It was the week before the Mike Tyson versus Evander Holyfield rematch at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
I'd been at the first fight when Holyfield had pulled off a major upset by stopping Tyson in the eleventh round, even though beforehand there was a concern that Evander might actually die in the ring. He had been diagnosed with a heart condition that he now claimed had been cured by a faith healer.
As a piece of sporting theatre it was the most exciting thing I'd seen. Afterwards both fighters came to a press conference in a big white tent that had been erected behind the casino and was the locus of media activities. Holyfield had been there almost every day in the run-up and would happily talk to anybody. Now he sat at a table with Mike Tyson, explaining how it was God's plan that he would win. Mike Tyson had angry red welts on his forehead where the fighters' heads had clashed, and he kept pressing them with a white towel. Between them sat Don King, beaming with delight.
A British journalist called Jeff Powell stood up and said, 'Mike, do you think that after that defeat you should consider retiring, and Evander, now that you've achieved everything in the sport, would you think about retiring again too?'
The look on Don King's face was priceless, which I suspect Jeff Powell knew it would be. One of his great talents as a promoter was to be up on both sides of the deal. A Holyfield victory meant not just a rematch but a potential trilogy of big-money fights - from which the one guaranteed winner would be Don King.
I needed a commission to get to the second fight and managed to sell the idea of a piece about Don to Punch, the humour magazine that was undergoing one of its many revamps. I went over intending to try and get an interview in the big white tent during fight week.
As usual, it was an interesting moment for Don. He was facing a trial for wire fraud that carried a prison sentence of 45 years. The accusation was that he'd profited from a false insurance claim to Lloyds of London after the cancellation of a fight involving Julio Cesar Chavez. He'd already been tried once, but the jury had failed to reach a verdict.
There were lots of things that a piece about Don King was duty bound to mention, from the fact he'd killed two men, to his rise from prison to promoting fights like the Thrilla in Manila and the Rumble in the Jungle, and then listing the many fighters, promoters and officials he'd duped, bilked and baffled with his brilliance and his bullshit. When he'd been acquitted on tax evasion charges in the mid-80s, the US Government's lead prosecutor said that Don King was the cleverest man he'd ever cross-examined.
It was an extraordinary life, an American life ('only in America' was one of the stock phrases Don loved to bellow at people), and in the flesh King was just as monumental, six feet four or five tall with the famous hair standing way above that. He dwarfed both Tyson and Holyfield whenever he stood next to them.
Although he sued anyone in boxing at the drop of hat, he never sued the media because he knew the value of his reputation. Instead he talked and talked, a verbal steamroller that simpy couldn't be stopped, not matter what was thrown at him.
I was a genuinely lightweight opponent, but after a couple of days I got my chance. He was standing by himself in the media tent, so I crept over, turned on my tape recorder and said, 'Don, could I just ask you about the insurance case...'
Without blinking, he was off. I can't recall much of what he said, but back then, a dictaphone ran on physical cassettes that had 45 minutes of tape before you had to flip them over, and by the time he'd finished speaking, the thing had turned off in my hand.
It was vintage Don, exactly what I'd hoped for. He called the wire fraud 'a victimless crime,' and 'insinuendo'. A 45-minute answer... Only in America. I wrote the piece, which was very much like every other Don King piece, but I was quite in thrall to boxing at the time. A few months later, he was acquitted after a trial in New York. As the New York Times reported, "the fight promoter laughed boisterously, soliloquised his jubilation in religious and hyperbolic terms and signed autographs."
Being in thrall to boxing changed, slowly. Two years later I was working at an Australian newspaper. I liked to get in early and read the wire reports. One morning I saw one that began: 'Rick Parker wanted to be Don King. Rich. Intimidating. Powerful...'
It was from a paper in Florida, only a few paragraphs about this Parker guy, who, it transpired, had been advised by King to try and find a white heavyweight boxer who could win the world title - at the time there hadn't been a white champion since Marciano. So Rick Parker did. Well sort of, he tried at least, and left behind him a wild and sad story of fixed fights, mayhem, money and ultimately murder - his own, at the hands of one of his fighters, Tim 'Doc' Anderson.
I tried to find out more about Rick Parker. When I got back to England, I began writing to Tim Anderson, who was serving life without parole in a Florida prison. As the story became clear - the story of how a good man came to kill another (deeply flawed) human being - I realised that I no longer loved boxing.
It was an emotional rather than a logical thing. Lots of sports, maybe every sport, was corrupt in some way or another, some, like FIFA or the IOC, to a much higher level than boxing was, too. But boxing seemed more personally ruinous, and there was a divide between the men that got in the ring and those outside of it. After wading through the wreckage of Tim's once blessed life, I didn't find Don King's stories about ripping off fighters and being up on both sides of the deal funny any more.
The corruption in boxing was mostly low-level, in then-unregulated states like Oklahoma, where Rick Parker had poisoned Tim Anderson so that he would lose a fight with Mark Gastineau, the former NFL defensive end. Where men fought under assumed names that they took from the local cemetary. Where fighters were smuggled over borders, given fake social security numbers, made to fight outside their weight class, and lots of other shit that no-one cared about.
But it stretched upwards, too. Everyone was connected. Tim Anderson had fought George Foreman at Rick Parker's behest. Rick had a piece of Big George's comeback at the start, but Bob Arum took that. Nonetheless Rick found himself hanging over the top rope of the ring at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta as 'Smokin' Bert Cooper, who he managed and promoted, was one more clean punch away from knocking out Evander Holyfield to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
One punch away.
Bert Cooper is dead now, and so is Rick Parker, and Tim Anderson is still in jail. Bob Arum is 88 years old and promotes Tyson Fury. Don King is also 88 years old, and much diminished.
Don's on the outside, and no-one is getting 45-minute answers any more.
Thursday, 26 March 2020
Friday, 20 March 2020
Other sports no. 2: Gazza and the train that never left
'May you live in interesting times,' goes the old Chinese curse, and
as we seem to be... thought I'd break the Old Batsman Fourth Wall and
for this (hopefully briefish) interregnum until the crimson rambler is
once again singing across the cricket fields of England, put up a few
yarns about other sports that have occurred along the way... This time, a brief meeting with Gazza...
During Italia 90, the Juventus president Gianni Agnelli called Paul Gascoigne 'a dog of war with the face of a child,' which remains an unbeatable and beautiful description of him as a footballer.
If you want to imagine how far away 1990 seems now, how distant that vanished England is, imagine Harry Kane returning from the World Cup wearing a shellsuit and a pair of fake plastic tits. Imagine Gazza's other great almost-triumph, Euro 96, all of the present England squad flying to Hong Kong and lying in a leather dentist's chair while a barman poured Drambuie and tequila down their throats before smashing up the plane on the way home and then nearly winning the tournament.
By the time France 98 rolled around, Gazza had been transferred to Middlesbrough and any residual genius was spasmodic at best, but he still was still playing well for England and tournament football had always been his arena: he seemed to feed on its intensity. And as usual, England weren't overburdened with errant geniusus, so he continued to feel like their best bet.
England's manager at the time was Glenn Hoddle, who taken over from Terry Venables after Euro 96. Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance...
That was the view at the football magazine where I was freelancing, anyway. With great fanfare Hoddle had selected an initial squad that he was about to trim to the final number. A day or so before the announcement, a team sponsor booked a Eurostar train and put an England player in each carriage for the football press to interview. The train was parked at Waterloo station and wasn't going anywhere, a clunking metaphor that seemed to be lost on the organisers.
I can't remember exactly which players were there now. Michael Owen was one, I think. The star attraction though was Gascoigne, as usual. Even in his faded state he was a magnet for headlines and attention, the legacy of not just his magnificence as a player, but of the chaos of his life. Within a few months he would be in rehab.
The writers were divided into groups and sent along the train. We only got about five minutes with each player, so it was a useless exercise really. We must have been one of the last groups to arrive in Gazza's carriage, but unlike some of the others, he remained cheerful. He waved us in.
"Sit down lads, sit down..."
He was still, then, a superb specimen, built like a boxer, his face surprisingly delicate with its line of wonky teeth and its soulful eyes. Even though we only had five minutes with each man, we had been through a ritual of prefacing the first few questions with "if selected," in recognition that some might not be. With Gazza though, that didn't seem relevant, so we didn't bother.
Two days later, Glenn Hoddle dropped him and when Gazza heard, he smashed up Hoddle's hotel room. He was inconsolable because, as would become obvious while his life unraveled, the football field was his only place of safety.
England got knocked out early on penalties to Argentina, a defeat that some, including Hoddle, tried to spin as a sporting tragedy on the scale of Italia 90 or Euro 96, which it wasn't. The truth was, they'd played four matches and lost two of them.
Hoddle got fired a year later. Gazza never played for England again. Hoddle managed a few more clubs before becoming an idiosyncratic pundit. Gazza tried the punditry once, became unintelligible with nerves and ran up a legendary bar bill. His real tragedy is not the end of his England career but the terribly damaged childhood and subsequent alcoholism that have ravaged his life.
That train seems like a long time ago.
Next time: Don King and the 45 minute answer...
NB: will obv. still post on cricket as often as possible, unless I sell the piece to a mag/website...
During Italia 90, the Juventus president Gianni Agnelli called Paul Gascoigne 'a dog of war with the face of a child,' which remains an unbeatable and beautiful description of him as a footballer.
If you want to imagine how far away 1990 seems now, how distant that vanished England is, imagine Harry Kane returning from the World Cup wearing a shellsuit and a pair of fake plastic tits. Imagine Gazza's other great almost-triumph, Euro 96, all of the present England squad flying to Hong Kong and lying in a leather dentist's chair while a barman poured Drambuie and tequila down their throats before smashing up the plane on the way home and then nearly winning the tournament.
By the time France 98 rolled around, Gazza had been transferred to Middlesbrough and any residual genius was spasmodic at best, but he still was still playing well for England and tournament football had always been his arena: he seemed to feed on its intensity. And as usual, England weren't overburdened with errant geniusus, so he continued to feel like their best bet.
England's manager at the time was Glenn Hoddle, who taken over from Terry Venables after Euro 96. Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance...
That was the view at the football magazine where I was freelancing, anyway. With great fanfare Hoddle had selected an initial squad that he was about to trim to the final number. A day or so before the announcement, a team sponsor booked a Eurostar train and put an England player in each carriage for the football press to interview. The train was parked at Waterloo station and wasn't going anywhere, a clunking metaphor that seemed to be lost on the organisers.
I can't remember exactly which players were there now. Michael Owen was one, I think. The star attraction though was Gascoigne, as usual. Even in his faded state he was a magnet for headlines and attention, the legacy of not just his magnificence as a player, but of the chaos of his life. Within a few months he would be in rehab.
The writers were divided into groups and sent along the train. We only got about five minutes with each player, so it was a useless exercise really. We must have been one of the last groups to arrive in Gazza's carriage, but unlike some of the others, he remained cheerful. He waved us in.
"Sit down lads, sit down..."
He was still, then, a superb specimen, built like a boxer, his face surprisingly delicate with its line of wonky teeth and its soulful eyes. Even though we only had five minutes with each man, we had been through a ritual of prefacing the first few questions with "if selected," in recognition that some might not be. With Gazza though, that didn't seem relevant, so we didn't bother.
Two days later, Glenn Hoddle dropped him and when Gazza heard, he smashed up Hoddle's hotel room. He was inconsolable because, as would become obvious while his life unraveled, the football field was his only place of safety.
England got knocked out early on penalties to Argentina, a defeat that some, including Hoddle, tried to spin as a sporting tragedy on the scale of Italia 90 or Euro 96, which it wasn't. The truth was, they'd played four matches and lost two of them.
Hoddle got fired a year later. Gazza never played for England again. Hoddle managed a few more clubs before becoming an idiosyncratic pundit. Gazza tried the punditry once, became unintelligible with nerves and ran up a legendary bar bill. His real tragedy is not the end of his England career but the terribly damaged childhood and subsequent alcoholism that have ravaged his life.
That train seems like a long time ago.
Next time: Don King and the 45 minute answer...
NB: will obv. still post on cricket as often as possible, unless I sell the piece to a mag/website...
Tuesday, 17 March 2020
Other Sports No. 1: Ronnie and the Normal Shoes
'May you live in interesting times,' goes the old Chinese curse, and as we seem to be... thought I'd break the Old Batsman Fourth Wall and for this (hopefully briefish) interregnum until the crimson rambler is once again singing across the cricket fields of England, put up a few yarns about other sports that have occurred along the way... The first involves the incomparable Ronnie O'Sullivan...
We were working on a magazine for Sky. It had the glorious frequency of six issues per year, which allowed for plenty of downtime (rigorously filled with editorial planning meetings and other good deeds, natch). One of the regular office debates was about what counted as a sport and what didn't.
I had a glib line about it not being one if you could do it your normal shoes, which nonetheless excluded two sports that I've always loved, snooker and darts. Snooker especially, with its langueur, its epic scale, its midnight finishes, that wash of light across the immaculate baize... It seemed to understand something that cricket understood - how and where deep pulses of drama accumulate through hours of play. And it drew its champions from the masses, players that could offer the strange charisma of one tiny quirk amplified by the TV cameras.
Anyhow, the snooker was on its way back from its precipitous 1990s fall. Barry Hearn was in charge again and had Ronnie O'Sullivan, the Rocket, knocking in impossible shots with a wild intensity and threatening to quit every ten minutes.
Now Ronnie was available for a phone interview, which our editor, Ryan, had said he would do.
"I'm going to ask him about the normal shoes..."
'Oh no... Don't do that..." I said, but people were already laughing at the thought.
"Anyway," he said, "I've got something else for you. Haile Gebreslassie..."
Gebreslassie was a runner, a great one, currently at his palatial home in Ethiopia and also available for a phoner.
Ryan rang Ronnie, and after a while, in a loud voice, said: "there's a bloke in our office says it's not a sport if you can do it in your normal shoes..."
"Tell him he's an idiot," Ronnie said.
"Actually he's about to speak to Haile Gebreslassie..."
Ronnie perked up at this news. He was well known as a good club runner, and had posted some impressive times at various races in the Essex area. He'd even credited it with improving his game.
"Haile likes snooker," he said. "He's seen me play..."
Just before I rang Haile, Ryan said, "Make sure you ask him about Ronnie..."
I was an admirer of Gabreslassie myself, and so placed the call with some trepidation. When I got through, the line to Ethiopia was terrible and I could barely hear anything he said. The only way I could tell he'd finished his answers was because he laughed loudly at the end of each one.
"So Haile," I shouted. "I hear you're a fan of snooker..."
Silence.
"Snooker?" I yelled again.
Faint laugh.
"And you've seen Ronnie O'Sullivan, the World Champion, play?"
Silence, barely audible laugh.
"Snooker..." I said, more desperately. "Played on a green table..."
Haile laughed faintly and hung up.
Somehow, Ronnie O'Sullivan seemed to have taken his revenge for the normal shoes idea.
Next time: Gazza, Glenn Hoddle and the Eurostar at Waterloo...
NB: will obv. still post on cricket as often as possible, unless I sell the piece to a mag/website...
We were working on a magazine for Sky. It had the glorious frequency of six issues per year, which allowed for plenty of downtime (rigorously filled with editorial planning meetings and other good deeds, natch). One of the regular office debates was about what counted as a sport and what didn't.
I had a glib line about it not being one if you could do it your normal shoes, which nonetheless excluded two sports that I've always loved, snooker and darts. Snooker especially, with its langueur, its epic scale, its midnight finishes, that wash of light across the immaculate baize... It seemed to understand something that cricket understood - how and where deep pulses of drama accumulate through hours of play. And it drew its champions from the masses, players that could offer the strange charisma of one tiny quirk amplified by the TV cameras.
Anyhow, the snooker was on its way back from its precipitous 1990s fall. Barry Hearn was in charge again and had Ronnie O'Sullivan, the Rocket, knocking in impossible shots with a wild intensity and threatening to quit every ten minutes.
Now Ronnie was available for a phone interview, which our editor, Ryan, had said he would do.
"I'm going to ask him about the normal shoes..."
