Wellington v Northern Districts, T20, Basin Reserve, 12 December 2010

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/304/304634.html

A pleasant summer’s day for my first visit to the Basin this season. There were games on both days last weekend, but live T20 versus the Ashes on TV is no contest, and today’s match showed why.

ND knocked up 200 in their 20 overs, with a spectacular 31-ball 66 from Peter McGlashan, including a reverse-pull which fell inches short of the mid-wicket boundary. McGlashan, a certainty for the New Zealand T20 team, should also be in the ODI team, badly in need of a confident presence after 11 successive defeats. For Wellington, Luke Woodcock was the best bowler, and should be considered if Daniel Vettori is not fit at the start of the ODI series in the New Year.

Jesse Ryder played for the first time since his most recent injury, but was out-of-touch, and holed out for four.

The result was certain when Ryder went in the third over, leaving Wellington already needing more than eleven an over. That’s the flaw with T20. If, as more often than not, a team batting second chasing a big total fails to make a swift start, that’s it. Even in the 50-over format a fightback is possible, but not in T20.

The Wellington team, sponsored by a well-known pizza company, are now known as the Hell Wellington Firebirds, which, when they perform as they did today, makes the sub-editor's headline writing easy.

A note on spectating etiquette. Just as Ronald Karataina bowled during the sixth over of the day, a late arrival (see previous post) pushed past me to get to a vacant seat. Wilson was out. “What happened there?” he asked.

“I don’t know, you were blocking my view” I replied. Another chance to make a lifelong friend disappears.

There was a time when it was generally recognised that it was inconsiderate to move to or from a seat except between overs, but, like having a fielder at third man in a Test match, it’s a nicety that has disappeared.

Random thoughts on the Ashes: Adelaide

This, my friends, is why you should always be at the cricket well before the start of play.

End of over 2 (1 run) Australia 2/2

SR Watson 0* (6b) SCJ Broad 1-0-1-0

MJ Clarke 2* (5b) JM Anderson 1-0-1-1

2.1 Anderson to Clarke, OUT, 135.3 kph, Two for Anderson! Clarke departs! Another perfect, pitched-up outswinger, Clarke has looked all at sea and walks into a nothing drive that flicks the edge and flies to Swann again

MJ Clarke c Swann b Anderson 2 (7m 6b 0x4 0x6) SR: 33.33

Impossible drama at the Adelaide Oval.

(Adapted from CricInfo's ball-by-ball commentary)

All this happened in the first ten minutes of the Test match. A few moments afterwards Channel Nine showed us a queue of people waiting to get in to the Adelaide Oval. They missed the most gripping cricket of the Test, Australia's worst start to a Test innings since 1950.

These people mistook going to the cricket for a day out, and have failed to undertake the thoughtful planning that is necessary for optimum pleasure. For example, everybody knows that it takes an age to get into sports venues these days, as the security folk go about their task of hunting down illicit sandwiches and soft drinks in the manner of Simon Wiesenthal on the trail of former members of the SS. The alarm must be set half an hour earlier.

When I went to Sydney for the final Test of the 1998/9 Ashes, on the first day play started at 11. I was in my seat in the Churchill Stand by 8.35. Of course, this may be habit borne of need, as in the seventies it was desirable to get to the St Lawrence Ground early to get a decent seat, essential for big matches in the knock-out competitions. John Arlott used to call it “the Canterbury breakfast”.

I favour cricket grounds adopting the practice of the opera, with no admittance for latecomers until the interval, but I can see that would be a difficult one to get past the marketing people.

There is always plenty to occupy the mind at cricket grounds before play begins. On an unfamiliar ground there is orientation to be done, and on a familiar one old friends to meet, old conversations to be repeated and idle speculation to be indulged in. There are newspapers or a carefully chosen book to read. The first Scotch egg of the day can be put away. This way, by the time play begins, the spectator is attuned to the atmosphere, and ready to appreciate the nuances of the game.

Obviously, the same applies to leaving the ground at the close of play. There are people who, regardless of the state of the game, will leave a quarter of a hour before the close of play, even a close one-day game. Do they do this elsewhere? Do they leave theatres at the end of act four and thus go through life believing that Hamlet and Ophelia married and opened a flower shop? Or cinemas, thinking that James Garner will have no trouble getting Donald Pleasance to the Swiss border? Almost certainly not. So why leave a cricket ground early, particularly first-class cricket where anything can happen at any time?

An example. At the end of the aforementioned first day at Sydney in 1999, Darren Gough took the first hat-trick by an England bowler in Ashes Tests for a hundred years, a moment that will make those of us who saw it smile with pleasure at its memory many decades hence, even when we can’t remember our own names. Yet several thousand seats were already empty, their occupants thoroughly pleased with themselves at getting a good place in the bus queue. Some of them may have had what they regard as better excuses for leaving early. To attend their child’s birthday party perhaps, or to be by the bedside of their sick wife. But look deep into their eyes and you will see a sadness that will be with them always.

As for the rest of the Adelaide Test, the unaccustomed ease with which the English batsmen took runs off the Australian attack reminded me of the 1985 series when Gooch, Gower, Gatting and Robinson scored a heap of runs at almost four an over, a welcome increase in the tempo of Test cricket. The reaction of the Australian selectors (chairman: Lance Corporal Jones) is more redolent of England’s in 1989, when the team was changed so often that by the final Test Ted Dexter failed to recognise Alan Igglesden, who he’d picked to open the bowling. Quite what Nathan Hauritz has done wrong is unclear. In Australian conditions he has appeared to be good enough to exercise some sort of control, and is a decent bat and fine field.

