Watching Kent lose on TV

Napoleon, when in exile on St Helena, used to receive news of how badly things were going with the Bourbon Restoration, and mightily did it depress him. The physical distance between him and France did not dampen the disappointment one bit.

Having spent last weekend watching recordings of Kent being swept away by the undercurrent of defeat when just an inch away from the shore of victory not once, but twice, I know how he felt. You would think that being separated from the carnage by 12,000 miles would ease the pain. It does not.

There was also the women’s test match between England and Australia from Canterbury, allowing me to think myself once more at St Lawrence in August. However, my Blean correspondent was quick to send caution. His email compared it to the 1969 Gillette Cup semi-final. It was the summer of Woodstock. My correspondent’s view is that what the festival was to rock’n’roll, the fixture between Derbyshire and Sussex was to slow scoring, a marker that no future event would surpass. So it was a warning to be heeded.

Look at the scorecard and you see his point. Derbyshire hewed 136 from the granite of 57 overs, PJK Gibbs leading the resistance with an innings of 44 that was as dogged as a pack of foxhounds (unfortunately Alan Gibson does not appear to have been there to describe the innings in its full horror). Sussex could merely hang on briefly to the crevices of the rock face; all out for 49 in the 36^th over.

The one thing I would say is that limited-overs cricket on a poor pitch (“slow and stopping” is Wisden’s description of the Chesterfield strip on that occasion) can be fascinating. Canterbury this week was merely slow, on the evidence of the two hours or so I have watched so far. Heeding my correspondent’s advice, I turned to the men’s game.

First, I watched Glamorgan v Kent in a group match in the 50 over competition. I used to cross the Severn Bridge to watch cricket at Sophia Gardens at some point in most seasons and always found it a convivial place to spectate. Now, over-reaching ambition has turned it into an arena in which county cricketers are hobbits in the full-sized world.

Though the game was a fortnight old when I watched, I had avoided the result, so the arrow of disappointment met no armour as it pierced my heart. Kent were put in. The Sams Northeast and Billings put on 104 for the third wicket. Northeast has had a good year and seems to be enjoying the captaincy. Rob Key remains club captain, but Northeast leads on the field. Key sits out the shorter forms and was doing a fine job in the commentary box, combining dry wit with observation of the subtleties.

Kent seem to be doing a better job of retaining their young players. The captaincy may be part of the deal that has persuaded Northeast to sign a long-term extension to his contract. Daniel Bell-Drummond has just done the same. It may help that Joe Denly and Matt Coles have returned after unsuccessful stints elsewhere, and that Billings is in the England ODI team without having had to move.

But today all the younger ones were outshone by the old stager, Darren Stevens. What a remarkable cricketer Stevens is. A couple of years ago I was there to watch him play one of the finest innings I have seen to beat Lancashire on the last day of the season. Here he made 110 from 64 balls, with nine fours and six sixes. Just as it was that day at Canterbury, his batting was aggressive, but almost wholly orthodox, each shot right for the ball it dispatched.

How gettable was Glamorgan’s target of 318? The pitch was amiable, if a little slow. There hasn’t yet been time to assess the extent to which the new fielding restrictions will restore the balance between bat and ball in the closing overs. Two fielders are allowed outside the circle in the first ten overs, four in overs 11 to 40 and five thereafter. This suggests that the gorging by batsmen in the final ten overs that we saw at the World Cup will be curtailed. Not today though.

Like Kent, Glamorgan had a solid stand early on: 132 between Bragg and Ingram for the second wicket. Ingram went on to a run-a-ball hundred, but momentum was lost mid-innings, thanks to none other than Stevens, who bowled his ten overs for only 38.

Stevens reminds me of Chris Harris. Both deliver ambling bowling that looks innocuous but makes decent batsmen into fools; both can be devastating bat-in-hand. The difference? Harris played 250 ODIs (taking 203 wickets), Stevens none. I doubt that anybody can think of a better player without an international appearance.

When there was a brief rain interruption in the 42^nd over, Glamorgan looked out of it, needing 13 an over with four wickets standing. On the resumption, Kent fell apart in a spectacular manner. The game should have been over when the hard-hitting Chris Cooke was caught-and-bowled off a skyer by Ivan Thomas, only for the replay to reveal a front-foot no ball, one of three no-balls in this period. There was a decent excuse: a wet ball, which made it particularly difficult for spinner Tredwell, but there was some poor bowling and fielding, as well as some fine hitting, by Cooke in particular. The win came with two balls to spare.