'Oh no... Don't do that..." I said, but people were already laughing at the thought.
"Anyway," he said, "I've got something else for you. Haile Gebreslassie..."
Gebreslassie was a runner, a great one, currently at his palatial home in Ethiopia and also available for a phoner.
Ryan rang Ronnie, and after a while, in a loud voice, said: "there's a bloke in our office says it's not a sport if you can do it in your normal shoes..."
"Tell him he's an idiot," Ronnie said.
"Actually he's about to speak to Haile Gebreslassie..."
Ronnie perked up at this news. He was well known as a good club runner, and had posted some impressive times at various races in the Essex area. He'd even credited it with improving his game.
"Haile likes snooker," he said. "He's seen me play..."
Just before I rang Haile, Ryan said, "Make sure you ask him about Ronnie..."
I was an admirer of Gabreslassie myself, and so placed the call with some trepidation. When I got through, the line to Ethiopia was terrible and I could barely hear anything he said. The only way I could tell he'd finished his answers was because he laughed loudly at the end of each one.
"So Haile," I shouted. "I hear you're a fan of snooker..."
Silence.
"Snooker?" I yelled again.
Faint laugh.
"And you've seen Ronnie O'Sullivan, the World Champion, play?"
Silence, barely audible laugh.
"Snooker..." I said, more desperately. "Played on a green table..."
Haile laughed faintly and hung up.
Somehow, Ronnie O'Sullivan seemed to have taken his revenge for the normal shoes idea.
Next time: Gazza, Glenn Hoddle and the Eurostar at Waterloo...
NB: will obv. still post on cricket as often as possible, unless I sell the piece to a mag/website...
Tuesday, 28 January 2020
Faf du Plessis and the implacable cruelty of cricket
Faf du Plessis is so comically alpha that he can have AB de Villiers as a friend since schooldays and not be overshadowed. AB might be the greater player but he's one of life's handsome wingmen, Ice Man to Faf's Maverick.
Faf du Plessis is so alpha, his box is called 'The Beast'. He wears pink gloves and has pink stickers on his bat in the same way that 1980s lover boys wore a pink shirt, to let the ladies know. His own playing shirts have the sleeves cut high to best display those magnificent triceps.
Faf is so alpha the grill on his helmet is specially adjusted to keep clear of his movie star jawline*. You could shred your fist on that razor-wire stubble. When he was once asked, at a pre-match interview, why Hardus Viljoen wasn't on the teamsheet, he replied, 'because he's in bed with my sister,' and smirked at the camera.
At the Bullring Faf went down with his ship, last hand of a generation on deck. He was done, cooked, the eyes had taken on that thousand-yard stare that skippers who have gone a series too far tend to get. He went into bat in the final innings with South Africa's score at 89-2, almost two days of cricket to play and another 376 needed to win. They had been caned in the last couple of games, and they were getting a further pasting in this one.
He knew the odds. How often would he get out of a similar Test with something, with anything - one time in a hundred? One in thousand? That's why they still talk about Atherton at the Bullring, why VVS Laxman has a wonderful life, eased along by the number 281. From this position in Test match cricket, you don't draw and you don't win. From this position you lose. You always lose.
The pitch had fourth day pub nutter tendencies, overly friendly one moment, threatening to glass you in the face the next. Faf's highest score in the series was 36. Since 2018, he had averaged above 36 in one of the eight series he had played. His career mark was about to dip below 40, which his career didn't deserve.
He dug in anyway. After 40 deliveries, he'd made nine. At the other end, Rassie van der Dussen was playing the innings of his short career, somehow smacking the bowling around, taking a heavy shot in the chest and battling on. The pub nutter pitch appeared temporarily placated. Root brought on Joe Denly. Faf watched from the non-striker's end as Rassie pumped long hops and full tosses over the rope. How he could do with a few of those himself, just to get the muscle memory going, but each time he got on strike Denly hit his length.
He was pleased for the kid anyway. He and a couple of the others were players who could maybe grab the torch and take it on. That's what old fighters hoped for, some kind of legacy. Leave it better than you found it. Mark Wood came back on, and he absolutely pured one off his pads, right out of the middle, easy as the glory days. Stokes, who has the odd pub nutter tendency himself, came back too, and suddenly the pitch was doing all sorts again, every other ball jumping from a length and smacking his gloves.
He got to 35, one short of his best for the series. His career average flickered back above the mark all batsmen want. He had batted for two hours and ten minutes, faced 91 deliveries. Stokes bowled again. He propped forward again and instead of jumping up, the ball hit something and stayed down, took the under edge of the bat and flicked off the bails without touching the stumps at all. He bent even lower, sank to a knee, beaten at last, beaten again.
He'd barely got his pads off when Rassie clothed a drive to short cover, out two short of the maiden century that he'd so deserved. Temba Bavuma, so often the whipping boy on social media, got to 27 before he copped a throat ball from Stuart Broad. He wondered if anyone knew how hard it was to score 27 on that pitch against that sort of bowling, how good you had to be to do that?
It was over. Big Vern got a strangle in his last Test innings. Maybe he deserved more, too. de Kock got out going death or glory, the highest run scorer on either side for the series. He deserved something, surely. There was even a run-out, which always happens in games like these.
Faf du Plessis was comically alpha. He stared the game down, time after time, but the game is cruel and implacable and notions like 'earn' and 'deserve', concepts of karma and reward, exist only in the mind, glimpsed in victory, rued in defeat.
It was all over at last.
* this one may not be true. 'The Beast' box is real, though. And in fairness to his excellent line, Faf went on to explain that his sister and Hardus had just got married.
Faf du Plessis is so alpha, his box is called 'The Beast'. He wears pink gloves and has pink stickers on his bat in the same way that 1980s lover boys wore a pink shirt, to let the ladies know. His own playing shirts have the sleeves cut high to best display those magnificent triceps.
Faf is so alpha the grill on his helmet is specially adjusted to keep clear of his movie star jawline*. You could shred your fist on that razor-wire stubble. When he was once asked, at a pre-match interview, why Hardus Viljoen wasn't on the teamsheet, he replied, 'because he's in bed with my sister,' and smirked at the camera.
At the Bullring Faf went down with his ship, last hand of a generation on deck. He was done, cooked, the eyes had taken on that thousand-yard stare that skippers who have gone a series too far tend to get. He went into bat in the final innings with South Africa's score at 89-2, almost two days of cricket to play and another 376 needed to win. They had been caned in the last couple of games, and they were getting a further pasting in this one.
He knew the odds. How often would he get out of a similar Test with something, with anything - one time in a hundred? One in thousand? That's why they still talk about Atherton at the Bullring, why VVS Laxman has a wonderful life, eased along by the number 281. From this position in Test match cricket, you don't draw and you don't win. From this position you lose. You always lose.
The pitch had fourth day pub nutter tendencies, overly friendly one moment, threatening to glass you in the face the next. Faf's highest score in the series was 36. Since 2018, he had averaged above 36 in one of the eight series he had played. His career mark was about to dip below 40, which his career didn't deserve.
He dug in anyway. After 40 deliveries, he'd made nine. At the other end, Rassie van der Dussen was playing the innings of his short career, somehow smacking the bowling around, taking a heavy shot in the chest and battling on. The pub nutter pitch appeared temporarily placated. Root brought on Joe Denly. Faf watched from the non-striker's end as Rassie pumped long hops and full tosses over the rope. How he could do with a few of those himself, just to get the muscle memory going, but each time he got on strike Denly hit his length.
He was pleased for the kid anyway. He and a couple of the others were players who could maybe grab the torch and take it on. That's what old fighters hoped for, some kind of legacy. Leave it better than you found it. Mark Wood came back on, and he absolutely pured one off his pads, right out of the middle, easy as the glory days. Stokes, who has the odd pub nutter tendency himself, came back too, and suddenly the pitch was doing all sorts again, every other ball jumping from a length and smacking his gloves.
He got to 35, one short of his best for the series. His career average flickered back above the mark all batsmen want. He had batted for two hours and ten minutes, faced 91 deliveries. Stokes bowled again. He propped forward again and instead of jumping up, the ball hit something and stayed down, took the under edge of the bat and flicked off the bails without touching the stumps at all. He bent even lower, sank to a knee, beaten at last, beaten again.
He'd barely got his pads off when Rassie clothed a drive to short cover, out two short of the maiden century that he'd so deserved. Temba Bavuma, so often the whipping boy on social media, got to 27 before he copped a throat ball from Stuart Broad. He wondered if anyone knew how hard it was to score 27 on that pitch against that sort of bowling, how good you had to be to do that?
It was over. Big Vern got a strangle in his last Test innings. Maybe he deserved more, too. de Kock got out going death or glory, the highest run scorer on either side for the series. He deserved something, surely. There was even a run-out, which always happens in games like these.
Faf du Plessis was comically alpha. He stared the game down, time after time, but the game is cruel and implacable and notions like 'earn' and 'deserve', concepts of karma and reward, exist only in the mind, glimpsed in victory, rued in defeat.
It was all over at last.
* this one may not be true. 'The Beast' box is real, though. And in fairness to his excellent line, Faf went on to explain that his sister and Hardus had just got married.
Thursday, 2 January 2020
Xmas leftovers Part II: Ben Foakes at Guildford
These few paras were taken out of a forthcoming piece as they didn't really fit. I thought Foakes, along with Smith and Labuschagne, was the best player I saw live last Summer. The gods of cricket have decreed that Dom Bess is with England in South Africa, and good luck to him.
In
July I went to Guildford, to Woodbridge Road to watch Surrey play Yorkshire. It was supposed to rain all day,
but when we arrived just after lunch Surrey had a hundred on the board for a
couple down and under low skies, Scott Borthwick, a number three bat these
days, darted around and Ben Coad pinned Ryan Patel in front.
Sat
square of the wicket, feet on the same earth as the players, felt like a
privileged position. There was an intimacy to it, the grunts of the bowlers,
the urging of the fielders, the sharp calls for quick singles. It was a place
of work, of effort. Ben Foakes came in at number five. His summer hadn’t been
great, overlooked by England, injured, short of runs, but even when they’re
struggling some players make the game look like second nature. Foakes had his collar
open and the sleeves of his shirt pushed up, as if he’d just shucked off a
jacket and tie at a wedding and got up to jam with the band. He was at ease here, a young man in an old
competition. His batting had true beauty and
that preternatural bit of anticipation where he appeared to be forward or back
to the ball in the instant it was delivered. Dom Bess, on loan from Somerset,
lacked the electric snap in his bowling that Foakes had in his batting, and as
soon as Foakes felt it he whipped a couple through midwicket, blade vertical
and face angled in the classical way. At tea the spectators went out and looked
at the wicket and after the resumption the veteran Steve Patterson got one
through Foakes, which surprised everyone, even him. The crowd sighed, Patterson
gathered himself again and bowled Will Jacks first ball. Drama. A hat-trick
chance. Across the far side, behind the high wire fence and the tall trees,
traffic flowed down the London Road oblivious.
-->
Saturday, 28 December 2019
Xmas leftovers Part I: The Strange Hinterland of Vinceness
For one reason or another, a piece sometimes falls by the wayside - inbetween commissioning and arrival, things shift and the spike is inserted. I've had a couple this year, so thought I'd throw them up here. The first was written around the start of the World Cup. It's about James Vince and the predicament of being England's spare man. Ultimately, he held the fort and played his part, so here's to the great JV...
-->
Ah, James Vince. A breathy sigh across
the face of the game, a player that, even when hitched up to the runaway train
that is England’s one-day batting, transports you to way-stations that no-one
else can. Take Cardiff, the T20i against Pakistan last month. He hit one
through cover so hard the ball seemed to leave a slight vapour trail behind,
pixels of white-light. ‘Are you watching this?’ said one of my direct messages.
‘It’s not just the timing, it’s the power…’ Or Nottingham, where he opened
against Pakistan and oozed the second ball of England’s innings to the boundary,
a shot that produced from the crowd the kind of deep ‘aahhh’ of satisfaction
that comes from air being taken in rather than expelled from the lungs.
Vince made 36 at Cardiff and 43 in
Nottingham, scores that populate that strange hinterland of Vince-ness in which
both fans and haters find their fuel. There is a vacancy for an enigma in
English cricket, has been since Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash became the last
two men to score one hundred first-class centuries. At the centre of any enigma
is mystery, and Vince’s lies somewhere between those of Ramprakash and Hick.
Like Ramprakash there is a dissonance between how he looks when he’s batting and
how he feels. Like Hick, there is a woozy sense of diffidence, of not appearing
to be quite present enough.
Here’s James Vince talking about how it
feels from the inside, speaking to the writer Jonathan Liew: “Every now and
again, you feel like your rhythm’s on, you can do pretty much anything. But
those days are very rare. It always feels like a grind. There’s never an easy
run.”
Then there’s the diffidence, the
maddening repetition of fifteen of his twenty-two Test innings ending with
catches somewhere between the wicketkeeper and cover. An analysis by the
Cricviz website found that he was the unluckiest batsman in world cricket. Another,
by Jarrod Kimber, focussed on the number of runs Vince scored in boundaries -
around 62 per cent of his Test tally came that way, a figure as high as
Sehwag’s.
Both analyses had value, both could be
right, and also wrong. Enigma sometimes exists as disparity between how
something appears and how it performs. Vince’s blessing, and his curse, is to
make something that everyone knows to be difficult seem as natural as
breathing.
A cricket bat maker once gave me a
wonderful analogy about the way he approached the bats of this new era: “fast
cars look fast,” he said.
James Vince looks fast. For the
aesthete, his grace at the crease can be overwhelming. He creates a sense of
possibility when he bats and when he gets out in the ways that James Vince gets
out, he leaves behind a sadness for what hasn’t happened, for what won’t now be
seen.
Some people, pragmatists generally, a
group into which many professional and ex-professional cricketers fall, don’t
really feel that loss in the same way. They were always on at Ramprakash and
Hick, and now at Vince too, mainly for giving the appearance of being something
that they’re not.
It’s hard to make the case that they
are wrong, in this moment of extraordinary fecundity in England’s one-day
batting. The line-up is as freakish as its results suggest, so James Vince will
play the role of spare man, a state almost as tantalising as one of his
thirties or forties.
Teddy Sheringham spoke recently about
Manchester United’s 1999 Champions League victory. Sheringham was a substitute
on the night of the final, and with United losing 1-0, Alex Ferguson told him
that if another fifteen minutes went by without a United goal, he’d be playing:
“I didn’t want Bayern to score because then it’s really hard to get back in the
game. But I didn’t want us to score either, because then I probably wouldn’t
get on…”
It’s a perfect summation of where James
Vince is right now. Wanting but not wanting. Hoping but not hoping, just like
Teddy, who pulled it off in the end.
-->
-->-->
Wednesday, 7 August 2019
First Test notes: England on the Edge (again); rethinking the last day
One evening during the Test, I saw The Edge, Barney Douglas' film about England's champion side of 2009-14. I've reviewed it for the next issue of WCM so I won't cover the same ground here, but soon after I'd sent the piece, I sat and watched England fold, and it was striking how the film's themes were being played out again in real time.
The Edge is structured around England's ambition to become the number one team in world cricket. It takes them two years to get there and another couple, give or take a few months, to fall apart. There is a core of players together for the whole span, others who drop in and out, but they all become part of something bigger, something that controls them as much as they control it.
After England beat India in 2011, Andrew Strauss is handed the ICC mace, a trophy so ridiculously grandiose it could only have been conjured by sports administrators. In his talking-head interview Strauss - and what a man he is - says, "I thought, is this it?"
That sense of anticlimax is not uncommon in sport. The golfer David Duval was so driven in the early part of his career that he briefly knocked a peak-era Tiger Woods from the top of the rankings, but when he won the Open Championship in 2001, it was his final victory on tour. Ten years later, when Woods had won 14 Majors to his one, Duval lost his tour card. His decline, which he likened to "a train wreck, and the train is loaded with toxic chemicals," had many causes, but one of them, as he admitted, was that same feeling as he held the claret jug: "is this it?"
