in that way.

Bats have been invested with emotion by their users long before they became consumables, because that is the nature of batting. It's about repetition, and like most things of that ilk, there's an obsessive edge to it. Its psychological demands mean that the bat itself becomes imbued with a kind of totemic power. Many pros and many amateurs are familiar with this odd psychic terrain, where the same piece of wood can feel one way one day and one way the next.

It's this conflux of urge and need that the manufacturers have tuned into. The bat, essentially unchanged for so long, is now a thing of technical and aesthetic beauty, machine-tooled yet natural, recognisible but reinvented for a new game that pulses with action and power. There are certain key adjectives that are common to all of the 50-plus batmakers and podshavers that have their wares on sale. Profiles are always 'massive'; edges are 'imposing'; bows are 'exaggerated'; middles are 'huge'; willow is 'prime'... If you don't feel rugged and ready to rock n roll with that lot on hand just below your waistband, then this probably ain't the game for you.

Sex and violence dominate the marketplace. From the same lingual category of 1970s men's mags, condoms and hairspray come the Willostix Anaconda, the Kookaburra Rogue, the Hunts County Envy, the Redback Surefire Performance, the Fearnley Magnum Super, the Adidas Libro, the Choice Black Prince, the Charlie French Recurve, the Ram Rambow, the San Andreas Erus Premier.

For those with the self-image of a destroyer, the lone-wolf hunter, there's the Gray-Nicolls Oblivion, the Adidas Incurza, the Hawk X-Bow, the Buffalo Bison, the Shark Tiger, the Bulldog Growler, the Warrior Grade A, the Choice Saladin, the Gray Nicolls Nitro Powerblade, the Samurai Tessen.

But the coming form is futuristic, faux-technological, suggestive of some new and weird science: the Woodworm iBat Gamma, the Gray Nicolls Quantum, the Vantage Lithium, the Puma Kinetic, the San Andreas Fabrica, the SS Matrix. They are shadowed by bats that allude to a kind of irresistible super-nature, an unstoppable act of god: the Vulcan Fire, the Newbery Krakatoa, the Black Cat Voodoo, the Hell4Leather 666 Monster, the Hunts County Mettle Cyclone.

Some have struck out alone, on their own esoteric little tip: Chase, from Hampshire, have, quite sweetly, the Finback, the Orca and the Beluga; Surridge have the Ocre, Charlie French the Aria and the Ovation, Gunn & Moore the Luna. Choice are probably trying too hard with the Teutonic, and Redback's Paradox remains in a baffling corner of its own.

This year's winner though introduces to the mix the kind of divine feel every batsman needs. Who wouldn't feel better going out there with a Hunts County Glory Almighty in their hands. Praise the Lord...

Old Dog's New Trick [Oh alright, I'm on Twitter...]

2011-04-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Old Batsman is now on Twitter. Well, you have to really, don't you? It's the Twenty20 of blogging.

Easing into it gently of course...

No country for old men

2011-04-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

A random selection of arbitrary World Cup 2011 awards...

The Kipling 'If...' Trophy
MS Dhoni
After the semi-final win over Pakistan, Dhoni gave a remarkable interview in which he described how he'd had nothing to eat until he reached the ground because the hotel that the team were staying in was now hosting ICC/BCCI/government guests and they weren't able to serve him breakfast. Dhoni was absolutely calm about this, even though it's an almost perfect example, in miniature, of every committee that's ever run any sort of cricket throughout the history of the game. The real sign of a good leader is that they never pass pressure downwards - this is Dhoni's great skill as a captain. It's hard to think of anyone who could have borne so much expectation with such ease. In comparison to the off-field stuff, the game itself must be an escape. He sauntered out ahead of Yuvraj in the final like a man walking up his garden path after a hard day at work, ready to relax at last.

Best display of human fallibility
Sachin Tendulkar
Every player has had days like Sachin did in the final, striking everything out of the middle of the bat and then inexplicably feathering a wide one. Many of his hundreds would have started less well than that 18 in Mumbai, and yet he may come to see his dismissal as a curious kind of blessing. Had he scored a century, he might have had to lay down his bat and ascend through the clouds immediately, because his legend would have blotted out the rest of his life. As it is, the failure was almost Bradmanesque, and the weight of runs earlier in the tournament entirely outweighed it.

Best transformation
Yuvraj Singh
And there we were thinking he was the sulky, spoilt one...

Heroic loser
Tillakaratne Dilshan
500 runs, 8 wickets, killer beard - didn't even need to get out the Dilscoop.

Easiest on the eye
Upal Tharanga
A rapier amongst the broadswords

Most surprising out-batting of Sachin Tendulkar
Andrew Strauss
For one innings only...

Prophet in his own land
Jonathan Trott
422 runs at 60.28, 5x50, strike rate above Bell, Haddin, Misbah, Kallis and Ponting, fifth in the ICC ODI rankings. 'He was batting like a schoolboy' - Mark Butcher and Bob Willis

Best strategist
Tim Neilsen
Three fast bowlers, one spinner. 'They [India] will be answering all the questions... on the surface, about their line-up...'

Noble Sacrifice
Ricky Ponting
'There's been no tap on the shoulder'.

Best 'fuck you' hundred
Ricky Ponting
All talking done with the bat...

Best Associates player
Ryan Ten Doeschate
307 runs at 61.40, 2x100. You sure he's not English...?

Best stat
17
The number of World Cup matches Shaun Tait had to play before he got a bat. Australia's recent history is contained within that number somewhere...

Overall winner
The 50-over game
Any format that can contain an innings as subtle as Mahela's in its biggest game must have something going for it. Now, if we could only play a bit less of it...

Truest words
Shahid Afridi
'After this match, we will all be old men...' On Pakistan's youngsters before the India semi-final

Now, when does the IPL start...?

Life Under The Pump

2011-03-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

In that cheesy, sobby, magnificent old movie The Shawshank Redemption, there's a scene in which Morgan Freeman's character, world-weary, repentant killer Red, finally understands the protagonist Andy's love of rock-polishing. 'Geology's like everything,' he says in that celestial voice, 'it's just pressure and time'.

Whether Sachin makes that 100th hundred on Saturday, or if Murali takes a wicket with his last ball [or whether there's a real Hollywood ending, and both things happen], the CWC 2011 has been all about pressure and time.

Geoffrey Boycott was lambasted for his comments on the withdrawal of England's Michael Yardy with depression. The condemnation was merited if self-righteous, but Boycott, who was offering an opinion on radio immediately after hearing the news, was clumsy rather than thoughtless. Indeed, he went through something similar himself after the death of his mother and his sacking by Yorkshire, which made his thoughts worthy of further examination. His initial reaction was to look to Yardy's on-field performances as a cause. That's inevitable, given Boycott's own obsessive personality, but it doesn't make the point entirely invalid. Humans are humans, and it is always a difficult moment when one comes up against the limits of their ability, especially when that ability has done so much to define their self-image.

What's more fascinating is whether a team can have a collective psyche, and if so, whether that psyche can dominate the individual within it. How else do you explain South Africa? And how do they explain themselves? The application of pressure made the unit fold again. Can something as intangible as the past really play a part?

Time has proved one of the best defences against pressure, or at least experience has, and experience is really time by another name. In different ways, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar have resisted it. Experience gives you options, offers perspective. They have provided the most enduring memories of the tournament - fitting given the time and pressure they've embraced and withstood.

Shaun Tait Retires From Bowling

2011-03-28T03:46:00.000-07:00

Australian paceman Shaun Tait has today retired from bowling in order prolong his bowling career.

'Playing cricket doesn't really suit my body, but this way I can still make myself available for the IPL auction without having to actually bowl. I'm sure plenty of people would still like the name Shaun Tait on the team sheet, even if I'm not playing.'

'I'd hate to retire from receiving those pay cheques,' he concluded. 'This way, I'm much more able to manage the strain on my bank accounts'.

NB: In seriousness, Taity's decision brings this day closer.

Ricky Ponting And The Ides Of March

2011-03-23T05:30:00.000-07:00

Australia, or at least the Australian press, seem to be the only ones who don't think the side has a shot against India tomorrow. The obituaries are already old news, written when the quarter-final line-up became apparent; the story has already moved on to when and how Ricky Ponting will be sacked.

Conspiracies abound, the Ides of March are here. Ricky has been knifed, it's just not entirely clear by who. Was it the anonymous Cricket Australia drone who briefed against him at the press conference? Was it the survey that said cricket in Oz needs to reconnect with the younger fans? Perhaps it was the tattooed, metrosexual Brutus himself, Michael Clarke, who Ponting 'privately believes' has been undermining him?

It's odd to see them this way, stabbing each other in the back - not least because in Australia there are plenty of people willing to stab you in the front first. The blowhards had their say on Ponting after the Ashes. Here is something altogether more sinister, less straight-up, less Australian.

For so long, Australia's strength has been its strength, its sense of common purpose. Every player, however great - and there are plenty of those - bowed to overall goals of the team. Now, there is no great team and just one great player, and look what is happening to him.

India are exactly the sort of side Australia used to relish destroying, a team seeking dominance that could nonetheless be dominated by imposition of will. Mental disintegration they called it. Now things are disintegrating around Australia. They are even questioning the long-cherished, no-quarter tenets of their game, comparing Ponting's refusal to walk unfavourably with Tendulkar's decision to. When you cop it for not walking in Australia, the dogs are at the door.

Australia are crumbling from the outside in. One thing that's certain about Ponting is, he won't crumble himself.

Like the old saying goes, sometimes you don't know what you got till it's gone.

Addendum: Reading the above back, I suppose the point I'm lumbering towards is not that Australia's captain may change - that's a judgement call that can be fairly made either way - it's that the culture around the team has changed, and not for the better. Border, Taylor and Waugh departed with varying degrees of 'encouragement', but the culture around Australian cricket remained, and the successor on each occasion was a man of substance. None of those certainties exist now.

Chris Gayle Flicks The Switch

2011-03-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

Power is an odd thing in batting. It's not absolutely necessary, or at least for a century and a half it wasn't. There's a great story about Geoffrey Boycott berating his batmaker because he'd been offered a gun bat 'that will really fly Geoffrey'. 'I don't want it to bloody fly,' the great man retorted. 'I want it to roll to the boundary. I still only get four for it'.

This is true of course, yet there is visceral shock to how hard the ball can be hit that has a psychological element to it. It's about dominance, even fear. I first experienced it in the nets at Alf Gover's as a young kid when Carlisle Best turned up. The ball came off his bat like a shell. Monty Lynch used to practice there often, and he could really lace it.

