No country for old men

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

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.

Ricky Ponting And The Ides Of March

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

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.

Random Observations Up To And Including Match 29

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

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....

The Shock Of The New

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...

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

Shoaib kicks ass early doors

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.

KP: Year Zero, Ball One

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

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.