It's a complex thought, but it must stem from the emotional release of achieving a long-held goal. What's missing is the goal itself, the meaning, the purpose, the journey. That's a wholly personal experience. Sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn't.
This England team, like Strauss', also had a four-year project, and it was also successful. This week, Jos Buttler spoke about the World Cup win. He'd kept England alive in the final, then batted in the super over, and then gathered Jason Roy's last, fateful throw during New Zealand's. A few days later, he moved house. "What was scaring me," he said, "was that if we lost, I didn't know how I'd play cricket again. This was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a World Cup final at Lord's. It felt like destiny, and I was thinking, if it doesn't happen, I will have no motivation to pick up a cricket bat for a very long time."
For a pro sportsman, this is a wonderfully frank thing to say. It has an obvious flipside, too. Having won rather than lost, but having gone through the ringer either way, what motivation is there to pick up a bat again, anyhow? At least, not a week or so later.
Part of what The Edge is saying is that we get so close to sport, we disassociate the performers from real life, real feelings. They never move house. They are held to impossible standards, often by their own will, but by the collective will too. We've won the World Cup, but now we want the Ashes, after you've played a game against Ireland, because that will be the perfect summer, Boy's Own stuff.
The teams of Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook played Ashes series in 2009, 2010-11, 2013 and 2013-4. They'd won the T20 World Cup, and contested series against South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, home and away, too. The film finishes, but the schedule goes on, a World Cup disaster, a Champions Trophy, another Ashes...
This summer has put the current team through the same thing. We're still throwing brickbats from the sidelines about Jos Buttler's only Test century, Jason Roy's mad charge, the 'declines' of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali, Joe Root not converting again... We look with great and rightful sympathy at the plights of Trescothick, Flintoff, Harmison, Trott, Finn, at the broken bodies of Prior, Swann, Tremlett and the rest. You may watch The Edge and find yourself re-evaluating Kevin Pietersen's "it's hard being me" moment, as I did.
And then you realise, it's happening again, and it's happening now, to a different group of people. It's happening because this is the modern game, but we're caught up in the moment and don't take a step back to see it. England looked shot at Edgbaston because they are shot. Who the hell can blame them, and who is going to do something about it?
If I was a proper journalist I'd try and find the stats of England batting out day five in the modern era. I'm not so I won't, but it doesn't happen very often. And yet every time, they do exactly the same thing. And they lose, and we all get annoyed about 'white ball techniques' and lack of sticks of rhubarb or whatever it is that causes them to be all out by 3pm.
What they never try is something different. Maybe not reversing the order (although if it's good enough for the Don...), but at least attempting to fit some tactics to the situation, rather than the meaningless "bat time" or "see where we are at lunch" (five down, usually).
Australia's pressure at Edgbaston was always going to come from Lyon bowling all day at one end and the seamers the other. As Jason Roy discovered, it was a risk trying to hit the GOAT out of the attack, but on a different day, or with a method agreed before play started, it would be no more risky than trying to block out. It's just less palatable, less easy. But sometimes audacity has its moment, too.
The Edge is structured around England's ambition to become the number one team in world cricket. It takes them two years to get there and another couple, give or take a few months, to fall apart. There is a core of players together for the whole span, others who drop in and out, but they all become part of something bigger, something that controls them as much as they control it.
After England beat India in 2011, Andrew Strauss is handed the ICC mace, a trophy so ridiculously grandiose it could only have been conjured by sports administrators. In his talking-head interview Strauss - and what a man he is - says, "I thought, is this it?"
That sense of anticlimax is not uncommon in sport. The golfer David Duval was so driven in the early part of his career that he briefly knocked a peak-era Tiger Woods from the top of the rankings, but when he won the Open Championship in 2001, it was his final victory on tour. Ten years later, when Woods had won 14 Majors to his one, Duval lost his tour card. His decline, which he likened to "a train wreck, and the train is loaded with toxic chemicals," had many causes, but one of them, as he admitted, was that same feeling as he held the claret jug: "is this it?"
It's a complex thought, but it must stem from the emotional release of achieving a long-held goal. What's missing is the goal itself, the meaning, the purpose, the journey. That's a wholly personal experience. Sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn't.
This England team, like Strauss', also had a four-year project, and it was also successful. This week, Jos Buttler spoke about the World Cup win. He'd kept England alive in the final, then batted in the super over, and then gathered Jason Roy's last, fateful throw during New Zealand's. A few days later, he moved house. "What was scaring me," he said, "was that if we lost, I didn't know how I'd play cricket again. This was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a World Cup final at Lord's. It felt like destiny, and I was thinking, if it doesn't happen, I will have no motivation to pick up a cricket bat for a very long time."
For a pro sportsman, this is a wonderfully frank thing to say. It has an obvious flipside, too. Having won rather than lost, but having gone through the ringer either way, what motivation is there to pick up a bat again, anyhow? At least, not a week or so later.
Part of what The Edge is saying is that we get so close to sport, we disassociate the performers from real life, real feelings. They never move house. They are held to impossible standards, often by their own will, but by the collective will too. We've won the World Cup, but now we want the Ashes, after you've played a game against Ireland, because that will be the perfect summer, Boy's Own stuff.
The teams of Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook played Ashes series in 2009, 2010-11, 2013 and 2013-4. They'd won the T20 World Cup, and contested series against South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, home and away, too. The film finishes, but the schedule goes on, a World Cup disaster, a Champions Trophy, another Ashes...
This summer has put the current team through the same thing. We're still throwing brickbats from the sidelines about Jos Buttler's only Test century, Jason Roy's mad charge, the 'declines' of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali, Joe Root not converting again... We look with great and rightful sympathy at the plights of Trescothick, Flintoff, Harmison, Trott, Finn, at the broken bodies of Prior, Swann, Tremlett and the rest. You may watch The Edge and find yourself re-evaluating Kevin Pietersen's "it's hard being me" moment, as I did.
And then you realise, it's happening again, and it's happening now, to a different group of people. It's happening because this is the modern game, but we're caught up in the moment and don't take a step back to see it. England looked shot at Edgbaston because they are shot. Who the hell can blame them, and who is going to do something about it?
Rethinking Day Five
In Duncan Hamilton's wonderful new book about Neville Cardus, The Great Romantic, he recalls the Melbourne Test of 1937, when Don Bradman outflanks Gubby Allen by reversing Australia's batting order in the Aussie second innings (Chuck Fleetwood-Smith asks why he has to open, and Bradman tells him that the only way to get out on this wicket is to hit the ball, and as Fleetwood-Smith never could do that... Chuck gets a duck anyway). Bradman made 270 from number seven and Australia won by a street.If I was a proper journalist I'd try and find the stats of England batting out day five in the modern era. I'm not so I won't, but it doesn't happen very often. And yet every time, they do exactly the same thing. And they lose, and we all get annoyed about 'white ball techniques' and lack of sticks of rhubarb or whatever it is that causes them to be all out by 3pm.
What they never try is something different. Maybe not reversing the order (although if it's good enough for the Don...), but at least attempting to fit some tactics to the situation, rather than the meaningless "bat time" or "see where we are at lunch" (five down, usually).
Australia's pressure at Edgbaston was always going to come from Lyon bowling all day at one end and the seamers the other. As Jason Roy discovered, it was a risk trying to hit the GOAT out of the attack, but on a different day, or with a method agreed before play started, it would be no more risky than trying to block out. It's just less palatable, less easy. But sometimes audacity has its moment, too.
Sunday, 17 February 2019
Third Test Notes: No-one born slow gets fast
Pace bowling remains one of the game's great unknowables. There is mystery inherent within it, and very few men on earth can do what Mark Wood did in St Lucia last week. As the old sprinters' proverb goes: 'no-one born slow ever got fast'.
It was interesting to hear Wood describe it as "feeling like a superhero." When I worked with Simon Jones on his book The Test, he made the same analogy: "It's like having a superpower, it's a surge, an urge. It's a feeling like no other, to know that the opposition are worried about you, sometimes frightened of you... I've had guys throwing up in the dressing room toilets before facing me. I've had guys refusing to come into bat."
And Simon was always quick, he was born fast. When he was fifteen years old and still five feet six inches tall, he toured Zimbabwe with a Welsh schools side and removed the front teeth of a 30 year old sheep farmer who refused to wear a helmet against a kids team. He felt he was at his quickest, and his wildest, when he first played for Glamorgan. Their wicketkeeper Colin Metson thought he was the fastest he'd kept to since Wayne Daniel. Bob Cottam saw Jones almost hit a keeper on the Lord's groundstaff during practice on the eve of his Test debut against India with a delivery he later called the fastest he'd ever seen.
Simon's genetic line illustrated something. His father Jeff Jones was England's leading wicket taker in the 1965-6 Ashes, and regarded for a while as the quickest on the county circuit. Yet Simon has a fraternal twin, Matthew, and an older brother Richard, "who can bowl quickly, but not as quick as me".
We are in the age of sports science, when almost everything in every sport is undressed and analysed, and everyone and everything is getting faster, stronger, longer. And yet fast bowling isn't, and arguably, it never has. Those who saw Larwood or Thomson, or Holding, or Croft, or Patterson, or Wasim, or Shoaib, or Johnson or Simon Jones, or Mark Wood, have seen men bowling about as fast as anyone can, give or take the vaguaries of the human eye and the speed gun. While the science and analysis might make it happen more consistently (and that's debatable) its arrival is dependent on particular genetics. If you're born slow, you may get less slow, but you won't get fast.
Simon Jones and Mark Wood are often compared. Simon endured some horror injuries that curtailed his career, yet he played in teams that beat West Indies home and away, South Africa away, and of course in the greatest series of all, the Ashes of 2005. Wood has struggled with injury too, though happily not to the same degree. Both generate a lot of their pace from their action rather than the impetus of their run. Simon can still bowl at more than 80 mph from four paces, and, in common with Mark Wood, cut down his early, long approach to something much shorter - six paces at one point.
It's a far more complex process than you may think, and when Jones decided to extend his run again because the strain on his body was too much, he had to consult with Lynn Davies, the champion long jumper, to find something that worked.
Wood has a much smaller and more slender frame than Jones, and it seemed like madness that his run had been made so short. His body couldn't possibly survive that amount of repetitive strain. Even in St Lucia, watching the super slo-mo of his ankle when the force of delivery went through it was like a video nasty as the joint kinked one way and then the other.
And yet as both men say, it is a superpower, and it does strange things to batsmen. The West Indies players who had stayed in for days on an Antiguan minefield against 85 mph were jerked from that comfort by Wood's pace on a far more predictable deck. After he faced Brett Lee for the first time at Lord's in 2005, Simon Jones said that McGrath from the other end "felt like spin".
It's just a few miles per hour, but it is the vital few, at which physiological limits are reached. Fast bowlers who can do that live on in the imagination of batsmen. Mark Wood is something rare, and it is impossible to guess how long it may last, or when it might come again.
It was interesting to hear Wood describe it as "feeling like a superhero." When I worked with Simon Jones on his book The Test, he made the same analogy: "It's like having a superpower, it's a surge, an urge. It's a feeling like no other, to know that the opposition are worried about you, sometimes frightened of you... I've had guys throwing up in the dressing room toilets before facing me. I've had guys refusing to come into bat."
And Simon was always quick, he was born fast. When he was fifteen years old and still five feet six inches tall, he toured Zimbabwe with a Welsh schools side and removed the front teeth of a 30 year old sheep farmer who refused to wear a helmet against a kids team. He felt he was at his quickest, and his wildest, when he first played for Glamorgan. Their wicketkeeper Colin Metson thought he was the fastest he'd kept to since Wayne Daniel. Bob Cottam saw Jones almost hit a keeper on the Lord's groundstaff during practice on the eve of his Test debut against India with a delivery he later called the fastest he'd ever seen.
Simon's genetic line illustrated something. His father Jeff Jones was England's leading wicket taker in the 1965-6 Ashes, and regarded for a while as the quickest on the county circuit. Yet Simon has a fraternal twin, Matthew, and an older brother Richard, "who can bowl quickly, but not as quick as me".
We are in the age of sports science, when almost everything in every sport is undressed and analysed, and everyone and everything is getting faster, stronger, longer. And yet fast bowling isn't, and arguably, it never has. Those who saw Larwood or Thomson, or Holding, or Croft, or Patterson, or Wasim, or Shoaib, or Johnson or Simon Jones, or Mark Wood, have seen men bowling about as fast as anyone can, give or take the vaguaries of the human eye and the speed gun. While the science and analysis might make it happen more consistently (and that's debatable) its arrival is dependent on particular genetics. If you're born slow, you may get less slow, but you won't get fast.
Simon Jones and Mark Wood are often compared. Simon endured some horror injuries that curtailed his career, yet he played in teams that beat West Indies home and away, South Africa away, and of course in the greatest series of all, the Ashes of 2005. Wood has struggled with injury too, though happily not to the same degree. Both generate a lot of their pace from their action rather than the impetus of their run. Simon can still bowl at more than 80 mph from four paces, and, in common with Mark Wood, cut down his early, long approach to something much shorter - six paces at one point.
It's a far more complex process than you may think, and when Jones decided to extend his run again because the strain on his body was too much, he had to consult with Lynn Davies, the champion long jumper, to find something that worked.
Wood has a much smaller and more slender frame than Jones, and it seemed like madness that his run had been made so short. His body couldn't possibly survive that amount of repetitive strain. Even in St Lucia, watching the super slo-mo of his ankle when the force of delivery went through it was like a video nasty as the joint kinked one way and then the other.
And yet as both men say, it is a superpower, and it does strange things to batsmen. The West Indies players who had stayed in for days on an Antiguan minefield against 85 mph were jerked from that comfort by Wood's pace on a far more predictable deck. After he faced Brett Lee for the first time at Lord's in 2005, Simon Jones said that McGrath from the other end "felt like spin".
It's just a few miles per hour, but it is the vital few, at which physiological limits are reached. Fast bowlers who can do that live on in the imagination of batsmen. Mark Wood is something rare, and it is impossible to guess how long it may last, or when it might come again.
Monday, 4 February 2019
Second Test notes: Root Maths - The Head of the Snake; Holder's Ban
The parsing of a player's stats in order to sustain a particular argument about their game has a name of quite longstanding: Root Maths. It generally fails because it assumes that stats are somehow infallible as well as immutable, when the truth is that they are as open to interpretation as a Jonny Bairstow straight drive.
But after the Antigua Test, when Joe Root's batting average as captain - 1,954 runs at 42.47 - fell more than ten runs behind his average when he's not - 4,594 at 52.80 - the urge for some Root Maths about the original victim of it becomes irresistable.
It was Glenn McGrath who put the concept of targeting the opposition's best batsman into the public arena, although the notion of Bodyline was constructed around it, as was the idea that the good Dr Grace's irascibility might occasionally be used against him. Cutting the head from the snake is especially attractive when it involves a captain: it rots authority; it opens psychic wounds.
So a specious bit of Root Maths appeals. Does team performance align with Root's when measured against his opposing skipper? Series by series, it looks like this:
Eng v South Africa (Home, 2017), Eng won 3-1
Root 461 runs at 57.62
Faf du Plessis 171 runs at 28.50
Eng v West Indies (H, 2017), Eng won 2-1
Root 268 runs at 67.00
Jason Holder 86 runs at 17.00; eight wickets at 39.12
Australia v Eng (Away, 2017-8), Eng lost 0-4
Root 378 runs at 47.23
Steve Smith 687 runs at 137.40
New Zealand v Eng (A, 2018), Eng lost 0-1
Root 142 runs at 35.50
Kane Williamson 124 runs at 41.32
Eng v Pakistan (H, 2018) Drawn 1-1
Root 117 runs at 39.00
Sarfaraz 31 runs at 10.33
Eng v India (H, 2018), Eng won 4-1
Root 319 runs at 35.44
Virat Kohli 593 runs at 59.30
Sri Lanka v Eng (A, 2018), Eng won 3-0
Root 229 runs at 38.16
Dinesh Chandimal 34 runs at 17.00
West Indies v Eng (A, 2019), Eng trail 0-2
Root 40 runs at 10.00
Holder 229 runs at 114.40; seven wickets at 17.85
Superficially, an argument could be made that there's some kind of link. Yet it has too many flaws to list. An Ashes of monolithic Australian dominance bears little relation to the delicate, butterfly-wing interventions of weather and fate that tilted the India series one way and then the other last summer. Root was outbatted in both. The batsmen around Root have collapsed like the post-Brexit Stock Exchange on several occasions, fatally in New Zealand and the West Indies, and so on, ad infinitum.
