This 2010/11 Ashes has shown that, in a perfect world, Test cricket would always be played in five-match series. If this series had finished one-all at Perth after three games the sages would have declared the two sides to be evenly matched, but Australia with a few more problems to solve. It took the last two games to reveal the extent of the difference in quality between the two teams.
Of course, when one side is far superior to the other, as was the case in too many series between England and Australia in the nineties and noughties, and against the West Indies in the eighties, a long series is superfluous, but this has not happened that often in cricket history. We have a two-match series against Pakistan beginning here in New Zealand today, which is no use to anybody (I shall report from the second Test at the Basin nevertheless).
For England, weaknesses identified at the start of the tour turned into strengths, particularly Alistair Cook, whose place was in doubt halfway through the last English season. He accumulated his runs so smoothly that news that he had batted longer than any Englishman in any Ashes series came as a surprise. Boycott and Barrington just seemed to bat longer, I suppose. Why the Australians did not pitch the ball up to him more? That is one of many questions they will ask themselves in the weeks and months to come.
The big bonus for England was the depth of the fast bowling. At the beginning of the series Stuart Broad was said by many to be crucial to the team's chances, but was not missed after he was injured in the second Test. How many teams have been able to drop their leading wicket-taker half way through the series, yet improve the team by doing so? This is what England achieved by replacing Finn with Bresnan. Anderson was world class, his control of reverse swing magnificent.
Despite the overwhelming scale of the victory England are not as good as some say, nor Australia as bad. This Australian side saw off New Zealand, West Indies and Pakistan easily enough last year, and remain a first division side, albeit one flirting with relegation. Optimism levels here in New Zealand remain low looking ahead to the two-Test series in Australia next November.
England have to lose the habit of throwing away a game a series (Perth, and at the Oval against Pakistan). A crushing defeat in South Africa this time last year was avoided only thanks to two last-wicket survival acts. Both sides are at home to India later this year, an effective test of quality and progress in both cases.
The composition of a team selected from both sides has been discussed in various media outlets. Some think that only Hussey would make it from the Australian team, but this going too far. I would pick Haddin ahead of Prior, as his runs came at more difficult times and because his glovework was tidier. It has been suggested that Prior was better because he took more catches, but wicketkeepers are judged by what they miss, not what they catch.
I am tempted to argue that, the Adelaide double century excepted (and others were scoring runs there) Pietersen threw it away too often and contributed less than the other batsmen, Collingwood apart, so Watson should take his place. Talk of Watson moving down the order is mysterious, as he has done a good job as an opener, apart from the comedy running between the wickets. Also, it seems to take the pressure off his bowling.
I watched more of this than any other Ashes series, with the possible exception of 2002/03, when I was working from home and could pass off time spent in front of the television as research for my role as a CricInfo writer. It has been an interesting and entertaining series, but not a classic, as none of the four tests that finished were close. The most tension was felt at Brisbane, before it became obvious that England's rescue act was being mounted in a shallow park pond, not a stormy ocean. It was a historic series though, as it leaves Andrew Strauss alongside only Len Hutton and Mike Brearley (who, as Tony Greig is never slow to point out, did it against the Australian 2nd/3rd XI) as the only England captains to beat Australia home and away.
Roll on Ashes 2013.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Random thoughts on the Ashes: Melbourne
When England last retained the Ashes as they just have, by winning the penultimate Test thereby ensuring that the series could not be lost, the fact was noted only in passing. It was 29 July 1972 and I watched it on Grandstand on our new colour TV. The game finished mid-afternoon on the third day, Kent's own Derek Underwood routing the Aussies with ten wickets on a sickly Headingley pitch about which Australians mutter dark conspiracy theories to this day.
There were few celebrations and no post-match presentation ceremony (there was nothing to present). England's captain, Ray Illingworth, might have had time for a quick beer before going back to Leicestershire to lead the team in the Sunday League the next day. Tony Greig played for Sussex at Arundel, a 350-mile drive away (John Snow's name is conspicuous in its absence from that day's Sussex teamlist; he was never the county game's most enthusiastic devotee).
