State of England

Justin Langer's dissection of the English condition was the best thing in the papers this weekend, but even JL, frothing away at his keyboard in sunny Somerset, didn't pick up on one of our greatest traits: our telling weakness for the past.

We don't have a word for it, but the Portuguese do. It's saudade, which means something along the lines of 'nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed'. 

It's a very English concept when you think about it, and it's the one behind the calls for Mark Ramprakash to come back. There's a tremendous romance about the idea, for several reasons. Firstly, English cricket loves its old warriors - Washbrook, Cowdrey, Close, Steele, all called up for a last mission in front of the guns. We trust that concept for exactly the reasons Australia mistrust it: for what it says, for what it means. 

Ramprakash also embodies the desire for a happy ending, the need for reality to match up to the kind of redemptive storylines you get in novels and films. The weight of his fame [which comes in part from his success on reality TV] plays into it, too, as does the British sense of fair play. All of those runs must amount to something, after all. 

But is is nostalgia, it is romance. Ramprakash and Graeme Hick were my  favourite English players of their era. They mean more to me than Atherton or Hussain or Stewart; I'd rather watch either of them get 40 than see Thorpe get a hundred. They were special in their way. Ramprakash's achievements over the last four years have a great nobility about them because they've been built by his pure love of batting. 

Yet if Ramps played at the Oval, it wouldn't just be about England needing a number three. It would be about the baggage he brings with him, his own and ours. We'd be asking him to bat not for his future, but for his past. And that's a very English thing.

NB: Strangely, the one way it might work would be if Ramprakash were not the only change, and Key went in ahead of him. That would skew the expectation, redistribute the pressure more evenly, make it less about either of them and more about the team as a whole. Wonder what JL would do...

The executioner's song

Conventional wisdom says that the greats wake up one day and just know. But how? How can they? Because often the quality that separates them from the rest is belief, and that rarely ever dies, bound up as it is with ego and self-image.

Some go gently into that good night. Others rage against the dying of the light. You won't get two more opposing departures than those of Justin Langer and Steve Waugh, for example. But they had the inevitable in common. They both understood they would have to go, one way or the other. 

Matthew Hayden knows it, hears the whispers. Like the old soldier, his talk is all of his fallen comrades. 'When they leave,' he sighed this week, 'a part of you goes with them'. His winsomeness contrasts with the thousand yard stare that Katich wears as standard. That guy's desire is the property of the unfulfilled.

Hayden has scored so many runs even he must be almost sated by now, and the numbers carry their own hints. 

It has been ten innings since his last hundred. Those innings have been: 0, 13, 0, 29, 83, 16*, 16, 77, 8, 0, an average of 26.88 against a career 52.04.

Steve Waugh's last hundred came nine innings before the end: 78, 61, 0, 56*, 30, 42, 19, 40, 80, an average of 50.75 against a career 51.06.

Justin Langer's last hundred came eight innings before the end: 4, 7, 37, 0, 27, 26, 20*, an average of 20.16 against a career 45.77.

Waugh averaged a hundred every eight innings (32 in 260), Langer one in eight (23 in 182), Hayden one in six (30 in 177). Hayden's stat is leant more weight by the fact he once went 30 innings without one.

The statistics say Hayden is waning. Waugh raged. Langer knew. Hayden hears the song, too.

When the Australian war machine was at its peak, they surrounded your castle and used Hayden as a battering ram. He has been the most okker of Aussies, and therefore not the most loved elsewhere, but it's impossible not to salute him. 

The best compliment I heard paid to an Australian from an Englishman came from Mick Jagger to their opening bowler. 'Glenn McGrath,' he said, reclining in his chair in the pavilion at Lord's. 'What a bastard'.

You knew what he meant. Matty Hayden, what a bastard too.