Notably, though, Root has been outmatched by the other 'Big Four' club members, Smith, Kohli and Williamson, whose hundred in the first Test of the short New Zealand series helped set up the win. And Root's decline as a batsman is evident. He has not averaged 40 in a series since the Ashes, and much of the old certainty that showed itself in the rapid, rhythmic starts to his innings has been whittled away.
Perhaps there is something more obvious. Root's reluctance to bat at three is understandable, as with England it's essentially opening. The captain should bat where he wants, and if Root, as the leading player, needs time to decompress then he should take it. But given the frailty of England's top order, does he get it?
Root has batted 47 times as England captain, eleven of those at three and the rest at four. Here's the breakdown of the team score at the time he went in:
0-10 - 6
10-20 - 9
21-30 - 6
31-40 - 6
41-50 - 2
50-100 - 13
100+ - 5
In 27 of his 47 innings, Root has gone in with England at 40-2 or worse. In 45 per cent, it's less than 30. The bulk of those have been after his first three series as captain, when the oft-maligned number three batsmen were Tom Westley and James Vince.
There was moment in the India series, during the Southampton Test, when I thought that if India had drawn level at 2-2, Root might have seriously considered his position. His agony was palpable, and he is not good at hiding it. Perhaps his feeling is that he will only truly be able to shape a team once Anderson and Broad have gone, although the hole they will leave is terrifying. Maybe he sees the Ashes next year as some kind of watershed, as it so often is.
Root Maths is Root Maths. But at some point, England and Root will have to decide whether his captaincy is worth the missing runs. In so many ways, it may not be.
The game itself, in terms of time, was incomplete. Just as DRS must predict the path of the ball and has a Schrodinger's Cat element, so Holder could suggest that, had England been less inept, the fourth and fifth days would have incorporated the use of his spinner, Roston Chase, as selected, and had its effect upon the rate.
The travelling fans that paid to visit Antigua have been sanctioned not by Holder's over rates but England's terrible cricket, and have missed two days' play. Those that have shelled out for St Lucia must now watch one team that has been manifestly weakened (it'll probably be a better game then, etc etc). Either way, they are denied spectacle. No-one, apart from the match officials and some ex-pros in the commentary box, gave a fig about the over rate in Antigua. As Jason Holder might ask: were you not entertained?
And anyway, do you want to be the one telling Shannon Gabriel he needs to walk back faster?
But after the Antigua Test, when Joe Root's batting average as captain - 1,954 runs at 42.47 - fell more than ten runs behind his average when he's not - 4,594 at 52.80 - the urge for some Root Maths about the original victim of it becomes irresistable.
It was Glenn McGrath who put the concept of targeting the opposition's best batsman into the public arena, although the notion of Bodyline was constructed around it, as was the idea that the good Dr Grace's irascibility might occasionally be used against him. Cutting the head from the snake is especially attractive when it involves a captain: it rots authority; it opens psychic wounds.
So a specious bit of Root Maths appeals. Does team performance align with Root's when measured against his opposing skipper? Series by series, it looks like this:
Eng v South Africa (Home, 2017), Eng won 3-1
Root 461 runs at 57.62
Faf du Plessis 171 runs at 28.50
Eng v West Indies (H, 2017), Eng won 2-1
Root 268 runs at 67.00
Jason Holder 86 runs at 17.00; eight wickets at 39.12
Australia v Eng (Away, 2017-8), Eng lost 0-4
Root 378 runs at 47.23
Steve Smith 687 runs at 137.40
New Zealand v Eng (A, 2018), Eng lost 0-1
Root 142 runs at 35.50
Kane Williamson 124 runs at 41.32
Eng v Pakistan (H, 2018) Drawn 1-1
Root 117 runs at 39.00
Sarfaraz 31 runs at 10.33
Eng v India (H, 2018), Eng won 4-1
Root 319 runs at 35.44
Virat Kohli 593 runs at 59.30
Sri Lanka v Eng (A, 2018), Eng won 3-0
Root 229 runs at 38.16
Dinesh Chandimal 34 runs at 17.00
West Indies v Eng (A, 2019), Eng trail 0-2
Root 40 runs at 10.00
Holder 229 runs at 114.40; seven wickets at 17.85
Superficially, an argument could be made that there's some kind of link. Yet it has too many flaws to list. An Ashes of monolithic Australian dominance bears little relation to the delicate, butterfly-wing interventions of weather and fate that tilted the India series one way and then the other last summer. Root was outbatted in both. The batsmen around Root have collapsed like the post-Brexit Stock Exchange on several occasions, fatally in New Zealand and the West Indies, and so on, ad infinitum.
Notably, though, Root has been outmatched by the other 'Big Four' club members, Smith, Kohli and Williamson, whose hundred in the first Test of the short New Zealand series helped set up the win. And Root's decline as a batsman is evident. He has not averaged 40 in a series since the Ashes, and much of the old certainty that showed itself in the rapid, rhythmic starts to his innings has been whittled away.
Perhaps there is something more obvious. Root's reluctance to bat at three is understandable, as with England it's essentially opening. The captain should bat where he wants, and if Root, as the leading player, needs time to decompress then he should take it. But given the frailty of England's top order, does he get it?
Root has batted 47 times as England captain, eleven of those at three and the rest at four. Here's the breakdown of the team score at the time he went in:
0-10 - 6
10-20 - 9
21-30 - 6
31-40 - 6
41-50 - 2
50-100 - 13
100+ - 5
In 27 of his 47 innings, Root has gone in with England at 40-2 or worse. In 45 per cent, it's less than 30. The bulk of those have been after his first three series as captain, when the oft-maligned number three batsmen were Tom Westley and James Vince.
There was moment in the India series, during the Southampton Test, when I thought that if India had drawn level at 2-2, Root might have seriously considered his position. His agony was palpable, and he is not good at hiding it. Perhaps his feeling is that he will only truly be able to shape a team once Anderson and Broad have gone, although the hole they will leave is terrifying. Maybe he sees the Ashes next year as some kind of watershed, as it so often is.
Root Maths is Root Maths. But at some point, England and Root will have to decide whether his captaincy is worth the missing runs. In so many ways, it may not be.
Banning Jason
Jason Holder's ban for slow over-rates is pedantry of the highest order, which I accept is the definition of having rules, too. Yet there is an element of Root Maths to it. England batted for a total of 103.1 overs in a Test that was done in less than three days. It is the role of the match officials to make a calculation based around a minimum over rate of 14.28 per hour (which gives 85 in a six-hour day, plus an extra half-hour to reach 90). From that, they must deduct time for drinks, stoppages while adjusting sightscreens and kit, injuries, use of substitutes, use of DRS and so on. This time is within their gift, and many of the stoppages that they stand there and watch are against match regulations.The game itself, in terms of time, was incomplete. Just as DRS must predict the path of the ball and has a Schrodinger's Cat element, so Holder could suggest that, had England been less inept, the fourth and fifth days would have incorporated the use of his spinner, Roston Chase, as selected, and had its effect upon the rate.
The travelling fans that paid to visit Antigua have been sanctioned not by Holder's over rates but England's terrible cricket, and have missed two days' play. Those that have shelled out for St Lucia must now watch one team that has been manifestly weakened (it'll probably be a better game then, etc etc). Either way, they are denied spectacle. No-one, apart from the match officials and some ex-pros in the commentary box, gave a fig about the over rate in Antigua. As Jason Holder might ask: were you not entertained?
And anyway, do you want to be the one telling Shannon Gabriel he needs to walk back faster?
Monday, 28 January 2019
First Test notes: Moeen's Immaculate Disaster
Moeen Ali is a poetic cricketer, a cricketer to watch, and almost everything he does is worth watching. When he has a bad Test, or a bad tour, he accommodates failure in his own way.
The first innings in Barbados was a lovely example of this. Advance publicity on Moeen is that the short ball can unsettle him. His instinct is to hook, but he knows that he probably shouldn't, and in going against instinct he has created a problem for himself. When his first delivery from Kemar Roach came flying down, chest high and on the line of his body, he did no more than offer the bat horizontally before the ball was on him, but being Moeen, a poetic cricketer to whom things happen, the merest shiver of the blade in his hands was enough to send a top edge almost eighty yards into the maw of long leg. It was an immaculate disaster.
With players like Moeen, it doesn't always matter what they do, but how they do it. His dismissal may have left the team in further trouble and the dressing room in high dudgeon, but it had flair. It had drama. It had humour, the very black kind that makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of it all - of cricket and of life.
When he was thirteen years old, Moeen scored 195 in a T20 game, a knock of which his younger brother Omar says, 'it is nearly twenty years since that evening, but it is by far the greatest innings I have seen in cricket.' That's because Moeen is an aesthete and the things he does and the way he does them live on in the mind. In that sense he's kin to any number of otherwise disparate sportsmen, from Alex Higgins to Herol Graham or even George Best, where it's not really about numbers or statistics but what you remember of them [incidentally, Higgins once took this line too far in an argument with Jimmy White over a hotel room, of which Higgins claimed occupancy, "because he was an aesthete" and would appreciate it in a way that Jimmy wouldn't. Yet as the man who reported on the row, Jonathan Rendall, pointed out, so was Jimmy White, perhaps even more so than Higgins*].
It's something that pragmatists, of which there are many in sport, never get. England didn't so much have a bad day at the office in Barbados as drive to the office pathetically late and then crash through the wall while trying to park the car. But like Prince Philip, they'll simply have a gleaming new Land Rover delivered the next morning and start driving again, ignoring the deeper problem that it's not the broken car, it's the fact that they're 97 years old - or in England's case, that they are a team full of all rounders, three of which are wicketkeepers.
Moeen's destiny is in sharp focus because of it. He is, clearly, a batsman who bowls, yet England need a bowler who bats, and he will be caught in this cleft forever now. Perhaps his personality is not quite forceful enough to escape, in the way that Ben Stokes' has been. Moeen's batting is as under-rated as Stokes' is over-rated, and in both cases that is by a little rather than a lot. Steve Harmison once said of Stokes that if England treated him like a number eight, then he would bat like one. Well Moeen has not so much been treated as a number eight as something mutable, shiftable, disposable.
Imagine, briefly, that England had the top five that took them to the number one ranking they again crave: Strauss, Cook, Trott, Pietersen, Bell. Would Stokes get into that? He would not, which suggests he is a not a genuine Test match number five, any more than he is a number eight. Of England's other middle-order players, Bairstow at his best might challenge an out of sorts Bell; Jos Buttler for sure has some of the mad and imaginative genius of Pietersen, if not the adrenalised swagger that enabled Pietersen to do it from debut.
And Moeen? Well not now, but there is an alternative universe in which his talent and difference were embraced and nurtured in the way that Ian Bell's were. At his best, Moeen is that good, that beautiful, that aesthetic and it is England's loss that his is a path not taken. The pragmatists will never get it, but this is an immaculate disaster.
* From memory, the upshot of this stoush was that Higgins refused to yield and spent three days sleeping in the bath.
The first innings in Barbados was a lovely example of this. Advance publicity on Moeen is that the short ball can unsettle him. His instinct is to hook, but he knows that he probably shouldn't, and in going against instinct he has created a problem for himself. When his first delivery from Kemar Roach came flying down, chest high and on the line of his body, he did no more than offer the bat horizontally before the ball was on him, but being Moeen, a poetic cricketer to whom things happen, the merest shiver of the blade in his hands was enough to send a top edge almost eighty yards into the maw of long leg. It was an immaculate disaster.
With players like Moeen, it doesn't always matter what they do, but how they do it. His dismissal may have left the team in further trouble and the dressing room in high dudgeon, but it had flair. It had drama. It had humour, the very black kind that makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of it all - of cricket and of life.
When he was thirteen years old, Moeen scored 195 in a T20 game, a knock of which his younger brother Omar says, 'it is nearly twenty years since that evening, but it is by far the greatest innings I have seen in cricket.' That's because Moeen is an aesthete and the things he does and the way he does them live on in the mind. In that sense he's kin to any number of otherwise disparate sportsmen, from Alex Higgins to Herol Graham or even George Best, where it's not really about numbers or statistics but what you remember of them [incidentally, Higgins once took this line too far in an argument with Jimmy White over a hotel room, of which Higgins claimed occupancy, "because he was an aesthete" and would appreciate it in a way that Jimmy wouldn't. Yet as the man who reported on the row, Jonathan Rendall, pointed out, so was Jimmy White, perhaps even more so than Higgins*].
It's something that pragmatists, of which there are many in sport, never get. England didn't so much have a bad day at the office in Barbados as drive to the office pathetically late and then crash through the wall while trying to park the car. But like Prince Philip, they'll simply have a gleaming new Land Rover delivered the next morning and start driving again, ignoring the deeper problem that it's not the broken car, it's the fact that they're 97 years old - or in England's case, that they are a team full of all rounders, three of which are wicketkeepers.
Moeen's destiny is in sharp focus because of it. He is, clearly, a batsman who bowls, yet England need a bowler who bats, and he will be caught in this cleft forever now. Perhaps his personality is not quite forceful enough to escape, in the way that Ben Stokes' has been. Moeen's batting is as under-rated as Stokes' is over-rated, and in both cases that is by a little rather than a lot. Steve Harmison once said of Stokes that if England treated him like a number eight, then he would bat like one. Well Moeen has not so much been treated as a number eight as something mutable, shiftable, disposable.
Imagine, briefly, that England had the top five that took them to the number one ranking they again crave: Strauss, Cook, Trott, Pietersen, Bell. Would Stokes get into that? He would not, which suggests he is a not a genuine Test match number five, any more than he is a number eight. Of England's other middle-order players, Bairstow at his best might challenge an out of sorts Bell; Jos Buttler for sure has some of the mad and imaginative genius of Pietersen, if not the adrenalised swagger that enabled Pietersen to do it from debut.
And Moeen? Well not now, but there is an alternative universe in which his talent and difference were embraced and nurtured in the way that Ian Bell's were. At his best, Moeen is that good, that beautiful, that aesthetic and it is England's loss that his is a path not taken. The pragmatists will never get it, but this is an immaculate disaster.
* From memory, the upshot of this stoush was that Higgins refused to yield and spent three days sleeping in the bath.
Wednesday, 22 August 2018
Third Test Notes: Ishant Sharma Keeps Running In; The Conversion Of Jonny Bairstow
Ishant Sharma was born in 1988. The Indian cricket team began that year by playing West Indies in Chennai, the final game of a four Test series. Opening the bowling for West Indies were Patrick Patterson and Courtney Walsh. Opening the bowling for India were Kapil Dev and Mohinder Amarnath. India won by 255 runs. Kapil sent down eleven overs in the match, Amarnath, in what was his 69th and last Test, just five.
Mohinder Amarnath took 32 wickets in his Test career and was really a batsman, but that didn't matter, because India was no place for fast bowlers. Kapil was simply the exception that proved the rule. Any cricket-mad parent would wish first that their kid was a batter, second that they were a spinner, thirdly, and impossibly, that they may be as good as Kapil. A fast bowler... Well in India, that was a calling of a different, far harsher kind...
When Ishant Sharma made his Test match debut in 2007, only four Indian fast bowlers had ever taken more than 100 Test wickets: Kapil, Karsan Ghavri, Javagal Srinath and Zaheer Khan, and of those, only Zaheer was still playing. At Perth in January 2008, Ishant Sharma, nineteen years old and running in like Peter Crouch trying to beat the offside trap, did something extraordinary. During the second innings he bowled a spell at Ricky Ponting that lives in the memory of all that saw it. Lightning-quick and with hurtful bounce, he barked the knuckles of the great number three, speared his head backwards on his neck, had him kicking at the crease-line open-eyed and rattled during eight overs that one reporter called: "as good as anything seen from a visiting fast bowler in a decade". Almost out on his feet, Sehwag urged him to bowl a ninth, and in it Ponting nicked to Dravid. India won. A star was born.