I suppose that in 1972 we were a bit too Celia Johnson for our own good, but in 2010 we have surely moved too far in the direction of Lady Gaga. David Cameron was effusive in his congratulations and invited the team (or the “group” as it is fashionably known) to No 10. BBC World News led with the Ashes for many hours on Wednesday, which even during the slowest news period of the year is getting things seriously out of proportion (Afghanistan anybody?). It wouldn't have been so bad if reporter James Pearce had not been so ignorant of cricket history, referring to England v Australia as “cricket's oldest contest” when USA v Canada beats it by 18 years. He also speculated that Ponting would be replaced as Australia's captain “as soon as the series ends”, which he certainly will not, as captain of the No 1 ranked ODI team and the World Cup only a few weeks away. The change will take place after that.
Hopelessly uptight as we were in the seventies, our reluctance to throw street parties across the country was at least informed by the knowledge that the series had not been decided. The fifth Test of the '72 series was outstanding, and ended with Australia winning on the sixth day (the extra day was added as the series was still undetermined, which was exactly the point). The stories that have proliferated in both hemispheres explaining why the English are so much better than the Australians are going to look pretty silly if Australia wins in Sydney.
That is not the most likely outcome, but twice already in this series a badly beaten team has come back to win the following Test and it could happen again, if Mitch Johnson rediscovers his inner Dr Strangelove and resists The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu, if Michael Clarke finds his form... I was going to add, if the Australian selectors see sense and drop Hughes and Smith, and include Nathan Hauritz, but that moment has already passed. Usman Khawaja comes in for the injured Ponting, but will bat at three, giving the hapless Hughes another chance as opener (I don't recall an Aussie opener as vulnerable since Andrew “Hooking” Hilditch, the current chairman of the Australian selectors, which may explain something), the richly promising but under-ripe Smith remains too, and they're sticking with Michael Beer, the good form that led to his original selection no doubt lost in the three weeks that he's been trailling the team around Australia.
While the Australian selectors have made and compounded mistakes galore, England's have got everything right. Winning the Ashes with a four-man attack including Bresnan? Can't see a problem there.
Jonathan Agnew described the first day's play at Melbourne as the most one-sided he'd ever seen in Tests, including those involving Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. There might be a few that can be dragged up from New Zealand's recent past that would contend. I immediately thought of the first day of the fifth Test of the 1989 Ashes, where openers Mark Taylor and Geoff Marsh batted all day.
And then there was Ponting. It's difficult to engender the appropriate degree of outrage at his outburst over the third umpire's correct decision to rule Pietersen not out for two reasons. The first is that during the Test Channel 9 replayed the Dennis Lillee aluminium bat incident at Perth in 1979, which culminated the Australian captain Greg Chappell coming on to the field with a replacement and Lillee hurling the offending piece of metal 30 metres across the Waca. In comparison the Ponting incident looks tame. Also, Ponting got it so wrong that the effect was comical rather than provoking. His expression of incomprehension as Aleem Dar used his forearm to explain that the “hotspot” seen on the screen could not have been produced by the ball could not have been bettered by either Laurel or Hardy.
I hope that Ponting has not played his last Test. He has been the great batsman of the past decade and deserves to go out with a century.
There were few celebrations and no post-match presentation ceremony (there was nothing to present). England's captain, Ray Illingworth, might have had time for a quick beer before going back to Leicestershire to lead the team in the Sunday League the next day. Tony Greig played for Sussex at Arundel, a 350-mile drive away (John Snow's name is conspicuous in its absence from that day's Sussex teamlist; he was never the county game's most enthusiastic devotee).