Currency has changed now, of course. You can talk about bat technology, shorter boundaries, the IPL, money, and you'd be right, but the real revolution is in the heads of the players. The culture has shifted, the sense of what's possible has moved. Hitting a long ball is now coached as legitimately as the forward defensive. It's in the mindset now.

There are lots of players who hit it miles. There are fewer who repeat the skill over and over. And then there's Chris Gayle. People hit the ball further than Gayle, but no-one hits it harder. Gayle doesn't go for distance, he goes for trajectory - flat and lethally powerful. His technique, with legs wideset, means that he will almost always carve square or hit straight, and he does so with fearsome velocity.

Yet what's more remarkable about it is its apparent randomness. Against England the other day, there was no logic to his onslaught - in fact it seemed to inject a mania into the West Indies chase that soon converted into desperation. They only needed 240-odd after all. But it's Chris Gayle's nature. He is a man at the mercy of his muse. When it happens, it happens. Very rarely in Test cricket he has subdued it and dug in for a hundred. The rest of the time, he surfs his own wave, a man apart.

He's inspiring and frustrating, comatose in the field and then savagely alive when he bats. He's sponsored by an obscure Pakistan-based batmaker when you would imagine that every major manufacturer in the world yearns for him to carry their stickers, because there's something about the way he hits the ball that is unique. It's like a Tyson punch, in that it looks the same as lots of other punches, but carries a force that comes from somewhere beyond. When Gayle flicks the switch, without rhyme or reason or warning, the ball travels with more intensity than it ever has before.

Tendulkar: Greater Than The Don

2011-03-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

Sachin Tendulkar, I think, stands on the edge of the greatest feat of batting in the history of the game. When [and it is when - his batting is an absolute at the moment] he registers the 100th hundred of his international career, he will achieve something that, like Bradman's average, will never be superseded.

It's human nature to try and measure achievement and to be driven to close to madness when it proves impossible. Time and its changes usually mean that it is. But Tendulkar's argument as the best ever is gaining weight.

It's a question of degree of course. Bradman's is measurable. He is, statistically, more than 30 per cent better than anyone else who has played. That's a stat that makes him not just the greatest cricketer of all time, but by the gap that he created, the greatest sportsman of all time. To draw facile comparison, Usain Bolt would have to run the 100 metres in six seconds to equal him; Tiger Woods would have to win another ten Major Championships.

Yet Tendulkar edges closer. One hundred international hundreds will put him more than 30 per cent clear of the next best, Ricky Ponting who has 68. Only one other player has 40 Test hundreds [SRT has 51] and that's Jacques Kallis. Yet Kallis has 'only' 17 ODI tons. There is Tendulkar and then there is daylight.

The Don of course scored with greater mass. If he had continued at his career rate, he would have made 100 Test hundreds in roughly 250 innings [Tendulkar has batted 290 times for his 51] but that presumes Bradman would have been able to continue. All of sport's geniuses, from Ali to Woods, have been slowed down and altered by life. No, what separates Sachin even from the Don is endurance.

Tendulkar has spent more than a year of his life playing ODI cricket, and a lot more than that in Tests. He has played the game internationally from the age of 16, and he's now 37. That's 57 per cent of his time on earth. He has played 626 Tests and ODIs in that time. Bradman played for 20 years, for a combined 234 Test and first-class games. The pace of life and the pace of the game is irrevocably different.

Efforts have been made to calculate what Bradman's average might have been had he played today, given the differences in bowling and especially fielding, and it comes out to around 77. What's unknowable is how modern life and the demands of the game would have impacted upon him. There is empirical evidence of Sachin's apparently unquenchable desire.

You'll get no argument from me if you want to surmise that Bradman could have scored a hundred international hundreds. But Sachin is actually going to do it, and given the likelihood of ODI cricket [and perhaps even Tests] surviving for long enough to prove that anyone can outstrip him, his record will stand forever, as distant and unreachable as anything of the Don's and as worthy of consideration as the greatest ever. It's hard to imagine that Bradman was better.

Random Observations Up To And Including Match 29

2011-03-12T08:15:00.000-08:00

No-one, surely to god, can ever have been a better player than Sachin Tendulkar.

Behind most successful batsmen there's Kamram Akmal.

Jacques Kallis's hair transplant has sprouted better than Michael Vaughan's.

Kieron Pollard can hit it miles one-handed.

Ross Taylor didn't get enough credit for his batting against Pakistan, however bad the bowling. His use of the crease was a lesson.

Robin Jackman discovers the value of research [whilst commentating on the Netherlands]: 'The bloke at cover just dropped it'; 'Yes, I mean you, number seven'.

Johan Botha's action hasn't exactly improved with time.

Someone's making up this 2.5m thing as they go along, aren't they?

You don't stand much chance with caught behind reviews without snicko or hotspot.

Jimmy Anderson can't remember that you're supposed to bowl yorkers at the end of an innings.

Are Australia still out there?

Graeme Smith knows that South Africa don't choke.

We're halfway through now, aren't we?

KP And The Ambiguous Frontlash

2011-03-07T23:08:00.000-08:00

73*, 53, 42*, 47. A little run of figures there that may be worth remembering, although with the short-termism that infects other sporting media showing itself more often in cricket now, they probably won't be.

They represent Kevin Pietersen's last four innings at the T20 World Cup all the way back in the dim and distant past that is last May. They sit quite nicely alongside his Man Of The Tournament trophy and England's only global limited-overs title. Within them is the utter destruction he wrought on the world's quickest bowlers, summed up when, in the final, he walked down the pitch to Shaun Tate and dumped him into the crowd over long-off. The last of the fight went out of Tate then.

Pietersen's first innings in the competition, by contrast, were 24 and 9. As he has done throughout his career, he became caught up in the escalating tension and euphoria of the game and delivered when it mattered. The list of those occasions is long, and stretches back to his ODI breakthrough in South Africa. His batting is studded with such moments. He is that rarest of beasts - the big-match man. The prime years of his playing life, the early 30s in which most batsmen are at their most productive, will answer one lingering question: is KP a great player, or simply a player of great innings?

Yet the ambiguity of the media towards him runs deep. Yesterday saw a series of pieces on the theme 'are England better off without KP?' - an idiotic question that was answered in one radio poll with a 95 per cent 'no'. The punters are ahead of the curve on this one. Andy Flower's fairly standard remarks on the matter have seen a variety of hacks desperate to imply a subtext that supports their theory that England are glad to be shot of him. Flower, the arch pragmatist, is merely playing the hand he's been dealt.

No team is better off without their most galvanising player. England can still do well, but the ultimate marker of a man's worth is the view of those who have to face him. Bowlers like Tate, Steyn, Lee, Zaheer and the others who've run in to him when the chips are down will look at the teamsheet and smile.

NB: Simon Hughes has a far better piece in the Telegraph on England's current state. No wonder the players are getting fractious....

Rock of Ageds

2011-03-04T11:06:00.000-08:00

The post below had some fine comments that veered back in time to the immortal summer of '76, the summer - indeed the year - of King Viv, and also of Michael Holding and the emergence of the West Indies war machine. England found themselves up against this new and deadly force relatively soon after they returned, shellshocked, from Australia and the first onslaught of Lillee and Thomson. Their response, in retrospect, was remarkable.

In a pre-helmet, as much short stuff as you like era, and in the line of fire of perhaps the two most extreme pace attacks of all time, England turned not to youth but to age. Colin Cowdrey, 41, flew to Australia in 1974 wearing a pinstripe suit and when he got to the middle, famously introduced himself to Jeff Thomson with the words 'I'm Colin Cowdrey,' [to which Thomson replied, 'that's not gonna help you, fatso']. The following summer, 33-year-old David Steele became 'the bank clerk who went to war' - still wearing his specs. Brian Close, who'd made his Test match debut in 1949, four years after the war, joined Steele in facing up to Holding, Roberts, Holder and the brutal Wayne Daniel.

Close was Viv Richards' mentor, county captain and great friend. When he was felled at Old Trafford [against bowling that even the Almanack was moved to record 'was frequently too wild and hostile to be acceptable', and for which Holding was warned by the umpires], Richards was moved to ask him 'are you alright, skip?' 'FUCK OFF' Close roared in reply.

Come the last Test at the Oval, after what was essentially two years of this stuff, England took account of the fallen. Cowdrey and Close had been beaten by age, if not nerve. Boycott and Edrich had, for various reasons, withdrawn. Brearley and Woolmer were callow. Steele was still there, along with Chris Balderstone, who got a pair. With a vacancy for an opener, England went back to Dennis Amiss, 33, who responded to the bombardments he had endured in the past by reinventing his technique, and turning to face the West Indies guns square on. It was a bravura move, as much psychological as technical. He made 203 in a losing cause.

It was, in retrospect, a fascinating time. It's hard to imagine a similar thing happening now, because the game is so different. Batsmen went in knowing that there was a very real possibility of serious injury. It took a particular kind of character to do it.

The Shock Of The New

2011-03-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

One innings from the past came repeatedly to mind today as Kevin O'Brien blazed Ireland to victory in Bangalore: Test match number 1594, 16 March 2002, England v New Zealand at Christchurch, Nathan Astle c Foster b Hoggard 222.

Like O'Brien's, Astle's was an innings that began with a team so deep in the mire that only the tops of their heads were visible. Set 550 to win, he came to the wicket with New Zealand at 119-3. Even though he put on 50 with each of the next three batters, the seventh wicket fell at 300, and the ninth at 333, still 217 short. When Astle finally got out, having hit 28 fours and 11 sixes, New Zealand needed just 99 more to win, and there wasn't a person watching or playing who hadn't started to think that he might get them. It was hurricane force batting, an outlier of an innings.

That feeling of creeping dread overcoming well-established complacency was repeated as O'Brien swung for the fences today. Astle recorded the quickest Test match double hundred of all time, O'Brien the fastest World Cup hundred. England survived Astle, but not O'Brien.

Astle actually went from 100 to 200 in 39 balls on that day in Christchurch. A four over spell of carnage cost England 61 runs, despite one of the overs being a wicket maiden. As Wisden noted, 'a cricket ball has rarely been hit so cleanly, so often'.

Subsequently, it probably has been. In Astle's wake came triple hundreds of sustained violence from Chris Gayle and Virender Sehwag. Then came T20, with its redefinition of the possible. O'Brien is a young guy who has been witness to a much broader horizon than many of the great players he blasted past today. In a way, he was able to bat like he did because T20 cricket has made it less remarkable. His 50-ball record may not even survive this tournament.

None of which is meant to diminish his achievement. England were complacent and bowled and fielded badly, but O'Brien won the game rather than England losing it. We may come to look back on it, as we do on Astle's, as a moment when the future arrived.

Different bat, same old, same old...

2011-02-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

Sachin finally changed his bat then. The new one seemed to go okay...