But it was just the fourth Test match for this nascent star. Ishant Sharma - gauche, gummy, rail-thin, accident-prone - had many miles still to travel. On dead pitches and in white-ball shoot-outs, he lost first his pace, then his confidence. When it happened, he stood out for the wrong reasons, too tall, too lanky, hidden in the field, lost at the bowling crease. His first fifty wickets cost him 31.76. By the time he had seventy-five, it was 37.40.
He came to Lord's in 2014 with 174, behind only Kapil, Srinath and Zaheer, the average still over 37, and bounced England out in one mad and glorious afternoon. With the old ball he produced what David Hopps described as "one of the most memorable spells in the history of Indian fast bowling," a careening rocket ride either side of lunch that brought India their first overseas Test win for more than three years, and only their second ever at Lord's.
Hopps went on: "India... will have eyes only for the performance of Ishant, who returned career-best figures of 7 for 74 and invited comparisons with the brilliant spell in Perth in 2008 when he roughed up no less a player of fast bowling than Ricky Ponting and encouraged India's hopes that they had a great fast bowler to reckon with. Ishant's career has never quite turned out like that..."
Ten months after Ishant had bowled that spell at Perth, Mitchell Johnson debuted for Australia against Sri Lanka. And the winter before Ishant destroyed England at Lord's, Mitchell Johnson had destroyed England in Australia. Johnson, who shared Ishant's capacity for haplessness as well as brilliance, had the classic, redemptive career arc, a three-act structure beloved of all scriptwriters: early promise, then rocky road, followed by last-reel, feel-good fulfilment.
In the week that Mitch hung them up for good, Ishant came to Trent Bridge with India needing something, anything, from a player other than Virat Kohli. They got it, too. England resumed their second innings miles behind but with their openers intact as the fourth day began. By inducing edges from first Jennings and then Cook, Ishant kicked open the door.
On the radio, Jonathan Agnew said of him: "He's not quite a one-trick pony, that would be harsh..." It was a backhanded compliment and you knew what he meant. Everyone understood how Ishant would bowl to England's left-handers, including Alastair Cook, who Ishant had dismissed ten times. Stopping him was another matter, and that is a hallmark of quality.
We invest great hopes and dreams in fast bowlers, yet even the real bruisers like Ryan Harris and Pat Cummins are physically fragile, always at the limits of what their bodies can do. Many of them, like Mitch and Ishant, are at the whim of the fates too, subject to a muse and rhythm that descends when it feels like it, rather than when we all think it should.
Things have changed for Ishant and for India. On TV commentary, Michael Holding noted that pitches for domestic competition there have become more conducive to fast bowling (well, it would have been hard for them to become less conducive...) and around Ishant were Jasprit Bumrah bowling in-slanting rockets for his first Test five-fer, and Mohammed Shami with his reverse swing touching 90mph. They have another swing bowling, hard-hitting all-rounder on the books, too, and plenty more where they came from.
Ishant has walked the bridge between then and now, and at times it has been a treacherous one to cross. The average is down to 35.16, and he has 249 wickets, behind only Zaheer and Kapil on the list. He has served his calling the best he can. He may not get Mitchell Johnson's final-act finish, but Ishant Sharma keeps running in.
NB: Sky produced an interesting stat: At the Trent Bridge Test, every Indian seamer bowled at least one delivery quicker than any of the England seamers.
England have middle order problems for sure, but they're nothing like England's top-order problems, where the openers don't score any runs and the number three looks tired, haunted and desperate to come in at number four. A thought emerged, from some knowledgeable ex-pros and commentators, that perhaps Bairstow, sans gloves, should open the batting.
My view, which is becoming, like many of my views, less popular by the second, is that Bairstow is not an opener in five-day cricket. His technique for the short forms is radically different, as demonstrated by the trouble he had in the first Test of the India series when he was so leg side of the ball he was almost conversing with the square leg umpire.
But there's a more interesting reason too. Bairstow would be making a strange kind of history should he successfully make such a switch. Trent Bridge was his 56th Test. He has batted 98 times, once, in 2016, at number four, and that aside, never higher than five. It poses the question, has anyone in the modern era successfully converted to opening so late in their career having never batted in the top four?
I couldn't think of anyone immediately, so I put out a Tweet, which produced this list of suggestions: Virender Sehwag; Justin Langer; Sanath Jayasuriya; Brendon McCullum; Simon Katich; Shane Watson; Tillakaratne Dilshan; Alec Stewart; Michael Vaughan; Ravi Shastri; Graham Gooch; Greg Blewett.
A pretty quick and unscientific search of cricinfo turned up the following info on when each first opened in a Test; their average as opener; and overall career average (F/T = full-time opener):
Sehwag: First opened in 6th Test; 8027 runs at 50.04; career 49.34
Langer: 2nd Test (F/T 42nd Test); 5112 runs at 48.22; career 45.27
Jayasuriya: 14th Test; 5932 runs at 41.48; career 40.07
McCullum: 1st Test (F/T 52nd Test); 1316 runs @39.87; career 38.64
Katich: 24th Test; 2928 runs at 50.48; career 45.03
Watson: 9th Test; 2049 runs @ 40.98; career 35.19
Dilshan: 55th Test; 2170 runs at 42.52; career 40.98
Stewart: 3rd Test; 3348 runs at 44.64; career 39.54
Vaughan: 16th Test; 3093 runs at 45.48; career 41.44
Shastri: 11th Test; 1101 runs at 44.04; career 35.79
Gooch: 3rd Test; 7811 runs at 43.88; career 42.58
Blewett: 34th Test; 588 runs at 29.40; career 34.02
On closer examination, many of these are easy to discount. Sehwag, Vaughan and Jayasuriya shifted early in their careers, and were top order batsmen already. Shane Watson also moved early and later dropped back down, as did Ravi Shastri. Justin Langer spent almost all of his first 40 Tests at number three. Simon Katich had been out of the Australian side for two and a half years when he returned as an opener. Graham Gooch spent the 1978-9 Ashes at number four plus a portion of the following summer, but opened for virtually all of his international career. Greg Blewett moved relatively late, and his record as an opener was worse than I remembered.
The remaining three are more intriguing. Tillakaratne Dilshan had played just two Tests fewer than Bairstow when he began opening, and like Bairstow, had never really batted higher than five.
McCullum and Stewart both kept wicket for long periods of their careers, and their key stat is perhaps average with and without the gloves. McCullum averaged 34.18 as keeper and 42.94 as a batsman. Alec Stewart was even more affected, averaging 34.92 with the gloves and 46.70 without.
Bairstow turns that stat on its head, averaging 42.33 when keeping and 28.96 when not. Surrendering the gloves and moving up to open after more Tests than anyone in the modern era would be quite a feat - according to the numbers at least.
Mohinder Amarnath took 32 wickets in his Test career and was really a batsman, but that didn't matter, because India was no place for fast bowlers. Kapil was simply the exception that proved the rule. Any cricket-mad parent would wish first that their kid was a batter, second that they were a spinner, thirdly, and impossibly, that they may be as good as Kapil. A fast bowler... Well in India, that was a calling of a different, far harsher kind...
When Ishant Sharma made his Test match debut in 2007, only four Indian fast bowlers had ever taken more than 100 Test wickets: Kapil, Karsan Ghavri, Javagal Srinath and Zaheer Khan, and of those, only Zaheer was still playing. At Perth in January 2008, Ishant Sharma, nineteen years old and running in like Peter Crouch trying to beat the offside trap, did something extraordinary. During the second innings he bowled a spell at Ricky Ponting that lives in the memory of all that saw it. Lightning-quick and with hurtful bounce, he barked the knuckles of the great number three, speared his head backwards on his neck, had him kicking at the crease-line open-eyed and rattled during eight overs that one reporter called: "as good as anything seen from a visiting fast bowler in a decade". Almost out on his feet, Sehwag urged him to bowl a ninth, and in it Ponting nicked to Dravid. India won. A star was born.
But it was just the fourth Test match for this nascent star. Ishant Sharma - gauche, gummy, rail-thin, accident-prone - had many miles still to travel. On dead pitches and in white-ball shoot-outs, he lost first his pace, then his confidence. When it happened, he stood out for the wrong reasons, too tall, too lanky, hidden in the field, lost at the bowling crease. His first fifty wickets cost him 31.76. By the time he had seventy-five, it was 37.40.
He came to Lord's in 2014 with 174, behind only Kapil, Srinath and Zaheer, the average still over 37, and bounced England out in one mad and glorious afternoon. With the old ball he produced what David Hopps described as "one of the most memorable spells in the history of Indian fast bowling," a careening rocket ride either side of lunch that brought India their first overseas Test win for more than three years, and only their second ever at Lord's.
Hopps went on: "India... will have eyes only for the performance of Ishant, who returned career-best figures of 7 for 74 and invited comparisons with the brilliant spell in Perth in 2008 when he roughed up no less a player of fast bowling than Ricky Ponting and encouraged India's hopes that they had a great fast bowler to reckon with. Ishant's career has never quite turned out like that..."
Ten months after Ishant had bowled that spell at Perth, Mitchell Johnson debuted for Australia against Sri Lanka. And the winter before Ishant destroyed England at Lord's, Mitchell Johnson had destroyed England in Australia. Johnson, who shared Ishant's capacity for haplessness as well as brilliance, had the classic, redemptive career arc, a three-act structure beloved of all scriptwriters: early promise, then rocky road, followed by last-reel, feel-good fulfilment.
In the week that Mitch hung them up for good, Ishant came to Trent Bridge with India needing something, anything, from a player other than Virat Kohli. They got it, too. England resumed their second innings miles behind but with their openers intact as the fourth day began. By inducing edges from first Jennings and then Cook, Ishant kicked open the door.
On the radio, Jonathan Agnew said of him: "He's not quite a one-trick pony, that would be harsh..." It was a backhanded compliment and you knew what he meant. Everyone understood how Ishant would bowl to England's left-handers, including Alastair Cook, who Ishant had dismissed ten times. Stopping him was another matter, and that is a hallmark of quality.
We invest great hopes and dreams in fast bowlers, yet even the real bruisers like Ryan Harris and Pat Cummins are physically fragile, always at the limits of what their bodies can do. Many of them, like Mitch and Ishant, are at the whim of the fates too, subject to a muse and rhythm that descends when it feels like it, rather than when we all think it should.
Things have changed for Ishant and for India. On TV commentary, Michael Holding noted that pitches for domestic competition there have become more conducive to fast bowling (well, it would have been hard for them to become less conducive...) and around Ishant were Jasprit Bumrah bowling in-slanting rockets for his first Test five-fer, and Mohammed Shami with his reverse swing touching 90mph. They have another swing bowling, hard-hitting all-rounder on the books, too, and plenty more where they came from.
Ishant has walked the bridge between then and now, and at times it has been a treacherous one to cross. The average is down to 35.16, and he has 249 wickets, behind only Zaheer and Kapil on the list. He has served his calling the best he can. He may not get Mitchell Johnson's final-act finish, but Ishant Sharma keeps running in.
NB: Sky produced an interesting stat: At the Trent Bridge Test, every Indian seamer bowled at least one delivery quicker than any of the England seamers.
The Conversion of Jonny Bairstow
In a moment that felt like a Passing Of The Gloves, Jonny Bairstow got a broken finger and a golden duck, departing the crease moments after the standing ovation for Jos Buttler's century. The Gods seem to be pointing one way: Bairstow as the specialist batsman England crave, free from the onorous physicality of keeping wicket, Buttler as keeper, batting enforcer and captain in waiting.England have middle order problems for sure, but they're nothing like England's top-order problems, where the openers don't score any runs and the number three looks tired, haunted and desperate to come in at number four. A thought emerged, from some knowledgeable ex-pros and commentators, that perhaps Bairstow, sans gloves, should open the batting.
My view, which is becoming, like many of my views, less popular by the second, is that Bairstow is not an opener in five-day cricket. His technique for the short forms is radically different, as demonstrated by the trouble he had in the first Test of the India series when he was so leg side of the ball he was almost conversing with the square leg umpire.
But there's a more interesting reason too. Bairstow would be making a strange kind of history should he successfully make such a switch. Trent Bridge was his 56th Test. He has batted 98 times, once, in 2016, at number four, and that aside, never higher than five. It poses the question, has anyone in the modern era successfully converted to opening so late in their career having never batted in the top four?
I couldn't think of anyone immediately, so I put out a Tweet, which produced this list of suggestions: Virender Sehwag; Justin Langer; Sanath Jayasuriya; Brendon McCullum; Simon Katich; Shane Watson; Tillakaratne Dilshan; Alec Stewart; Michael Vaughan; Ravi Shastri; Graham Gooch; Greg Blewett.
A pretty quick and unscientific search of cricinfo turned up the following info on when each first opened in a Test; their average as opener; and overall career average (F/T = full-time opener):
Sehwag: First opened in 6th Test; 8027 runs at 50.04; career 49.34
Langer: 2nd Test (F/T 42nd Test); 5112 runs at 48.22; career 45.27
Jayasuriya: 14th Test; 5932 runs at 41.48; career 40.07
McCullum: 1st Test (F/T 52nd Test); 1316 runs @39.87; career 38.64
Katich: 24th Test; 2928 runs at 50.48; career 45.03
Watson: 9th Test; 2049 runs @ 40.98; career 35.19
Dilshan: 55th Test; 2170 runs at 42.52; career 40.98
Stewart: 3rd Test; 3348 runs at 44.64; career 39.54
Vaughan: 16th Test; 3093 runs at 45.48; career 41.44
Shastri: 11th Test; 1101 runs at 44.04; career 35.79
Gooch: 3rd Test; 7811 runs at 43.88; career 42.58
Blewett: 34th Test; 588 runs at 29.40; career 34.02
On closer examination, many of these are easy to discount. Sehwag, Vaughan and Jayasuriya shifted early in their careers, and were top order batsmen already. Shane Watson also moved early and later dropped back down, as did Ravi Shastri. Justin Langer spent almost all of his first 40 Tests at number three. Simon Katich had been out of the Australian side for two and a half years when he returned as an opener. Graham Gooch spent the 1978-9 Ashes at number four plus a portion of the following summer, but opened for virtually all of his international career. Greg Blewett moved relatively late, and his record as an opener was worse than I remembered.
The remaining three are more intriguing. Tillakaratne Dilshan had played just two Tests fewer than Bairstow when he began opening, and like Bairstow, had never really batted higher than five.
McCullum and Stewart both kept wicket for long periods of their careers, and their key stat is perhaps average with and without the gloves. McCullum averaged 34.18 as keeper and 42.94 as a batsman. Alec Stewart was even more affected, averaging 34.92 with the gloves and 46.70 without.
Bairstow turns that stat on its head, averaging 42.33 when keeping and 28.96 when not. Surrendering the gloves and moving up to open after more Tests than anyone in the modern era would be quite a feat - according to the numbers at least.
Thursday, 16 August 2018
Second Test Notes: In the Flesh
It was the first day of the second Test... Well it was the second day if you're being like that, but it was the first day on which there was any play, so that makes it the first day in most people's minds... In my mind, anyway.
So, it was the first day of the second Test, my first day at a Test since last year, first time seeing India for four years, and well... you forget don't you. The TV coverage is brilliant now (I saw a clip of Botham's Ashes the other day - the picture was almost square, the resolution like looking through a pair of someone else's glasses... Beefy's beard smeared across his face, the pitch-invading kids Lowry stick men...), it's brilliant but much of the depth and speed, all of the sensory joy, is lost among the pixels.
We were still on the stairs at the back of the stand when the first wicket went down, but everyone stuck outside knew what had happened. The noise was unmistakable. The wicket cheer. Slightly different to the wicket roar, which you only get occasionally at Lord's (it came later in the game though, when Broad got himself on another hat-trick), and to the DRS cheer (recent addition to the canon, but easy to distinguish). We pushed up to the top of the steps and could just see a thin line of the electronic scoreboard by the Pavilion: 'India 0-1', glowing quite orange-ly under heavy skies.