The Kentish benchmark for wrenching defeat from the certain hands of victory remains the Sunday League contest against Middlesex at Folkestone in 1972. Chasing 128, Kent were 109 for three, then 126 for six, only to lose the last four wickets without addition (including a malaria-stricken Asif Iqbal at No 10). The Glamorgan game was an honourable contender, but at least, thanks to later rain, they still got through to the knock-out stage.

The second Kent fixture of my weekend was the T20 quarter-final against Lancashire at St Lawrence. I watched this one just a few hours after it was played, again without knowledge of the result. This was a defeat of a different school. Kent struggled throughout, only coming close to an unlikely win at the end, but then losing anyway, by a squeak.

It was good to see the old ground full, though the current definition of “full”—7,000—is less than half the number of us who squeezed in for the Gillette Cup semi-final in ’67. Five-figure crowds were common for the big one-day games of the seventies. It didn’t help that plenty of thought appeared to have been put into finding ways to block the view from the stands. The sightscreen put the lower pavilion out of commission, the TV scaffolding the upper; the dug-outs got in the way of the corner of the Underwood-Knott where I spent seventies summers.

There has been pleasing news about county attendances elsewhere in the last few weeks. There were 6,000 at the Oval for a 50-over game I watched on TV. Best of all, 14,000 attended the three-days of a Championship game at Scarborough. So if county cricket is played at times and in places that suit people, they will watch. This statement of the obvious will be ignored by the ECB as the Championship is further curtailed, probably to take place only on weekdays in April and September.

Kent were put in, and struggled almost throughout, losing wickets whenever a smidgen of momentum had been gained. That they reached 142 was largely thanks to an eighth-wicket partnership of 52 between Tredwell and Fabian Cowdrey, who looks much like his Uncle Graham at the crease, which is no bad thing at all.

A low first-innings in any form of cricket always brings with it the hope that the pitch is to blame, and that the opposition will find run-making just as difficult, if not more so. This strip was next to the one that induced torpor among the women, and shot making was not straightforward; orthodoxy is imposed upon batsmen by this sort of surface. A couple of early wickets gave substance to the hope, but as long as Ashwell Prince remained, there seemed to be inevitability about the outcome, particularly when he was joined by Jos Buttler in a fifth-wicket partnership of 73.

England players appear for their counties so rarely these days that some Lancashire folk may not have remembered that Buttler had joined them from Somerset. He was very impressive, the one batsman able to play cross-bat shots and reverse sweeps with confidence in the conditions. With two overs to go and the partnership intact, 13 were needed, nothing at all in T20 terms. Prince was out to the first ball of the over, but seven were scored off the remainder, leaving six to win, but effectively five as in a tie Lancashire would have lost fewer wickets.

Why is there is no “super” over in the event of a tie in this competition, as there is everywhere else? T20 is only about entertainment so razzmatazz should be pursued to its logical outcome. Deciding a tie on a statistical nicety is like finishing a punk rock concert with the national anthem (actually, the Sex Pistols did end concerts with God Save the Queen so I’ll leave it there).

There was a single off the first ball, then Buttler and Croft holed out in the deep off successive deliveries by Coles. New Batsmen James Faulkner missed the fourth ball, and for the first time in the game Kent were on equal terms.

However, Faulkner—man of the match in the World Cup final a few months ago—is developing the habit of trampling on my dreams. Two runs from the fifth ball left two needed for the tie. They were fluked. Faulkner’s drive hit the stumps at the bowler’s end and ricocheted at precisely the angle needed to place the ball between two fielders to allow a safe two to be taken. It was Jack Bond diving to catch Asif Iqbal all over again.

I look back to the glory days of the seventies and think that we should have enjoyed them even more than we did had we known that decades of frustration were to follow. Distance does not temper that feeling, but the thing about sport is that there is always another game. Surrey v Kent in the 50-over quarter-final, in this case.

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2012, edited by Lawrence Booth

The 2012 Wisden has arrived, its yellow cover for us in New Zealand representing autumn leaves rather than spring flowers.

Each almanack records a cricketing year, but when you have 45 yellow jackets on your shelves, as I do (46 if you count the 1964 edition that I picked up from the second-hand-book stall at the Basin Test a couple of years ago) you find that each Wisden represents another notch on the stick of your own mortality.  I mention this because the 2012 edition is the first to be edited by Lawrence Booth.

37-year-old Lawrence Booth.

