What You Can Get Away With

For those of you who can bear to look ahead past the Ashes for a moment, the Rest of the World sides for the Super Series games against Australia in October were named today.
[read more…]

Combining two of the obsessions of this blog, has anyone else noticed that when Australia began their dominance over England in the Ashes in 1989, it was only a few months later thatDoctor Who went off the air? And then, just a few months before this series started, it came back.

(Edgbaston 1997 is thus an easily explained blip - the one-off appearance of the Paul McGann TV Movie version inspired that victor, but the fact that no series was commissioned on the back of it led to the slump that followed in that series.)

I think I may have to stop watching the Ashes, just because it’s getting far too tense, and whenever I watch, things seem to go bad for England. For instance, when all the wickets were tumbling last night, I was managing between radio and the Cricinfo scorecard - this morning I was enduring the full nail-biting experience on Channel 4. Coincidence? Probably.

Still, we won. Just. The second closest Test victory of all time and if Lee and Kasprowicz had held on for those last few wins, it would have been the highest ever victorious last wicket partnership.

This has the potential to be one of the great Test series, not just a great Ashes series so what lies in wait at Manchester? I’m going for heavy rain and one of those draws where there’s not even a chance of a result with the third innings starting sometime on Monday afternoon.

So, England and Australia play four games in the Natwest Series - England win one, Australia win one, one’s a no result and then the final is tied. Can you say ‘two incredibly closely matched teams’?

It bodes well for the Ashes when they finally come round, which no doubt means Australia will win 4-1 rather than 5-0.

Review of Parting Of The Ways later on, but right now I’m too shocked. Not by Who for once, but by the fact that Bangladesh have beaten Australia.

I repeat, Bangladesh have beaten Australia. Don’t think anyone saw that coming.

Here comes the latest mad idea from the ICC - allowing sides to select 12 players for one-day internationals and then substitute one during the match. Not just for injuries, either, but for tactical reasons, obviously because there just aren’t enough confusing rules and tactical ploys in ODIs already.

Sunil Gavaskar attempts to make a case for it in the article I linked, but somehow I suspect his examples wouldn’t be the ones we’d see. Any system that will effectively allow teams to field an extra specialist when they’re batting or bowling is going to be used for that, unless match referees are also going to be given new powers to determine whether a substitution will be exciting or not.

Great timing from me me just now - turned on the radio just in time to hear David Graveney announce the England squad for the First Test against Bangladesh. Pietersen doesn’t make it - though Graveney is now suggesting that he’s in competition with Graham Thorpe for a place - but Ian Bell and Jon Lewis do. And now that’s been announced, surely we’re at least in the spring so can all these bloody frosts stop now please?

From Decca Aitkenhead’s Guardian profile of Charles Kennedy, an excellent description of him from Tom McNally:

“He’s been the kind of David Gower of politics,” reflected Lord McNally, party leader in the Lords. “He has all the elegant strokes but he can sometimes give the impression that he has scored 80 and is a little bit bored, and will play a casual stroke.”

In terms of 80s cricketing metaphors, I’m thinking that makes Tony Blair the Mike Gatting of politics - successful, but annoying more and more people as his career goes on. I can’t think of a good one for Michael Howard, but that’s maybe because when trying, my mind keeps switching to snooker, with images of Ray Reardon - a Welshman often compared to a vampire - popping up.

Writing in the Guardian’s Spin cricket email, Lawrence Booth points out the paucity of the challenge offered to Australia in world cricket right now:

And it really is worryingly shallow. Pakistan’s victory was only their third in 11 Tests. New Zealand have lost eight out of 11 since arriving full of hope in England last summer. South Africa are still trying to juggle politics and the business of winning. Sri Lanka have virtually disappeared from the radar with only two Tests since August. West Indies are an increasingly unfunny joke, both on and off the field. Zimbabwe and Bangladesh? The laughter stopped a long time ago.

The onus, then, shifts squarely onto the shoulders of England, the side which more than any other has developed an inferiority complex against Australia. Their first task is not to dwell on the thought that the last thing international cricket needs is a ninth successive one-sided Ashes series. In a month’s time, Australia will be celebrating 10 years as the world’s best team. Not even the West Indian reign of the 1980s lasted that long: they were already on the wane when they drew 2-2 in England in 1991, eight years after establishing themselves as the No1s with a 3-0 win in India.

I know that we’re all more hopeful than we’ve been in years that England will finally offer a challenge this summer in the Ashes, but it has to be admitted hat we’re travelling in hope rather than expectation, carried along on a tide of ifs: if Vaughan can start winning tosses, if Pietersen can carry his one-day form into Test cricket, if Strauss can play at the same high level for another year, if Harmison can rediscover his form from the Caribbean, if Flintoff is healed, rested and raring to go and if all those ifs come true then maybe, just maybe, we can have a chance of taking them on from a level playing field.