Shoaib kicks ass early doors

2011-02-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

In his famous piece about the Kasparov versus Karpov chess match - one of the most vicious and destructive of all 'sporting' encounters, which lasted an entire winter and almost destroyed Karpov's mental and physical health - Martin Amis noted that cheating, or at least gamesmanship, was more than possible, even in a board game.

'Sit your opponent with the sun in his eyes' said one player; another smoked 'a particularly noxious cigar' at the board; another let his cats weave around the place on the off-chance that his opponent would have an allergy. Boris Spassky once messed with Korchnoi's mind by spending the entire match in a curtained booth on the stage, emerging only to make his move. When he did appear, he wore an off-putting sun-visor.

The point is that when things get intense, it doesn't take much to ratchet up the pressure even more. I thought of those things when I saw Shoaib's boots in Pakistan's first game - pure white they were, with long tongues that flopped up and down under the brilliant green of his trousers. What a sight he was, too, sweating like a boilerman from ball one, rolling from side to side with the effort of his charge to the crease. Still quick though, and cunning with it.

On closer inspection of the boots today against Sri Lanka, they have 'S.A. 100.2 mph' embroidered on them in red stitching. Superb. He even took one off and replaced it with another style of boot entirely. He's only just warming up, be sure of that.

For me, Shoaib's been the star of the World Cup so far. Pakistan look up for it. They'll probably lose the next one by about 300 runs, but they're dangerous.

So is Sreesanth, the other candidate for man of the tournament up to now. 'Everyone played well, except Sreesanth' said Sehwag after India's opening win. He was then told to stop irritating his team-mates. Yesterday in the nets, he hit Yuvraj on the helmet with a beamer.

The World Cup is up and creaking. In about a month, it might even get good.

Wisdom of the Ancients

2011-02-22T12:51:00.000-08:00

One of cricket - and sport's - great archetypes is the aged and taciturn coach, the kind of man who will watch silently for half an hour and then impart, often via a single and devastating sentence, a thought that changes not just how you play the game, but how you see it.

My own was the great Alf Gover, a man I wish I had appreciated more. I thought of Alf when I read this interview with John Jacobs, who has coached golf to Open champions and desperate hackers for sixty years. There is wisdom here that comes only from decades of observation. It doesn't come second-hand, from books or anywhere else.

Jacobs has distilled his philosophy down to one thought: you can learn everything you need to know about a player's swing by watching what the ball does once it's been struck. It's fantastically obvious and wonderfully true, and it applies equally well to cricket. All that matters is that moment when bat meets ball. You could discover how to coach anything by talking to John Jacobs.

NB: It's interesting to contrast the Jacobs interview with this one. It's with Tiger Woods' much-hyped new coach Sean Foley. He quotes Ghandi and Aristotle in one answer. I know who I'd rather have coaching me. Good luck, Tiger...

KP: Year Zero, Ball One

2011-02-21T11:55:00.000-08:00

In club cricket opening is the only place to bat, as any fule no. If I'm not opening, I'm not playing, pal. It offers the opportunity [not often taken, admittedly, but glorious when it is] to do what Virender Sehwag did in the first match of this World Cup - play a swaggering, gratifying, alpha-male innings whilst developing some sort of injury that gets you out of fielding later on.

Club cricket is for the most part a short game, hence the imperative not to waste any of it. In the pro ranks there's always another innings, but the shape of 50 over cricket gives opening an appeal that other formats don't for the alpha batsman. In Test cricket it is the ultimate examination of skill and nerve, and thus suited only to certain players with particular temperaments. In T20 matches, someone always gets out early, so the number three is essentially an opener too. In 50 over cricket, though, its appeal glistens in a particular way: the powerplays, the high-vis new ball that cracks off the bat, the bowler concerned with defence and attack, the chance to build and pace an innings.

It's no surprise then that many of the biggest, most anticipated and feared batters of the modern era open in ODIs: Hayden, Gayle, Gilchrist, Sehwag, Tendulkar, McCullum, Watson, Jayasuriya [the proto-ODI opener] and so on. No surprise either that KP fancied adding his name to the list.

It's a smart move in lots of ways. It suits his game on the sub-continent, it offers him a challenge, it boosts his misunderstood psyche. Pietersen is indisputably a big-game player, recently to the exclusion of almost everything else. As the T20 world cup proved, he's well suited to tournament cricket, with its unfolding narrative and building momentum. He's somehow attuned to things like that. For a deeply idiosyncratic man, the most idiosyncratic place in the order might be perfect.

50 0ver and Out

2011-02-18T11:16:00.000-08:00

This World Cup has an end of empire feel about it, from the $18m opening ceremony featuring yesterday's rocker Bryan Adams to what Jonathan Agnew described this morning as 'a month of matches designed to knock out the minnows'.

The 50-over game belongs to the last century. This will be a final World Cup for some of the players who worked out the format and then exhausted its variations over hundreds of matches: Sachin Tendulkar, Jacques Kallis, Muttiah Muralitharan, Ricky Ponting have set records that will not beaten, but that will in time reflect an era.

The first match of the competition will be the 3,100th ODI. The format will not reach 4,000, at least in its current style. The new century has brought with it a new game, new players. T20 is accelerated, intensified, condensed, not just in length of games but in the length of its tournaments. Contrast the last 50 over World Cup in West Indies with the T20 tournament there last year, and contrast this World Cup with the IPL that follows.

Repetition has killed 50 over cricket, both in the methods of play, and the commercial imperative to keep staging it. What percentage of those 3,100 matches have been rendered meaningless by one or both?

Perhaps a tournament in India can keep it staggering on, but if it can't, nothing can. There are kids today who are growing up wanting to be Test players, and there are kids wanting to be T20 players. You don't hear many saying 'I'll make my career in 50 over cricket'.

On the pitch, invention might solve the problem of the middle thirty. Maybe a team will decide to forget about the 50 over limit and bat in T20 style until they're out. It would be interesting to see how many they got. Perhaps someone will bowl death overs from the start. There are new techniques out there.

The radical surgery required though is to the calendar. The way to make something desirable is to make it rare. It won't happen of course. Like an old car, 50 over cricket might as well be run into the ground. There are new things ready to replace it. Welcome to the endgame.

Burn a little brighter now

2011-02-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

A final, sort of free association addendum to the post below about Trevor 'The Boil' Bailey: as ever that era of the media brought to mind John Arlott, and then his unlikely, touching and longstanding friendship with Ian Botham, himself a current occupant of 'the comm-box'.

The outsider's view of that friendship is hostage to the public image of Beefy as a no-nonsense man's man whose rare collisions with the written word might occur via something by Tom Clancy. Yet that is to misjudge both men.

They met, according to Botham, when he was a 16 year old at Somerset and he was summoned to lug two of Arlott's hampers into the press box at Taunton. Arlott opened one, which was filled with wine, and asked Botham if he'd ever tried any. He proceeded to uncork several bottles and then the other hamper, which contained cheeses chosen as accompaniments. Botham had met the man he describes as his mentor. The friendship ended many years and many legends later when Arlott died on Alderney at 77. Botham was his neighbour at the time, and would visit him every day.

'At the end when the emphysema took over and he was struggling with speech he had an oxygen mask and I often had to empty his bag for him,' Botham told the Guardian in 2007. 'But he liked me being there because I knew to wait and let him finish his sentences between gasps. I didn't try to say the words for him because I knew how much they mattered.'

Anyone meeting Arlott when they were just 16 might have felt the same. As his obituary in Wisden noted, 'he was a man of deep humanity'. What's more interesting is what Arlott might have seen in Beefy. There was his talent of course, and his Falstaffian love of cricket and life. But there was much more than that. He could, by his own admission, be deeply selfish and annoyingly laddish, and conservative and reactionary. But he is also a man of great heart and loyalty, a man who has spent a lifetime raising millions of pounds for cancer research after spending just one afternoon at a children's hospital, a bloke who inspired equal loyalty in his friends and from others who've never met him.

Botham, you suspect, works quite hard to keep that side of himself hidden. Not everything can be public property. There's something else, too. Arlott did express a regret that he retired from commentary in 1980, and missed the chance to go through '81 with Botham.

Beefy was one of those players who stirred something in the spectator. In a fabulous piece on trying to write a book about the snooker player Jimmy White, Jonathan Rendall says: 'It doesn't really matter what people like Jimmy do; it's how they express it. They have "it", whatever "it" is, in the way that great painters, writers, poets and violinists have it. They're rare. So when they fall, they must be saved. It's a shame no one thought to save [Alex] Higgins - although technically there's still time - but I suppose the same could have been said of Dylan Thomas. That's my theory, anyway'.

Arlott was a friend of Dylan Thomas, as well as an accomplished poet and a connoisseur of wine and cricket and life; in short an aesthete, and he recognised another when he saw one. It's a shame that, with the demise of the pro broadcaster, a player like Beefy might not meet a man like Arlott in similar circumstances again.

'And after Trevor Bailey...'

2011-02-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

The death of Trevor Bailey is another disconnect from the past. While most of the obituaries [rightly] focused on his playing career, to later generations like mine Bailey was known firstly as a voice on TMS. He appeared, with Fred Trueman, as one of the expert summarisers, men who sat alongside the commentators and provided the earthy insight of the trenches - Trueman the autodidact philosopher king, regally dismissive of flannel and Southern nonsense; Bailey the flint-hearted pro with an unexpected aesthetic eye.

Henry Blofeld gave a radio tribute this week, remembering how easily Bailey had slapped him into place early in his TMS career: Blofeld had said - hyperbolically by the standards of the mid-70s - that Greg Chappell had just provided an unmatchable example of an off drive. 'Greg Chappell of course,' sniffed Bailey, 'is better-known for the on drive...'

Both Trueman and Bailey were ribbed back by the commentators, Trueman for his tendency to rose-tint the past [especially any aspect of it that involved him], and Bailey for his legendary ability to remain at the crease almost runless for many hours at a time. It offered an interesting distinction between the pair. Fred didn't much like any challenge, however light-hearted, to his ability, whereas Bailey would chuckle happily at the same, and rejoiced in his nickname of 'The Boil'.

What we have lost, apart from a man who, even at 87 went before his time in awful circumstances, is that balance between pro broadcasters and pro players. TMS clearly delineated between them: the broadcasters commentated and the pros offered analysis and opinion. Bailey was not expected to describe Botham, as Arlott unforgettably did, as 'coming in from the Kirkstall Lane end like a shire horse cresting the breeze', just as Arlott wasn't obliged to hold forth on facing Wes Hall.

Some cricketers have been able to do it, Richie Benaud their nonpareil, but today, especially on television, all other talents have been lost. A richness has gone from the media surrounding the game. Arlott and Bailey would have very different careers today.