But a word of caution. The two teams in this series are not that far apart in terms of quality (remember England’s loss to Pakistan at the Oval just a few months ago), and England have won only once at the Waca, and then against a weak Australia in the World Series years. I have just seem Matt Prior quoted as saying that England are aiming to go through the tour unbeaten, which is foolish talk, suggesting that some in the England camp are making the mistake of believing their own publicity. I hope that the Australians do come back, as it would be magnificent watching if the Ashes are still at stake in Sydney.

Random thoughts on the Ashes: Brisbane

There was something for everyone in the first Test at the Gabba. A hat-trick on the first day; a fighting partnership by Hussey and Haddin to push Australia ahead; an Ashes debut six-for by Finn (he'll bowl much better for less reward); and rearguard heroics from Strauss, Cook and Trott. England have yet to prove that they can win consistently against strong opposition, but they can certainly save games, which is a pleasing novelty for those of us who have lived most of our lives with an England team that had the willpower and steadfastness of Jesse Ryder in a pie shop.

The result leaves key questions unanswered, as is right in a five-match series, which should unfold like a good mystery, the full truth not being revealed until just before the end.

The most important of these questions is “can either of these attacks take twenty wickets to win a Test?”. Mitchell Johnson, with his Movember moustache, looked like Ronald Colman, and bowled like him too. Graham Swann bore little resemblance to the match-winner of recent series. An off spinner winning the Ashes in Australia? The idea begins to sound more absurd than ever.

If the bowlers are to be successful, they will need more help from the pitch than the Gabba gave them. The Channel Nine commentary team, in full every-day-is-Australia-Day mode, sang the praises of the curator (a term I rather prefer to the more rustic “groundsman”) for producing an “excellent” – Bill Lawry – surface. In fact, the pitch was difficult to stay in on in the first half of the game, and difficult to get out on for the second half, pretty much the antithesis of how a Test pitch should behave.

Despite the undoubted merits of the innings of Hussey, Haddin, Strauss, Cook and Trott, 962 runs for six wickets over the last three-and-a-bit days of a Test match means that the pitch was a poor one, in that it did not facilitate an even match between bat and ball. One or two match-saving centuries are worth celebrating. Five are merely mundane.

And then there is the question of the decision referral system (DRS), which functioned poorly in Brisbane. Anderson had Hussey lbw when he was 85, but Aleem Dar rejected the appeal (he had sound grounds for doing so, as there were two noises as the ball hit both pads on the way through) and England could not refer the decision to the third umpire because they had already had two unsuccessful referrals, the allowance for one innings.

It’s true that England had rather squandered their opportunities to refer, but the reason for the limit is to prevent frivolous referrals, not to introduce an extra tactical dimension; that sort of thing is fine for ODIs, but not Tests. When the DRS was first trialled, three unsuccessful referrals was the limit, which prevented abuse of the system, but meant that few close decisions went unscrutinised. That the two-strikes limit is too severe was further illustrated in England's second innings when Australia had two unsuccessful referrals for lbw decisions (including Strauss first ball; what a difference that would have made). Both were exactly the sort of marginal decisions that the DRS was designed for, and Ponting was right to refer them, but a serious umpiring error might have gone uncorrected as a result.

Another alternative would be to declare unsuccessful referrals as spent after, say, 50 overs. Under the present system the fielding side will almost inevitably lose their referrals in a long innings, which is exactly when they need them most.

At least the DRS is operative in Australia, which it was not for the recent series in India, presumably because the BCCI (the governing body in India) was too stingy to pay for all the necessary hardware, preferring to spend their IPL riches on asses milk for Board members to bathe in, or similar. Was this discussed by the commentators? It was not. Why? Because the BCCI is producing the TV broadcast and selling the finished product, rather than just the rights. This is a disturbing trend that would seriously affect the quality of sports coverage were it to spread.

The good news is that Jeremy Coney has replaced the dreadful Morrison on the team for the ODIs.

Can’t wait for Adelaide.

India v New Zealand: Once More into the Valley of Death

And it was all going so well. After two Test matches in the current series in India, New Zealand supporters, exiled for so long in the dark vale of batting collapse and follow ons, found themselves transported to the sunny uplands of centuries, wickets and—no, not victory, that would be more excitement than was good for us—of honourable draws. What’s more, New Zealand were well-placed to win had either game gone into a sixth day.

But, as we all expected, it’s all gone wrong at Nagpur, venue for the deciding third Test. As I write India lead by 250 with five wickets standing, wondering when they’ll have enough to declare and not have to bat again, while everybody here thinks they passed that mark fifty runs ago. Rahul Dravid (once of Kent) is batting like cream being poured over fresh strawberries.

Let us walk away from the scene of the crash and reflect on what went right at Ahmedabad and Hyderabad before we become convinced that it was all a dream.

The success of the batting was particularly pleasing. For a couple of years that’s where the real talent of the team has lain, but it has rarely delivered. So far in this series there have been four centuries by different batsmen.

