Patrick Kidd blogs on the world of Cricket. Subscribe to a feed of this Times Online blog at http://timesonline.typepad.com/line_and_length/rss.xml
Could India's win in the Twenty20 jamboree spell the end for the 50-over World Cup as we know it? OK, so not all the things that went wrong in the Caribbean were the ICC's fault but India's win over Pakistan suggests that the sub-continent will rapidly embrace this form of the game ahead of the longer version where they always come second to Australia. Given the huge TV audience among Asian fans and the fact that another World Twenty20 will be held before the next 50-over tournament, we may well find that the World Cup has to reform itself dramatically in 2011 or die from lack of interest.
Here is a list of what was right with the World Twenty20 compared with the World Cup:
1) This tournament was over and done with in a fortnight; the World Cup took seven weeks
2) Three minnows took part in Twenty20 (and one beat Australia), compared with seven in Fifty50 (I include Zimbabwe and Kenya as minnows but not Bangladesh).
3) Australia played well but didn't win and it was never a foregone conclusion that they would. That gives the rest of the world hope
4) Only one game was ruined by rain and the final finished in the light
5) The pricing policy has been sensible and as a result the grounds have been full
6) If there were any batty bans on advertising or taking things into the grounds, they were not so bad that there was a mass media outcry
7) No one died
I can hear the howls of protest from Australia. "Twenty20 is a lottery in which the best team doesn't always win," they will say. "It will soon become as corporate and money-focused as 50-over cricket. It destroys players' reputations more than it builds them, it is a game based on ridicule and luck rather than brilliance. It is a game for people with low attention-spans who don't appreciate cricket."
I agree with all those sentiments, but surely this is the strength of Twenty20. It is so catchy, so made for bitesize TV, so guaranteed to draw the numbskulls in that it will give Test cricket, the only form of the game worth following, a new lease of life. The best thing that could happen to Test cricket would be for most of the game's administrators and fans to ignore it. If cricket splits between what I shall call Classic Cricket and Cricket Light (the former run by players and national boards once more, the latter by the ICC) then that can only be a good thing. 50-over cricket was too integrated with the Test calendar to allow separation; Twenty20 offers a real chance at revolution.
Test cricket is fillet steak, Twenty20 is cheap burgers. Both are good in their way, but I'd far rather have the former. By comparison with both, though, 50-over cricket now has the taste of cardboard. Let the ICC make oodles of money from peddling crap and leave the pure game back where it belongs - with those who care about it.
It may have been watched at the Oval by no more than a couple of hundred people, to judge from the TV pictures of Lancashire's run-chase against Surrey yesterday, but the final day of the 2007 County Championship was thrilling. Sussex polished off Worcestershire early, as expected, which ended Durham's slim chances of staying top of the table, but if Lancashire could score a whopping 489 in the fourth innings against Surrey, 462 of them on the last day, then they would be the champions for the first time since 1934.
How close it was, how close. ECB flunkies had spent most of the afternoon sat in their car on a lay-by on the M23, prepared to dash north or south to present the trophy and cheque depending on what happened at the Oval. At lunch, Lancashire were 178 for two; at tea, with two wickets falling in the penultimate over before the break, they were 307 for five. Dominic Cork (47) and Saj Mahmood (26 - those are runs, not years, in brackets) took them agonisingly near but when Cork was bowled by Murtaza Hussain, the chase ended 25 runs short of victory. What a finish to a fascinating season.
It may even get a paragraph or two in tomorrow's papers, although Chelsea are playing Manchester United so don't expect too much.
Lancashire fans will look back on this game with regrets. If only for the odd slip, they could have been chasing a much smaller target (failing to take advantage of an easy chance to run out Mark Ramprakash 196 runs before he finally went, for instance) but they should be proud of their team's efforts yesterday. Magnanimously, King Cricket, a Lancashire fan, has awarded Mark Ramprakash a Grimlock, a robot-cum-dinosaur, as a prize for scoring 2,000 runs in a season yet again, the first time in first-clas history that anyone has done that twice in a row.
It is rare to find a Lancashire supporter praying for rain at the end of the season. Normally, bad weather in September is enough to dent Lancashire's hopes of a first championship title since 1934, but all Lanky fans will be hoping tonight that it comes down in buckets. In Hove, anyway, where Sussex need to take only five Worcestershire wickets tomorrow on the last day of the season to win another title.