Taj Malik - Local Hero

2011-02-08T04:11:00.000-08:00

Much praise has been righteously showered on Out Of The Ashes, Tim Albone and Lucy Martens’ film about the Afghan national cricket team, screened last night on BBC4. All of the big themes are there, as many have noted, but what makes it glorious and human are the small moments that catch those essential truths about all sides, amateur or pro, wherever they’re from.

The team go to the Channel Islands in an ICC comp, and when they make it through a tense semi-final despite never having seen a grass pitch before, the coach, Taj Malik Alam, makes a call home that every player is familiar with – to the wife or girlfriend or partner or kids explaining that yes, the game has only just finished, and no, you won’t be back for a bit yet. In Taj’s case, it’s longer than normal, him being in Jersey and having a big final still to play, nonetheless, it’s all there in his face as he explains.

Taj is one of the stars of the film, a man at the other end of the human spectrum from Andy Flower – if Flower is a closed book, Taj, a man with an even bigger job on his plate, is palpably readable, walking around the boundary chaining ciggies, head often in his hands, hostage to all that is uncontrollable out on the pitch. Every club has a guy like Taj as its heart and soul. Later, back in Afghanistan, we find him in his personal nirvana, on what looks like rutted scrubland with a ramshackle wooden hut beside it, but which is unmistakably oval – and you can see what Taj is thinking once again.

In the dressing room, the standard arguments rage amongst the usual collection of drama queens and prima donnas that make up teams across the globe. ‘I wasn’t out,’ one batsman claims, ‘he got that wrong’. ‘Don’t give me your bullshit’ comes the immediate and angry reply from someone who’s heard it all before, and will again.

As the final, against Jersey, unfolds and Afghanistan find themselves needing just 86 for an unlikely win, the same batsman is pointlessly run out and walks off shouting the immortal lines: ‘Why do you make me play with a bisexual? He is a bisexual.’ Simon Katich was probably mumbling much the same thing in Adelaide. Afghanistan somehow edge over the line, and all of the tension and the fear melts away as Taj dissolves into tears, only to find himself almost immediately confronted with the booming Yorkshire tones of a jaunty Geoffrey Boycott, on hand to present the trophy – a wonderfully unlikely scene.

Afghanistan go on to Argentina and ultimately, staggeringly, to the World T20, but they go without Taj, who is brutally sacked after the Channel Islands trip in favour of former Pakistan Test player Kabir Khan. ‘This is the Afghan,’ says a cab-driver. ‘He doesn’t like what the Afghan says. If Pakistani, Indian, English say it, they like it…’
Well, it’s not just the Afghan, pal, as a glance at the list of international coaches will show you.

Taj can be proud though, and not just of his huge heart. The game is the game, wherever and whoever you are, and I hope he’s there now, at the side of his pitch, watching it grow.

NB: Jrod has an Out Of The Ashes giveaway over at CWB - well worth a go.

Unbelievable tekkers

2011-02-02T11:51:00.000-08:00

A nice piece with Allan Lamb in the new Wisden Cricketer. Asked 'what made you so successful against quick bowling?' he replied: 'I had a technique that worked. On quick wickets against quick bowling, you don't get in behind the ball because, if it lifts a bit off a length, how are you going to get out of the way? You stayed inside the ball so you could cut, or outside so then you could pull. You had to duck or play, there was no fending on bouncy wickets.

'Against the really quick bowlers I would watch the wrist. Sometimes you could see the seam, and the quicker the wrist came down, the shorter the ball was going to be. That was vital. I didn't love playing against them but it was always a challenge'.

There is a huge amount of truth and insight here [yes, from Allan Lamb...], perhaps most of all his thoughts at the beginning and the end of his answer. The measure of a technique is its effectiveness; the reality of quick bowling is that no-one likes facing it [and speed is relative to ability, so the feelings it invokes are universal].

The detail of Lamb's technique, as described, is not textbook. It sounds more like Phil Hughes than Geoffrey Boycott. That's why technique cannot be applied or evaluated equally to all. Boycott, for example, or Atherton, were rather good at fending. It's an individual thing.

It's also why Peter Roebuck's otherwise well-wrought argument over the 'nonsensical' changes in technique for T20 cricket is not quite convincing. Technique, to me, is like language. It is not a static thing. Rather, it's alive and vital, always being added to and adapted as well as used classically. To draw a rather gallumphing allusion, we no longer speak like Shakespeare, but the beauty and rhythm of his language retains all of its power.

No-one bats like Grace any more, and perhaps only Dravid leaves the ball like Boycott, yet technique is as alive and as mutable as it has ever been. No single player will encompass it all. The key will be the same as always: to the fit the relevant parts to what you're trying to achieve.

Great advances of our time

2011-01-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

Ace idea: Let's play the next two installments of that little-watched series the Ashes back-to-back and get it out the way so that we can make sure another 50-over World Cup goes uninterrupted. Because let's face it, we can't get enough of those Super Six phases, can we? Always sell-outs, they are.

'To ensure that the teams have better preparation time for the World Cup, this is the only solution, but I also think it's absolutely manageable,' says Steve Elworthy of the ECB. Give that man an MBE.

Anyway, as the next two Ashes are over and done with in a few months, you'll need something to wear, won't you? Try this then. Not sure it's philosophical, but it don't half feel good...

The deadliest ground on earth

2011-01-27T12:54:00.000-08:00

It looks, on TV, like it lies at the very edge of the world. It's one of the most beautiful, strange grounds I've ever seen, and in my dreams I'd like to bat there. Set at the end of a deep green valley, surrounded by mountains and with a long and apparently depthless [according to Jeremy Coney] lake, Queenstown seems more like a film set than a real place.

What's most alluring about it is its approachability. It has a small and charming stand that appears more like an extended pavilion than anything designed to put bums on seats, and the rest is open, the kind of place you can just wander up to and stroll around, pick a spot to sit for a while. To see international cricket there, well, that's just a curious and welcome bonus.

Small aircraft sweep over it. Traffic sails past in the distance. Boats skim the lake. The views are almost heartbreaking. Then you hear the stats. Average score in ODIs - 173. Highest successful run chase - 236. Man, forget the Gabbatoir. Never mind Eden Gardens with a hundred thousand in, or Sabina Park back in the day, when the pitch shone like a darkened mirror, here is a graveyard disguised as a paradise.

173. Now that must be the lowest par score of any international ground on earth. Queenstown, I'll see you in my dreams...

It's not his fault, it's his glands...

2011-01-21T01:01:00.000-08:00

So Samit Patel has had another kicking from Andy Flower, a display of the particularly piquant disappointment that only the uber-pro who had to scrap for everything he's got can conjure up. But it's not just Flabby Sam who's fat and lazy. The very sight of him was enough to prod the Guardian into that old standby, the Fat Cricketers XI.

Fat and lazy it was too, containing all the usual suspects, among them IT Botham, Boony, Mike Gatting and Shane Warne - just the 20,185 runs and 1,095 wickets in Test matches from them - plus Colin Milburn [yawn], Boof Lehman [groan], and then some others - Rob Key, Ian Blackwell - who bit the bullet and got fit seasons ago.

Then there was Dwayne Leverock [that picture again, yes] who, let's be honest, is a clubbie, and if we're counting them, listen up: I've seen guys fatter than him open the bowling, pal... And most egregiously of all, the good Doctor himself, founder of the modern game, maker of 54,000 runs across 44 first-class seasons on pitches that make my back garden look like the WACA circa 1974. Yes, WG was fat - when he was 55 and had spent half his life on Victorian trains going back and forth to matches. As the most cursory study of his career would reveal, when he was Samit Patel's age, he had scored a double-hundred at the Oval and then nipped down to Crystal Palace in the evening to win the 440-yard hurdles, and was regarded, with his brother, as the finest fielder in the land - his throw was measured at 122 yards.

But what was most fat and lazy about the Guardian's space-filler is that there is actually a good story here. What it's about really is fitness for purpose, because the standard of fitness has shifted and almost all of the Fat XI simply aligned with the requirements of their day. The most obvious absentee from the list was Samit Patel's Australian equivalent, Mark Cosgrove, who would walk into the Australian Test side at the moment if only he'd tow the line.

It's fascinating psychologically why players like that won't do something as simple as getting fit when it would obviously advance them. Are they maverick figures who would actually lose the edge from their game if they felt like they were conforming? Or is it a deeper fear of failure [or success] that manifests itself in the safety net of appearing too cool to care? Flower obviously feels like it's a problem worth solving, and Australia should too.

Very Superstitious [Part 234]

2011-01-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

If you had to guess which member of the England squad had 'a slightly strangely formed kneecap on his left knee', you'd probably head for Graeme Swann, and you'd be correct.

It hasn't held him back. He can counterbalance any effects of its weird shape with the application of superstition and ritual, a tip he tried to pass along to his old Northants mucker Mike Hussey in Melbourne.

'I said to Hussey that day, and I’ve said to him since, he messed with the cricketing gods. He changed his stickers. He had blue stickers before, when he scored all those runs, but his sponsor had obviously got a new range out and they made him bat in orange pads and orange stickers. Never do that! I’m a very superstitious character.'

'I’ve always believed that if something works, don’t change it. I don’t agree in upsetting whoever’s up there looking down over us.'

Swann did not explain how he copes with his own switch in stickers, but we await...

Watto: Weirder than first thought

2011-01-13T12:15:00.001-08:00

While it's not exactly the ECB's Black Ops analysis department, Opta, best known for their who-kicked-it- to-who data in footie, have produced some Ashes stuff [you can download it here, or if that doesn't work, there's a Guardian link here]. It's quite blunt, but [provided it's correct] it does illuminate the differences between Shane Watson and the rest of the world.

Opta have broken down the balls faced by each batsmen into 'defensive shots' and 'attacking shots', which is subjective in itself but does allow a rough calculation of productivity or effectiveness. For example, Alastair Cook faced 1,438 balls, of which he played no shot to 245, defended 436 and attacked 757, scoring 766 runs. Now, he will have missed some of the balls that he played at, and he would have scored a proportion of his runs from defensive shots, but for argument's sake if you divide the number of runs scored by the number of attacking shots played, you get a rather unscientific but interesting ratio of 1.01. This represents a 'productivity' of 1.01 runs per attacking shot.