Via The Corridor of Uncertainty comes an interesting opportunity for those of you who think you’ve got a bit of bowling talent.

The contest will take place on 12-15 April with spin and pace bowlers aged 16-25 bowling two overs each at a professional batsman.

Those who take the eye will be back for the final on 24 April, with the cream of the crop chosen to attend a series of development workshops.

And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - besides the prospect of a professional career - is a game against the MCC under the captaincy of West Indian great Sir Vivian Richards.

It’s all being run by the newly refounded London County Cricket Club (originally founded by WG Garce in 1899) which aims to give talented club and local players the chance to break into professional cricket. Obviously, I’m too old to take part (if I was under 25, I’d just have to fall back on the excuse that I’m rubbish) but it seems like a club with laudable aims and maybe they’ll discover a future star, or - and this is admittedly on the wilder shores of speculation - an English player who can actually get a ball to turn.

Interesting piece by Lawrence Booth in the Guardian’s Spin email about Kevin Pietersen:

The facts are these: like thousands of others in many walks of life, he has made a pragmatic, career-based decision. And like any outsider - and the term is used advisedly - he will now have to work extra hard to prove himself. The beneficiaries will be the England team and the public, who will not be able to get enough of watching Pietersen in tandem with Andrew Flintoff.

And an interesting statistic:

There are 246 Google entries for “Kevin Pietersen traitor”. “Hansie Cronje traitor” brings up only 56. As Pietersen has been an international cricketer only since the end of November, that is pretty impressive.

One hopes he doesn’t become like Rusedski in tennis - English when he scores a blistering hundred, but ‘South African born’ added as a prefix when he’s out for a duck.

Days to go until the Ashes series starts, or so BBC Sport tells us with an almost indecent haste in sweeping the tour of South Africa into history. It can’t be that much fun to be a Bangladeshi cricketer knowing that your sole role is to be an easily-digestible appetiser before the main course. Then again, that may motivate them even more, though demoralisation is waiting around the corner as it seems likely at the moment that they could be the team Kevin Pietersen makes his Test debut against.

Yes, I’ve been quiet and haven’t posted much recently, but it’s been hard enough to concentrate on anything when England are edging to yet another series victory. And now that’s all over…I’ll need to find another excuse.

Couple of interesting cricket-related articles about today after Matthew Hoggard’s heroics in the Fourth Test. A great Angus Fraser piece in the Independent about the mentality of fast bowlers:

Bowlers have little time for batsmen, who feel sorry for themselves when they break a finger. When batters walk about with their digit in a splint looking for sympathy you want to tell them to “stop being such a tart and get out there”. This is because bowlers seldom play without an ache or pain and when they get injured it normally results in surgery. Indeed, there are few members of the fraternity who have not woken up with a dry throat and the horrible taste of anaesthetic in their mouth.

And then Hoggard himself writes for BBC Sport Online, with one great line:

Going into the final Test, I’m raring to go once the captain loses the toss. In fairness, he’s not the best of tossers.

Judge for yourself what he meant by that.

Only two days into the year and this prize has already been won by TalkSport’s Chris Cowdrey who moved on from a mention of Robben Island with the line ‘of course, South Africa got out of jail in the last Test…’

I was thinking that the England cricket team are in an unusual position right now of perhaps having more confidence in themselves than many fans seem to have in them. Shaking off the shackles of 20 years of watching England underperform is probably harder for the fans though, as we’ve seen false dawns before (though none quite as successful as this one) and there’s always the worry that at some point reality’s going to slip back into gear and we’re going to go back to getting our regular stuffings at the hands of allcomers.

So, when England lost to South Africa A last week, I - and I suspect many others were the same -was ready to file last summer under good memories and go back to waiting for the occasional victory against overwhelming odds as a shaft of light against the prevailing darkness. Of course, this makes the performance so far in the First Test all the more enjoyable, especially the continuation of Andrew Strauss’ assault on some of cricket’s more obscure records (he’s also the first batsman ever to score a century in his first Test against three different countries). I think it’s a general rule that the longer it takes to describe a record, the more obscure it is.
[read more…]

Amongst everything else that happened yesterday, I was going to mention the ECB’s incredibly short-sighted decision to ensure that Test Matches will no longer be shown live on free-to-air television, but Jonathan Calder beat me to it, saying everything I would have said. Oh well, at least there’s still Test Match Special.