In the second Test the odd couple, Tim McIntosh and Brendon McCullum, put on the first century partnership for the first wicket for New Zealand for more than six years, a measure of how bad things have been. McIntosh bagged a pair in the first Test, and might have been dropped. He has the happy knack of scoring runs in these circumstances, and produced his best Test innings, with a sound rearguard 49 to follow. He kept the score ticking over better than he has done in the past, though having McCullum at the other end reduces the pressure in this respect.

Ever since I saw McCullum score a fine hundred for New Zealand under-19s against South Africa at Pukekura Park, New Plymouth almost ten years ago (it was his third in successive games)...
http://www.espncricinfo.com/newzealand/content/story/99089.html
...I have felt that he would become a successful top-order Test batsman (ODIs are another matter; I still think he may be more valuable in the finisher role at six or seven). He was praised for curbing his attacking instincts during his match-saving double century at Hyderabad, yet still moved along with a strike rate of 75 (four-and-a-half an over in old money), which is hardly laggardly. He passed 200 with a T20 scoop shot, probably a first for Test cricket.

Kane Williamson’s debut hundred was all efficiency and temperament. He bats like a mathematician solving a complicated equation and the pleasure of watching him rests as much in the knowledge of the runs that he will score in the years to come as in those that he is scoring now.

But it is Jesse Ryder that most pleases the eye. He reminds me of Colin Cowdrey, at the crease at least, and that is high praise from this source. So much time, and a large form moving with such grace. It becomes clear why New Zealand cricket has been so patient with him. He’s not in great shape (I know this because he’s much the same shape as me) and batted with a runner for some of his century in the first Test, which put me in mind of Guardian football writer David Lacey’s comment on the selection of a half-fit Paul Gascoigne: “the manager clearly took the view that half an oaf was better than none”.

Less is expected of the bowling, so taking 20 wickets on Ahmedabad’s flat track was the best of all these achievements, Chris Martin a revelation. Martin is one of those bowlers who always appears to be bowling into the wind, and at the age of 36 there are times when it has seemed to have risen to a force ten gale. Yet in the second innings he produced an opening spell that was pure Glenn McGrath, 135kph bowling that troubled the batsman as if it were 15 kph faster, probing lines and steep bounce. India were 15 for five at one point.

New Zealand’s undoing has come in the improbable form of the batting of Harbajan Singh, who has registered his three highest Test scores during the series, including two hundreds. He is the Errol Flynn of the crease, taking on all comers fearlessly, erasing the invisible line that separates bravery from stupidity, the outcome pre-determined. Exciting, yes, but also (and I hope that this does not come across as ungracious) staggeringly lucky. Mark Richardson pointed on TV that New Zealand has form in the matter of allowing lower-order batsmen to rise above their station. In support he cited Warne, McGrath, Gillespie, Jerome Taylor, and Geraint Jones, which is a bit harsh on Kent’s current No 3.

In coming weeks I shall be writing on the Ashes, as there are only three million Ashes blogs and the world deserves another one.

"The Best Loved Game" and the "Wisden Cricketer" 50 best books

A few editions ago the Wisden Cricketer announced its list of the 50 best cricket books, as chosen by a panel consisting of most of the world’s best cricket writers, plus a few better known in other fields, such as Michael Parkinson, Michael Billington and Simon Heffer. The choice of any edition of the Wisden Almanack was forbidden, like Shakespeare and the Bible on Desert Island Discs.

The earliest choice is John Nyren’s The Cricketers of My Time (32nd: 1833), the most recent Harold Larwood by Duncan Hamilton (18th: 2009). The Australian writer Gideon Haigh is the most popular author, with four books on the list.

I’ve read about half of those that made the final cut, but not the book chosen as the best: The Willow Wand by Derek Birley (1979), a revisionist history of the game that took on every establishment figure from Lord Harris to EW Swanton (who was very nice when I got his autograph at the Oval in 1970). Of course, I’m a sucker for lists and have determined to read all those that I’ve missed so far, as well as reminding myself of some of the best that I haven’t read for a few years.

So I was pleased to have the opportunity to fill one of these gaps when I spotted a copy of Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Best Loved Game (8th) in a second-hand bookshop in Wellington a few weeks ago. It is an episodic account of the 1978 season, with Moorhouse travelling around England watching cricket from the village green to a Lord’s Test Match, which was where my path crossed with his for the only time, on the Saturday of the Test versus Pakistan. This is surprising, as he visited Canterbury during cricket week, but, seduced by the old lie that travel broadens the mind, I found myself in the Ruhrland at that time (actually, it’s only travel to cricket matches that achieves the desired effect).

The memory is a curious thing. Moorhouse describes Haroon Rashid hitting a six onto the top deck of the old Grandstand that Saturday, and I have it in HD in my mind as if it were happening now. Yet I have no recall of a tenth-wicket stand of 40 between Bob Willis and Phil Edmonds in the same session, which is odd as I regard myself as a connoisseur of late-order partnerships (should you find yourself in the company of my Blean Correspondent and myself, on no account ask us about the Willis/Hendrick stand at the Oval in ’77; you will never get away and will end up wishing yourself dead).

Moorhouse’s strengths are his powers of description and imagery. He describes Ian Botham, scoring 108 in only his eighth Test, like this:

He bats the way small boys dream of batting.

And contrasting Gower with Botham:

The one excites the mind and shyly discloses grace; the other makes the heart leap and truculently has his way.