Here are some of the batters [in order: runs scored, balls left, balls defended, balls attacked, run ratio]:

Mike Hussey: R 570 B 1085 BL 276 BD 301 BA 508 RR 1.12

Jonathan Trott: R 445 B 883 BL 162 BD 259 BA 462 RR 0.96

Kevin Pietersen: R 360 B 563 BL 102 BD 134 BA 327 RR 1.10

Brad Haddin: R 360 B 656 BL 71 BD 242 BA 343 RR 1.05

Ian Bell: R 329 B 586 BL 139 BD 174 BA 273 RR 1.20

Michael Clarke: R 193 B 437 BL 85 BD 142 BA 210 RR 0.92

Now here's

Shane Watson: R 435 B 903 BL 247 BD 336 BA 320 RR 1.35

What's apparent, however blunt the data, is that Watson is batting differently, or at least achieving different results, to the other effective top-order batsmen in the series. He attacked significantly less deliveries than anyone else - 35.44 per cent, compared to a high of Pietersen's 58.08, and a low of Hussey's 46.82 and Bell's 46.59, but scored far more heavily when he did [The only batsmen who attacked a higher percentage of deliveries than Pietersen were in the lower order: Matt Prior at 63.98 and Mitchell Johnson at 60.29, for run ratios of 1.22 and 0.97 respectively].

Watson's ratios don't really compare to the other openers, either:

Alastair Cook: R 766 B 1438 BL 245 BD 436 BA 757 RR 1.01

Andrew Strauss: R 307 B 592 BL 194 BD 155 BA 243 RR 1.25

Phil Hughes: R 97 B 250 BL 51 BD 96 BA 103 RR 0.94

Simon Katich: R 97 B 207 BL 54 BD 59 BA 94 RR 1.03

Although Strauss is the player who comes closest to Watson's runs per attacking shot ratio, he still attacked 41. 05 per cent of the balls he faced - far higher than Watson - and it was obvious throughout the series that there was an [admirable] intent to lead from the front in Strauss's batting.

Watto, then, played differently. The supposition would be that he hit a higher percentage of boundaries than anyone else - answer: maybe [runs scored, runs in boundaries, percentage of runs scored in boundaries]:

Cook: R 766 RiB 330 = 43.08%

Prior: R 252 RiB 112 = 44.44%

Trott: R 445 RiB 208 = 46.74%

Haddin: R 360 RiB 170 = 47.22%

Hussey: R 570 RiB 286 = 50.17%

Strauss: R 307 RiB 162 = 52.76%

Watson: R 435 RiB 234 = 53.79%

Pietersen: R 360 RiB 206 = 57.22%

Watson's percentage of dot balls to deliveries faced, at 78.63%, was also far higher than any other successful batsman in the series. Strauss was nearest at 76.35%, Pietersen was, at 70.87%, the lowest. Significantly, Watto also featured in three run-outs.

While the differences between batters might not seem huge, they are significant. They seem to back up the view that Watson is not great in two areas that might really improve his game: revolving the strike and working the ball around. His defensive shots especially don't appear to result in as many singles as most other batsmen's. The Black Ops people would probably add all of this kind of stuff together with the wagon wheels of where Watson does score his runs - anecdotally with lots of booming drives. In all, it makes him pretty easy to work out, and leaves him open to the 'bowling machine batsman' accusation.

Watto has many virtues. For a converted opener he gets himself a start on a significant number of occasions and he leaves the ball well. Assuming that early in his innings the fields are up, thus allowing him plenty of boundaries when he does attack, perhaps he gets stuck when the fields become more defensive and he can't knock the ball around as effectively as most other players. That may explain his tendency to get out for around the same score a lot of the time.

That's presuming that the stats are right, obviously...

Tough Love: Australia Player-by-Player

2011-01-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

Twas the summer when Ricky Ponting and Shane Watson competed with one another for who could use the adjective 'disappointing' the most. However, Watson said it best when he said nothing at all: the most illuminating interview of the series came halfway through the Melbourne Test when he was asked if Australia could still win. His thin smile spoke volumes. Those of a sensitive disposition might want to look away now. That means you too, Mitch...

Shane Watson
435 runs at 48.33, 4x50; 3 wickets at 74.33
Watson's technique is pinned by the phrase 'a bowling machine batsman'. There is something inhuman about it - it brings to mind George Plimpton's wonderful description of his golf swing: 'my body changes its corporeal status completely and becomes a mechanical entity, built of tubes and conduits, and boiler rooms here and there, with big dials and gauges to check, a Brobdingnagian structure put together by a team of brilliant engineers'. Perhaps his lack of fluidity and instinct is the reason that he gets stuck in the 50s. He arrives there often enough though, which reveals a doggedness that deserves a place in the middle order where he can breath a little. His bowling figures came as a shock - he appeared to have been more effective than he was.
7/10

Phil Hughes
97 runs at 16.16
In contrast to his opening partner, Hughes's technique is ineffably human, full of the kind of quirkiness of someone who might have had the game described to him but never actually seen it played. However, I'm in the camp - along with Justin Langer and Steve Waugh [and how chuffed they'll be to hear that] - that sees genius in his madness as this new age of batsmanship dawns. Viv Richards said that when he first came to England no-one thought he could bat either, because he hit across the line. Richards created the new orthodoxy, and while Hughes is more maverick and less brilliant, there is some logic behind the way he plays. His problem in this series is that he removed the wrong part of his game. He was at his best when he made room and threw his arms at the wide, short ball, as he did against Morkel and Steyn in South Africa. As the demons filled his head, he stifled himself for fear of the critics and it got him nowhere. He will find a way though, if he trusts his inner voice.
4/10

Simon Katich
97 runs at 24.45, 1x50
You can't kill the Krab. His leg has regenerated but he might not get the chance, at 36, to scuttle across the crease in green and gold any more. His greatest service to Australian cricket now might be to mentor Phil Hughes in the methods of making an unlikely style work against the world's best bowlers.
4/10

Ricky Ponting
113 runs at 16.14, 1x50
'Sadder still to watch it die than never to have known it', as someone once said. Never has a man wanted something more, and in wanting it pushed it further away. Perhaps he has learned that, for all of his efforts - and they were mighty - no amount of captaincy can overcome such a gulf in performance. England's bowlers had a head start with the Punter's brain scrambled before he reached the crease, and the infinitesimal dulling of his eye and hands did for him. Can and should come again in the middle order, a rheumy-eyed legend clearing a path towards a better future.
5/10

Usman Khawaja
58 runs at 29.00
Greeted with a revealing hysteria - Australians getting excited about 30-odd...? - Khawaja nonetheless has that priceless quality of time. He could have waved to his mum and dad, so early was he in position to pull Tremmers for four second ball up. However, the stats say that very few young batsmen come into the side at three and survive for long unless they are specialists or openers, and Khawaja is neither.
6/10

Michael Clarke
193 runs at 21.44, 1x50
Most culpable of all of Australia's top order, Clarke appeared handicapped by his back at Adelaide, and all of his frailties remained on display. The best bat by some distance in England in 2009, he was arguably the worst of all here on the experience-responsibility index. He probably needs to come to terms with the ambivalent attitude that his countrymen have towards him in order to progress. At least they discovered at Sydney that Australia's failings had nothing to do with who was captaining the team.
3/10

Mike Hussey
570 runs at 63.33, 2x100, 3x50
A triumph for whole-heartedness. If there was any Australian the English wished well it was Mr Cricket, a man unembarrassed by his overwhelming love for the game. His selfless, immediate attack on Swann in Brisbane spoke of a team player to the core [imagine if he'd edged that first pull up in the air], and Hussey stood with distinction upon the burning deck through all five matches. Courageous and skilled, he can take huge pride in the way England celebrated his wicket. He was the man.
9/10

Steve Smith
159 runs at 31.80, 1x50; 0 wickets
A batsman who bowls seemed to be the selectors verdict, and as they've said, they had a great summer, so we must take their word for it. There will be no shelter as Australia rebuild their team and Smith might benefit from a year in Div 1 county cricket, tightening everything up. He's probably on a level with Adil Rashid, and Rashid is nowhere near the England side right now.
5/10

Marcus North
49 runs at 16.33; 1 wicket at 110.00
No-one else called North has ever played Test cricket. That is Marcus's claim to fame. At least he holds one record.

Brad Haddin
360 runs at 43.00, 1x100, 3x50; 8 ct, 1st
As redoubtable as he is vulnerable outside the off peg early on, Haddin fought his nuts off with no little skill and the kind of grit that made Healy a legend. Naturally the selectors have axed him without explanation from the T20 side. But then, they've had a great summer etc etc.
7/10

Mitchell Johnson
15 wickets at 36.93; 122 runs at 17.22, 2x50
Deep breath then... The Barmy Army enjoyed Mitch perhaps more than men should: badges, songs, t-shirts, masks, he occupied their thoughts above all others. It was love, albeit forever unrequited. But then Mitch gave them so much to love: deliveries that swung past Brad Haddin like they'd been served by Pete Sampras, that armful of tattoos that speaks mutely of a tortured and uncertain soul, the mad rug and the buck teeth, the existential despair in those dark, dark eyes... It was a relationship born of experience, because Mitchell is another Steve Harmison, physically capable of immediate and thrilling devastation but mentally prone to introspection and self-pity. It is in the nature of sports followers to cling to the former once it has shown itself. Harmison was a chimeric presence in the England side, kept there by the ghostly vision of what he once was. Johnson is the same, a man doomed to humiliation by his occasional brilliance.
5/10

Peter Siddle
14 wickets at 34.57; 154 runs at 19.25
The Sizzler is emblematic of the player that Australia must confront and accept over the next couple of years. He's strong, willing, eager, hard to deter. He is also unpolished, gauche, a Merv Hughes rather than a Glenn McGrath. In short, he's not the kind of player who would get into a great side, but he can be the engine room of an improving one. England's success as a bowling unit has sprung in part from a core group knowledge of technique, and Siddle can't develop that alone. The appointment of the next bowling coach is key.
7/10

Ryan Harris
11 wickets at 25.54; 14 runs at 3.50
If Mitch is a new Harmi, the Harris is Simon Jones, a bowler of quality whose action imposes impossible strain on his body. Hopefully he'll have more luck than Jonah.
7/10

Ben Hilfenhaus
7 wickets at 59.28; 55 runs at 11.00
The Australian press settled on calling him 'Gentle Ben', not really the nickname you want as an opening bowler. Gentle he was, though. One commentator was practically apopleptic as he described the inswinger, yorker and bouncer that the Gentle one apparently bowls in State cricket.
3/10

Doug Bollinger
1 wicket at 130.00; 7 runs [no ave]
Picked when unfit by selectors who had a great etc etc. As he said, 'You're not going to turn down a Test match', but shouldn't have been put in the position to accept. Nonetheless, when fit, Douggie can bowl. So get him fit, then...
3/10

Xavier Doherty, Michael Beer
3 wickets at 102.00/1 wicket at 112.00; 27 runs at 9.00/4 runs at 4.00
Their most likely future is as quiz questions: 'which two spinners did Australia play in the Ashes of 2010-11?' Answer: these two. Possibly, if brought into a winning side against a very average one [Australia v England in about 1994 for example] they might have passed unnoticed.