I suppose that in 1972 we were a bit too Celia Johnson for our own good, but in 2010 we have surely moved too far in the direction of Lady Gaga. David Cameron was effusive in his congratulations and invited the team (or the “group” as it is fashionably known) to No 10. BBC World News led with the Ashes for many hours on Wednesday, which even during the slowest news period of the year is getting things seriously out of proportion (Afghanistan anybody?). It wouldn't have been so bad if reporter James Pearce had not been so ignorant of cricket history, referring to England v Australia as “cricket's oldest contest” when USA v Canada beats it by 18 years. He also speculated that Ponting would be replaced as Australia's captain “as soon as the series ends”, which he certainly will not, as captain of the No 1 ranked ODI team and the World Cup only a few weeks away. The change will take place after that.
Hopelessly uptight as we were in the seventies, our reluctance to throw street parties across the country was at least informed by the knowledge that the series had not been decided. The fifth Test of the '72 series was outstanding, and ended with Australia winning on the sixth day (the extra day was added as the series was still undetermined, which was exactly the point). The stories that have proliferated in both hemispheres explaining why the English are so much better than the Australians are going to look pretty silly if Australia wins in Sydney.
That is not the most likely outcome, but twice already in this series a badly beaten team has come back to win the following Test and it could happen again, if Mitch Johnson rediscovers his inner Dr Strangelove and resists The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu, if Michael Clarke finds his form... I was going to add, if the Australian selectors see sense and drop Hughes and Smith, and include Nathan Hauritz, but that moment has already passed. Usman Khawaja comes in for the injured Ponting, but will bat at three, giving the hapless Hughes another chance as opener (I don't recall an Aussie opener as vulnerable since Andrew “Hooking” Hilditch, the current chairman of the Australian selectors, which may explain something), the richly promising but under-ripe Smith remains too, and they're sticking with Michael Beer, the good form that led to his original selection no doubt lost in the three weeks that he's been trailling the team around Australia.
While the Australian selectors have made and compounded mistakes galore, England's have got everything right. Winning the Ashes with a four-man attack including Bresnan? Can't see a problem there.
Jonathan Agnew described the first day's play at Melbourne as the most one-sided he'd ever seen in Tests, including those involving Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. There might be a few that can be dragged up from New Zealand's recent past that would contend. I immediately thought of the first day of the fifth Test of the 1989 Ashes, where openers Mark Taylor and Geoff Marsh batted all day.
And then there was Ponting. It's difficult to engender the appropriate degree of outrage at his outburst over the third umpire's correct decision to rule Pietersen not out for two reasons. The first is that during the Test Channel 9 replayed the Dennis Lillee aluminium bat incident at Perth in 1979, which culminated the Australian captain Greg Chappell coming on to the field with a replacement and Lillee hurling the offending piece of metal 30 metres across the Waca. In comparison the Ponting incident looks tame. Also, Ponting got it so wrong that the effect was comical rather than provoking. His expression of incomprehension as Aleem Dar used his forearm to explain that the “hotspot” seen on the screen could not have been produced by the ball could not have been bettered by either Laurel or Hardy.
I hope that Ponting has not played his last Test. He has been the great batsman of the past decade and deserves to go out with a century.
Friday, December 31, 2010
I am not a number, I'm a cricket writer
It is now possible to search CricInfo, sorry ESPN CricInfo, by author. Turns out I'm author 160. The reports listed are the close-of-play wraps. The hourly reports are still there, but hidden deeper in the achives:
http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/story/author.html?author=160;page=1
http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/story/author.html?author=160;page=1
Friday, December 24, 2010
Random thoughts on the Ashes: Perth
This was an Aesop's Fable of a Test, a simple moral tale of the dangers of pride and self-regard. Though the England camp (and there are so many "support" people present that it's more of small town) would not associate itself with the premature triumphalism of the British media - even the Guardian ran an on-line poll on whether this was the worst Aussie side ever - Matt Prior's statement quoted in an earlier post that England were looking to go through the tour unbeaten showed that hubris had been asked in and given a cup of tea. Not for nothing is "we'll take each game as it comes" sport's oldest cliche.
