Locked in the arms of a Krejzy life

Cricket: the game of desperate and beautiful anomalies.

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The dream debut is the dreariest of sporting cliches. But Jason's Krejza's first bowl in Test cricket - all eight or so hours of it - was gloriously, illogically, undeniably dreamlike. To recap:

His first three overs went for 32.

His first Test wicket was Dravid, his second was Sehwag.

His were the most expensive debut bowling figures in 1,892 Test matches. 

He speared the tail in a spell of 5-19.

He became the eighth man in Tests to take eight wickets on debut (more dreaminess: Lance Klusener is one of the others...).

He dismissed three of the big four, plus Sehwag and Dhoni, and had Tendulkar dropped - twice.

He went at 4.9 runs per over.

At one point he was on a hat trick.

He took 0-199 in his only warm-up match, meaning his two bowls in India so far have gone for over 400.

It was his first-ever five-fer in first class cricket.

Presumably he woke up after that lot covered in sweat and thinking he'd gone to a wedding in his pyjamas.

Now, does anyone actually know if he can bowl or not? Anyone?

Batting: endless failure and despair

A nice little stat from Nagpur:

Sachin has more scores of 50+ than any other player in Tests: 

91, made in 251 innings.

By comparison, Ricky Ponting has 77 in 204 innings

Brian Lara 82 in 232 innings

Jacques Kallis 78 in 209 inns

Rahul Dravid 78 in 222 inns

Thus, statistically, even these great players fail more often than they succeed. And the bowlers try to tell you it's a batsman's game...

NB: India's debutant in Nagpur, Murali Vijay, just made a double hundred in an opening stand of 462 for Tamil Nadu against Maharashtra. His partner Abhinav Mukund got a triple. New ball wasn't doing much, then?

New Labour for the new labourers

In the UK, we used to have a Minister for Sport. Now we have a Ministry for Culture, which includes sport. It's run by doe-eyed Andy Burnham who last week was upset by how much money the Premiership chavs and proles were rolling in, but this week felt queasy about noble England lowering themselves to play for the Stanford dollar.

Oh yeah? Tell it to Darren Sammy, MS Dhoni, Swapnil Asnodkar, Shahid Afridi and all of the other kids from the villages of West Indies, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka who have been lifted up by playing for money in the Stanford match, the IPL and ICL. Money has driven cricket since 1844. Andy Burnham should find someone whose cash can get a bat into the hands of kids from Moss Side, Croxteth and Peckham, someone whose cash can lift up the people he apparently represents.

A list of recent cultural developments that haven't disturbed the Minister's delicate sensibility: 

Damian Hurst flogging his Beautiful Inside My Head Forever exhibition for £70m 

Daniel Craig cleaning up in the new James Bond film 

Louis Hamilton making £10m from his F1 season

Andy Murray winning $3m this summer  

They must be devaluing art, cinema and sport too? No? Andy? Hello....

Objects of fetish

The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind.

St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into the consciousness by signing one of the biggest stars of the day, Tony Greig, to front them. Greig not only used the bat but debuted the classic 'mitts', the one-piece batting gloves that became instant objects of fetish. After a century of lumpen sausage gloves (and even spikes for the nets) how sleek and 21st century were Greiggy's mitts. Club grounds were soon awash with SP bats and gloves. If I remember correctly, even King Viv had a brief SP flirtation post Jumbo and before Duncan Fearnley. Then as soon as they had arrived, they were gone (although a cursory search reveals you can still pick up SP bats in Oz).

The Batsman landed an SP from a bloke my father met on a building site. It was far too heavy for my puny early adolescent wrists but the pull of the logo was great. I used it the first time I batted through an innings (instant nostalgia: first bat I scored a fifty with was a Slazenger, first hundred with a Gray Nicolls Scoop (!), thousand runs in a season for the first time with a County: Christ I can even remember how each one smelt. The two best I ever held were a Slazenger V12 that belonged to a teammate - I was still in and using it when he came to the wicket; he was saintly enough not to demand it back at that moment - and a short-handled Jumbo in a sale at a shop in Kingston (Surrey, not Jamaica) that picked up like a wand and that I've always regretted not buying).