NB: This post goes up as Brisbane, a city where I lived for three years, faces devastating flooding. Cricket's only a game. You'll see the real Australian spirit over the next few days.

Meet The New Boss: England player-by-player

2011-01-08T10:02:00.000-08:00

'When we were good, we were good enough,' said Andrew Strauss at the Oval in 2009, and he was right. It was hard to imagine anything other than a bit of nip and tuck this time, too, but then, as the old saying goes, it's called Test cricket for a reason...

Andrew Strauss
307 runs at 43.85, 1x100, 3x50
'One day you'll thank me for this,' Duncan Fletcher whispered in Strauss's shell-like when he made the weary decision to give the captaincy of the tour that dare not speak its name to Andrew Flintoff. It's one of those sentences that usually makes the recipient want to insert a slim knife through the eye and into the brain of the speaker, and yet there is truth in it. Strauss and Flower are the right men at the right time. The prevailing view on his captaincy is that it is functional, and yet it was he who suggested the broad strategy of drying Australia up that brought such dividends. It cuts against current batting mentality, as Strauss observed at Adelaide in 2006 when he was on the sharp end of it. With a pleasing perversity, he refused to yield to anything of the sort himself and slashing the third nut of the series to gully didn't alter his thinking. That's ballsy. The second innings hundred at Brisbane and the 60 in Sydney set a ruthless agenda.
9/10

Alastair Cook
766 runs at 127.66, 3x100, 2x50
Australia were undone by the least Australian person on earth. Justin Langer thought James Anderson was a pussy, so it's probably best that his view of the pre-tour Cook went unrecorded. Delicately boned, cow-eyed and from a good school he may be, but England have always believed, however hard the faith was tested. He entered a zone of piercing clarity in Brisbane and stayed there, resident of a nirvana that might never appear for so long again. At least he has known it once. Like Anderson, he fiddled with his natural technique before returning to what made him good in the first place. You don't need a trigger movement to know which balls to leave, just confidence and discipline. Still only 25, the bastard.
10/10

Jonathan Trott
445 runs at 89.00; 2x100, 1x50
Scratch, scrape, scratch, take block, stand up, scrape, take block, hit ball, repeat. Forever. The Trotters' guard is a thing of weird juju and obsessive-compulsive ritual probably best set to Dance Of The Knights, so epic is its scale. Rarely are neurotics so tough, too. His back foot bunt through wide mid-on is as spectacular and singular in its way as the Dilscoop or the Flamingo. Try it yourself in the nets if you disagree. Mitchell Johnson foundered on the rocks of the Trotters psyche.
9/10

Kevin Pietersen
360 runs at 60.00; 1x100, 1x50; 1 wicket at 16.00
Just as Spinal Tap were reborn with their performance of Derek Smalls' Jazz Odyssey, so the newer, older, maybe wiser KP played an innings of shimmering class in Adelaide. The follow-up 50-odd in Melbourne was beautifully judged too. Flower and Strauss could now ask him to lead the batting in the same way that Anderson leads the bowlers. While the hook at Johnson's bouncer in Sydney may have looked like a throwback brain-fade, there's more to it. Johnson also did Bell and Collingwood with his short one. It comes from a low arm but somehow ends up above the batsman's eye-line right at the death, its danger compounded by the fact that danger is hardly Mitch's middle name. The one wicket, of Michael Clarke, was priceless in many respects.
8/10

Paul Collingwood
83 runs at 13.83; 2 wickets at 36.50
Getting teary just thinking about him. His runs and wickets are replaceable, but as his team-mates have said, Colly offers less definable, less common qualities too. The grab to dismiss Ponting joins the Hayden catch at Bristol in the file marked 'immortal'. The last couple of days at Sydney were like watching the end of Old Shep. Countries are built by men like this.
5/10

Ian Bell
329 runs at 65.80, 1x100, 3x50
Timing is everything, especially for Ian Bell. Not just in the enviable beauty of his shotmaking, but in being part of an era of tolerance and belief. Had he played a generation earlier, he might well have been as enigmatic as Hick or Ramprakash. He almost certainly would have failed consistently against the bowling that haunted them, and in the ramshackle side that they played. Should not move above five, and should not see that as a defeat - Steve Waugh didn't, after all.
8/10

Matthew Prior
252 runs at 50.40, 1x100, 1x50; 23 ct
Cricket writers of a certain age experience occasional printed yearnings for the days when a keeper was selected to keep - even when Knott was in the side they dreamed of Keith Andrew and Bob Taylor - but those years are distant things. Prior has learned to keep while in the Test team, and he's powerfully athletic now. They payoff comes with that broadsword of a bat, especially when the coup de grace is required. The only mystery now is why he's not in the ODI side.
8/10

Tim Bresnan
11 wickets at 19.50; 39 runs at 19.50
'England are better with a Yorkshireman in the side,' said Geoffrey Boycott [somehow omitting the words 'called Geoffrey Boycott' from the middle of the sentence] and booger me, he weren't wrong. Blessed with the quality of being 'thick as two short planks' [according to Swann] Bresnan possesses other assets too, including the traditional fast bowler's backside and the strength and power to run in hard all day. These things we knew about: the artfulness he brought to his reverse swing bowling was a glorious surprise. Add solid late-order biffing and you have a formidable contender for a permanent place.
8/10

Graeme Swann
15 wickets at 39.80; 88 runs at 22.00
Swann will perhaps never have a greater compliment paid to him than the pitches Australia prepared to negate him. His figures won't tell the story of his tour: buried deep in them is a match-winning spell at Adelaide that beat the rain by vital moments, and all of the hard yakka of tying Australia down. His 219.1 overs were the most on either side, and they cost just 2.72 runs each. Immaculate at slip, too. He is the spirit of the team, and the Swann-Anderson Bromance remains a tender thing, captured in his Brokeback Mountain-inspired video diaries.
7/10

James Anderson
24 wickets at 26.04; 22 runs at 4.40
When Swanny is commissioned [as he surely will be] to direct the Jimmy Anderson biopic, the scenes on this tour will be set to 'I had the time of my life': the burst at Adelaide that opened up Australia, the dash home for the birth of his daughter, the heroics at Sydney despite a virus that had him falling asleep in the dressing room after the game. He is now a major player in world cricket, a bowler of beguiling grace and skill.
10/10

Chris Tremlett
17 wickets at 23.35; 19 runs at 6.33
A body permanently on the edge of injury, a face on the brink of tears, the young Tremmers was - as former Hampshire team-mate Shane Warne recalled - unplayable in the nets and invisible on the pitch. Yet the move to Surrey, a mature mind and physique and the confidence of Flower and Saker have allowed him to become the bowler he always looked like he could be. As one of those who never thought he'd make it, I've never been more happy to be proven wrong. England will probably only ever need four bowlers when three of them are Anderson, Tremlett and Swann.
9/10

Steve Finn
14 wickets at 33.14; 3 runs at 3.00
May worry about how he fits back into the side in the short-term, but he shouldn't. He is really a member of the next generation rather than this one, and England's stocks look rich. Didn't fall over, either, which was good.
7/10

Stuart Broad
2 wickets at 80.50; 0 runs
Cruel injury, but it's an ill wind, and he will be fresh for the World Cup. Will have much more Ashes cricket too, and can go back to his best position as first change behind Anderson and Tremlett.

Next time: Australia player-by-player.

Fifth Test, Third Day: Paul Collingwood says 'Fuck It'

2011-01-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

As Shane Watson edged behind in Australia's first innings, he said aloud, 'Oh No', picked up on the stump mike. He's a well brought up boy, a credit to Mr and Mrs W. I remember as a kid exclaiming quite loudly 'No!' in a spoiled brat voice when I popped a leading edge up in the air in some game or another, and being shocked as the sound came out of my mouth. Always weird when your internal monologue spills into the real world [over the years I've met a surprising amount of people who admit to commentating on themselves in their heads as they play... and you don't want to be involuntarily gobbing that out].

Watching Paul Collingwood last night, his thought processes seemed as stark and obvious as if he'd spoken them. Often the years of mental battle weigh on you more heavily than any physical injury or stress, because batting is an inward fight, a constant search for elusive stillness and instinct. Sometimes it becomes unreachable, and the short-circuit comes.

Beer was bowling to him, and, contrary to the hype he wasn't useless, or Paul Harris. He got a little turn, but more impressively, some drift and dip, and the ball thudded heavily into the pitch. Colly left a few and then came down to him. In those instants before he struck the ball, he would have been aware that it was a fraction too wide, that he wasn't quite there, and instead of dropping the bat he thought, 'fuck it', and swung anyway.

The shot was more revealing than most: it was a shot made in the accumulation of every failure that has gone before it, a shot of a man who has fought for a long time and who - somewhere in his psyche - wants to go out on his shield, to feel the relief of the struggle being over. That's what Colly did. Vale - and well played for all of those years. See you on the other side.

NB: This post went up before Colly announced his Test retirement: a more fitting tribute will appear in the player-by-player shindig to come.

Fifth Test, Second Day: Such a fine line between clever and stupid

2011-01-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

Cook’s talent scientifically quantified at last: ‘He’s got 600, 650 runs in the series so it’s pretty obvious he's talented. He’s probably more talented than a KP, KP’s so naturally gifted with the shots he’s got and Cooky’s not got that. He relies on the shots that he has got and his mental toughness to get him through. He’s shown how talented he is this trip’ – James Anderson

Sub-editors of Australia unite: ‘Beer goes flat after line ball delivery’ [Australian]; ‘No ball leaves bitter taste for Beer’ [Courier-Mail]; ‘Bitter taste of Beer no ball’ [Daily Telegraph]; ‘Full-strength Beer shows his spirit’ [SMH]

No idea: ‘We’re always trying to find ways to get behind the line. Whether we feel enclosed with the nets being there, I don't know what it is, but I'll still bowl half a foot over in the nets. I don't know how we can fix that’ – Mitchell Johnson

MJ – healing the world one at a time: ‘The boys were upbeat with him and consoling. We've got to keep doing that tonight, just be around him’ – Mitchell Johnson on Michael Beer

Loving us now: ‘Philip Hughes has turned the corner, says Mike Atherton’ - Sydney Morning Herald headline

Et Tu, Victor? ‘For a while Strauss might have been facing David Hasselhoff, a celebrity guest at the SCG, rather than Ben Hilfenhaus’ – Vic Marks, Guardian

Fifth Test, First Day: Say hello, wave goodbye

2011-01-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

Call that a day? 134-4 - usually a session in this series isn't it...

