So England take their counter-intuitive leap into the dark with Alastair Cook at the Oval tomorrow. A man with an ODI strike rate of 71 will be opening the batting for the foreseeable future. Just like Oscar Wilde's wallpaper, either that strike rate will have to go, or he will.
Cook will be asked to play against nature in ratcheting up his hitting. The question is, by how much? It's an odd and indefinable one to answer, but it is a question that cricket asks all the time because, as the old cliche goes, it's the sort of sport that reveals character as often as it builds it.
Samit Patel is another man fighting his nature. The state of the fat professional cricketer is probably more complex than it's given credit for. It's pretty simple to get in the gym and re-engineer yourself if you want to, with all of the help that's on tap, so when it doesn't happen there have to be reasons why. On saturday, Patel, who has achieved some sort of arbitrary minimum standard that doesn't seem to have included losing much timber, was run out not attempting a run.
It was a slack dismissal for a slack cricketer. There are guys like Patel all across sport, guys whose efforts are approximate, who seem ambivalent to their talents and opportunities. They're almost there but not quite. Beneath the self-deprecating grins and all the rest of the image projection is something fragile, something fearful, something preventing them from taking that final step through the door. It can be tough to contemplate finding out what lies at the end of yourself.
Patel appears to be fighting a battle like that one; perhaps it's easier for him at the moment to have people say 'if only' than it is to find out. Bring in the shrinks. Not far from Bristol, scene of Samit's latest stand, an even more majestically-upholstered enigma has appeared like a galleon in full sail.
Clad in always flattering red spandex, hair teased into a mad omelette of tints and highlights, Mark Cosgrove opens the batting for Glamorgan, geographically and figuratively separated from the players he outshone as a kid - he was the Bradman Young Cricketer Of The Year in 2005. He's now about as popular with Cricket Australia as Simon Katich is, and they don't seem as inclined to unravel his mystery as England are with Patel's.
It's a mystery of a different kind, because Cosgrove seems at one with his nature. He is a supremely gifted batsman in all formats, easily as good as Usman Khawaja, far superior to David Warner, and with a touch of X-factor about him. He may not be an athlete, but his hands and eye are lethally fast. He parted company with South Australia last year at their behest ['we were unable to help him fulfill his full potential'] and then went to Tasmania to score a shedload of runs as they won the Sheffield Shield ['at times it looked like he was batting on a different wicket to the rest,' said his coach].
No, Cosgrove's problem is one of image - external rather than self. Quite patently he is worth the few extra runs he may give away in the field. It's just that Australia, in a rebuilding phase, can't be seen to be sanctioning a free-spirited attitude like his, which is ironic, given that his attitude is very Australian in its way. Cosgrove's self-image, unlike Patel's, doesn't need breaking down. I'd bet he'd be a lesser player without the excess pounds, because those pounds are expressing his need to be different and free.
There are no pat answers; a man's nature is complex, for all the nurturing it gets.
Showing posts with label Mark Cosgrove. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Cosgrove. Show all posts
Monday, 27 June 2011
Friday, 21 January 2011
It's not his fault, it's his glands...
So Samit Patel has had another kicking from Andy Flower, a display of the particularly piquant disappointment that only the uber-pro who had to scrap for everything he's got can conjure up. But it's not just Flabby Sam who's fat and lazy. The very sight of him was enough to prod the Guardian into that old standby, the Fat Cricketers XI.
Fat and lazy it was too, containing all the usual suspects, among them IT Botham, Boony, Mike Gatting and Shane Warne - just the 20,185 runs and 1,095 wickets in Test matches from them - plus Colin Milburn [yawn], Boof Lehman [groan], and then some others - Rob Key, Ian Blackwell - who bit the bullet and got fit seasons ago.
Then there was Dwayne Leverock [that picture again, yes] who, let's be honest, is a clubbie, and if we're counting them, listen up: I've seen guys fatter than him open the bowling, pal... And most egregiously of all, the good Doctor himself, founder of the modern game, maker of 54,000 runs across 44 first-class seasons on pitches that make my back garden look like the WACA circa 1974. Yes, WG was fat - when he was 55 and had spent half his life on Victorian trains going back and forth to matches. As the most cursory study of his career would reveal, when he was Samit Patel's age, he had scored a double-hundred at the Oval and then nipped down to Crystal Palace in the evening to win the 440-yard hurdles, and was regarded, with his brother, as the finest fielder in the land - his throw was measured at 122 yards.
But what was most fat and lazy about the Guardian's space-filler is that there is actually a good story here. What it's about really is fitness for purpose, because the standard of fitness has shifted and almost all of the Fat XI simply aligned with the requirements of their day. The most obvious absentee from the list was Samit Patel's Australian equivalent, Mark Cosgrove, who would walk into the Australian Test side at the moment if only he'd tow the line.
It's fascinating psychologically why players like that won't do something as simple as getting fit when it would obviously advance them. Are they maverick figures who would actually lose the edge from their game if they felt like they were conforming? Or is it a deeper fear of failure [or success] that manifests itself in the safety net of appearing too cool to care? Flower obviously feels like it's a problem worth solving, and Australia should too.