Even in later years when they were famous, the difference between the two was never more sharply put. Nor could a sentence sum up how easy Viv Richards could make batting look better than the following:

Off Imran’s third ball he drives four runs to the long-on ropes so lazily that I almost expect him to finish the stroke with hand to mouth, stifling a yawn.

But the book is a disappointment, because the prose is all there is. There are no profound insights, no astute observations, no original ideas. Cricket was in turmoil in 1978 because most of the leading players had joined Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. Moorhouse’s views on this issue are mainstream and mundane , nothing more than could be read in the papers every day that summer, and all discredited by hindsight. Like many others at that time, he allows his antipathy to Packer to cloud his judgment on other matters. He tells us that Tony Greig, Packer’s chief recruiting officer,

...wouldn’t now be able to get into the side even if he were in a position to try.

What nonsense. Greig would have walked in, for Roope, for the supposed off-spinner Miller (Greig won a Test in the West Indies bowling slower off-cutters), or even for Chris Old, leaving Botham to open the bowling with Willis.

His condemnation of the wearing of helmets, the new thing for batsmen and fielders that year, makes as much sense as if he were advocating the return of the man with the red flag to walk in front of motor cars, and they were offered in the knowledge that at least two cricketers—Roger Davis of Glamorgan and Ewen Chatfield of New Zealand—had recently come within a whisker of death for the want of cranial protection.

Alan Gibson’s Journal of the Season in The Cricketer stands as a superior account of cricket in England in 1978. The Best Loved Game has other faults too, such as the absence of an index, for which points are always deducted. Moorhouse might just cling on to a place on the list on the back of his quality as a writer, but the top ten? Never.

Which books not on the top 50 list should be? Of those mentioned on My Life In Cricket Scorecards previously, two recently published books should be there: John Major’s More Than a Game because of the hole it fills in cricket scholarship, and Alan Gibson’s Of Didcot and the Demon, near the top, of course. I’d suggest two more, just because both authors should be represented on a list of the best.

Some writers are wise, some brilliant with words. Matthew Engel has consistently been both. He is represented, but only as an editor, of The Guardian Book of Cricket (22nd, 1986). Engel is a victim of his own virtuosity. Though he has never stopped writing about cricket, the Guardian was smart enough to recognise that his talent could be deployed to other areas, including serving as the paper’s Washington correspondent. Editing twelve editions of Wisden took up time too. What little time he could spare to writing books he has devoted mostly to non-cricketing subjects, such as popular journalism and the British railway system. However, there is Ashes ’85, a collection of his reports on that series, and it should be on the list.

The other unrepresented writer is Martin “Scoop” Johnson, the inaugural cricket correspondent of The Independent, now of the Sunday Times, his output secreted behind Mr Murdoch’s paywall. Had Groucho Marx taken up cricket writing, he’d have written like Martin Johnson, a limitless stream of one-liners, all making a point and the reader laugh. Here’s part of a piece written during the 1993 Ashes series, from Can’t Bat, Can’t Bowl, Can’t Field (the only three things that, according to Johnson, were wrong with the 1986/7 England team), a collection of his cricket writing:

England’s Test team might be a waste of space, but as far as English Test cricket is concerned there is barely enough space to accommodate all those who want to watch it. England do not so much attract crowds these days as mourners at a funeral...Only in Yorkshire and Lancashire, where Venus would have to be aligned to Macclesfield and Pudsey before they stumped up in advance of the weather forecast, are there seats to be had at short notice...[England’s] domestic system generates less small change than a Saturday morning harmonica player outside Woolworth’s...

How could they leave him out?

The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters

The event of the year in Wellington for those of us who don’t get out much is the annual book fair, which can be relied upon to turn up an unexpected pleasure. This year’s was the The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters.
Rupert Hart-Davis was a publisher who preferred to publish books he liked, rather than those that made money, and who was thus in perpetual financial strife. George Lyttelton had been his teacher at Eton. They corresponded (and there’s a verb that’s disappearing over the horizon into obsolescence) weekly for seven years until Lyttelton’s death in 1962.

Hart-Davis writes engagingly about many subjects, particularly the literary world, and his interesting domestic arrangements: he lived with his secretary in London during the week, and with his wife (who was called Comfort) in Oxfordshire at the weekends. Was he to be envied or pitied?

But it is Lyttelton who steals the show, with more wit and wisdom at his disposal than it seems fair for one man to have, and the ability to churn out original phrases at will. Both were cricket men, which is why I mention them here. Hart-Davis closed his office whenever a Test Match was being played at Lord’s or the Oval. Lyttelton characterises himself as “an old fathead in an MCC tie”. Cricket experiences and anecdotes litter the book. I particularly enjoyed these two. The first is from Lyttelton in June 1957:

On Thursday I shall be watching Ramadhin, and Weekes, and Worrell—and yawning when Trueman bowls or Bailey bats. (Do you realise that Trueman walks thirty-five steps from the crease to the end of his run and that four balls an over the batsman leaves alone?)

This will delight anybody who suffered Fred Trueman on Test Match Special for a quarter of a century castigating any bowler who didn’t make the batsman play every ball. And:

...the only match I ever go up for is the Australian Test Match when the pavilion is cram-full one and a half hours before play begins—and I only got a seat in 1956 because a man (in the best seat of all) died ten minutes before I arrived and in Housmanly fashion I took it).