That is to say, Wisden is now in the charge of a man who has no recall of the first two World Cup finals, the Test match career of David Steele or Headingley ’81, and who never watched cricket in black-and-white. Booth is the first of the Good Book’s sixteen editors to have made his name, in part at least, through his on-line writing, for The Guardian’s over-by-over coverage of Tests and its email newsletter The Spin (an email newsletter – how quaint). That seems to be the way in these days. Talented young sports writers such as the Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Liew and The Guardian’s Barney Ronay serve apprenticeships in front of television screens in newspaper offices in the dead of night before being allowed out to file from a proper press box.

Lawrence Booth’s appointment is a response to the question “What is Wisden for?” Throughout the twentieth century the answer was so obvious that the question was not worth asking. Wisden was the game’s record, unrivalled in its breadth, depth and completeness. Then the internet arrived and Wisden suddenly found itself as contemporary and useful as a powdered wig. Like most cricket followers, I turn first to CricInfo and Cricket Archive for statistics (which are up-to-date to the second) and scorecards, and when I get around to owning a smart phone it will probably be with a view to having all this information at hand when I am spectating at the Basin.

Wisden was, in fact, an early adapter to the digital age, or tried to be. It had a website going early in the new century, and experimented with a paywall for access to its archive, but that did not work so it bought CricInfo, saving it from financial oblivion (and allowing a few of us in distant corners of the world to be paid when we had almost given up hope). A few years later CricInfo was sold to ESPN and Wisden appeared to be left on the platform waving a handkerchief as the age of electronic publishing sped towards the horizon.

Lawrence Booth’s brief is to ensure that Wisden catches up and remains as indispensable in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth. Not that the Almanack is in commercial decline. On the contrary, sales have held up well, and it remains one of the British publishing’s most bankable titles. But it cannot remain immune to the effects of changing times, which will see any number of familiar titles ceasing to appear in printed form over the next few years.

So the 2012 Almanack is the first to be available as an ebook. Booth has also initiated Wisden Extra, an online pamphlet full of good writing, but which can only be easily read if printed out, which seems to rather miss the point. The content of the Almanack is also increasingly influenced by on-line competition, though some of these changes pre-date Lawrence Booth’s accession to the editor’s chair by several years. The records section has migrated to the back of the book, reflecting the loss of its status as the main reason to buy the Almanack. The Wisden website will henceforth update records in real time, but it would be a mistake to put much effort into duplicating what is available elsewhere.

Almost all scorecards of English domestic one-day and T20 cricket appear in potted form. All hell was let loose when the Sunday League scores for 1976 appeared in this form in the 1977 Almanack, as this removed the only collected source of these records. Now the omitted scores are freely available on-line, so nobody cares. But brief reports, not necessarily easily available with the full cards, are retained, which is sensible.

And there we have the reason why Wisden remains relevant, essential indeed, in digital times. It’s not the numbers, it’s the words.

The biggest change in Wisden in the period represented on my shelves is the quality of the writing, for so long pedestrian, now often outstanding. I reached for the 1972 edition for comparison. The features give the impression of having been written in a particularly dusty corner of the Carlton Club for a readership in another part of the room. The editor’s notes have the dull air of the bowls club AGM about them. Norman Preston, editing his 22nd edition, is sniffy about the success of Ray Illingworth’s Ashes-winning side because of “unsavoury” incidents that occurred during the series.

Though not yet aspiring to the heights of pontifical infallibility achieved by Matthew Engel, Lawrence Booth’s notes are intelligent and pleasingly written. They lead a consolidated comment section of more than 200 pages, a book in its own right and more than double the ration of forty years ago.

The overall standard is so high that it is almost invidious to nominate a favourite. Mike Brearley’s insightful piece on depression among cricketers contends. So does Gideon Haigh’s account of the development of the International Cricket Council from the time 20 years ago when it was housed in a converted canteen at Lord’s to its present location in luxurious premises in Dubai. Haigh nails it by the second paragraph in which he notes the appropriateness of the proximity of the animal so often described as a horse designed by a committee.

Michael Henderson writes an uncharacteristically cheerful, almost romantic, piece inspired by the moment at Taunton when

Croft of Blackpool hit the runs that threw a hoop around almost eight decades of history

and won Lancashire the Championship.

For those who moved away long ago, and will never go back, Lancashire – and Lancashire cricket – still grips us, for it is part of that personal mythology without which no human being can feel entirely fulfilled.

So true, just substitute the name of your county or team. Will Kent win another Championship in my lifetime?