Sussex appear to be the champions elect, but Durham beat Kent with ease today to move to the top of the table and will seal their first title if Sussex don't win. And Lancashire? Well all they need is 462 runs on the last day of the season one of the country's best batting wickets. May as well have a go for it. How wonderful that we can come to the end of a county season and still have three teams in the hunt - and how English that it could all be decided by bad weather.
Many congratulations to Mark Ramprakash, who made his second hundred of the match against Lancashire today, his tenth of the season and went past 2000 runs for the second year in a row. And yet he still won't be named for England's winter tour, poor thing.
David Batts has become "masterplan project director" at Lord's, according to this press release issued today, but it is not clear what that exactly means. As long as I can still bring a bottle of wine in for Test matches next year, I don't really mind. I have a firm view that sports administrators and politicians should act like the House of Peers in WS Gilbert's Iolanthe, who "did nothing in particular and did it very well".
Batts, the deputy chief executive at Lord's, is certainly capable of getting things done without a fuss or interrupting the cricket. He has been responsible for the refurbishment in recent years of the Pavilion and the Tavern Bar, both achieved on time and on budget. He has also been advising the ICC on how cricket grounds should handle catering in-house rather than through contractors, which is almost always a good idea. Whatever the Lord's masterplan involves (elephant polo on the outfield during lunch intervals, perhaps?), Batts is probably a good man for the job.
Just remember, David: keep on sticking two fingers up to the ICC's "no booze" policy and I'll be happy.
Essex have signed Jason Gallian, the former England opening batsman, for next season from Nottinghamshire. Gallian has turned down the chance of first division cricket next season to play the senior role at a county that has struggled for runs this season. With the retirements at the start of the season of Andy Flower, the England batting coach, and Ronnie Irani, Essex have been deprived of experienced batsmen who made 2,500 runs between them last season.
The regular loss to England duty of Alastair Cook and Ravi Bopara has also left the county's batting looking frail and heaped pressure on the young captain, Mark Pettini, whose form has suffered. It has been two months since Essex last made 300 in the first innings of a championship match. Gallian, who played three Tests in 1995, has turned down an approach from Glamorgan to join Essex. His place at Nottinghamshire was under threat from the impressive Samit Patel and Will Jefferson, who ironically left Essex last season in frustration at the lack of opportunities.
Also moving clubs is Usman Afzaal, who has signed for Surrey. Afzaal is another former Notts batsman, although he has been at Northamptonshire for the past three seasons. He has only played eight games this season, scoring 570 runs at an average of 36, but says that he hopes that another change of club will enable him to reboot his England career, which amounted to three Ashes Tests in 2001. Good luck to Afzaal, who is one of the nicer blokes on the circuit, but he should be wary: scoring stacks of runs at Surrey has not helped Mark Ramprakash's hopes of an England recall.
Continuing our exclusive serialisation of Ronnie Irani's memories of life on the county circuit, thanks to Essex CCC and boredfingers.com, his sponsor. Read Part 1 here
On his Test debut, in 1996 against India: "I remember turning up a couple of days earlier to Edgbaston for the preparation and even though you've been selected for the squad you still feel like you are on trial. You end up being completely knackered before the Test match begins because you feel that you still need to impress the captain and coach.
"In the hotel the night before the game we all gathered for a meal with the Chairman of Selectors, Raymond Illingworth. Mike Atherton (the captain) came up to me beforehand and said 'Good luck tomorrow', so I was really happy with him saying that, especially as he never had too many nice words to say about me. But I did take heart from those words as they were probably a first from him to me ... but unfortunately a last as well!
Continue reading "Retro Ronnie part 2" »
Nineteen years ago today, Franklin Stephenson, the West Indies all-rounder at Notts, became only the second player, after Richard Hadlee in 1984, to do the all-rounder's double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in an English season since the reduction of fixtures in 1969. Needing 210 in his final match to get to 1,000 runs, he made 111 and 117 against Yorkshire.
All-rounders are thin on the ground these days, even overseas players, and I have long given up on the idea of anyone coming close to repeating Stephenson and Hadlee's feat but with barely 20 batsmen having passed 1,000 runs with one match to go this season and only 16 having taken 50 wickets it is hardly surprising. A further, slight, reduction of fixtures when two divisions came in did not help, nor did the bad weather this summer. A less romantic target these days would be 750 runs and 50 wickets.
