Another country

Ben over at Crucket recommended Netherland, Joseph O'Neill's book about a Dutch banker living in New York and playing for the Staten Island club. I'm only a little way in, but there are some excellent moments - a description of fielders who 'again and again converge in unison on the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm'; someone's silver nail polish wearing away to 'a fishy shimmer'; the 'mechanical dark' of a hotel's service staircase.

O'Neill seemed to be writing a lot from life, and, googling him, it turned out to be so. The New York Times followed him down to Staten Island to watch a match for a piece that was warm and funny, if not always intentionally. O'Neill, they report is 'a decent off-speed bowler' who also 'led off the batting, hitting some nice cuts and sweeps, a couple of long balls, even a delicate backwards slice before being 'run out' for a disappointing 21. He was picked off base as it were, trying to eke out a run where there wasn't one.'

'After just 17 overs [the cricket equivalent of a inning, roughly] the team was all out with 117 runs, a meagre score.'

Fact-checking departments at American magazines are legendary [a friend of mine was once asked 'how he knew' that Kurt Cobain was dead], so it's good to see that some subjects - off-speed bowling for one - still lie beyond their fearsome reach. It's truly another country over there.

Nobody knows anything

Latest odds for World T20:

Pakistan [Wins over Netherlands and New Zealand so far] 9/2 third favourites

England [lost to Netherlands, beat Pakistan and India] 15/2 fifth favourites

West Indies [Couldn't beat England at all before tournament began] 7-1 fourth favourites

New Zealand [Who's injured? Who's flown home? What's going on?] 12-1

Admit it chaps, you've got about as much of a clue as the rest of us. It must be a half-decent tournament...

Not them ones

Great story from John Holder in today's You Are The Umpire in the Observer. The question was the old chestnut about the bowler losing his grip on the ball and delivering a three-bounce dolly that stops just in front of the batsman. Holder gave the usual answer, and then went on:

'In the late 80s I was umpiring a match between Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire when Curtly Ambrose lost control of the ball during his delivery. It looped high in the air and dropped at forward short leg in front of batsman Derek Randall. His eyes lit up as he saw the chance of some easy runs: he teed up the ball and smashed it to midwicket for four. Turning round, he saw Ambrose towering over him with a face like thunder. Realising he would have to face a pumped up Ambrose, Randall looked to the bowler's end umpire Merv Kitchen and shouted, 'Merv, I don't want them runs - cancel them!' Of course Merv couldn't cancel the runs, but everyone fell about laughing, and Curtly, ever the professional, let Derek off with one of his normal, blisteringly fast deliveries'.

A glory era of county cricket, too...

NB: On the subject of the law, came up against an odd one in a match the other day: the batsman pulled away as the bowler ran in and gestured to the fielder at long-off that he was in his eyeline. The fielder at long-off gestured back, not unreasonably, that he was standing at least two yards away from the sightscreen. He moved, but I'm not sure that he had to. Anyone know for sure?

Time's arrow

Perhaps Ricky Ponting has played his last T20 international. The game's waiting for no man at the moment, and Ponting looked like yesterday's man during Australia's two games. His bewilderment at their exit was perhaps the most bewildering thing of all: how could he not see what was wrong?

It's strange that such an instinctive batsman, one with an eye for the kill, seems to lack a feel for the ebb and flow of the game, yet it has always been missing. Ponting's professional life has run along straight rails, he is the uber-pro, brought up by Taylor and Waugh, the man anointed young to take over the war machine. So grooved was that machine it didn't take much insight to run it, just that flinty sporting heart that allows you to put a foot on a head that's already been in the dirt for days. 

But few great sportsmen are schooled purely by victory. Waugh was the last Australian captain that knew not just what it was to lose, but to be beaten. On the few occasions Ponting has been confronted by it, he hasn't really known what to do. The most resourceful captains of recent years - Hussain, Vaughan, Vettori - knew the feeling inside out. When your plans work for years on end, you don't really need any others. 

The other great and intangible facet of captaincy is personality, but what is Ponting's? After all of this time, I'm not sure anyone really knows that much about him. Under extreme pressure Waugh had that bloody-minded steel, that thrilling love of the fight. Vaughan had a preternatural calm that held flaky England together. Ponting's prime traits have been anger, frustration. 

