Is This Bowled?
6 years ago
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Ground Down
In the good old days for a 5-match test series to finish 0-0, or 1-0 if one side was feeling a bit frisky, was far from uncommon. When people trot out statistics of years passing without a side losing a single game, I’m always tempted to ask whether they actually won any either. Those days are by and large long gone, unless it’s a test match at Lord’s. Of the last 6 test matches at said venue, a mere 6 have been draws. And the one just passed between England and South Africa is probably the worst of them.
The scorecard, given a cursory glance, suggests that England let the Proteas off the hook, but this is far from the truth. On reflection England’s 593 was no more than par on this flatter than flat pitch. The South African’s initial reply was indeed poor and England’s bowling was disciplined, if unspectacular. Ashwell ‘The Fresh’ Prince proved with his prosaic century, that as long as you batted sensibly and didn’t get an absolute jaffa, nobody was going to get you out. Following on, the rest of the South African batsmen had got with the programme and realised that even if they played 24 hours a day, for a fortnight, in blindfolds and straight-jackets, England were never going to take 20 wickets. The recriminations began in earnest, long before the game was even over and will no doubt continue ad nauseum; England aren’t ruthless enough, South Africa are too negative, England batted too long, South Africa were undercooked, on and on, forever and ever. Amen.
However, the two guilty parties who should be fixed in our crosshairs are Lord’s and the ECB. I understand and can just about cope with all the sentimental old bollocks about Lord’s being the ‘home’ of cricket and how every cricketer who has ever lived would die happy were they to be allowed a single touch of its hallowed turf. What I can’t understand is how the ECB let Lord’s get away with producing, year after year, such a turgid, lifeless excuse of a wicket. It’s a pitch so dead I often wonder whether even the toss is going to produce a result. Any other ground would be given a public dressing down were it to produce anything as flaccid. Old Trafford, which is England’s happiest hunting ground of recent times, has been denied test cricket for the next 4 years. Officially it’s because of spreading international matches to different grounds, i.e. having to give the Welsh some international cricket. But everyone knows it’s because the ECB don’t think Old Trafford is up to the standard required, too shabby around the edges. Well how about you give some of the millions of pounds that you earn just from tests at Lord’s to Old Trafford to improve its facilities? Or give them more matches, so they can earn more income to tart the place up a bit. I hate to think what the ECB would have done if Old Trafford had not been a successful ground for England. The cynic in me says that all Lord’s is doing is maximising income at the expense of competitive cricket. 4 full houses plus any bonus-extras on day 5, at £85 a ticket, must make the ECB a fortune, and all the sales of drink, food and merchandise must do likewise for Lord’s. I really hope that this isn’t the case. But I suspect it probably is. How very sad.
It is highly unlikely that the ECB will ever stand up to Lord’s; after all the MCC is there, jealously guarding the Laws of Cricket and dribbling partially digested bits of food down their disgusting ties as they doze in the afternoon sun.
We can only hope that the vitriol rained down upon Lord’s will have the desired effect and then next year we might see something slightly more competitive than God versus Sodom and Gomorrah.
From one catastrophe that has happened to one waiting to happen. Various plans for a re-vamped Twenty20 Cup, from 2010 onwards have been announced. The spectre of 9 city-based franchises has re-materialised and although Giles Clarke (head honcho at the ECB) is against anything less than the 18 counties taking part, ‘market forces’ might still win the day. (Mind you, making up names for city-based franchises is quite an amusing way to pass 5 minutes – any suggestions gratefully received.)
In Britain we love our sporting past. Morons in pubs talk about ’66 like they were actually on the pitch when Geoff Hurst scored the winner, when in fact they weren’t even born. In cricket, people talk about ‘Botham’s Ashes’ as if they were yesterday and the Rugby World Cup victory in ’03 and Wilkinson’s drop goal in particular, will be drooled over for ever more. (Which is part of the reason that we struggle at sport, but that issue will have to wait for another day – can you imagine the Germans getting all teary-eyed about a football match that happend 40 years ago?)
What people want is to buy into a team with some history behind it, irrational as that may be. A fictitious team called the Leeds Luddites or Bristol Bumpkins that has been made up in a committee meeting won’t have the historical gravitas demanded by sports fans. It is ridiculous, what does it matter who won what in 1905? Or if ‘who’ even existed then? But I’m in the minority.
The killer argument against the city franchises is that for Twenty20 cricket to become the major sporting event of the summer, it has to distinguish itself from other sports, in particular, football. Calling the teams after the counties automatically achieves this, not to mention that it will also avoid the administrative kerfuffle of merging various counties.
As for the format, I think that playing in 3 randomly selected groups (rather than the regional ones we have at the moment – I’m bored of the Bears playing the same teams in the group stages every year), followed by the quarter finals, over an 8 or 9 week period in June and July. The games, with the exception of finals day, which should be on a Saturday in August, should be played on a Friday night, so you can have a proper build up to the matches, rather than squeezing 800 games into a 25-minute slot at the end of June. This has two main advantages; weather is unlikely to ruin someone’s chances as it did last year to Leicestershire and Surrey and the punters are more likely to go to every game if they are spaced out a bit, i.e. they don’t have to put their life on hold for two weeks.