"What happened?"
"Jimmy bowled him..."
"Bowled who?"
"Vijay..."
Pujara was already out to the middle, radiating innocence in his usual way. He bears the look of someone whose dad still drives him to the game while the cool kids sit together on the coach (as someone whose dad used to drive him to games, I know it when I see it...).
"Who have they dropped then?"
The replay goes up on the big screen at that moment, Vijay, Bollywood hair falling from his helmet, trying to hit an outswinger through midwicket. A shame because on the last tour here, he was one of the few who batted well. Very solid. On the scoreboard I see 'KL Rahul', so poor Shikhar has gone the way of all flesh. Wouldn't have minded seeing the old moustache stroke a few of those glossy cover drives... Ah well...
The clouds banked up to the left of the Pavilion, unyeilding as tower blocks. Rahul drove Broad for four, and although Broad was 'only' bowling about 80mph, it happened quickly and with such precision, the small movement of the feet and hands, the batswing just a sweet little punch, like the ones that old boxers don't see coming. Rahul has a Kohli-esque beard, perhaps a subconscious act of hero worship, and his cover drive is like Kohli's too. He seemed to be compact and strong, a reaction to his terrible shots at Edgbaston, probably, and the likely Shastri bollocking that followed.
The groundsmen came on to the outfield behind the boundary rope with the hover cover. Rahul hit another four but then Jimmy Anderson nicked him off, and instead of signalling the grounsmen on with the cover, the umpires let Kohli walk out and face two deliveries. This was very poor, I thought. They knew they were going off, and within a minute it was raining and dark, the Pavilion looming like a mansion in a ghost story. How was that fair to Kohli, or to India, or to a lot of the people in the ground who'd paid out for their tickets in the hope of seeing Kohli have a go at the England bowling?
By 3pm, when the ground was essentially underwater, Kohli had comically run out Pujara, whose dad, if he was like mine, was probably sitting in the car quite annoyed. Kohli showed the self-preserving instincts of the superstar, and Pujara at least had the luxury of being able to graciously forgive his captain over lunch, and not have to worry about being out through his own error.
We'd sneaked into the Mound stand, and we sat and watched the standing water get funnelled off through little drains in the outfield until somehow the sun broke through and what had been a series of small lakes receded and Lord's became a jewel glowing in the luminous afternoon light.
From side-on it was easy to see why Kohli has a bad back. He likes to stand with his feet almost parallel to the stumps and then twist his torso so that his head is out in front of his body and looking squarely down the pitch. He managed to miss most of the miracle deliveries that England sent down by keeping his hands close to his chest, and then smiling phlegmatically at the slips as they moaned about him.
The slips were both brilliant and terrible. Root kept changing them around and joining in himself, which didn't help. The problem seemed obvious, especially when Anderson and Broad were on, in that they had to stand close enough to catch the soft-handed edges from balls bowled at eighty miles an hour, but then Anderson or Broad would occasionally send one down in the mid-eighties that bounced and then flew at Bairstow, threatening his chin.
Then when Woakes came on the slips didn't really seem to move back, even though he was noticably quicker. Buttler dropped a couple, one from Hardik Pandya that he went for like a wicketkeeper, hands cupped and trying to ride the bounce, and missed completely. Woakes didn't look too happy and gestured at Buttler to catch Australian style, with his fingers pointed up. Pandya nicked the next one too and this time Buttler did catch it, so, much like Pujara and Kohli, he and Woakes could be friends again.
It was that sort of day for India. They were on the wrong side of everything from the toss to the weather breaks. I suppose as a professional you get used to that happening occasionally. Everything seemed fated, and, like the rule that says work expands to fill the time allocated to it, so India's innings fitted perfectly inside the final session, with only the remarkable, redoubtable, spider-like Ashwin really resisting Woakes, with his bruiser's run-up and boxer's rhythm, and Anderson, who flitted around like Roger Federer and sent the ball swimming through the claggy air, its rough side resisting the path the smooth side wanted to cleave.
107 all out at nineteen minutes past seven. Cricket in England in the raw, in the flesh.
So, it was the first day of the second Test, my first day at a Test since last year, first time seeing India for four years, and well... you forget don't you. The TV coverage is brilliant now (I saw a clip of Botham's Ashes the other day - the picture was almost square, the resolution like looking through a pair of someone else's glasses... Beefy's beard smeared across his face, the pitch-invading kids Lowry stick men...), it's brilliant but much of the depth and speed, all of the sensory joy, is lost among the pixels.
We were still on the stairs at the back of the stand when the first wicket went down, but everyone stuck outside knew what had happened. The noise was unmistakable. The wicket cheer. Slightly different to the wicket roar, which you only get occasionally at Lord's (it came later in the game though, when Broad got himself on another hat-trick), and to the DRS cheer (recent addition to the canon, but easy to distinguish). We pushed up to the top of the steps and could just see a thin line of the electronic scoreboard by the Pavilion: 'India 0-1', glowing quite orange-ly under heavy skies.
"What happened?"
"Jimmy bowled him..."
"Bowled who?"
"Vijay..."
Pujara was already out to the middle, radiating innocence in his usual way. He bears the look of someone whose dad still drives him to the game while the cool kids sit together on the coach (as someone whose dad used to drive him to games, I know it when I see it...).
"Who have they dropped then?"
The replay goes up on the big screen at that moment, Vijay, Bollywood hair falling from his helmet, trying to hit an outswinger through midwicket. A shame because on the last tour here, he was one of the few who batted well. Very solid. On the scoreboard I see 'KL Rahul', so poor Shikhar has gone the way of all flesh. Wouldn't have minded seeing the old moustache stroke a few of those glossy cover drives... Ah well...
The clouds banked up to the left of the Pavilion, unyeilding as tower blocks. Rahul drove Broad for four, and although Broad was 'only' bowling about 80mph, it happened quickly and with such precision, the small movement of the feet and hands, the batswing just a sweet little punch, like the ones that old boxers don't see coming. Rahul has a Kohli-esque beard, perhaps a subconscious act of hero worship, and his cover drive is like Kohli's too. He seemed to be compact and strong, a reaction to his terrible shots at Edgbaston, probably, and the likely Shastri bollocking that followed.
The groundsmen came on to the outfield behind the boundary rope with the hover cover. Rahul hit another four but then Jimmy Anderson nicked him off, and instead of signalling the grounsmen on with the cover, the umpires let Kohli walk out and face two deliveries. This was very poor, I thought. They knew they were going off, and within a minute it was raining and dark, the Pavilion looming like a mansion in a ghost story. How was that fair to Kohli, or to India, or to a lot of the people in the ground who'd paid out for their tickets in the hope of seeing Kohli have a go at the England bowling?
By 3pm, when the ground was essentially underwater, Kohli had comically run out Pujara, whose dad, if he was like mine, was probably sitting in the car quite annoyed. Kohli showed the self-preserving instincts of the superstar, and Pujara at least had the luxury of being able to graciously forgive his captain over lunch, and not have to worry about being out through his own error.
We'd sneaked into the Mound stand, and we sat and watched the standing water get funnelled off through little drains in the outfield until somehow the sun broke through and what had been a series of small lakes receded and Lord's became a jewel glowing in the luminous afternoon light.
From side-on it was easy to see why Kohli has a bad back. He likes to stand with his feet almost parallel to the stumps and then twist his torso so that his head is out in front of his body and looking squarely down the pitch. He managed to miss most of the miracle deliveries that England sent down by keeping his hands close to his chest, and then smiling phlegmatically at the slips as they moaned about him.
The slips were both brilliant and terrible. Root kept changing them around and joining in himself, which didn't help. The problem seemed obvious, especially when Anderson and Broad were on, in that they had to stand close enough to catch the soft-handed edges from balls bowled at eighty miles an hour, but then Anderson or Broad would occasionally send one down in the mid-eighties that bounced and then flew at Bairstow, threatening his chin.
Then when Woakes came on the slips didn't really seem to move back, even though he was noticably quicker. Buttler dropped a couple, one from Hardik Pandya that he went for like a wicketkeeper, hands cupped and trying to ride the bounce, and missed completely. Woakes didn't look too happy and gestured at Buttler to catch Australian style, with his fingers pointed up. Pandya nicked the next one too and this time Buttler did catch it, so, much like Pujara and Kohli, he and Woakes could be friends again.
It was that sort of day for India. They were on the wrong side of everything from the toss to the weather breaks. I suppose as a professional you get used to that happening occasionally. Everything seemed fated, and, like the rule that says work expands to fill the time allocated to it, so India's innings fitted perfectly inside the final session, with only the remarkable, redoubtable, spider-like Ashwin really resisting Woakes, with his bruiser's run-up and boxer's rhythm, and Anderson, who flitted around like Roger Federer and sent the ball swimming through the claggy air, its rough side resisting the path the smooth side wanted to cleave.
107 all out at nineteen minutes past seven. Cricket in England in the raw, in the flesh.
Sunday, 5 August 2018
First Test Notes: Virat Breaks Bad; Root-mathing Rooty's Fifties; Worst Shot Award
In Breaking Bad Season Three, Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine kingpin of New Mexico, is almost exactly halfway through his transformation "from Mr Chips to Scarface". Walt has already, with varying degrees of willingness, killed several people, but now he is dealing with the genuine article, his dead-eyed boss in the crystal business, Gustavo Fring. Fring has manipulated the near fatal shooting of Walt's brother in law, the swaggering DEA agent Hank Schrader, and in doing so, steered the assassins away from Walt himself.
For Walter it's a revelatory moment. Not only does he puzzle out the "much deeper game" that Fring has designed, he admits - both to Fring and, implicitly, to himself - that "I would have done the same..." Less than a year later, he organises Gus Fring's murder.
Walter loves chemistry because chemistry is "the study of change". It's the metaphor for the show's five seasons, as Walt, in the words of his partner Jesse Pinkman, "breaks bad". Yet it becomes apparent, as Walt meets his fate, that change is also about accepting your true nature. Walt did what he did, he confesses at the end, "because I liked it..."
Okay, it's a writerly leap from Breaking Bad to Test match cricket, from Walter White to Virat Kohli. But what is Kohli if not a man who has embraced his true nature as India's alpha-dog player and the game's latest supernova, a man for whom batting is absolutely the study of change.
Sam Curran many have been the man of the match at Edgbaston, but the award fooled no-one. This Test match revolved around the powerful gravity of Kohli's star. By the game's third evening, England's players were openly admitting the obvious: that the result was intimately bound up with Virat's fate. Graham Gooch's 154 of England's 252 at Headingley in 1991 has been called Test cricket's greatest innings. Kohli's 149 of India's 274 walked in the foothills of such mastery. At Headingley the next best score was Mark Ramprakash's 27; at Edgbaston, it was Dhawan's 26.
Much has changed since 2014, and you can read about Kohli's transformation anywhere. He will talk happily about the small technical changes, tiny shifts of back foot and hip position, that have allowed him to do his thing. What is more impressive and more important is the act of will that has accompanied it. Kohli changed because he wanted to, because it is his nature, because he likes it.
He has evolved a preternatural, majestically orthodox style of batting that works in every format: all he does as he swaps between them is alter the tempo, retune himself to different frequencies. It is pure and beautiful. He is 29 years old and has 57 international hundreds. Only Kallis, Sangakkara, Ponting and Tendulkar have more, and all of them played over 500 games. Kohli has played 340.
More than this, Kohli's desire to fulfil himself and to leave his mark on history is important politically. India and the BCCI's commitment to Test cricket must match his - Kohli demands it, and the whole game benefits. He lifts us up.
It kicked off the old debate about whether it's better to have a champion player who scores fifty all the time, or one who scores 100 and then nought but averages fifty.
Since his last century, against West Indies in August 2017, Root has played twelve Tests, batted 21 times and made eleven scores of fifty-plus. Of those twelve Tests, England have lost seven and drawn two. All three victories have been at home, against West Indies (in a series win), Pakistan (draw) and India.
England players have made hundreds in some of those games: Stokes against West Indies at Leeds (lost); Malan and Bairstow against Australia in Perth (lost); Cook against Australia in Melbourne (drawn) and Bairstow against New Zealand in Christchurch (drawn), so the argument, when refined, is not just about one batsman making fifties.
The significance of course is that England came up against players that did convert, notably other members of the current Big Four, Steve Smith, Kane Williamson and Kohli. Steve Smith batted seven times, making three hundreds and two fifties; Williamson batted three times and made one hundred; Kohli has batted twice and made a hundred and a fifty.
It's a (too) small sample size, but it suggests a ruthlessness that shows up in their overall stats. Smith has batted 117 times in Test cricket for 23 hundreds and 22 fifties; Williamson 116 times for 18 and 26; Kohli 114 times for 22 and 17. Root stands at 128 innings, 13 hundreds and 41 fifties.
England are below India, Australia and New Zealand in the Test rankings. The question of which is better, consistency or big scores from players with similar averages and overall output, seems to have an answer - not that Bradman would have been in any doubt...
There was KL Rahul determinedly dragging on a wide half volley second ball having edged his first through the slips. There was Ajinkya Rahane playing the weirdest of half-bat wafts to Ben Stokes - if he was trying to edge it to slip, he couldn't have done so any better; and then there was Stokes himself, essaying a magnificently atrocious, almost indescribable caught and bowled to Ashwin. He looked like an indulgent dad on the beach, contorting his arms to make sure that he directed a wayward tennis ball back at his three-year-old to catch.
Almost as culpable was Joe Root, who lollied Ashwin to leg gully off the face of the bat having just stared at the two (count 'em) fielders placed there, and Johnny Bairstow, following him in, playing the same shot to his first ball...
It was a wonderful Test match, made in part by its participants' fallability.
For Walter it's a revelatory moment. Not only does he puzzle out the "much deeper game" that Fring has designed, he admits - both to Fring and, implicitly, to himself - that "I would have done the same..." Less than a year later, he organises Gus Fring's murder.
Walter loves chemistry because chemistry is "the study of change". It's the metaphor for the show's five seasons, as Walt, in the words of his partner Jesse Pinkman, "breaks bad". Yet it becomes apparent, as Walt meets his fate, that change is also about accepting your true nature. Walt did what he did, he confesses at the end, "because I liked it..."
Okay, it's a writerly leap from Breaking Bad to Test match cricket, from Walter White to Virat Kohli. But what is Kohli if not a man who has embraced his true nature as India's alpha-dog player and the game's latest supernova, a man for whom batting is absolutely the study of change.
Sam Curran many have been the man of the match at Edgbaston, but the award fooled no-one. This Test match revolved around the powerful gravity of Kohli's star. By the game's third evening, England's players were openly admitting the obvious: that the result was intimately bound up with Virat's fate. Graham Gooch's 154 of England's 252 at Headingley in 1991 has been called Test cricket's greatest innings. Kohli's 149 of India's 274 walked in the foothills of such mastery. At Headingley the next best score was Mark Ramprakash's 27; at Edgbaston, it was Dhawan's 26.
Much has changed since 2014, and you can read about Kohli's transformation anywhere. He will talk happily about the small technical changes, tiny shifts of back foot and hip position, that have allowed him to do his thing. What is more impressive and more important is the act of will that has accompanied it. Kohli changed because he wanted to, because it is his nature, because he likes it.
He has evolved a preternatural, majestically orthodox style of batting that works in every format: all he does as he swaps between them is alter the tempo, retune himself to different frequencies. It is pure and beautiful. He is 29 years old and has 57 international hundreds. Only Kallis, Sangakkara, Ponting and Tendulkar have more, and all of them played over 500 games. Kohli has played 340.
More than this, Kohli's desire to fulfil himself and to leave his mark on history is important politically. India and the BCCI's commitment to Test cricket must match his - Kohli demands it, and the whole game benefits. He lifts us up.
Root-mathing Rooty's fifties
After Joe Root's first-innings run out, Jonathan Liew tweeted: 'You hear lots about Root's (very poor) conversion rate from 50 to 100, but very little about his conversion rate from 0 to 50, which is insane. It's 43%, which is the highest of any batsman since Bradman'.It kicked off the old debate about whether it's better to have a champion player who scores fifty all the time, or one who scores 100 and then nought but averages fifty.