He's been uneasy with his selectors, short of faith in some of his players, and, like Langer and Hayden, he has a hankering for the good old days. He thought T20 was a joke - he was not alone there - but he failed to catch up. He looked bewildered at the World Championship, and more than that, he looked old, his face deeply lined, his body-language agitated. His confusion was manifested most in his handling of Brett Lee. In a game where one bad over results in a 'thanks very much' and a quick hoicking off, Lee bowled three in a row. 

Now he's clinging to the win over South Africa at the start of the year, but South Africa's recent history is one of boom and bust, each big win followed by a big deflation. Australia's weaknesses - no spinner, a tendency to collapse against spin, Mike Hussey's decline and Brett Lee's too - have not been managed, or even addressed.

That's not to say that England will win the Ashes, but they might if they exploit the holes. T20 may be nothing like Test cricket, but it proved a decent x-ray of the Australian condition, and of Ricky Ponting's. Time's arrow is flying his way.

Television personality

One of the archetypes of club cricket is the ersatz pro, the player who exhibits a growing number of the things he's seen [or thinks he's seen] the professionals do on the telly. For a reason I can't pinpoint, it's older players who are most susceptible. 

I played against a classic example of the genre last week. Coming in at number three, he was one of those who has a couple of heaves early on and then, more by luck than judgement, seems to get his eye in. As he got to twenty-odd, his mental transformation into Kevin Pietersen began. He started walking singles. He began calling the umpire 'Umps' in a loud voice. Every time he got the strike in the middle of an over, he'd hold his glove across his chest with either one or two fingers outstretched to indicate the number of balls remaining. When he hit a boundary, he'd engage the nearest fielder in some sort of banter. He looked like he wanted to ruffle their hair too.

When they won the game he ran off and up the steps, waving his bat, weaving past the non-existent fans who hadn't come onto the pitch. Ran off! Presumably he thought he'd have to give an interview to Nasser Hussain or something.

This man was, I'd guess, way past 35 years old, a classic ersatz pro, watching a mini-movie in his head in which the boundary was no longer deserted but ringed by misty-eyed admirers, the pavilion occupied not by a junior football team who'd just won a five-a-side but rheumy old fellas in egg-and-bacon ties, his vanquished opponents walking from the field in wry contemplation, well beaten but able to tell their families they'd played against him.

The ersatz pro. You've got to love them. Haven't you?

Luke Wright, jacuzzi, hotel...

... Enduring image, isn't it?

Well Brit is the man who shared said bubbles. And then saw Mushtaq Ahmed having dinner. And then wrote a poem about it. 

Just remember that when you're watching him open against South Africa this week [Luke Wright that is,  not Brit. Or Mushtaq].

Measure for measure

Sky have a revealing little graphic for their World T20 coverage. As they preview the next three batsmen in, they show a single stat - their strike rate.

Murdoch companies make their fortunes by taking complex pieces of information and making them simple; it's worked across tabloid newspapers and television channels for forty years. They have a nose for what the punter likes, and a saucy strike rate is the sexiest new stat in cricket. It's easily understandable, and it's a comparatively big number. 

T20 has produced an obvious demand for new ways of measuring player data. Batting average doesn't cut it for T20, it's too skewed. In Test cricket a benchmark of, say, 40 works across the top six. It's universal enough to apply to each of those batting positions. But in T20, the opportunity for numbers one, two and three batsmen to build higher averages than those coming in after over number 10 is far greater. Equally, a number six or seven in a decent side may get a very high proportion of not outs. Either way, the average loses meaning, and stats are all about meaning.

So strike rate measures the speed of scoring, which is meaningful. But it feels as though it needs a supplement, a stat that tells you over what period that speed has been sustained. Average would be the obvious measure, but again it doesn't feel accurate enough. The skewing mentioned above is one reason. Another is that high team scores in T20 generally come from using a variety of batsmen to optimum effect: blazing hitting is usually suited to shorter individual innings, and individual wickets hold less value than they do in longer games.

So what measure should sit alongside strike rate? Maybe it should be average duration of innings, or average number of balls faced. Something like: 's/r 150.33, av b/f 28.1'

Now like KP, maths is not my strongpoint. I guess that multiplying those two stats out would result in something very much like an average. But batting effectiveness might be more clearly stated via the method above. 

Over to you, stattos.