Fat and lazy it was too, containing all the usual suspects, among them IT Botham, Boony, Mike Gatting and Shane Warne - just the 20,185 runs and 1,095 wickets in Test matches from them - plus Colin Milburn [yawn], Boof Lehman [groan], and then some others - Rob Key, Ian Blackwell - who bit the bullet and got fit seasons ago.
Then there was Dwayne Leverock [that picture again, yes] who, let's be honest, is a clubbie, and if we're counting them, listen up: I've seen guys fatter than him open the bowling, pal... And most egregiously of all, the good Doctor himself, founder of the modern game, maker of 54,000 runs across 44 first-class seasons on pitches that make my back garden look like the WACA circa 1974. Yes, WG was fat - when he was 55 and had spent half his life on Victorian trains going back and forth to matches. As the most cursory study of his career would reveal, when he was Samit Patel's age, he had scored a double-hundred at the Oval and then nipped down to Crystal Palace in the evening to win the 440-yard hurdles, and was regarded, with his brother, as the finest fielder in the land - his throw was measured at 122 yards.
But what was most fat and lazy about the Guardian's space-filler is that there is actually a good story here. What it's about really is fitness for purpose, because the standard of fitness has shifted and almost all of the Fat XI simply aligned with the requirements of their day. The most obvious absentee from the list was Samit Patel's Australian equivalent, Mark Cosgrove, who would walk into the Australian Test side at the moment if only he'd tow the line.
It's fascinating psychologically why players like that won't do something as simple as getting fit when it would obviously advance them. Are they maverick figures who would actually lose the edge from their game if they felt like they were conforming? Or is it a deeper fear of failure [or success] that manifests itself in the safety net of appearing too cool to care? Flower obviously feels like it's a problem worth solving, and Australia should too.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Enter the [fat] dragon
Real life rather rudely intruded on this week's noble ambition of lying around watching cricket, but the Surrey-Glamorgan pro-40 do at the Oval should not pass without comment. The bald reality of the result on the scorecard, Surrey win by 39 runs [d/l method], is a bit like describing Moby-Dick as a book about a bloke chasing a whale. It's true, but there's a little bit more to it than that.
Like Ahab, Glamorgan were pursuing something massive in dodgy weather - 386 from 38, which was D/L-ed 'down' to 227 from 20. Enter the dragon, Mark Cosgrove, floating across the floodlit green in Glamorgan's fire-engine red kit, an item of fashion that on the more slender fellow looks like something Culture Club might have worn on Top Of The Pops, but stretched across the mighty Cossie frame resembles a top-notch darts star approaching the oche.
Underneath his helmet, Cosgrove also has the look of a heavier Barry Richards - it's something to do with the toothy smirk and fuzz of hair - and he carries with him the same sense of the possible. He thrashed a gloriously defiant 88 from 55 in a dead-loss of a chase, but by god there was something magnificent about it, too. His eye is extraordinary. Many times he backed away to leg, and if the ball didn't quite land in the slot, he simply dropped the bat on it with the same insouciance as a golfer tapping in a putt one-handed. When he swung and connected, the ball departed the arena with sonic force. No-one has bat-speed like Cossie's.
Everything he does is set against the backdrop of his size. The commentators have a sob in their voice as they describe his travails with the ACB. 'If only' is the default position on his career. Yet there is an alternative view. Cosgrove is actually keeping cricket democratic. He could buckle down to the protein shake and push-up routine if he really wanted to, but he doesn't. Instead, he's a maverick figure, a lone sail on the horizon, a big man who knows that, in the end, it's just a game so why not enjoy it as you want to?
It makes him more human and more watchable. He's one of cricket's great archetypes and I'd bet that more kids will pick up a bat through seeing him than will through watching Marcus North.
Like Ahab, Glamorgan were pursuing something massive in dodgy weather - 386 from 38, which was D/L-ed 'down' to 227 from 20. Enter the dragon, Mark Cosgrove, floating across the floodlit green in Glamorgan's fire-engine red kit, an item of fashion that on the more slender fellow looks like something Culture Club might have worn on Top Of The Pops, but stretched across the mighty Cossie frame resembles a top-notch darts star approaching the oche.
Underneath his helmet, Cosgrove also has the look of a heavier Barry Richards - it's something to do with the toothy smirk and fuzz of hair - and he carries with him the same sense of the possible. He thrashed a gloriously defiant 88 from 55 in a dead-loss of a chase, but by god there was something magnificent about it, too. His eye is extraordinary. Many times he backed away to leg, and if the ball didn't quite land in the slot, he simply dropped the bat on it with the same insouciance as a golfer tapping in a putt one-handed. When he swung and connected, the ball departed the arena with sonic force. No-one has bat-speed like Cossie's.
Everything he does is set against the backdrop of his size. The commentators have a sob in their voice as they describe his travails with the ACB. 'If only' is the default position on his career. Yet there is an alternative view. Cosgrove is actually keeping cricket democratic. He could buckle down to the protein shake and push-up routine if he really wanted to, but he doesn't. Instead, he's a maverick figure, a lone sail on the horizon, a big man who knows that, in the end, it's just a game so why not enjoy it as you want to?
It makes him more human and more watchable. He's one of cricket's great archetypes and I'd bet that more kids will pick up a bat through seeing him than will through watching Marcus North.
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