So who is the country's leading all-rounder? Well, only four of the men who have taken 35 wickets or more this season have made even 500 runs and two of them are ancient. Ottis Gibson, the West Indies and Durham player, has 538 runs to go with his 75 wickets. If he does a Stephenson with the bat in Durham's final match, against Kent this week, it would not only get him near to the target but may win the title for his fourth English county.
Robert Croft, who at 37 is a year younger than Gibson, is another hardy perennial. He has 55 wickets and 595 runs this term, while Graham Swann, 28, should perhaps be attracting attention for this winter's tour of Sri Lanka with 45 wickets and 516 runs.
But the winner, by a country mile, is Adil Rashid, the 19-year-old Yorkshireman who has 823 runs to his name this year at an average of 46 and needs seven more wickets with his leg spin in his last fixture, against Hampshire, to do the 750/50 double. I know we are doing him a disservice by talking him up so much, but Rashid, as I have mentioned on this blog many times, will and must be an England player very soon.
OK, to be fair and balanced, "Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Winston Churchill, Henry Cooper, Margaret Thatcher, etc, our boys took one HELL of a beating."
I flew back from holiday last night so I am only just catching up on the story and Kevin Pietersen's rather odd comments. How on earth he felt it was sensible to talk of "humiliating" Australia in a one-off game of hit and giggle, and how he could claim that it would be revenge for the 5-0 Ashes loss, is baffling. Didn't he learn from the CB Series win in January that Australia always bounce back after losing?
I believe that the more polite Australians would call Pietersen a "dill". But feel free to suggest other adjectives in the usual fashion. I can only apologise that we keep on picking this pillock. That said, Australia never let Shane Warne's Pietersenesque mouth blind them to his other skills.
I was in the middle of the Sicilian countryside eating linguine when this evening's cricket result came through, so, with apologies both for gloating and to the Norwegian football commentator, felt compelled to write this:
"John Howard, Kylie Minogue, Rolf Harris, Steve Irwin, Dame Edna, Shane Warne, Mrs Mangel, Nicole Kidman, Crocodile Dundee, Cathy Freeman, Banjo Patterson, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Toadfish Rebecchi, Bouncer the dog - are you listening, Bouncer the dog? Your boys took one HELL of a beating."
Not that England have ever lost to Zimbabwe, of course...
I'm in Sicily for a few days (back Saturday) so blogging will be light and dependent on the toleration of Mrs Kidd.
Naturally, Italian state television isn't broadcasting the World Twenty20, which has just got under way in South Africa but maybe they would show more interest if they knew that AC Milan, the great football team, was originally founded in the 19th century as a football and cricket club.
More surprising, the rugby World Cup doesn't appear to be broadcast on any of the 12 TV stations in my hotel either. There was a volleyball game but that hardly grabbed the attention. Perhaps Italy's walloping by the All Blacks on Saturday has killed enthusiasm.
At least England's cricket team can approach the World Twenty20 with more confidence than the rugby side after finally discovering some one-day form. They have more experience of the format than most countries, have chosen some specialists who may catch opponents cold and have a good chance, I feel, of reaching the final.
Of course, by the time I return to England, that could look a very foolish display of faith...
Despite a tough upbringing - "my father was a coalminer, he was picking at seams long before Inzamam-ul-Haq" was an opening gambit in his speech to the Cricket Writers Club on Friday - Ronnie Irani has always been a colourful fun-loving character. To mark his retirement from county cricket this season, Line & Length has been given a unique insight into what makes a Ronnie, thanks to Essex County Cricket Club and boredfingers.com, his sponsor. There will be more memories next week.
In his first season with Essex in 1994, Irani made his first championship century as Essex chased 405 for victory against Worcestershire, winning off the final ball. Irani recalls going out to bat third wicket down with Graham Gooch, who got a double hundred, and that there was plenty of needle: "An attempted sweep top-edged into my chin and Steve Rhodes [the Worcs keeper] said something like 'I hope that hurt'. Goochie overheard it and as a fatherly figure said to Rhodes 'what did you say?'. Rhodes soon shut up."