Since his last century, against West Indies in August 2017, Root has played twelve Tests, batted 21 times and made eleven scores of fifty-plus. Of those twelve Tests, England have lost seven and drawn two. All three victories have been at home, against West Indies (in a series win), Pakistan (draw) and India.
England players have made hundreds in some of those games: Stokes against West Indies at Leeds (lost); Malan and Bairstow against Australia in Perth (lost); Cook against Australia in Melbourne (drawn) and Bairstow against New Zealand in Christchurch (drawn), so the argument, when refined, is not just about one batsman making fifties.
The significance of course is that England came up against players that did convert, notably other members of the current Big Four, Steve Smith, Kane Williamson and Kohli. Steve Smith batted seven times, making three hundreds and two fifties; Williamson batted three times and made one hundred; Kohli has batted twice and made a hundred and a fifty.
It's a (too) small sample size, but it suggests a ruthlessness that shows up in their overall stats. Smith has batted 117 times in Test cricket for 23 hundreds and 22 fifties; Williamson 116 times for 18 and 26; Kohli 114 times for 22 and 17. Root stands at 128 innings, 13 hundreds and 41 fifties.
England are below India, Australia and New Zealand in the Test rankings. The question of which is better, consistency or big scores from players with similar averages and overall output, seems to have an answer - not that Bradman would have been in any doubt...
And the Worst Shot Award goes to...
Has there been a Test match in recent times in which so many good players have got out to such truly terrible shots? Not just the usual nick-offs, hole-outs and brain-fades, the workaday lapses of concentration and moments of fear and panic (of which there were plenty on both sides), but the kind of shots that you would be deeply embarrassed to play yourself.There was KL Rahul determinedly dragging on a wide half volley second ball having edged his first through the slips. There was Ajinkya Rahane playing the weirdest of half-bat wafts to Ben Stokes - if he was trying to edge it to slip, he couldn't have done so any better; and then there was Stokes himself, essaying a magnificently atrocious, almost indescribable caught and bowled to Ashwin. He looked like an indulgent dad on the beach, contorting his arms to make sure that he directed a wayward tennis ball back at his three-year-old to catch.
Almost as culpable was Joe Root, who lollied Ashwin to leg gully off the face of the bat having just stared at the two (count 'em) fielders placed there, and Johnny Bairstow, following him in, playing the same shot to his first ball...
It was a wonderful Test match, made in part by its participants' fallability.
Tuesday, 24 July 2018
Watching You Watching James Vince
For hardened James Vince watchers, for the jittery acolytes of batting’s fragile beauty, his latest recall to the England team, this time for the final one-dayer against India at Headingley, was very James Vince indeed. He hit his first ball for four (check); went scoreless from the next seven (check); got to a lovely twenty (check); was dismissed in frustrating fashion (check); opinions on both sides were retrenched (check)…
It joined the long list of very James Vince moments: the run-out at Brisbane, the Mitchell Starc miracle delivery, all of the nicks and all of the brain-farts, the recalls when he hadn’t scored any runs, the dropping after he made a double hundred… Each of these states are familiar not just to Vince but to the James Vince watchers. Because James Vince has something about him that comes from deep inside the game: it’s the longstanding trope of the underachiever, the dilettante, the dashing artist cut slightly adrift by attitude and time. Vince, like CB Fry, like Compton, like Dexter, like Gower, is carefree with his talent, playing fast and loose with a gift offered to the few – that precious extra heartbeat in which to see the ball and play it.
It’s not true of course. A state like that could only exist if we were able to inhabit the minds of each of these players and know what they were thinking and feeling, instead of just how they looked. David Gower, for example, said: “When people came to me and went, ‘You are not trying’, I said, ‘Honestly, I am’.”
In the age of ultra-professionalism, of seed-based diets and marginal gains, such ambiguity shrouds James Vince, refracting him in a harsher light. His grace at the crease can be overpowering for the watchers. Words trail along behind him, stripped of their power; they lumber after his cover drive like defeated fielders to a distant and shimmering boundary at which the ball has already arrived. He glitters with a promise that his stats call fool’s gold.
Jonathan Rendall once wrote a newspaper column about a colleague of his who looked like Richard Gere. At first it didn’t matter because Gere wasn’t famous, but as he became a star, it had a knock-on effect for the man who looked like Richard Gere. His life changed too. Women became available to him. He began to live in a certain way. He missed a business trip because he spent the entire time in a tryst with a girl he’d met at the airport. He lost his job, his marriage broke up, his house was repossessed. Looking like Richard Gere ruined his life.
The story was about the power of appearances, how they could shape lives one way or another. Behavioural psychologists will talk about anchoring and heuristics, but what it comes down to is that it’s fundamentally human to appreciate something beautiful, to have it stir up emotions, sometimes inchoate. It applies in sport as much as in art. Professional footballers were in no doubt about who the better player of Paul Scholes and David Beckham was, yet their careers and lives were dictated in part by their appearance. Gower and Graham Gooch were the classic English cricketing juxtaposition, wafter versus grafter. How much of this perception came about because of the way they looked when they batted? Who can know, but there is something deep-lying in our judgement of such things, and it skews the table.
To say that James Vince is a divisive figure understates the case. On Twitter any mention of him is catnip for the outraged, for the un-seduced and for those who think they scratch beyond the superficiality of surface. As I’ve blogged before, he’s cricket’s equivalent of a Rorschach test: what you see in James Vince tells you something about yourself.
Most cricketers fail most of the time. How they deal with that failure may shape and define them. In his introduction to David Frith’s book Silence Of The Heart, Mike Brearley wrote: “cricket more than any other sport helps a person work through the experience of loss by virtue of forcing its participants to come to terms with symbolic deaths on a daily basis.” For James Vince, and for the watchers of James Vince, each of his dismissals comes seeded with its own particular sadness, a sadness for what will not now be seen. For the outraged it’s simply more evidence of what James Vince is not. Either way, that is a very particular burden for a cricketer to carry.
NB: You can also find this post at Wisden.com, along with lots more from the premier independent voice in the game...
TAKE ME THERE NOW...
It joined the long list of very James Vince moments: the run-out at Brisbane, the Mitchell Starc miracle delivery, all of the nicks and all of the brain-farts, the recalls when he hadn’t scored any runs, the dropping after he made a double hundred… Each of these states are familiar not just to Vince but to the James Vince watchers. Because James Vince has something about him that comes from deep inside the game: it’s the longstanding trope of the underachiever, the dilettante, the dashing artist cut slightly adrift by attitude and time. Vince, like CB Fry, like Compton, like Dexter, like Gower, is carefree with his talent, playing fast and loose with a gift offered to the few – that precious extra heartbeat in which to see the ball and play it.
It’s not true of course. A state like that could only exist if we were able to inhabit the minds of each of these players and know what they were thinking and feeling, instead of just how they looked. David Gower, for example, said: “When people came to me and went, ‘You are not trying’, I said, ‘Honestly, I am’.”
In the age of ultra-professionalism, of seed-based diets and marginal gains, such ambiguity shrouds James Vince, refracting him in a harsher light. His grace at the crease can be overpowering for the watchers. Words trail along behind him, stripped of their power; they lumber after his cover drive like defeated fielders to a distant and shimmering boundary at which the ball has already arrived. He glitters with a promise that his stats call fool’s gold.
Jonathan Rendall once wrote a newspaper column about a colleague of his who looked like Richard Gere. At first it didn’t matter because Gere wasn’t famous, but as he became a star, it had a knock-on effect for the man who looked like Richard Gere. His life changed too. Women became available to him. He began to live in a certain way. He missed a business trip because he spent the entire time in a tryst with a girl he’d met at the airport. He lost his job, his marriage broke up, his house was repossessed. Looking like Richard Gere ruined his life.
The story was about the power of appearances, how they could shape lives one way or another. Behavioural psychologists will talk about anchoring and heuristics, but what it comes down to is that it’s fundamentally human to appreciate something beautiful, to have it stir up emotions, sometimes inchoate. It applies in sport as much as in art. Professional footballers were in no doubt about who the better player of Paul Scholes and David Beckham was, yet their careers and lives were dictated in part by their appearance. Gower and Graham Gooch were the classic English cricketing juxtaposition, wafter versus grafter. How much of this perception came about because of the way they looked when they batted? Who can know, but there is something deep-lying in our judgement of such things, and it skews the table.
To say that James Vince is a divisive figure understates the case. On Twitter any mention of him is catnip for the outraged, for the un-seduced and for those who think they scratch beyond the superficiality of surface. As I’ve blogged before, he’s cricket’s equivalent of a Rorschach test: what you see in James Vince tells you something about yourself.
Most cricketers fail most of the time. How they deal with that failure may shape and define them. In his introduction to David Frith’s book Silence Of The Heart, Mike Brearley wrote: “cricket more than any other sport helps a person work through the experience of loss by virtue of forcing its participants to come to terms with symbolic deaths on a daily basis.” For James Vince, and for the watchers of James Vince, each of his dismissals comes seeded with its own particular sadness, a sadness for what will not now be seen. For the outraged it’s simply more evidence of what James Vince is not. Either way, that is a very particular burden for a cricketer to carry.
NB: You can also find this post at Wisden.com, along with lots more from the premier independent voice in the game...
TAKE ME THERE NOW...
Friday, 30 March 2018
So you've been publically shamed... By, er, me...
One Saturday afternoon in the long-off winter of 1979, an object of some interest arrived at the Gover Cricket School in Wandsworth. It was the aluminium ComBat, as recently used by Dennis Lillee in the Test match between Australia and England at the SCG: used and then hurled "fully forty yards" across the outfield when the umpires made him swap to a conventional blade after Mike Brearley, the England captain, complained that the ComBat had damaged the ball.
I'd seen the report on the news, Lillee, completing his futuristic cowboy look with a white helmet and perspex face guard (an object itself almost as alien then as a NASA space suit), struck one through mid off and then engaged in some finger-pointing with Brearley and the umpires before underarming the ComBat high into the air and out of view. It was in all of the papers, too, but they said that Lillee wasn't going to be banned or anything like that. The laws of the game didn't specify what a bat should be made of, so why couldn't he use an aluminium one...?
Alf Gover's school was housed in an old industrial shed, and when a ball struck one of the steel crossbeams that supported the roof it was like being inside a great bell. The air itself seemed to vibrate. The ComBat was a deeply strange thing. Aside from its colour and texture, like that of the flat side of a kitchen knife, it was thin even by the standards of the day, and the back had barely any spine, so it looked almost the same on both sides. When it made contact with the ball here in Alf's shed, it sounded unearthly, like one of those effects when cartoon characters hit one another with frying pans.
Reading up on the ComBat this week, the only real censure Lillee faced came from the Wisden Almanack, which Pootered: "The incident served only to blacken Lillee's reputation and damage the image of the game as well as, eventually, the Australian authorities because of their reluctance to take effective disciplinary action." The players realised right away that it was a stunt. The ComBat had been developed by Graham Monaghan, a friend of Lillee's, with the idea that it would be a cheap product for schools and juniors. When Lillee asked the England players to sign the one he'd thrown across the SCG, Brearley wrote "good luck with the sales".
It was an incident from another time, played out at another speed, and it exists now not as a cautionary tale, but as burnishment to Lillee's legend. Brearley was aghast that his carefully shined ball was flattened by the ComBat. Had AB de Villiers gone to the crease with one in Cape Town, he could have saved Cameron Bancroft a job (and Smith, Warner and Lehmann theirs). The Laws have been amended to ensure that bats are made of willow, yet they still mitigate to a degree against reverse swing, a thing of deadly and useful beauty.
Imagine, say, David Warner hurling his Kaboom forty yards across the field because it wouldn't pass through the bat gauge. The thought that he might not be banned is actually an unthinkable one: he'd be more likely to face criminal charges. This is not simply a function of changing mores and morals. It's clear, from the Ben Stokes case and now the Sandpaper Three (or four, if we count Darren Lehmann), that the essential substance of such issues are being affected by the surrounding culture, specifically social media. The shape of them, their actual outcomes, are distorted in and by real-time.
Stokes is not the first cricketer to get involved in a punch up. David Hookes died in one. Botham hit Chappell, Warner hit Root, Ponting copped a black eye in a bar in Sydney, Andrew Symonds had an altercation at a hotel in Brisbane, and so on. The difference with Stokes was that someone filmed the incident on a camera phone. Everything that followed, followed in the light of the footage. Stokes' suspension was inevitable once it was seen on social media. Regardless of whether or not that was the right course of action, it became the only one open. It left a tortured course ahead for everyone, from the CPS, the police and Stokes, who face a Crown Court trial in which some of the evidence will have been publically available for almost a year, to the ECB, with whom it's possible at last to have some sympathy (although their new thing is suing journalists, so you know, fuck them).
At least the Stokes case is now protected by sub judice. Its social media moment has come and gone. The sandpapering in Cape Town may be the Ur manifestation of the near-future. Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publically Shamed brilliantly framed the phenomenon, the dizzying and unstoppable speed at which events unfold online, the weight of comment acting like ballast, moving the story in different ways. It looks at the divorce between the unreal, virtual world, in which everything is permitted, and the real one, where the subjects of the storm, at first unknowing, cocky, secure, are suddenly, bewilderingly, upended and changed by its momentum. It is no longer comment but part of the story itself, integral to its outcome and demanding its price.
Its unpredictability - which event will it latch onto, which will gain no traction; which transgression is insignificant, which is instant fuel - makes it frightening and alien, too.
The best analogy I can think of is that being on Twitter this week was a bit like driving your car. Inside it, you are both part of the world and sealed safely away. You can say anything you like to the other cars and their occupants because it has no effect, or at least it has a false effect: one that makes you feel omnipotent in your tiny, 2015 Vauxhall Corsa. You are never the one doing anything wrong.
I'm a writer. If I don't write, I don't get paid (and when I do write, I don't always get paid much, but that's a different matter). I aim to be as good as I can be, whether it's a 100 word review or 100,000 words of a book. The 140 characters (or 280 or whatever Twitter is now) is seductive. It offers instant feedback, instant satisfaction. Publishers want writers on it and visible. The problem is that it's a fucking timewaster, and it changes the way that you think. In the recent past, when something like ball-tampering happened my first urge would be to blog about it, which demands a certain kind of piece, a particular consideration. I realise now I blog less in part because that sort of thinking takes a bit of time. Twitter's easier, and it kills the urge to write properly. A post here usually gets about a thousand hits. Over 24 hours after Cape Town, my Tweets had 50,000 impressions.
When James Sutherland's first press conference finished, a cricket writer I respect very much sent me a DM that said: "what the fuck was that?" I was thinking exactly the same. The difference was, I Tweeted something like it too. His piece came out later; it was properly weighted, properly judged, and I envied his wisdom in messaging to satisfy that initial urge to say something.
Mickey Arthur wrote a piece about his time coaching Australia (one that I found out about on Twitter), and he mentioned Homework-gate, which had led to his own public humiliation and sacking. I realised I couldn't even remember what had happened beyond it maybe having something to do with Shane Watson and papers under hotel doors - or perhaps that was something else entirely...
The other effect of these storms is that they pass so quickly it makes their consequences appear unreal, too. I think in the case of Smith and Warner, these twelve months are going to feel prehistoric, monolithic. Real time is slow time, and virtual time moves away from it at the speed of light.
I love Twitter. I met the people I now play cricket with there, which has enriched my life in all sorts of ways. Lots of great things have happened for me because of it. A week dripping in sanctimony hardly needs any more, but there is cause and effect in everything, even being a wise-ass on Twitter. It's not the effect on anyone else, it's the effect on me and the way it makes me think that I don't really feel as sure of any more.
NB: Now I'm off to Twitter to post this link...
I'd seen the report on the news, Lillee, completing his futuristic cowboy look with a white helmet and perspex face guard (an object itself almost as alien then as a NASA space suit), struck one through mid off and then engaged in some finger-pointing with Brearley and the umpires before underarming the ComBat high into the air and out of view. It was in all of the papers, too, but they said that Lillee wasn't going to be banned or anything like that. The laws of the game didn't specify what a bat should be made of, so why couldn't he use an aluminium one...?