Selecting and using bats looms heavily in the psyche of almost every batsman (see Marcus Trescothick's recent autobiography, and Ramps' devotion to the Gray Nicolls Predator that took him to the hundred hundreds). When you pick up a bat that you're going to use, you just know. You have to be strong if it's a make you don't favour. 

KP will now front adidas's assault on the bat market, while Freddie looked like he was using Puma out in Antigua. The Batsman has met Puma's batmaker and can testify to his talent. He did, however, look up from his lathe and lament, "it all depends how good your stickers are these days..."

NB: The names of bats used to reflect their shape or heritage: Jumbo, Scoop, Signature etc. Now they're becoming as nonsensical as car brands. The adidas range are called Incurza, Libra and Pellara. Which one are you?

The Stanford Non-Prison Experiment (ii)

The papers here in England were a festival of predictability, albeit mitigated in terms of length by their need to devote several acres of otherwise useful space to the latest developments at Harringay Hotspurs and/or some man who drove a billion-dollar racing car slightly faster than some other man. The prevailing view, naturally, was: England - rubbish, Stanford Superstars - heartwarming, now can we go to India please... 

But the nugget of elusive truth was in there, and the Batsman finally stumbled on it via this quote from Giles Clarke, the ECB's own shining superstar: 'the week has brought to the surface a large amount of cultural and philosophical issues'.

Giles old mate, you've got that one right. 

Some years ago, Bill Drummond, who was a pop star with a group called KLF, took a million quid - which represented most, if not all, of his earnings from said group - and threw the lot onto a bonfire. It was meant to be some sort of arch art-terrorism prank, but as Drummond later admitted, it ruined his life. 

England had tied themselves in knots over earning an easy mil - 'can I smile when we pick up the cheque; how long should I leave it before I buy the new motor etc etc' - when the real freight of Stanford's brutally brilliant offer has its heft elsewhere. Each of the defeated players will, one quiet evening many months from now, realise that they do not have $1m. They would not be human if they didn't. Drummond suffered months of depression as the feeling sank into his bones.

Sporting careers, like life in the middle ages, can be nasty, brutish and short. As Chris Gayle said, 'who doesn't need a million dollars?'. What England did wrong was allow liberal guilt to eat into their heads like brainworms. 

In Clarke's desire to get the players a sop as the IPL set sail without them, he certainly considered the downsides of England winning the match. But how long did he think about the downsides of not winning it? 

NB: The county chairmen who elected Clarke to the ECB are now astonished to find that Giles, who after all has an MA in Persian from Oxford as well as various wine and pet emporiums, has been outnegotiated by a billionaire financier from Texas with many years of experience in ramping sports events and another man who turned India into the new powerbase of the game overnight. They might not even re-elect him, they threaten. Now, now chaps. English cricket didn't get where it is today by being hasty...

Instant Sharma

1429 runs were scored  in the Delhi Test last week, 1428 of them by batsmen other than Ishant Sharma. Ishant's tremendous appearance as nightwatchman at the end of day three was run over by other, more newsworthy stories, but the five minutes and two balls he survived were a comedy classic. He made Jimmy Adams look like King Viv circa 1976. In this age of instant worldwide video analysis, Ishant has just lined up at least a decade's worth of short stuff for himself. Chin chin!

The Stanford Non-Prison Experiment (i)

A fuller reflection on the weekend in Antigua once the Batsman has a tour of the papers tomorrow, but a couple of thoughts that might otherwise get trampled in the stampede:

i) Ravishing Rudi Koertzen referred a good-looking leg before shout from Steve Harmison to Steve Davis, the TV umpire. Davis checked it wasn't a no ball and then used the pitch tracker to establish that the ball landed marginally outside Chris Gayle's leg stump. It took about 35 seconds. The world did not end. 

ii) Stanford has essentially used his money to bypass the West Indies Cricket Board and set up his own team. They showed more unity than the real West Indies team has in two decades. Supposing an equally rich fella came along and sidelined the ECB? 

iii) There have been many late night pavilion discussions on who you might choose to bat for your life, if you had to. On Saturday night, it turned out, Chris Gayle was batting for his brother's. Gayle's $1m will pay for heart treatment. Cavalier Chris is not often top of any list of this kind, but as he said afterwards, 'my back is broad'. It was, it was.