What Mike Atherton has in common with Mick Mars

One played 115 times for his country and is the cricket correspondent of The Times. The other is a member of Motley Crue and once accidentally shot his own girlfriend. One published an autobiography in which he revealed that he didn't like Raymond Illingworth. The other published an autobiography in which he revealed that he believed in aliens. One has a child named after a guitar, Les Paul. It's unlikely that the other has a son called Gray-Nicolls.

There is however some common ground between Michael Andrew Atherton, 43, of Failsworth, Lancashire, and Robert Alan Deal [no, Mick Mars is not his real name], 60, of Los Angeles California. When the histories of their respective occupations are written, neither will quite inhabit the upper echelons frequented by great men, yet both have had their moments too. Athers, for example, resisted Alan Donald for 12 hours in Johannesburg. And Mick Mars wrote Girls, Girls, Girls.

And then there is ankylosing spondylitis, an auto-immune form of arthritis that affects the spine. Yesterday it was announced that researchers have isolated the genetic mutation that causes the disease, which has impacted the lives and careers of both Athers and Mick Mars.

Atherton wrote in yesterday's Times about the discovery [unfortunately it's behind lovely Rupert's paywall] and about how the condition imposed itself on his game. By the age of twenty he was suffering badly enough for him to undergo special exercise and treatment, and he played with it throughout his career. It was usually referred to as 'a bad back', which is somewhat understating the case. Athers is one of life's stoics, but in addition to putting up with Ray Illingworth, Glenn McGrath, Wasim and Waqar, Brian Lara, the press and just 31 wins in those 115 games, it's no surprise that his increasingly hunched, purse-lipped, white-faced presence at the crease appeared to offer him so little pleasure.

Mick Mars' suffering was somewhat overwhelmed by the gargantuan feats of debauchery that Motley Crue fessed up to in their book The Dirt, but in one memorable passage he refers to ankylosing spondylitis as 'a grey ghost' that he he imagined hovering over his body, causing it to gradually lock up. His spine has fused and he is now three inches shorter than he was as a young man. He has had a double hip replacement, which has eased pain so debilitating he once tried to kill himself by walking out into the sea.

After Athers was caught rubbing dirt on the ball in 1995, the The Times accused their future correspondent of 'failing to uphold the values to which his society aspires'. He had to endure Jimmy Tarbuck calling for his resignation. In his next innings he made 99, and in his press conference quoted Roosevelt: 'It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled ... The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena; whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood.'

Both Atherton and Mick Mars have managed that, although Athers would probably accept that a little mild ribbing is due given that he has jumped the fence and become an occasionally caustic critic himself. He wrote yesterday that he hoped the new research meant future generations of Athertons would not have to go through the same thing. Let's hope they can bat though. Or write Girls, Girls, Girls.

Melancholy and the infinite sadness of Ian Bell

So, England came close to declaring on Ian Bell when he was 98 not out. What stopped them was Andrew Strauss's argument that a mood of 'melancholy' might be created around the team. As melancholy is an important emotion in life and one woven into the fabric of the game, it was good to see Strauss's England respect its influence and get their unlikely reward.

There's an obvious parallel with Sydney 1995, when Mike Atherton pulled the plug on England's second dig with Graeme Hick on the same score. That was an extraordinary, weather-affected game too, eventually drawn after first Australia looked like they'd chase England down and then fell in a heap before clinging on. 'Atherton lost patience and ungenerously declared,' the Almanack thundered. 'He had batted far more slowly himself'.

There was plenty of support for Atherton's decision at the time, though. There was a view that the England team needed steel, a kind of Australian-style macho, no-bullshit, no-frills, low indulgence of the individual which in turn would make the unit stronger.

It did not allow a lot of room for melancholy, although there was always plenty around Hick, and around Atherton, too. It's a worldview that seems very 90s now. In cricket, more than almost any other team game, it is about the individual. It has to be. There's no point pretending that individual achievement doesn't matter, or that the team must always take precedence. Instinctively, Strauss, with the team in mind, invested in Ian Bell's happiness. It was a decision that might not have paid off in the short term, but it was guaranteed to at some point, because as Strauss understood, it would have made every individual in the team feel good.

Sometimes, you just get back what you give out. Athers and Strauss did when they made their different calls.

KP: opinion divided [again]

There must be something 'wrong' with Kevin Pietersen, because he's not scored a hundred a full six innings into his comeback - that's the media view at least. There were contrasting opinions as to why from Mike Atherton on Sky and Geoffrey Boycott on TMS [paraphrased here].

Athers: 'He's at that stage of his career where he has to decide what he wants from the game. Players get married, kids come along, travelling's different, priorities change and you have to ask yourself what kind of player you want to be remembered as, how much the game means to you, how many runs you want to score.'