That’s how I’d like to go when the time comes for the great umpire in the sky to lift the index finger of doom, but it would be better at the close of play, rather than before the start. You could expire in the top deck of the RA Vance Stand at the Basin Reserve on the last day of the season and not be discovered until the following year’s Test Match. The southerly would nullify the decaying process.

"More Than a Game" by John Major

More Than a Game is a history of cricket from its earliest days to the First World War, by none other than Sir John Major, the former British prime minister.

Throughout his term of office Major gave the impression that he’d rather be at the cricket. When he lost the ’97 election by an innings and plenty, he dropped the keys to No 10 off at the Palace and headed straight for the Oval, for a Benson and Hedges zonal game between Surrey and the Combined Universities no less, so More Than a Game is a labour of love.

He’s done a good job; More Than a Game should be regarded as the standard work on the early history of cricket, despite the intrusion of Major’s Pooterish manner of speaking into his written style.

The best part of the book is the early chapters, in which Major subjects the accepted scholarship on the game’s origins to rigorous scrutiny, from which it does not emerge well. He can find no reference to cricket before 1700 that he is convinced by, showing that those accepted by a variety of authors are likely to be mistranslations or misinterpretations.

He also questions the pre-eminence of the Hambledon club on the South Downs, presented in histories passim as the centre of the cricketing universe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Major argues that other clubs in the south and south-east of England may have been at least as strong, but did not have a chronicler present (much of what we know of Hambledon comes from John Nyren’s The Young Cricketer’s Tutor).

By promoting good historical methodology Major has created a standard which cricket historians of this era will have to observe, sufficient in itself to give the book merit, though he is not always as careful about facts outside cricket. To describe 1832 as “the year in which the Great Reform Bill split the country” is an elementary error (1831 was when most of the trouble took place—notably the Bristol riots in which all but one building in Queen Square was destroyed). But there is plenty more to interest, particularly for Kentish readers.

I had no idea, for example, that Bourne Park, near Bishopsbourne, four miles south-east of Canterbury, was a major venue around the 1770s. Fifteen to twenty thousand spectators attended the first day of a game between Hampshire and All England in 1772. The house is still there, and I must resolve to visit it next time I’m in the frozen north.

Another strength of the book is the descriptions of the players. I particularly enjoyed portraits of three figures from Kent’s early history, all of whom had been little more than names to me.

Alfred Mynn was the great all-rounder of 1830s and 40s, bowling round arm at a ferocious pace and hitting the ball with great power. Mynn was hugely popular, but rather feckless, the Freddie Flintoff of his day. “My boy”, he said to a teammate sipping tea, “beef and beer are the things to play cricket on”. He spent several spells in debtors’ prisons.

Nicholas Wanostrocht, a teacher who ran his own school at Blackheath, adopted the sobriquet “Felix” for his cricket. Felix was one of the best batsmen of his era, and another cricketer-writer, Felix on the Bat (1845) being his best known work.

Mynn and Felix played the most famous of all single-wicket contests, at Lord’s in 1846. Single-wicket matches were the T20 of their day, in terms of popular appeal, if not intensity of action. Felix faced 247 balls from which he scored three runs. The crowd were said to be “enthralled”, bless them.

Fuller Pilch was poached by Kent from his native Norfolk in 1835. In his early days he was an all-rounder, but as an underarm bowler he was called on less and less as time went on and round-arm bowling became dominant. Pilch scored ten centuries and 63 fifties, impressive figures for those times on those pitches.

As the book moves into less distant times it becomes more of a recital of well-known material. An earlier cut-off than 1914 would have been beneficial (the first test, in 1877, perhaps). But there is still much to praise, notably the account of the Grace family, which Major starts ingeniously not with WG, but EM ("the Coroner"). I had not fully realised how good EM was, deserving to be regarded as one of the leading players of the age, not merely as an adjunct to the greatest.

Major describes Grace’s parallel life as a doctor with a surgery in the working-class Bristol suburb of Southville, noting that this was at odds with his money-grabbing approach to his cricket career, and praising him for it. I take the more cynical view that WG was simply not a very good doctor, and would have practised in Clifton had he had the talent to attract a richer clientele.

For all its merits the book could have benefitted from more assertive editing. Too often Major wanders off the point, to the extent of a whole chapter on leisure activities apart from cricket that were available to mid-Victorians. Such an editor might also have spared us occasional passages that raise the suspicion that Mary Poppins was employed as a ghost writer, and curbed the quoting of dreadful contemporary verse (to call it poetry would be to misuse the term).

But enough carping. There is much to recommend More Than a Game, and its non-appearance in the Wisden Cricketer’s list of the fifty best cricket books is surely only because its publication is so recent.

Good and bad at commentating

When I left the UK I said that I’d miss two things: Radio 4 and the cricket, especially county cricket. Thanks to the internet, Radio 4 is on tap (as I type I’m listening to the wonderful Dr Jonathan Miller reviewing archive recordings of his career), and ball-by-ball coverage and commentary of county and test cricket from the BBC and CricInfo means that cricket in England can be lived in every respect, except for the joy of eating Jaffa cakes and scotch eggs in the sun.