No pressure, then: 'Usman Khawaja attempted to fill the growing void that is Australia's leadership vacuum. In just his first relatively modest Test innings, the delightfully poised left-hander has already done enough to show why he should bat above Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke' - Malcolm Conn, The Australian

Cheers mate: 'Colly has been a brilliant servant for English cricket and is well liked by the management. This is England's chance to show there is no room for sentiment within their squad. If England want to become the best side in the world they have got to be ruthless. Morgan is as tough as they come...' - Andrew Flintoff writes about his old chum, News Of The World

Fred's qualifications as a columnist: 'Don't know anything about Aussie no. 3!' - via Twitter

What Fred was watching on Sky Sports last night: 'Can't believe they're moving the darts for the cricket' [as the world darts semi-final was shifted from Sky Sports 1 to Sky Sports 2 at 11pm]

And... 'Don't stop for lunch and tea at the arrows! Real sport!' - both via Twitter

Weather forecast: 'Sydney is baking today. Hotter than Alastair Cook in a pair of skinny jeans' - Graeme Swann, via Twitter

The Third Annual OB Innings Of The Year Award

2010-12-31T07:53:00.000-08:00

It's odd looking back on the first and second editions of this arbitrary, random and little-known Award [it's not an award that's actually awarded, of course, nor do its recipients know anything about receiving it, and no-one has to turn up at a dodgy casino to collect it but if you are the winner, feel free to email to address on the right...]. The first, offered in 2008, took in a 'career-saving' hundred from Andrew Strauss [fancy that...], and had Virender Sehwag pegged as 'misunderstood' [we hear your truth now, Viru...]; while last year's opened with twin hundreds from Phil Hughes and Cricinfo's opinion that Australia's 'transitional period is over'. And it was, too... just not in the way you thought, boys...

As much as anything they serve notice of the brutal short-termism of writing about sport. Time shifts, contexts change. What's true today is true in a different way tomorrow, let alone next year. But with that, the envelope please... As usual, the criteria for this glittering prize is simple: it has to be an innings played in the last year, that I've seen, either in the flesh or on the box, that upholds the noble principal that a transcendent knock is more than just the numbers in the book, that it's how as well as how many.

There is little doubt about the batsman of the year, or the bat. Sachin Tendulkar has risen again, perhaps higher than ever before, and he has done it with some sort of deeply mysterious, Arturian broadsword in his hand, a bat that has very probably scored more Test match hundreds than any bat ever made. Its middle is blackening now, the cracks horizontal as well as vertical, its deep bow deeply exaggerated by the thousands of balls that it has struck. But what a bat it has been, and no wonder the little master won't lay it to rest. He'll probably have to throw it back into the lake, or at the very least re-insert it into the stone from which it came, because it must have something supernatural about it. Imagine how it feels to hold it, especially now it has struck the man's fiftieth ton. Let's hope it goes to a museum where we can all gaze upon it and wonder. Was Tendulkar ever better than he was in Bangalore in October, a towering 214 in the first innings, and that icy 50-odd not out in the second? It was the match that took him back to the top of the rankings for the ninth time. What a man he is, and has been.

At times, Tendulkar visibly conquered his nerves. Like a genetic freak who feels no pain, VVS Laxman doesn't appear to have any. If the theme of this year has been the final decline of the monolithic Australian empire, then he was the man who knifed them in that deathless next game in Mohali. They say that some blades are so sharp, you don't feel them go in: Laxman's 73 not out left them gutted before they realised it. He did it again in Durban, too, with 96 that set up an equalising win against South Africa, India's potential usurpers.

It's no batsman's year in South Africa - not with those pitches they're doctoring anyhow - and nor was it in a green and grey English summer in which Pakistan's brilliant but tainted seamers bowled some mesmerising stuff. Eoin Morgan delivered a pitch-perfect ODI ton under lights at the Rose Bowl to do in Australia, but then that doesn't quite have the cache it once did. Jonathan Trott served notice of the winter to come with a double at Lord's but surely the best innings of the summer were a brace of hundreds from Tamim Iqbal at Lord's and then Old Trafford. His eye is as pure as his heart, and Bangladesh have a true star in their midst.

Jacques Kallis got a hair transplant and a double hundred back to back, and it's hard to decide which one was more impressive, but then it's easy to be blase about Jacques. You get the feeling he's Jonathan Trott's hero, though, and KP named him the greatest cricketer ever, albeit via the underwhelming medium of Twitter.

For an Englishman though, 2010 has been about England versus Australia, first in the Carribbean at the T20 World Cup and then in Oz itself [and it really has been like Oz rather than Aus, hasn't it, we certainly ain't in Kansas any more...]. Mike Hussey's knee-trembling last-over semi-final hitathon was gobsmacking, and his renaissance in the Ashes Tests proves that it doesn't always hurt to be a nice guy in love with the game. He is a man beyond cynicism. Well played, Huss.

But it's England who have prevailed and the T20 final perhaps carries more weight than it seems. Australia had found a key to their T20 cricket at last, pairing Shaun Tait and Dirk Nannes as the short-form, less hairy Lillee and Thommo. They were terrifyingly quick [T20 will surely be the arena for the world's fastest bowling in the future], yet come the final, the team visibly cracked when Kevin Pietersen simply walked down the wicket to Tait and deposited him into the crowd over long off. Suddenly the mirage of England actually winning a limited overs trophy became solid. Kieswetter's violent unpredictability played its part, but Pietersen's eye and skill were unmatchable.

Strange that his year bowed so much in the middle, but the double ton in Adelaide pointed to a new, less fraught KP. Again, Australia could not bowl to him. England's sheer weight of runs have, along with a new bowling potency, retained the Ashes, and outside of Pietersen, they have been scored by the side's great pragmatists: Strauss, Cook and Trott.

Of all of them, few moments matched the one when those of us in the Northern hemisphere awoke to news of the fourth day's play in Brisbane. Here was a Test match drowning in hype that began with England losing a wicket to the third ball of the series, so often the kind of portent that has heralded disaster. Instead, the scoreboard read 309-1. England's flag was in the beach, Australia's bowlers undermined. It was Cook who blunted them, and come the end of his epic, bloodless, 235 not out, he was honest enough to admit that he wasn't certain that he actually had it in him until his moment came.

Therein is the greatness of the game and what it offers to its combatants. It wasn't the most beautiful innings ever played, but it was symbolic of the trajectories of both teams: they crossed as one rose and one fell. Cookie, with your girlie eyes and iffy backlift, we salute you: the innings of the year is yours.

Fourth Test, Wrap Up: Twilight of the Gods

2010-12-30T00:54:00.000-08:00

Threes and Fives: Michael Vaughan, now the Beeb's bumptious but insightful between-ball waffler, said the other day that he'd only had two players that he didn't want in the side landed on him by the selectors during his years as England captain*.

It's a consistency of selection that England nicked from Australia, of whom it used to be claimed that the only thing more difficult than getting into the side was getting out of it again. Now the rot goes far deeper than the 34-odd players used over the last four years. Choosing the team is only half of selection. Choosing how the team fits together is the other, tougher half.

England's batting order only really dropped into place with the unlikely arrival of Jonathan Trott [strange now to think that his rival for the place was the lost prince, Ramps...]. Asked on TV the other night to name great England number threes, Bob Willis came up with Barrington, Cowdrey and Dexter. The gap since has yawned somewhat. The theory with number three is that it's either the position for your best bat - Richards, Ponting, Lara [when he felt like it] - or someone who is essentially a third opener - Boon, Dravid, Amla. Trott is the latter and offers a solidity that Bell couldn't come up with. He has quelled thoughts of Pietersen shifting up. He's also weird enough to bat there for years, whittling away at the crease, in thrall to the rituals that get him through. England's order will probably jiggle after Sydney and the likely farewell of faithful Colly, but Bell to five and Morgan in as a tyro six offers a line-up that can push them towards the top of the rankings.

By contrast, it's hard to think of an Australian who is batting in the right position. There are probably only two: Hughes, who they should stick with, and Hussey. Australia haven't had to think about number three for a generation, but Punter has done his noble time there. That leaves Watson, who is a natural number five, Clarke, who has failed at four but made his name at five, and Ponting, should he stay to shepherd the transition, ready to bat five. And of course Hussey, who looks fit for another long stretch at... number five.

Trotters - not the maddest in the dressing room: 'There has been more ribbing this week about my crease-scratching, especially when I put in one final scratch after James Anderson had been dismissed to leave our side all out. I’ll probably still be doing it when I’m 80 years old and standing in the street... I’d like to point out, though, that I’m not the most superstitious person in our changing room. On this tour in Australia, I’ve seen a few things go on that make me think, “Crikey, I’m not as mad as everybody else”... I’m not going to name names, but you might want to look out for the bloke who always bowls the same number of warm-up balls to mid-off, and then to mid-on...'

And...: 'Apparently the only other batsman to average over 100 in Ashes cricket is Albert Trott, an Australian all-rounder who played around the end of the 19th century. My grandfather always said that he was related to Albert Trott, though I never knew how. What I do know is that Trott shot himself at the age of 41, after living his life in the fast lane. I prefer the slow lane myself' - Daily Telegraph

Compliment of the day: It's massive pressure coming into the side for the Boxing Day Test. Luckily he's thick as two short planks so he didn't realise' - Graeme Swann on Tim Bresnan

*One was Darren Pattinson, the identity of the other remains mysterious...

