Leave it, Stuart son...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confessions of a man insane enough to live with beasts...

Jarrod Kimber is not a normal Australian. He doesn't live in Australia. He honours a non-Australian idol. He does un-Australian things, like write a book about the 2009 Ashes. For those reasons alone, it would be worth reading but I suspect it will be funny, too, and not just about Mitchell Johnson.

NB: The only other Australian to go into print about 2009 has been Gideon Haigh, another terrific writer. The England side of the ledger stands at Andrew Strauss, Andrew Flintoff, The England Team's Official Story, Stuart Broad, Mike Atherton, the official DVD and the back end of Michael Vaughan's autobiography. Not that the market is dictated by who won at all...

There is a Gid

Jrod put up the link to Gideon Haigh's address at Oxford, 'Cricket And The Media: The Pantomime Horse'. 

It's as good as you'd expect, and the opening point about the mediated experience of watching the modern game is superbly made.  The only defence against that experience, I'd say, is to trust the evidence of your own eyes - or at least take note of who's doing the mediating. 

NB: I actually misread the first line. I thought he'd said: 'Cricket and the media... the topic has haunted me since Bopara suggested it'. Now that would have been something...

The inner Ronnie

Anyone watching the IPL on TV outside of England cannot fully appreciate the nature of the nightmare that we are enduring. Ronnie Irani is in the Setanta Sports studio.

It's not that Irani is merely inarticulate. That would be survivable. Inarticulacy does not quite do it. What's required is one of those tremendous compound words that the Germans specialise in: a word that means 'someone whose shallow vocabulary perfectly expresses his simpleton's worldview'. Truly, the inner life of Ronnie Irani is a terrifying, if tiny, place.

But here is the real terror: Irani is not just a part-time pundit for Setanta's once-a-year T20  bonanza. He has a lucrative media career as a radio presenter at Talksport, where he appears daily as a foil to a rent-a-gob ex-footballer called Alan Brazil [The awfulness of Brazil's radio show can only be comprehended by looking at this picture and imagining that you are trapped next to him in a pub for three hours. Every day.]

12th Man pointed me towards Gideon Haigh's Cricinfo piece on the nature and repercussions of the IPL TV coverage. I'd extend the point. If the language used to describe the game is limited to trite conventional wisdom, then that will become the prevailing culture. Just look at football.

Haigh and mighty

Gideon Haigh's farewell to Matthew Hayden in today's Guardian was a couple of weeks late, but to mangle a cliche, if it's good enough who cares how old it is?

Haigh's is very good indeed, and he seems as engaged as everyone else by Hayden. Writers love an enigma, and Hayden's character and career are divisive things, inherently contradictory. 

He pulls out a glorious stat and a raging sledge to make an incisive point. The stat is that Hayden averaged 67 under the captaincy of Steve Waugh and 41 elsewhere. The sledge came after he took Zaheer Khan apart in the World Cup Final. 'Smell that Z?' he said. 'That's your house in India burning down'.

Haydos was Waugh's battering ram, the bull-chested alpha-male given license to mete out the mental disintegration. The pay-off for Hayden was the peace that continuity offered him. 

Haigh began his piece with some EJ Thribb: 'So Farewell then Haydos/mental disintegration/That was your catchphrase/Keith's mum pointed out that you have a higher test average than either Viv Richards or Denis Compton/But I found you about as interesting as your nickname'.

That's part of the reason why Haigh can write about Hayden two weeks late and still be worth reading. It's also part of the reason why the media should not consist solely of ex-cricketers. 

Further evidence was provided by another of today's intros, this one from Mike Atherton. 'In this week of fresh starts and renewed hope,' he wrote, 'has English cricket found, in Andrew Strauss, its Barack Obama?' 

That is probably the single most stupid sentence in all of the newspapers this year, and I'm including the Daily Mail. Private Eye run a regular round-up of tenuous and tortuous analogies made by hacks attempting to link their unrelated copy into the big story of the day. If Atherton doesn't make the Obama-Balls section, I'll eat Channel 9's Baggy Green ceramic replica.

Making Haigh, and punting on Punter

For all cricket correspondents embarking on their 'Australia's fallen empire' piece, here's how it's done, courtesy of Gideon Haigh.

It's a piece filled with lovely, wry lines ('Michael Hussey's average has deflated like a sub-prime asset book') and genuine insight ('This defeat does not mark the end of an era. The era had already ended. And the 13 year green-and-gold age has really been a series of overlapping phases, subtly different, distinguished by key retirements'). Here is real writing.

He also touches on a point that seems to be generally accepted: that Ricky Ponting would retire rather than play under another captain. 

I wonder if that's true. Ponting is still only 34, that glorious late summertime for Test batsmen. The ageless (and for the most part captaincy-free) Tendulkar, and Jacques Kallis apart, he must be the only mid-30 year old with 127 Tests and more than 300 ODIs, and his record as a batsman is exemplary. Within four years, every major landmark aside from Lara's high scores could be his. 

In the hazy way of perception he somehow seems more vital than Michael Vaughan (34), Mohammad Yousuf (34), Rahul Dravid (35), VVS Laxman (34) and the hooded-eyed Kallis (still just 33). Only Chanderpaul, impish as ever at 34, seems to have as much gas in the tank.

Katich is the man most mentioned, and he is just a year Ponting's junior. If Ricky took the Tendulkar/Lara view of the captaincy - a cross you have to bear from time to time - he might live forever in their exalted company.