A far cry from my early visits to New Zealand, and the first two or three years of living here. Then, finding out the score was a question of locating a faint BBC World Service signal, or relying on two-day-old potted scores in the New Zealand Herald. I was even reduced to the weekly shame of skulking into McLeod’s Bookshop in Rotorua to buy a copy of the international edition of the Daily Express.

Now, it’s very different. Last weekend I watched the end of the third test at the Oval on television, listening to the Test Match Special commentary at the same time, while keeping in touch with Kent’s latest collapse, against Lancashire, on CricInfo.

Such reliance on the media means that the quality of the commentary is crucial. Fortunately, the BSkyB and Test Match Special teams have not let me down. On other occasions in the past few weeks I have not been so fortunate.

When BSkyB took over the exclusive contract for English cricket in 2006 some tough decisions were taken about the composition of the commentary team. Paul Allott and Bob Willis, both of whom had worked for BSkyB from its inception, were relegated to the highlights and county cricket. Allott is bland, and the absence of Willis takes the heat off the Samaritans, who would otherwise be stretched to breaking point with calls from the desperate, driven to the edge by Willis’ mournful commentary spells.

What remains is the strongest commentary line-up of any around the world, with Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton outstanding. Atherton came to BSkyB after four successful years with Channel 4, and he is a historian, so it is no surprise that he is good. But as a player and captain, Hussain came across as intense, prickly and humourless, so it is a pleasant surprise that he is an incisive, interesting commentator with dry humour and the ability to make an Essex accent sound intelligent.

And there’s Bumble, David Lloyd, who is both shrewd and funny, qualities that many commentators think they possess (see below) but few do. He provided the commentary box moment of the match at the Oval when talking passionately about Alistair Cook’s footwork having forgotten to pick up his microphone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cygWze9RJMA

On the radio, Jonathan Agnew is completing twenty years as the BBC’s cricket correspondent. Agnew isn’t in the class of John Arlott or Alan Gibson as a wordsmith, but is good enough and gets the mix of analysis and humour just right. Though I’d stick with Arlott, Gibson and Mosey as my all-time line-up, I’d add Agnew as fourth commentator were I allowed one, just ahead of Brian Johnston.

Agnew’s pleasing line in self-depreciating anecdotes—there was a cracker at the Oval about how he hid in a cupboard on Test debut to avoid being sent out as night-watchman—probably leaves those who did not see him play with an unduly underwhelming idea of his ability as a player. In fact, he took more wickets than any other bowler in county cricket over several seasons in the 80s, and it is a minor scandal that he only played three Tests. In 1988 he took a stack of wickets early in the season, but was omitted from the first Test on the grounds that the pitches he had been bowling on were too bowler friendly, an argument undermined by the selection of his Leicestershire teammate Phil de Freitas instead. On the same pitches, de Freitas had taken half as many wickets as Agnew.

At the Oval, a listener emailed in a “Boycott bingo” card, consisting of a number of the great man’s most well-used phrases. Boycott was not a summariser for this match, so knew nothing about this when he arrived to record the daily podcast at the close of play. The idea had taken Agnew’s fancy, and he took the opportunity to extract as many of the phrases on the card as he could. Boycott fell for it every time, along these lines:

Agnew: Where should they bowled, Geoffrey?

Boycott: In the corridor of uncertainty...

Agnew: Different from the pitches in your day which were?

Boycott: Uncovered pitches...

Agnew: It was an easy chance. How would your Mum have caught it Geoffrey?

Boycott: In ‘er pinny...

And so it went on.

Unfortunately, Henry Blofeld has replaced the pleasant Bristolian Simon Mann in the radio team for the Lord’s Test. Blofeld would have us believe that he was created by PG Wodehouse, when really he is only one of Lord Snooty’s more irritating pals.

At the other end of the commentating spectrum, I give you Pete and Ed of Radio Bristol. I got up in time to hear last hour or so of the Radio 5 Live commentary on T20 finals day, but it cut off online a few overs from the end, so I found this pair instead. I know that T20 is supposed to attract people who have never been to the cricket before, but not to commentate, surely.

When I lived in Bristol, Radio Bristol’s cricket commentary often led me to put my head in my hands while muttering “please make it stop” and things have not improved. Neither Pete nor Ed appeared to be able to identify the type of shot played, were shaky on player identification, and didn’t know what the rule was to decide a tied game (which is how the final between Somerset and Hampshire ended). Worse, they didn’t have the vocabulary to sustain a cricket commentary. In the tense last over, the best Ed (or possibly Pete) could offer was “I shall need the toilet soon”.

And further down the food chain, there’s Danny Morrison, one of a five-man team covering the ODI tri-series between Sri Lanka, India and New Zealand in Sri Lanka. Morrison hung around the fringes of the commentary team in New Zealand for a decade or so, but was used for international games very rarely. Yet now he pops up all the time on international games from South Asia, and the IPL.

Employing a curious vocabulary of synonyms (the bat is the “willow” or “blade”, the stumps the “woodwork” and anybody over six feet is the “big fella”) and cliché, Morrison’s commentary consists of a disjointed stream of consciousness on which a Freudian analyst could base a career’s research if extracted from a patient under hypnosis. It never includes anything that is interesting, or not, in the immortal words of Basil Fawlty, “the bleeding obvious”. He pauses meaninglessly in mid-sentence, and plonks (to plonk: a verb coined by Clive James in his TV reviewing days, meaning to stress the most unimportant words in any sentence). His purpose here seems to be to make Tony Greig look literate.

