Days of Grace

A bomb went off at Grace Road yesterday, one of those comedy cartoon ones that has 'BOMB' written on the side in big white letters and a long fuse that slowly burns down while it gets passed between the characters, everyone wondering who'll be left holding it when it finally explodes. Matthew Hoggard, Tim Boon and chairman Neil Davidson turned out to be the ones covered in soot.

As with lots of wars these days, it wasn't entirely clear afterwards who had won. Hoggy, being Hoggy and one of England's stoutest yeomen, has all of Leicester on his side, including the players, staff and membership. But this is county cricket, and this is England, and so Neil Davidson has his job title and the minutiae of company procedure on his [The Skiver provides an excellent summary here*].

Ex-milkman Davidson then did what all chairmen under the cosh do - he immediately went on holiday. Poor old Hoggy, who must be wondering exactly what he has done to offend the Gods over the past couple of years, had to go and bowl at Mark Ramprakash. Ramps only got 179 not out. Under that famous stack of hair, Hoggy grimaced and ran in once more, uphill and into the wind.

* J-rod was presumably otherwise disposed appearing on the radio. I was driving home minding my own business when he turned up on Five Live, defending the indefensible Ricky Ponting. I almost crashed my car...

Hoggard's Run

Matthew Hoggard must feel like he's appearing in a 70s sci-fi flick, sacked by Yorkshire in part for breaching the directives on age. 

In this new dystopia of county cricket, clubs fielding young players are 'incentivised', thus producing teams full of future champions.

That never works. Sport is a genuine meritocracy, a talentocracy if such a word exists. Mike Tyson could be heavyweight champ at 20, George Foreman at 46. Tendulkar can be an international at 17 and 36. A generation artificially ramped into county teams will be weak, not strong.

The IPL demands young players, too, but then the IPL is not culling at the other end. It runs on nous and star power. It runs on merit and talent. Its the only way.

The Ballad of Matthew Hoggard

We'll be seeing a lot of Matthew Hoggard over the next few weeks: he has a book out, a serialisation in the Times and a column at Cricinfo. Come the Ashes, he'll join the noble ranks of the Fallen of 2005 - Tresco, Gilo, Simon Jones, Geraint Jones, maybe Harmi, perhaps Vaughany - as ghosts on the sidelines, young men who know that the best moments of their sporting lives have already been and gone.

Hoggy's end has been the most sudden. No second chances for him. That seems harsher because he was the stoutest of yeoman, as ingenuous as his haystack of hair. No-one worked harder for his wickets, no-one celebrated them with more childlike delight, and no man hit a better off drive than the one he hit at Trent Bridge on that deathless summer evening. The best eight not out of all time. 

His book throws the suddenness of his dropping into sharp relief. His wife had post-natal depression, he and she weren't getting on. He was getting depressed himself, 'doing a Tres, going cuckoo' as he told Vaughan, mid-over.  One bad game and it was over. It was more than a dropping, because it came with a tolling bell. They said he'd lost his zip, that indefinable thing. Here one day, gone the next. 

The cruelest thing of all is that it was fair, and that can be hard to accept. Hoggy needs a villain, and it seems like it's the ECB. 'We've had the same problems with the ECB since I started international cricket,' he says. 'There were people slagging them off when I first came in and there are people still slagging them off. And it's not the ECB who pick the side anyway. See if you can find a player with a good word to say about the ECB. What are they going to do, sue me for telling the truth?'

So Hoggy's bad guys are not his captain or his coach or the selectors, or even the time and circumstance that robbed him of his form, but the ECB, who can legitimately argue that they provide a stupendous lifestyle with awesome perks while it lasts. 

Sadly, it's blame displacement. It's a soft-landing for the mind. The real bad guy here is sport, where one day you're in, and the next day you're out. Twas ever thus. It's hard, even harder when it's a good man like Hoggy, but it's what makes it great.