Colin Schindler, another Lancashire man, marks the fifty seasons that have passed since amateurism was abolished in English first-class cricket with a few stories that suggest the move was overdue, such as that of Peter Murray-Willis, captain of Northamptonshire in 1946, who once stopped chasing a ball to the boundary because his cap fell off.

But it is PJK Gibbs – yes, Alan Gibson’s bête noire again – who tops the rest with his account of a day in 1964 that he spent in the company of SF Barnes, perhaps the greatest bowler ever to play the game. It is like somebody still living describing a day spent chopping down trees at Hawarden with Gladstone. Gibbs, a junior player in the Staffordshire team playing in the Minor Counties Championship against Bedfordshire at Walsall, was assigned the task of looking after 91-year-old Barnes, a short straw given the great man’s reputation for irascibility. Barnes was a century ahead of his time when he followed the money to the leagues when Lancashire would not pay him enough. He would play for England only if “the money was right” and would have approved enthusiastically of Chris Gayle and the like, seasonally migrating from T20 team to another across the globe.

Despite his great age Barnes’s mind and prejudices were steel-tipped.

“Batsman?” he said after a pause. “Yes”. “Oxford?” “Yes”. “Blue?” His voice had a dark, accusing tone.

His opinions on the modern game and its players were acute.

“Frank Worrell, fine player, fine man. Laker? Those pitches in ’56 were a travesty. Money for old rope. What did he do in Australia?”

Barnes took 77 Test wickets in Australia, in just 13 Tests. On that day in 1964 Gibbs got a pair.

And then there are the obituaries, the anticipation of which has kept my Blean correspondent and myself reason to live through many a cold English winter. Year by year, the number who I saw play edges up. Abberley, Bailey, Carew, Dilley, d’Oliveira, Pataudi, Reifer, Roebuck, Saxena, Titmus, only a wicketkeeper short of a team. All the notices are unsigned, so I don’t know who to praise for the outstanding piece on Peter Roebuck, which gets the blend of dark and light just right (though I’d guess Gideon Haigh). Those on Graham Dilley and Basil d’Oliveira manage to say something fresh despite the thousands of words written about both men in the days after their deaths.

But the real attraction of the obituaries is the stories told of minor figures, some of whom are included only because there is a good story to be told, not necessarily related to cricket. So the notice for Martin Searby, the Yorkshire journalist who was something of legend on the county circuit, records an exchange that took place in a cruise ship swimming pool. “Are you Martin Searby?” asked a woman he did not recognise. “Who wants to know?” “I was your first wife” came the reply. I met Searby once. “A good bloke before nine in the evening” was what I had been told about him. As he entered the Vittoria on the Whiteladies Road in Bristol – the last call of an all-day drinking session in the company of David Green of Lancashire, Gloucestershire, and the Daily Telegraph – I looked at my watch. It was ten to ten. The next hour was a long one.

Sir Roger Jowell is included on two grounds. In 1965 he was protesting at Lord’s against the team representing white South Africa, but was so taken with a shot by Graeme Pollock that he put down his placard to applaud; and “one of the Americans he succeeded in converting to the game” (this conjures up a marvellous image of him going from door to door in the mid-West, Wisden in hand) was Bill Clinton’s campaign chief of staff.

Richard Douglas-Boyd’s claim for inclusion is slim: his company published a few cricket books. But had he been omitted we would not have known that he severed his big toe with a lawnmower, or that his spaniel ate the toe before it could be recovered.

So callow youth as Lawrence Booth may be, the first Wisden in his charge matches the high standards set by his recent predecessors. The 2013 edition will be the 150th

Adult Book by Malcolm Knox

The cricket novel is in fashion, a genre, almost. There is Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, in which the game is a symbol of calm in post 9/11 New York. Today’s Guardian carries a favourable review of Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka. The recent history of Sri Lanka is contemplated through the story of a journalist making a documentary about a disappeared spin bowler.

Then there is 28 for 3 by “Jennie Walker” – a pen name for a writer called Charles Boyle (what if cricketers had game names?; another time, perhaps) – in which an eternal triangle is played out to the background of an England v India Test.