A month later, Irani twice dismissed Brian Lara for Warwickshire. "This match was a massive highlight for me," Irani said. "because it was Brian Lara's summer of runs. It seemed like he scored a million runs that year coming to Warwickshire after scoring his then-record Test score of 375. I got him out first innings caught by Nick Knight at slip trying to hit me out of Birmingham and I was delighted because it was a real scalp. Then I got him out second innings too – lbw – in the evening and as I was walking back to the boundary edge one of the home supporters in the stand shouted out 'Irani, you ****er, I've finished work early to see Brian Lara bat and you've got him out!'."
A few weeks later, Essex played Middlesex and Irani managed to get into a dressing-room brawl: "Me and Michael Kasprowicz [then an Essex fast bowler] went out for some nets after a day's play. When we got back into the dressing-room there was a rugby player in there who had been drinking all day – absolutely trolleyed – and had somehow managed to get in. He started to abuse me and Kasper and I said to him 'look mate, we don't want any trouble'.
"I thought that might calm the situation down and then he'd go but to those words he landed a massive great haymaker straight on my left eye and it swelled up immediately. I've worn contact lenses all my career and as he hit me it actually popped out but I managed to catch it in my left hand. So I'm bundling with this bloke, holding on to my lens – because they weren't disposable in those days so cost about £200 – and skating around on my spikes like on ice; Kasper grabbed hold of him as well and he's on spikes too so we are all over the place. There were glasses in the corner for after-match drinks and I'm thinking this is going to be carnage but we managed to get him out of the dressing room, I kept hold of my contact lens and gave him a bit of a send-off in polite terms!
"Once everything had calmed down I'm left thinking 'I've got to bat tomorrow'. By the next day I couldn't see out of my eye, even though I'd iced it all night, but I managed to just squeeze my contact lens in – I don't know why because I could hardly see out of it. When I went out to bat Phil Tufnell proceeded to bowl left-arm over the wicket, purposely throwing the ball up into the sun. So there I was baking in the sun with one closed eye and Tuffers giving it extra air but I was fortunate enough to score 102 not out."
In 1995, Irani made his first one-day century for Essex, off just 47 balls (two more than the record at the time), against Gloucestershire. "Essex had a fantastic week that year at Cheltenham," Irani said. "We had a few drinks in Montpellier Wine Bar at a time when I was full of life and full of energy. Now it's two beers or two glasses of wine and I'm tucked up in bed by half nine like a boring old git. We'd just finished a four-day game and had worked our socks off at Cheltenham without getting any reward out of it (Gloucestershire won by three wickets) so were a bit down. It was a Saturday so we decided to make a night of it – I can remember it as if it was yesterday. The following day I came into bat still steaming of Shiraz and I hit 100 off 47 balls. I remember middling every delivery. I don't remember them coming out of the bowler's hand but I remember them going into the stands."
I'm a week late on this but found myself in conversation on Friday with Graham Morris, the esteemed cricket photographer, about the recent 10-year anniversary of Princess Diana's death. I asked Mooro whether he had been covering a game at the time and he revealed that he can still remember it well.
"I was covering an England Under-19 Test at Canterbury and some of the journos and players had stayed up late drinking after the match," Morris said. "Actually, given that the news of her death broke at about 4am we'd stayed up pretty bloody late." Realising that there wouldn't be much attention on cricket the next day, the drinking continued right on until dawn.
Those were the days. Mooro cannot remember which players were up late in the bar but looking at the scorecard, while stressing that any or all of the following may have been nowhere near a pub in their life, the likes of Chris Read, Ryan Sidebottom and Rob Key may have equally hazy memories.
Appropriately for a cricket ground just round the corner from Abbey Road, the Backbeat Beatles, a tribute band for the Fab Four, will be entertaining the crowd in the luncheon interval at the final one-day international against India at Lord's.
I don't know if the Beatles were/are ever big cricket fans. Paul McCartney lives in St John's Wood but it is the Rolling Stones who are more associated with watching cricket. I suppose Get Back could have been about a batsman turning down a quick single.
Just got home from the annual Cricket Writers Club dinner at which Adil Rashid, the Yorkshire leg spinner, was named "young player of the year". Some pretty good players have won the award in the events 50-year history with the likes of Alastair Cook, Stuart Broad, Andrew Flintoff and James Anderson winning in the past decade. Let's hope that Adil, who is tipped to make his first senior tour this winter, lives up to their standard rather than emulating the odd duff tip like Paul Franks and Rikki Clarke.