He does not succeed.

At home at The Oval with Allen Hunt

Kent played a home T20 game against Essex at The Oval last month. They lost, as they usually have this season, but it was a decent contest, Essex passing Kent’s 171 for six with two balls to spare.

Playing a home game away like this has caused a good deal of grumbling among the faithful, and may not have been a success, with a crowd of only 7,000 attracted when many more were hoped for, though this is twice the average T20 crowd at Canterbury this season, apparently.

No doubt when the game was scheduled it was anticipated that Kent would be heading for the final stages of the competition for the fourth year in a row; instead, they began the match all but eliminated.

Playing a home game at The Oval is not a new idea. I recall it being mooted in the eighties. It made good sense then, and still does. With the disappearance from the county circuit of Blackheath, Dartford and Gravesend, a game a season near home for the county’s many London fringe supporters redresses the balance, and most train lines in Kent point to south London.

Anyway (and this will come as a surprise to most) Kent played a home game at The Oval in 1981, and I was there.

http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/41/41303.html

It was the Benson and Hedges quarter-final against Warwickshire, scheduled for Canterbury, but moved to the Oval on the morning of the scheduled third day after a deluge had prevented play on the first two days set aside for what was, in theory, a one-day game.

At 133 for two, Warwickshire appeared comfortable chasing Kent’s modest 193 from 50 overs. Then collapse, the remaining eight wickets falling for just 46 runs. My firmest memory of the play is of a splendid catch by Alan Ealham to dismiss “Yogi” Ferreira. I must write about Ealham, one of my favourite players.

As might be imagined in these circumstances, the crowd was sparse. Of the few present, only two were sufficiently intrepid, dedicated and lacking in perspective to watch from the top deck of the pavilion, a fine view, but grievously cold in the face of a scathing northerly. So it was that I made the acquaintance of Allen Hunt.

I was to spend a lot of time at the cricket with Allen over the years that followed, around Kent and, particularly, at away games. He cut a distinguished figure, slightly raffish even, with swept-back white hair and goatee beard; Allen would often sport a cravat, which made him stand out like a Zandra Rhodes model when compared with the sober suits favoured in the top deck of the pavilion at Canterbury. He would have been about seventy then, but could have passed for a man fifteen years younger. That remained the case for most of the time that I knew him.

Allen passed the CLR James test (“What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”) easily. A civil servant in the Ministry of Education, he had acquired an MA from the London School of Economics in middle age, and continued to teach adult education classes at City University into his eighties. It was just that he thought cricket more interesting and rewarding than anything else.

In 1968 he won a Kent Messenger competition to pick a greatest-ever Kent XI. The prize–very exotic for those days–was a trip to South Africa to watch part of the Test series between South Africa and England. When the tour was cancelled as a result of the South African Government’s shameful refusal to accept the Cape Coloured Basil d’Oliveira as part of the touring party, Allen handed the holiday on to his niece. “No use to me with no cricket to watch”, was his view.

He divided his time between his flat in Leyton, east London and his house in Halling, north of Maidstone. I never went to either, but those that had described a somewhat chaotic existence, particularly when it came to meal times, which would consist of a fusion of whatever tinned food was available. Corned beef would share a plate with rice pudding, to save washing up.

Allen was a wonderful person to watch cricket with, drawing upon seven decades of cricket watching to analyse the game with intelligence and wit. He was my window on to cricket’s past, describing, among many other things, watching Les Ames score a century in the first Test played by New Zealand in England at Lord’s in 1931, Frank Woolley batting, and Tich Freeman bowling.

An entourage collected around him. There was “Budgie” Burgess, Brian Cheal, exiled like me in Bristol, the two Rays, and his most regular associate, George Murrell. George was a little younger than Allen, and also retired. Slim, dapper (readers of a certain age should think of the keyboard player from Sparks) and possessed of a tinderbox wit, George was also excellent company. I was sitting next to him at the Oval in 1985 when Graham Dilley took a hat-trick. He claimed, somewhat improbably, never to have seen a hat-trick before and said, rather wistfully, “I had intended to have the words ‘He never saw a hat-trick’ on my gravestone”.

Winter days were always brighter for the appearance of a letter from Allen. They would never contain small talk, but would arrow straight in on the main point. Had I heard that a particular player was thinking of leaving, or that we had signed a talented young player? Occasionally he would stray on to the subject of the fortunes of Gillingham FC (he rarely missed a home game, unless it clashed with the cricket, obviously).

I last saw Allen at the Kent v the Australians game in 1997, the week before I left for New Zealand. His health had started to go downhill, and he couldn’t manage the train any more, but had got a lift from a neighbour. So much to talk about, so little time.

The letters continued to arrive over the next couple of years, with increasingly unsteady handwriting. They became irregular, and stopped coming as the century approached its end. For me, it is still a sign that a day’s play has been interesting if I think, as I leave the ground, that I’d like to write to Allen to tell him about it.

I went to the Cricket Instead

Just as Americans a bit older than me can tell you where they were when Jack Kennedy was shot, so English people know where they were on the afternoon of 30 July 1966, the day England won the football World Cup (Scots also remember, but only because it is seared upon their soul).

Me too. I was at the cricket, the first day of Canterbury Week, Kent v Leicestershire, to be precise.