Alf Gover's school was housed in an old industrial shed, and when a ball struck one of the steel crossbeams that supported the roof it was like being inside a great bell. The air itself seemed to vibrate. The ComBat was a deeply strange thing. Aside from its colour and texture, like that of the flat side of a kitchen knife, it was thin even by the standards of the day, and the back had barely any spine, so it looked almost the same on both sides. When it made contact with the ball here in Alf's shed, it sounded unearthly, like one of those effects when cartoon characters hit one another with frying pans.
Reading up on the ComBat this week, the only real censure Lillee faced came from the Wisden Almanack, which Pootered: "The incident served only to blacken Lillee's reputation and damage the image of the game as well as, eventually, the Australian authorities because of their reluctance to take effective disciplinary action." The players realised right away that it was a stunt. The ComBat had been developed by Graham Monaghan, a friend of Lillee's, with the idea that it would be a cheap product for schools and juniors. When Lillee asked the England players to sign the one he'd thrown across the SCG, Brearley wrote "good luck with the sales".
It was an incident from another time, played out at another speed, and it exists now not as a cautionary tale, but as burnishment to Lillee's legend. Brearley was aghast that his carefully shined ball was flattened by the ComBat. Had AB de Villiers gone to the crease with one in Cape Town, he could have saved Cameron Bancroft a job (and Smith, Warner and Lehmann theirs). The Laws have been amended to ensure that bats are made of willow, yet they still mitigate to a degree against reverse swing, a thing of deadly and useful beauty.
Imagine, say, David Warner hurling his Kaboom forty yards across the field because it wouldn't pass through the bat gauge. The thought that he might not be banned is actually an unthinkable one: he'd be more likely to face criminal charges. This is not simply a function of changing mores and morals. It's clear, from the Ben Stokes case and now the Sandpaper Three (or four, if we count Darren Lehmann), that the essential substance of such issues are being affected by the surrounding culture, specifically social media. The shape of them, their actual outcomes, are distorted in and by real-time.
Stokes is not the first cricketer to get involved in a punch up. David Hookes died in one. Botham hit Chappell, Warner hit Root, Ponting copped a black eye in a bar in Sydney, Andrew Symonds had an altercation at a hotel in Brisbane, and so on. The difference with Stokes was that someone filmed the incident on a camera phone. Everything that followed, followed in the light of the footage. Stokes' suspension was inevitable once it was seen on social media. Regardless of whether or not that was the right course of action, it became the only one open. It left a tortured course ahead for everyone, from the CPS, the police and Stokes, who face a Crown Court trial in which some of the evidence will have been publically available for almost a year, to the ECB, with whom it's possible at last to have some sympathy (although their new thing is suing journalists, so you know, fuck them).
At least the Stokes case is now protected by sub judice. Its social media moment has come and gone. The sandpapering in Cape Town may be the Ur manifestation of the near-future. Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publically Shamed brilliantly framed the phenomenon, the dizzying and unstoppable speed at which events unfold online, the weight of comment acting like ballast, moving the story in different ways. It looks at the divorce between the unreal, virtual world, in which everything is permitted, and the real one, where the subjects of the storm, at first unknowing, cocky, secure, are suddenly, bewilderingly, upended and changed by its momentum. It is no longer comment but part of the story itself, integral to its outcome and demanding its price.
Its unpredictability - which event will it latch onto, which will gain no traction; which transgression is insignificant, which is instant fuel - makes it frightening and alien, too.
The best analogy I can think of is that being on Twitter this week was a bit like driving your car. Inside it, you are both part of the world and sealed safely away. You can say anything you like to the other cars and their occupants because it has no effect, or at least it has a false effect: one that makes you feel omnipotent in your tiny, 2015 Vauxhall Corsa. You are never the one doing anything wrong.
I'm a writer. If I don't write, I don't get paid (and when I do write, I don't always get paid much, but that's a different matter). I aim to be as good as I can be, whether it's a 100 word review or 100,000 words of a book. The 140 characters (or 280 or whatever Twitter is now) is seductive. It offers instant feedback, instant satisfaction. Publishers want writers on it and visible. The problem is that it's a fucking timewaster, and it changes the way that you think. In the recent past, when something like ball-tampering happened my first urge would be to blog about it, which demands a certain kind of piece, a particular consideration. I realise now I blog less in part because that sort of thinking takes a bit of time. Twitter's easier, and it kills the urge to write properly. A post here usually gets about a thousand hits. Over 24 hours after Cape Town, my Tweets had 50,000 impressions.
When James Sutherland's first press conference finished, a cricket writer I respect very much sent me a DM that said: "what the fuck was that?" I was thinking exactly the same. The difference was, I Tweeted something like it too. His piece came out later; it was properly weighted, properly judged, and I envied his wisdom in messaging to satisfy that initial urge to say something.
Mickey Arthur wrote a piece about his time coaching Australia (one that I found out about on Twitter), and he mentioned Homework-gate, which had led to his own public humiliation and sacking. I realised I couldn't even remember what had happened beyond it maybe having something to do with Shane Watson and papers under hotel doors - or perhaps that was something else entirely...
The other effect of these storms is that they pass so quickly it makes their consequences appear unreal, too. I think in the case of Smith and Warner, these twelve months are going to feel prehistoric, monolithic. Real time is slow time, and virtual time moves away from it at the speed of light.
I love Twitter. I met the people I now play cricket with there, which has enriched my life in all sorts of ways. Lots of great things have happened for me because of it. A week dripping in sanctimony hardly needs any more, but there is cause and effect in everything, even being a wise-ass on Twitter. It's not the effect on anyone else, it's the effect on me and the way it makes me think that I don't really feel as sure of any more.
NB: Now I'm off to Twitter to post this link...
Tuesday, 16 January 2018
Ramprakash and Hick: onwards down the years...
Thursday 6 June 1991, Headingley. First Test, England v West Indies. The Windies team-sheet is a study in greatness, or at least in grandeur beginning imperceptibly to fade: Simmons, Haynes, Richardson, Hooper, Richards, Logie, Dujon, Marshall, Ambrose, Walsh, Patterson.
England's side has some old stagers with no illusions - Gooch, Lamb, Smith, Russell, Pringle - two established fast bowlers in Defreitas and Malcolm, an opening batsman, Mike Atherton, who has made three centuries in his first thirteen Tests and is already regarded as a future captain, and three debutants blinking softly in the Yorkshire gloaming: Steve Watkin, Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick.
Under rain-streaked skies, Viv Richards wins the toss and bowls. Hick, at three, doesn't have to wait long for his chance. After 22 minutes, Atherton is bowled by Patrick Patterson and he walks out. Few modern players have taken guard in Test cricket for the first time with quite as many runs behind them. In the seven years he has spent qualifying for England, he has made 2,000 runs in a season, a thousand runs in May, been named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year and has a top score of 405 not out for Worcestershire against Somerset, an innings so vast and rare that it was reported on the Nine O'Clock News.
He bats for 51 minutes, hits one boundary and is caught by Dujon from the bowling of Walsh for six, leaving England on 45-3. As Hick walks off, Mark Ramprakash walks out. They pass one another just inside the boundary rope.
Many years later, I had the chance to talk to Mark Ramprakash about that day. While he wasn't carrying quite the expectations that Hick was, he'd made his County Championship debut for Middlesex while still at sixth-form, struck a first class hundred at the age of eighteen and followed it with an innings of 56 in the NatWest final, which won him the man of the match award. Now he was twenty-one years old and playing for England.
What he remembered most was not just the unforgiving brilliance of the West Indies bowling, but how good their fielding was. After a while he'd looked around and thought, 'how am I going to score a run here?' Yet he made 27 of them, the third-highest total in an innings of 198 all out.
His knock was set in further context when England dismissed West Indies for 173, with only Simmons, Richardson and the great Richards, with 73, making double figures. From there the game assumed its real significance. When England batted again, Gooch scored 154 of the team's 252, an innings regarded now and perhaps forever as the best played by an Englishman in Test cricket, and ranked in the top two or three of all time. West Indies were bowled out for 162 and England won by 115 runs, a first home victory over the Windies for twenty-two years. They went on to draw the series 2-2 by winning the last Test at the Oval.
Mark Ramprakash scored 27 in that second innings at Leeds, too, and it would become, eleven years later, his final average. It was one of the strange symmetries that echoed through the careers of he and Graeme Hick: the shared debut, the shared trajectory, the notion of each being, in their way, an enigma. They are, and will probably remain, the last two players to score 100 first-class hundreds, the traditional mark of a kind of batsmanship and a type of career that has now passed. Two others in that Headingley game, Viv Richards and Graham Gooch, immediately precede Hick and Ramprakash on the list. Viv Richards was Ramprakash's batting hero, and each would end their career with 114 hundreds.
In the Ashes series just gone, Hick and Ramprakash opposed one another as batting coaches for Australia and England respectively. Each would have recognised in their line-ups some of the struggles that they endured, in James Vince's ability to get started and then get out, perhaps, or in Shaun Marsh's endless drops and recalls. People often wonder what batting coaches at that level actually do, aside from develop the world's strongest shoulders via the dog-thrower.
Last year, for Wisden Almanack, I spoke to Joe Root about his innings of 254 against Pakistan at Old Trafford. Root felt he'd been playing well going into the game, but remembered that Ramprakash had asked him whether he was 'still in one-day mode' after watching him give it away a little in the defeat at Lord's. Root at first disagreed, but then thought about it some more, and with Ramprakash, made some small but crucial changes to his technique against Pakistan's three left-arm quicks, each of whom bowled quite differently.
The result was that definitive innings, and Root was happy to acknowledge Ramprakash's unobtrusive but key role in it. That's what batting coaches do, although, like everything in cricket, it doesn't always happen and it doesn't always work. Having the knowledge to understand what to say, and the sensitivity of when a player may want to hear it said, are skills that can take a lifetime to develop, especially in the blizzard of noise that surrounds every international performance.
For a long time, I wanted to write a book about Hick and Ramprakash, a kind of double-biography which would begin at the Headingley game and somehow spin outwards to talk about England in the 1990s, and about notions of success and failure and what those twin states actually are. That one's just another on the great pile of 'books' destined not to exist, like Martin Amis' joke in The Information about the novels of its central character Richard Tull: 'Unpublished, then unfinished, then finally, unwritten and unthought of'. But I did get to write a chapter in The Meaning of Cricket, The Descendants, about it and about that day talking to Mark Ramprakash.
The era still feels like an extraordinary time. Joining the quartet of bowlers that Ramprakash, Hick and Atherton squared up to at Headingley would come Wasim and Waqar, Warne, McGrath, Muralitharan, Kumble, Donald, Pollock, Saqlain and many more. With that little lot, plus reverse swing and mystery spin, almost every bowling record would be shattered during a decade that looks, in hindsight, more like a reign of terror. It's easy to imagine Ramprakash and Hick, Nasser and Athers and Graham Thorpe and the rest listening to the discussions about Australia's Ashes attack, wearing the kind of smiles that are always best described as wry...
England's side has some old stagers with no illusions - Gooch, Lamb, Smith, Russell, Pringle - two established fast bowlers in Defreitas and Malcolm, an opening batsman, Mike Atherton, who has made three centuries in his first thirteen Tests and is already regarded as a future captain, and three debutants blinking softly in the Yorkshire gloaming: Steve Watkin, Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick.
Under rain-streaked skies, Viv Richards wins the toss and bowls. Hick, at three, doesn't have to wait long for his chance. After 22 minutes, Atherton is bowled by Patrick Patterson and he walks out. Few modern players have taken guard in Test cricket for the first time with quite as many runs behind them. In the seven years he has spent qualifying for England, he has made 2,000 runs in a season, a thousand runs in May, been named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year and has a top score of 405 not out for Worcestershire against Somerset, an innings so vast and rare that it was reported on the Nine O'Clock News.
He bats for 51 minutes, hits one boundary and is caught by Dujon from the bowling of Walsh for six, leaving England on 45-3. As Hick walks off, Mark Ramprakash walks out. They pass one another just inside the boundary rope.
Many years later, I had the chance to talk to Mark Ramprakash about that day. While he wasn't carrying quite the expectations that Hick was, he'd made his County Championship debut for Middlesex while still at sixth-form, struck a first class hundred at the age of eighteen and followed it with an innings of 56 in the NatWest final, which won him the man of the match award. Now he was twenty-one years old and playing for England.
What he remembered most was not just the unforgiving brilliance of the West Indies bowling, but how good their fielding was. After a while he'd looked around and thought, 'how am I going to score a run here?' Yet he made 27 of them, the third-highest total in an innings of 198 all out.
His knock was set in further context when England dismissed West Indies for 173, with only Simmons, Richardson and the great Richards, with 73, making double figures. From there the game assumed its real significance. When England batted again, Gooch scored 154 of the team's 252, an innings regarded now and perhaps forever as the best played by an Englishman in Test cricket, and ranked in the top two or three of all time. West Indies were bowled out for 162 and England won by 115 runs, a first home victory over the Windies for twenty-two years. They went on to draw the series 2-2 by winning the last Test at the Oval.
Mark Ramprakash scored 27 in that second innings at Leeds, too, and it would become, eleven years later, his final average. It was one of the strange symmetries that echoed through the careers of he and Graeme Hick: the shared debut, the shared trajectory, the notion of each being, in their way, an enigma. They are, and will probably remain, the last two players to score 100 first-class hundreds, the traditional mark of a kind of batsmanship and a type of career that has now passed. Two others in that Headingley game, Viv Richards and Graham Gooch, immediately precede Hick and Ramprakash on the list. Viv Richards was Ramprakash's batting hero, and each would end their career with 114 hundreds.
In the Ashes series just gone, Hick and Ramprakash opposed one another as batting coaches for Australia and England respectively. Each would have recognised in their line-ups some of the struggles that they endured, in James Vince's ability to get started and then get out, perhaps, or in Shaun Marsh's endless drops and recalls. People often wonder what batting coaches at that level actually do, aside from develop the world's strongest shoulders via the dog-thrower.
Last year, for Wisden Almanack, I spoke to Joe Root about his innings of 254 against Pakistan at Old Trafford. Root felt he'd been playing well going into the game, but remembered that Ramprakash had asked him whether he was 'still in one-day mode' after watching him give it away a little in the defeat at Lord's. Root at first disagreed, but then thought about it some more, and with Ramprakash, made some small but crucial changes to his technique against Pakistan's three left-arm quicks, each of whom bowled quite differently.
The result was that definitive innings, and Root was happy to acknowledge Ramprakash's unobtrusive but key role in it. That's what batting coaches do, although, like everything in cricket, it doesn't always happen and it doesn't always work. Having the knowledge to understand what to say, and the sensitivity of when a player may want to hear it said, are skills that can take a lifetime to develop, especially in the blizzard of noise that surrounds every international performance.
For a long time, I wanted to write a book about Hick and Ramprakash, a kind of double-biography which would begin at the Headingley game and somehow spin outwards to talk about England in the 1990s, and about notions of success and failure and what those twin states actually are. That one's just another on the great pile of 'books' destined not to exist, like Martin Amis' joke in The Information about the novels of its central character Richard Tull: 'Unpublished, then unfinished, then finally, unwritten and unthought of'. But I did get to write a chapter in The Meaning of Cricket, The Descendants, about it and about that day talking to Mark Ramprakash.
The era still feels like an extraordinary time. Joining the quartet of bowlers that Ramprakash, Hick and Atherton squared up to at Headingley would come Wasim and Waqar, Warne, McGrath, Muralitharan, Kumble, Donald, Pollock, Saqlain and many more. With that little lot, plus reverse swing and mystery spin, almost every bowling record would be shattered during a decade that looks, in hindsight, more like a reign of terror. It's easy to imagine Ramprakash and Hick, Nasser and Athers and Graham Thorpe and the rest listening to the discussions about Australia's Ashes attack, wearing the kind of smiles that are always best described as wry...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