And I learn from the 2012 Wisden – received a couple of days ago – that Alan Gibson’s nemesis PJK Gibbs has a cricket novel, Settling the Score, on the way. Gibbs’ dogged approach to opening the batting for Derbyshire regularly prompted Gibson to scorn:

When Gibbs…was out for 40 scored in 223 minutes, he walked back to the pavilion in a silence which was eloquent and not, in the circumstances, churlish. 7 June 1968

After giving up the unequal struggle against the new ball Peter Gibbs became a successful writer, for stage, screen and radio, including more than 50 episodes of Heartbeat and several dramas with cricket themes or connections. Like several cricket players turned journalists (I mean you, Mark Nicholas), it is to be hoped that he is more entertaining to read than watch.

Any of these works might have been included in The Wisden Cricketer’s list of the top 50 cricket books had they been published a few years earlier. As it is, Adult Book by Malcolm Knox is the only fiction represented. Knox is in the tradition of Alan Ross as a writer whose work can be found in both the sport and literary sections of the paper. He was cricket correspondent, then deputy literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and still writes about the game, most recently as Greg Chappell’s ghost.

The story moves between two timelines, one before and one after a Sydney New Year early this century. The central characters are the Brand family. Dr John Brand, the father, is alive in the first timeline, dead in the second. His wife Margaret, and their three sons are the other major characters. Davis, the eldest has followed his father into medicine. Hammett, the youngest – estranged from the family as the story begins – is a significant figure behind the scenes in Sydney’s pornography industry (hence the title). The middle son, Chris, is the lynchpin of the Australian middle order. He is 34 and has played 91 Tests and 201 ODIs. To describe him as hard-bitten is an understatement. In comparison Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh are happy-go-lucky chancers.

The later timeline takes us through the New Year Test against South Africa at the SCG. As it begins Chris Brand is dealing with his father’s death and is fighting to save his career: his last six innings have accrued 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 and 1.

And there’s the thing. We would understand that the player was struggling to hold his place if a couple of low double-figure scores had been thrown in to that sequence, or the ducks halved in number. But Knox carries a heavy bat and wants to clear the ropes, when delicate shots played with a lighter blade would be more satisfying to the discriminating spectator. Throughout the book such points are underscored too heavily. For example, we have already got that John Brand is a porn-obsessed old man by the time Knox has him leave a family gathering to slather over more of the hard stuff on the internet.

The best parts of the book are the descriptions of the cricket, particularly Chris Brand’s redemptive innings. After –predictably – being dropped at third slip early on, he survives through to lunch, rediscovering form and confidence in the process.

…Chris’s mind is drained. There is no longer a need for solutions. There is only a ball, and his bat…His bat and the ball start arriving at the same place at the same time. The scratchiness, the hesitation, the undecided shotmaking of recent weeks seem to have fallen away like a snake’s skin, a decayed product of his last form cycle.

By close of play he has a century, and by tea the next day has a double, though only after being caught (you’ll never guess) off a no-ball. At the close he is 331 not out, three short of Bradman and Taylor’s joint landmark, and with Hayden’s 380 in sight (publication preceded Lara’s 400), but his despised skipper Tom Pritchard (not obviously based on any recent Aussie leader) declares overnight.

As it happened, I read Adult Book during this year’s Sydney Test, when Michael Clarke passed RE Foster’s 287, the individual record score at the SCG for 108 years, a few years after Chris Brand had done so in fiction. For a time as I read and watched they matched each other, run for run. Clarke declared when he was 329 not out, two short of Brand’s mark.

Off the field, Knox’s portrayal of life around the Australian Test team is less convincing. It must, of course, be acknowledged that any author’s obligation to present the world as it really is extends only as far as they themselves determine it should. Knox has spent plenty of time in the world of international cricket, but it would be disappointing if the reality closely resembled Chris Brand’s world, summed up thus:

No matter how individually talented, no matter how great they all think they are…the glue that holds them together is the lowest common denominator. They’re boys.

The glue is spread very thin. None of the Australian players appear to like or respect any of the others. Off the field their main form of entertainment is solitary surfing for internet porn, punctuated by trawling for groupies, wives and girlfriends kept away. Only a fool would imagine that there is not a strong element of truth about this, the Australian team consisting of rich, successful twenty-something males as it does. But few of them will be quite this one-dimensional and the majority will be more interesting and nicer people than their fictional counterparts.

Mind you, none of the spheres of life represented in Adult Book would be delighted with their portrayal in it, particularly the medical profession. It is not a book that makes it easy to sympathise with any of its characters. Like a ground-out 40 on a seaming pitch it is to be admired for its technical proficiency, but it is a relief to be able to turn to the newspaper for diversion while it proceeds. O’Neill’s Netherland is more deserving of fiction’s token place on in the top 50, even though the cricket is more tangential to its story.