Had the World Cup started a month earlier, everything might have been very different. But by early July I was already entranced by the other great sporting event of the summer of ’66: the Test series between England and the West Indies. I watched the opening World Cup game, a monumentally dull nil-nil draw between England and Uruguay, and lost interest after that.

As far as I remember, the opportunity to go to the cricket with a family friend arose on the morning of the final. Displaying wisdom beyond my seven years, I unhesitatingly grabbed it rather than watch the biggest football match ever played in England, thus absenting myself from the most significant shared national experience between VE Day and Lady Di’s funeral.

It was an early lesson that cricket watching would require stoicism and fortitude; only 25 overs or so were possible, my hero Colin Cowdrey got a duck and the whole thing was finished by a hailstorm in mid-afternoon.

Good choice, nevertheless.

Later World Cups are also reminders of days at the cricket.

By Mexico 1970 I had developed more enthusiasm for football, but cricket still had priority whenever a choice was to be made. Hence I missed Alan Mullery’s goal that put England one-nil up against Germany in the quarter-final at Leon because I was on the way back to Herne Bay from a Sunday League game at the lovely Crabble Ground in Dover (Kent chased down Northamptonshire’s 239 in the last over). Martin Peters extended the lead, but the Germans began their long period of domination in finals games between the two countries, and came back to win three-two in extra time.

Failure to qualify in 1974 and 1978 meant that England’s next World Cup finals match did not take place until they played France on 16 June 1982, when I was watching Ian Botham reverse-sweep Somerset to victory in the Benson and Hedges quarter-final at Canterbury.

Four years later I listened to Peter Jones and Bryon Butler’s radio commentary on the “hand of God” game against Argentina on my way back to Bristol from a Sunday League game at Basingstoke.

As the years went on, other events vied with cricket for my time, and came off second best. In 1985, for example, I was offered tickets for, and transport to and from, a concert. Kent were playing Northamptonshire at Maidstone that day, so I turned it down. What was the concert? It was Live Aid, my friends, the greatest gathering together of popular musical talent in the history of the universe.

But at Mote Park, Roger Harper made a most entertaining run-a-ball century, so again, good decision.

Under duress, I might miss a match for events deemed significant, such as the marriages of friends of the family. When, some years later, the predictable news was delivered that the happy couples had separated, my reaction was always that they could have made more of an effort given that I had sacrificed a day’s cricket for their wedding.

World events occurring during the cricket season also remain indelibly associated with particular fixtures. President Nixon’s resignation, for example, occurred during the Canterbury Week of 1974, between the second and third days of the Warwickshire game. Surely others recall, as I do, the Royal Wedding of 1981 as the day Ken McEwan of Essex made an elegant hundred in John Shepherd’s last first-class game for Kent (plenty of people gave up a day’s play needlessly that day)?

On this theme, an old story. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.

A batsman pulls away just before the bowler’s delivery stride, removes his cap (I said it was an old story) and bows his head as a funeral cortege passes the ground. When it has gone, he replaces his cap and beckons the bowler to proceed. At the end of the over the wicket-keeper says “that was a nice gesture”.

“It was the least I could do”, replies the batsman. “I was married to her for thirty-five years.”

Letter to the editor

The July edition of the Wisden Cricketer arrived today, and is as entertaining and interesting as ever, particularly its list of the ten best cricket books ever published, of which more anon. However a more immediate concern was a piece by Mark Nicholas in the Expert Eye column:
http://wisdencricketer.com/item.php?parent_id=12&child_id=8&item_id=704

It postulates a reduction in the number of first-class counties to 14, or even 12. Now, I don't like this idea, but the day will probably come, and opposition based on dogged sentimentality is unrealistic. What made me dash off a letter to the editor was the assumptions that Nicholas makes about how the change would come about.

Here's the letter:

If there is to be a cull of first-class counties, it must not be driven by the assumptions made by Mark Nicholas (Expert Eye, July).
First, why should the Test-staging counties be guaranteed a place in the new structure? So that it can benefit from the financial and cricketing acumen that has taken Surrey from top to bottom in less than a decade? Or so that we don't miss the one player of true international class that Glamorgan produces every 30 years? How would we manage without Yorkshire's people skills?
English cricket would do better with more influence from counties that have used scarce resources to produce young players of true international potential, as, for example, Leicestershire are doing, and less from those whose grandiose dreams have lumbered the game with more international grounds than it needs.
A knowledge of geography wider than Mr Nicholas' would also be useful. The view that a merger between Gloucestershire and Somerset is "natural" is sustainable only if you believe that everybody south and west of Swindon wears smocks and sucks straw. A more natural alliance would be between Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, given that the cricketing heart of the former is in the north of the county, half an hour from New Road, but two hours from Taunton.
And why should the south-eastern counties be inviolate? As a lifelong Kent supporter I hope the day never dawns, but with the population of the county balanced towards London and the books in dire straits, amalgamation with Surrey is every bit as realistic as any of those suggested. Nor is Brighton to Southampton an arduous journey.

I like Mark Nicholas as a broadaster and journalist. At any rate, reading and listening to him is more entertaining than watching him play ever was. As an Englishman verging on the posh, his achievement in becoming the face of cricket on Channel Nine in Australia is remarkable, even if he has adopted the every-day-is-Australia-Day commentary style which only Messrs Benaud and Chappell resist.

But he's wrong about this.