An hour or so into the second day it appeared that complacency was justified, with England 78 without loss in reply Australia's unimpressive 268. Then Mitchell Johnson began to swing it like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, finishing with six for 38. Johnson is the Peter Sellers of contemporary cricket. A long period of nothing but rubbish, then, suddenly at the Waca, it's Being There.
In contrast to the Gabba, and to a lesser extent the Adelaide Oval, the pitch nurtured good cricket, chiefly because of its pace and trueness of bounce. It was through the air, rather than off the pitch, that the bowlers caused problems.
The less thoughtful members of the media, supported by the ignorati of the internet, will say that all is well in Australia, while England are in crisis. Neither is true. This Ashes series is unfolding like a Shakesperian drama, in five acts. Whether Ricky Ponting or Andrew Strauss is the tragic figure who will fall on his sword in the final scene is not yet clear. Both sides have weaknesses, and it is these fallabilities that are making it such a good contest.
For England, Collingwood is out of touch, Swann somewhat neutralised, and Finn tired (but still taking wickets, a happy knack). It is rumoured that he may be rested in Melbourne. England to win a Test with a four-man attack, one of whom is Bresnan? It has an improbable feel to it.
For Australia, there must be several openers available more secure than Phil Hughes, and Clarke looked as if he'd lost it in the second innings at Perth, slogging away from the start. Ponting looks vulnerable too, but Ian Chappell says that the feet are moving well, so runs will follow. The Australians may green up the pitch at Melbourne, and go without a spinner, though Beer is still in the squad, at the expense of the unfortunate Hauritz.
Much nonsense is being written about "momentum" and the "psychological advantage". At Melbourne in will simply come down to which team bats and bowls better. The issue of sledging has taken up many column inches too. Peter Siddle gave a radio interview in which he defended the aggressive use of words on the cricket field, the irony of his failure to form words into a coherent sentence at any point of the interview lost on him.
Happy Festival of the Day Before the Boxing Day Test to one and all.
An hour or so into the second day it appeared that complacency was justified, with England 78 without loss in reply Australia's unimpressive 268. Then Mitchell Johnson began to swing it like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, finishing with six for 38. Johnson is the Peter Sellers of contemporary cricket. A long period of nothing but rubbish, then, suddenly at the Waca, it's Being There.
In contrast to the Gabba, and to a lesser extent the Adelaide Oval, the pitch nurtured good cricket, chiefly because of its pace and trueness of bounce. It was through the air, rather than off the pitch, that the bowlers caused problems.
The less thoughtful members of the media, supported by the ignorati of the internet, will say that all is well in Australia, while England are in crisis. Neither is true. This Ashes series is unfolding like a Shakesperian drama, in five acts. Whether Ricky Ponting or Andrew Strauss is the tragic figure who will fall on his sword in the final scene is not yet clear. Both sides have weaknesses, and it is these fallabilities that are making it such a good contest.
For England, Collingwood is out of touch, Swann somewhat neutralised, and Finn tired (but still taking wickets, a happy knack). It is rumoured that he may be rested in Melbourne. England to win a Test with a four-man attack, one of whom is Bresnan? It has an improbable feel to it.
For Australia, there must be several openers available more secure than Phil Hughes, and Clarke looked as if he'd lost it in the second innings at Perth, slogging away from the start. Ponting looks vulnerable too, but Ian Chappell says that the feet are moving well, so runs will follow. The Australians may green up the pitch at Melbourne, and go without a spinner, though Beer is still in the squad, at the expense of the unfortunate Hauritz.
Much nonsense is being written about "momentum" and the "psychological advantage". At Melbourne in will simply come down to which team bats and bowls better. The issue of sledging has taken up many column inches too. Peter Siddle gave a radio interview in which he defended the aggressive use of words on the cricket field, the irony of his failure to form words into a coherent sentence at any point of the interview lost on him.
Happy Festival of the Day Before the Boxing Day Test to one and all.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Wellington v Northern Districts, T20, Basin Reserve, 12 December 2010
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, November 22, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, November 5, 2010
"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:
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:
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?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
"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.
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.
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