Bit disappointing that Yorkshire, who were playing Sussex at Hove, didn't release Rashid to come up to London to receive the award in person. Even when Sussex wrapped up an easy win early in the afternoon, Yorkshire still wouldn't give their lad permisson to have an evening off.
Ronnie Irani was the guest speaker and gave a good speech that barely managed to stay on the right side of good taste. Beginning with jokes about Dermot Reeve's alleged drugs habit received healthy laughs ("it all started at school when he was made to do 50 lines"), while there were embarrassed sniggers when he referred to the elderly luminaries on the chairman's table as "the cast of Last of the Summer Wine". By the time he got to a line about Phil Tufnell being called "the cat" because "he can lick his own bollocks" he had probably strayed across the line.
Still, Ronnie is never shy about giving his views so check back here on Monday for the first extracts from his reminiscences for the Essex Cricket magazine.
Having gently mocked Ryan Sidebottom's inclusion on the ICC's long list for Test player of the year, Line & Length is outraged that he has not made the shortlist (we're capricious like that). What have Muralitharan, Ponting, Pietersen and Yousuf done in the past year that betters old floppy-haired Ryan's five-for against West Indies in Durham?
Still, he can bask in this freshly found fact, dug up by my colleague John McNamara: that The Times's spellchecker tries to change "Sidebottom" to "ossiculotomy", which John says is the "surgical removal of the ossicles of the middle ear".
That would have to be some bouncer to do that.
Gosh. And indeed, Cripes. With three overs to go in England's ODI innings against India just now Ian Botham said "280 is an absolute minimum". Given that England were 265-6 that was a fairly low expectation that Sir Beefy had. Fortunately Dimitri Mascarenhas had higher hopes. Here's how the last 18 balls went, Mascarenhas taking strike:
1lb-wd-1-1-wd-2-wd-dot-1 // 4-dot-2-4-1-1 // (are you ready for this?) dot-6-6-6-6-6 = 51 runs, with Mascarenhas scoring 32 of them off nine balls.
Phew. Match that India.
With maddening contrariness, the cricket season is heading for its conclusion just as summer finally arrives in England but there is still some fun to be had. It will be lights, cameras and action at the Brit Oval next Tuesday (11th) when Surrey play host to Somerset in their penultimate NatWest Pro40 fixture, which will be televised by Sky and is the only floodlit match at the Oval this season.
This year marks the tenth year of floodlit cricket in England. Surrey were due to host the first ever match but it was abandoned because of a downpour, so Warwickshire had the honour of staging the first one three days later.
Line and Length is able to give away three free pairs of tickets to the match, which starts at 4.10pm, to the first three readers who click "comments" below and tell us what reality show they want to see Mark Ramprakash appear in during the winter.
Those who would rather buy their tickets can do so through the Surrey Cricket website.
CMJ has spoken. The wise sage has contemplated the 18 best-of-all-time county XIs assembled by Times writers and has judged that the Yorkshire team of Hutton, Sutcliffe, Vaughan, Leyland, Lehmann, Hirst, Rhodes, Wood, Verity, Trueman and Bowes is the strongest and will be picked to play against the Martian XI at Headingley.
Many congratulations to John Westerby, the Yorkshire selector, although he did have a rather stronger pack to pick from than those of us selecting a county to the east of London.
At least one England player emerged as a winner from the otherwise disastrous World Cup in the spring. Essex have announced today that Graham Gooch, their former captain, is to sponsor their academy at Chelmsford with £30,000 a year of his own dough earned during the competition. He is also continuing his scholarship programme in which he pays for talented youngsters to get experience of conditions overseas during the winter.
"With the money raised on my successful World Cup cruise I have been looking to support the future of Essex cricket in an enhanced way," says Gooch, which raises worrying images of exactly how he raised so much money from cruising the Caribbean. For some reason, I have an image of Goochie in a cheap sequined tuxedo serenading wealthy American widows with You Are Always on my Mind while John Childs and Peter Such pass around a hat for donations. Still, if it produces a couple more Cooks and Boparas then all credit to Goochie. Maybe he can get Ronnie Irani to accompany him on the harmonica on his next tour?
Patrick Kidd is a sports writer for The Times.
He first fell in love with cricket when he saw Graham Gooch swat successive balls over his head for six and on to the same red Cortina's bonnet
at Castle Park, Colchester.
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