Fourth Test, Third Day: Yorkshire 1, England 1, Australia 0

2010-12-28T06:26:00.000-08:00

Proper bowler: 'They say England play well when there is a Yorkshireman in the side...' - Geoffrey Boycott, Telegraph

Modesty Blaize: 'He [Ricky Ponting]'s out of form, He's under pressure and he starts playing an innings that's totally foreign to him. There are certain people I've seen in my career who in playing a long, disciplined rearguard action are comfortable with it. I could do it' - Geoffrey Boycott, TMS

Number of the day: Five - the amount of times Shane Watson has been dismissed between 51 and 57 in his last 11 innings

Battle of the metaphors: 'Fish rots from the head' - Sydney Daily Telegraph; 'It was like the band was still playing as the stern began to rise' - The Australian; 'Like visiting a dear friend with a terminal disease' - Herald Sun; 'Perth can be seen for what it was, one dead cat bounce' - SMH

Tim Bresnan - hacks get poetic: 'He has a heart the size of a cabbage' - Kevin Mitchell, Guardian; 'He looks like a coalminer and weekend leagues cricketer' - Greg Baum, SMH

Who can he be referring to? 'Andrew Strauss's side has been a cut above the glamorous England outfits of the 1980s, an era in which the team's failings were hidden by the emergence of a handful of gifted players.That was a time of rebel tours, dissolution, cynical domestic exchanges, lazy champions and false prophets' - Peter Roebuck, SMH

Someone call Alanis Morrissette: 9am: 'In my heart and in my mind, I still believe he [KP] inside-edged that ball' - Ricky Ponting on ABC Radio; 4pm - bowled off an inside edge

Fourth Test, Second Day: Simply Seeking Clarification

2010-12-27T07:13:00.000-08:00

KP - the Verdict: 'Terrific batsman, great entertainer, huge presence at the crease. But still a wanker' - Chucker, The Age

What happened honest, by R Ponting, age 36 and 8 days: 'I entered into discussion with the umpires about the detail of the decision having viewed replays being shown on the big screen. I accept the discussion went for too long and I understand the reasons for the dissent charge handed down by the ICC this evening. I was simply trying to seek clarification from the umpires regarding how the decision had been made after being referred to the third umpire' - CA statement

Trotters - lone boozer: 'he is the batting equivalent of the fellow at a party who no one recognises, who stays in the kitchen on his own but is last to leave' - Mike Selvey, Guardian

Righteous anger: 'Not one Australian applauds Prior's half-century - not good to see' - Michael Vaughan, via Twitter

Old Proghead daddio: Michael Vaughan is now following Muse on Twitter

Pots, kettles etc: 'And the award for Most Graceless Captain in World Sport goes to...Ricky Ponting. What a shocking little hissy fit' - Piers Morgan, via Twitter

Cross-sport commentary: 'another Aussie bottling it on the darts' - Andrew Flintoff, via Twitter

Fourth Test, First Day: The Death Of Momentum

2010-12-26T08:56:00.001-08:00

Parwatch - all over now: Manchester United take a 4-0 half time lead over Chelsea at Old Trafford, only for Chelsea to draw 4-4. In the next fixture Chelsea win 7-0, before United strike back with a 6-0 victory the following week. They play again, when Chelsea go 3-0 up after ten minutes... Roger Federer beats Rafael Nadal 6-0, 6-1, 6-0, then Nadal hits him with a triple bagel next time out... Frazier kayos Ali in round number one, before Ali sparks Smokin' Joe after a minute in the return...

Not really on, is it? Cricket is unique in that closely-matched opponents sometimes display that closeness over a series rather than in matches that can veer wildly from one side to another. It is a sport that is measured differently, more slowly, than most, and that has narratives that take their time to emerge. It is also more of a slave to external forces - the climate, the conditions - than the others. The concept of momentum has seeped in from other sports. It's an easy line to drop into the endless press conferences [their volume also a product of the sprawl of a series]. But it's hard to make a case for its existence. Generally speaking, the longer the teams play for, the more chance that the best side will win, and in cricket, they play for a long time. That's all the momentum you need, isn't it?

On Tremmers: Cricket, in common with most sports, is in thrall to aesthetics: it's the reason that Lara's cover drive hits a place in the heart that Simon Katich's doesn't. Aesthetically, Chris Tremlett appears lab-produced, a physically-perfect specimen built for fast bowing. The incongruity of his apparent psychological frailty, the propensity for that giant body to implode, cut against the visual evidence to produce an anomoly that was as amusing as it was frustrating. Tremmers is the one laughing now, and rightly so. Is he the new Andy Caddick? The next Richard Ellison? England's McGrath? Come back in five years for the answer...

You sure? 'Australia has suffered its worst cricketing day for 100 years' - Peter Roebuck, SMH

Past tense, Michael? 'Ricky has been an amazing leader, a wonderful player' - Michael Clarke

Things we don't seem to talk about any more: The Kookaburra ball

Stat of the day I: '[In] The second over of the match... Phil Hughes took Tremlett for more than 10% of the final total' - Mike Selvey, Guardian

Stat of the day II: 'Australia was bowled out for 98, roughly a run for every 1000 spectators' - Peter Roebuck, SMH

Phil Space Trophy Flight Of Fancy: 'Of the phoenix that was Australia in Perth, only ashes remain. The namesake trophy - once Australia's pride and joy - is again England's to parade as they see fit' - Greg Baum, SMH

Third Test, final day: Time through the hourglass

2010-12-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

Today, Dominic Cork announced that he'll be one of the contestants on Dancing On Ice, confirmation that this endlessly competitive, estimable cricketer has crept onto the celeb Z-list. Yes, it'll be funny to see him expressing his hitherto well-concealed aesthetic bent, but hell, ain't it sad, too? They all go so quickly, those days on the field - as Buk once put it, 'they run away like wild horses over the hills'.

The newly-connected Twittering world draws the lines even more clearly now: there's Goughy flying home from doing his laddish radio bits in Perth, MPV joshing with his golf partners, Tresco sitting, suited and booted, at the Sports Personality of the Year awards, and many more of them, newly embarked on their long afterlives.

This Ashes series feels concertina-d; three-fifths gone already and it's barely started, the other two matches back to back. It's over so quickly in a way it never used to be, played in a rush so that they can shoehorn in lots of one-dayers before another world cup and then another full summer, another winter, all strung together in such a way that the rhythm of the game feels disrupted. Such acceleration saps the joy for everyone. Even the players are wishing away their days.

It doesn't always do to be winsome, but the great series in cricket have a feel of semi-permanence to them, or at least they should have. Even the Ashes of 2005 unfolded, and they were nothing compared to the summer-long duels of the 1980s and 1990s, where the Tests would stop for county and state fixtures, and the one-day series were fitted in halfway through.

It comes and it goes quickly, this stuff, and it needs to be held and savoured for a while because before you know it, you're Corky, sat backstage in a dreadful TV studio, pulling on a lycra jumpsuit and hoping that the public still dig you.

Third Test, Day Three: Underneath The Lid

2010-12-18T06:53:00.000-08:00

Middle day, middle Test - halfway through the series already. All to play for then, boys...

Best Readers Poll: 'Is this the worst Australian team of all-time?' - Guardian, Friday morning

Who's on first? 'The way they were out was exactly the way we planned. They'll have to second-guess themselves now' - Ryan Harris

Momentum - a new understanding: 'We're not worried about momentum. They are going to take some momentum with a positive performance on their front, but we're going to concentrate on our game. We're still full of confidence, we're still 1-0 up in the series and there's always tomorrow and we still believe we can do it' - Chris Tremlett

The Great Twitter Rug Debate, sponsored by Advanced Hair Studio: 'Seems Ricky's found his tongue! Is he in your barnet gang? Looks thick on top' [Andrew Flintoff to Michael Vaughan]; 'I believe he is a member of the club... He is getting very excited.. Job's on the line' [Vaughan to Flintoff]; 'Is it true that Kallis has had a thatch too? Between the 3 of you there's about 25000 test runs under them rugs!' [Flintoff's reply]

The last person you expected to say something sensible: 'Teams are always going to do well sometimes. You can't just think that they're going to be poor or be great all the time' - Peter Siddle

Third Test, Day Two: Double Reverse Ferret

2010-12-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

The reverse ferret is a 1990s adaptation of Orwell's famous notion of Doublethink - the art of being able to hold two apparently contradictory opinions as true. It was invented specifically for journalists by Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, and used whenever an overnight volte face was required. As the cameras scanned the press boxes during the day's play, hacks of both hues - Australian and English - wore the looks of me who were about to reverse ferret on two of their favourite and previously immutable subjects, Mitchell Johnson and the destination of the Ashes.

Of course, the true art of the Reverse Ferret is to allow just enough wriggle room to reverse it once more...

Too good to be true: 'A mythical God. He grabbed the world and his own fate and forced it to roll his way' - Peter Lalor on Mitch [The Australian]

Not us, mate: 'They [the selectors] were pilloried by any number of former players mystified as to why Johnson was not sent back to State cricket' - Malcolm Conn [The Australian]

All down to you now, buddy: 'When Johnson is good, Australia is good. When he loses his way it seems to drag down the entire show. Australia pins its mojo to his mast' - Robert Craddock, Courier Mail

As you were: 'Mitchell sets off the Collapsometer! England had batted so sublimely in this a series that we had almost forgotten how our "collapsometer" worked.' - Vic Marks, Guardian

Tweet Reason: 'Just hold fire for a day or so ... It's not over yet.. We could chase 350' - Michael Vaughan

Double Reverse Room For Manouvre Man Of The Day: 'Australia will be forced to revive its Ashes hopes without Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke after the leaders failed again' - Malcolm Conn [The Australian]

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow: 'It's a long game, Test cricket, and there is time for decisions and revisions which, as Alfred Prufrock says, a minute will reverse. Harold Pinter was a keen cricket fan and wrote a poem about Len Hutton that went "I saw Len Hutton in his prime/Another time/another time". He sent the three-line poem to his friend, the playwright Simon Gray, and when he hadn't heard anything from him for a week or so rang to ask what he thought of it.Gray replied that he hadn't finished it yet. The same could be said of the Ashes and some of its key protagonists' - Peter Lalor

Third Test, Day One: The Sound Of One Knife Sharpening

2010-12-16T10:06:00.000-08:00

Is he mad... Is he bad... Is he sad... Ricky Ponting WACA Ashes Special

Early Onset: 'Ponting is physically at his fittest and looks in fabulous shape, but his mind, 36 years old on Monday, is winding down' - Peter English, Cricinfo

False Memory Syndrome: 'Ricky Ponting turns 36 this month and he appears to be morphing into Steve Waugh in the final few years of his Test career - jerky, nervous, uncertain' - Robert Craddock, Courier Mail

Dry your eyes mate: 'He doesn't want to leave the scene, as he showed with his funereal shuffle off the ground' - Peter English, Cricinfo

Bunny: 'He's nearly done. Jimmy Anderson has him three times in the series for just 15 runs' - Crash Craddock, Courier Mail

From the other side: 'The Don, had he been alive, would have been appalled' - Andrew Faulkner on the decision to omit Michael Beer from the XI

Everyday occurrence: 'Yet another Ashes series slips away' - Malcolm Conn, The Australian

Dead Man Walking's Shoes: 'Michael Clarke, leader in waiting' [cricinfo]; 'Captaincy bolter Michael Hussey' [SMH]; 'Shane Watson, come on down' - [Herald Sun]

Key criteria: 'How can we have a bloke captain Australia with tattoos? It's just not on' - Ian Chappell

Absolutely no exaggeration: 'Such mistrust [of the media] is understandable given the September 11-like coverage of his relationship and break-up with Lara Bingle' - Andrew Webster on Michael Clarke

From the coach's mouth: 'Each and every one of us must relax and live in the moment, enjoying every contest between bat and ball...all day, every day' - Tim Nielsen [via his blog]