Boycott: 'He's a big man, six feet four, and his height means he can get much closer to the pitch of the ball than most players. But he's only taking half a stride. His bat's two and a half feet in front of his pad, he's walking towards the ball, his front leg's stiff and his whole right side is getting turned around. He just needs to play straight'.

No prizes for guessing which one of these men played in the era of the sports psychologist...

'He's a great lad, I like him a lot and I like his batting,' concluded Boycs. 'But he won't listen to anybody. He just says, that's the way I play, take it or leave it'. 

Remind you of anyone, does he Geoffrey?

NB: Not that the great Yorkshireman is blind to the new age. 

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.

Captaincy, the time for love

Mike Atherton's writing is a lot like his batting: spiky, unpretty, rarely epic. At times he seems almost too detached. On occasion though he forgets his Nietzschian struggles with an ambivalent universe and produces something like this, a sweetly observed piece on Kevin Pietersen and Mike Brearley in India. 

Captains usually look, consciously or not, to fashion teams in their image; either that or they simply overwhelm them with force of personality. Brearley's triumph was of a different order. He gave a means of expression to a cabinet of talents far greater than his own. 

No batsman without a Test match hundred has been more revered by his men. I only saw one day's play of the 1981 Ashes series live, and it was the nadir: second Test at Lord's, Botham the captain making the second duck of a pair, bowled round his legs by Ray Bright trying to sweep. He walked back to the dressing room in a silence that can only be described as contemptuous. His despair was not hard to imagine. 

Bob Woolmer was dropped to make way for Brearley at Headingley. Of course, Brearley could never have done it without Botham. But then, manifestly, Botham was not doing it without Brearley either. 

Brearley's method with Beefy was merely to reassure him of his worth, let him know he was loved, and set him loose. This was important because the public had turned against Botham for the first time in his career. Pietersen has the same need within him, and on a greater scale too. He sees the value in passing it along. Harmison was the first to be enveloped in KP's cloud of love, but he won't be the last.

So the vision of KP and Brears sitting together on the flight to Mohali is a sweet one. You know they'll have been talking love as well as the joys of the in-out field. 

Picture byline

Private Eye has a piece in the new issue about the cull of sportswriters and name columnists at the Daily Telegraph. They're comparing and contrasting with the arrival there of one MP Vaughan. He is, according to the Tele's puff: 'a real asset to our cricket coverage. His experience of captaining  the England cricket team and being one of the best batsmen in the world puts him in a remarkably strong position to comment on cricket'.

Oh does it now. And what do we think the man on a central contract trying to get his place back in the side is going to tell us, exactly? What position is he in?

Hiring Vaughan is anti-comment. It's not Vaughan's fault. He's going to have to do something after cricket, and so following former England captains David Gower, Ian Botham, Bob Willis, Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain into the Sky commentary box must appeal, as must joining Atherton, Gower, Mike Selvey, Derek Pringle, Vic Marks and Angus Fraser in a cricket correspondent's position on a national newspaper. 

Ultimately this has happened because conventional wisdom has it that these people know something that the rest of us don't. That may be true. But unless they can mediate their experience, unless they can translate it, it remains in its trough of comfortable cliche. Cliche, along with psychobabble, is the language in which sportsmen address each other. Waffle on, Vaughany. 

NB: Vaughan has provided one piece so far: a Q&A about golf.

Related post: I blogged before about the great Arlott and Sky here.

English player 'good enough for IPL' - Official!

The line from the sunday papers is that England should return to India with whatever squad they can patch together. While we wait, Mike Atherton is the first journo to confirm that he will be on the plane. Maybe pack your pads, too, Athers. We miss having an opener on 27 not out at lunch. Or just not out at lunch. 

Concealed in the depths of Simon Wilde's why-oh-why in the Times* is the news that Graham Napier has a deal in place to play for Mumbai in the IPL. This is significant in that he'll be just the second Englishman, behind Dimi Mascarenhas, to do so.

So what do Dimi and Napier have in common? That's it - neither of them are in the England one-day set-up (except for inclusion in the pat-on-the-head 30 man 'performance squads' that we cherish so). The point is slightly skewed because those on central contacts can't sign for IPL sides yet, but it's common knowledge that only KP, Freddie, Shah, Bopara and Monty are likely to get one.

Flintoff had a pre-terrorism rant about the importance of playing IPL cricket next year. Which provokes a question as to why Napier and Mascarenhas aren't in the T20 side, never mind the squad. 

It's not as if England don't need someone who can hit 30 off five balls against India, or 24 from four against New Zealand like Dimi did. Dimi can do that stuff. Napier can too, and he can sustain it for far longer because he's not confined to hitting in one area.

So shall we give someone who's good enough for one of the two IPL contracts in England a go. Or shall we just pick Belly again? 

* Can anyone from that newspaper explain why they still insist on calling Mumbai 'Bombay'? They are alone in this. Old stylebooks die hard, eh boys...