The real key to the English Premier League (as it will be known) being a success is television. If the games or at least some of them, are on terrestrial TV, especially the final, it will be a success. If it all stays on Sky, it will meander along for a few years until interest wanes and someone has a ‘brighter’ idea. The government should, at the very least, add finals day (and home test matches – but that’s another story,) to the list of ‘sporting crown jewels’. How good would it be to see domestic cricket on the BBC or Channel 4? We can but live in hope.
The future will be better tomorrow
Dan Quayle
The scorecard, given a cursory glance, suggests that England let the Proteas off the hook, but this is far from the truth. On reflection England’s 593 was no more than par on this flatter than flat pitch. The South African’s initial reply was indeed poor and England’s bowling was disciplined, if unspectacular. Ashwell ‘The Fresh’ Prince proved with his prosaic century, that as long as you batted sensibly and didn’t get an absolute jaffa, nobody was going to get you out. Following on, the rest of the South African batsmen had got with the programme and realised that even if they played 24 hours a day, for a fortnight, in blindfolds and straight-jackets, England were never going to take 20 wickets. The recriminations began in earnest, long before the game was even over and will no doubt continue ad nauseum; England aren’t ruthless enough, South Africa are too negative, England batted too long, South Africa were undercooked, on and on, forever and ever. Amen.
However, the two guilty parties who should be fixed in our crosshairs are Lord’s and the ECB. I understand and can just about cope with all the sentimental old bollocks about Lord’s being the ‘home’ of cricket and how every cricketer who has ever lived would die happy were they to be allowed a single touch of its hallowed turf. What I can’t understand is how the ECB let Lord’s get away with producing, year after year, such a turgid, lifeless excuse of a wicket. It’s a pitch so dead I often wonder whether even the toss is going to produce a result. Any other ground would be given a public dressing down were it to produce anything as flaccid. Old Trafford, which is England’s happiest hunting ground of recent times, has been denied test cricket for the next 4 years. Officially it’s because of spreading international matches to different grounds, i.e. having to give the Welsh some international cricket. But everyone knows it’s because the ECB don’t think Old Trafford is up to the standard required, too shabby around the edges. Well how about you give some of the millions of pounds that you earn just from tests at Lord’s to Old Trafford to improve its facilities? Or give them more matches, so they can earn more income to tart the place up a bit. I hate to think what the ECB would have done if Old Trafford had not been a successful ground for England. The cynic in me says that all Lord’s is doing is maximising income at the expense of competitive cricket. 4 full houses plus any bonus-extras on day 5, at £85 a ticket, must make the ECB a fortune, and all the sales of drink, food and merchandise must do likewise for Lord’s. I really hope that this isn’t the case. But I suspect it probably is. How very sad.
It is highly unlikely that the ECB will ever stand up to Lord’s; after all the MCC is there, jealously guarding the Laws of Cricket and dribbling partially digested bits of food down their disgusting ties as they doze in the afternoon sun.
We can only hope that the vitriol rained down upon Lord’s will have the desired effect and then next year we might see something slightly more competitive than God versus Sodom and Gomorrah.
From one catastrophe that has happened to one waiting to happen. Various plans for a re-vamped Twenty20 Cup, from 2010 onwards have been announced. The spectre of 9 city-based franchises has re-materialised and although Giles Clarke (head honcho at the ECB) is against anything less than the 18 counties taking part, ‘market forces’ might still win the day. (Mind you, making up names for city-based franchises is quite an amusing way to pass 5 minutes – any suggestions gratefully received.)
In Britain we love our sporting past. Morons in pubs talk about ’66 like they were actually on the pitch when Geoff Hurst scored the winner, when in fact they weren’t even born. In cricket, people talk about ‘Botham’s Ashes’ as if they were yesterday and the Rugby World Cup victory in ’03 and Wilkinson’s drop goal in particular, will be drooled over for ever more. (Which is part of the reason that we struggle at sport, but that issue will have to wait for another day – can you imagine the Germans getting all teary-eyed about a football match that happend 40 years ago?)
What people want is to buy into a team with some history behind it, irrational as that may be. A fictitious team called the Leeds Luddites or Bristol Bumpkins that has been made up in a committee meeting won’t have the historical gravitas demanded by sports fans. It is ridiculous, what does it matter who won what in 1905? Or if ‘who’ even existed then? But I’m in the minority.
The killer argument against the city franchises is that for Twenty20 cricket to become the major sporting event of the summer, it has to distinguish itself from other sports, in particular, football. Calling the teams after the counties automatically achieves this, not to mention that it will also avoid the administrative kerfuffle of merging various counties.
As for the format, I think that playing in 3 randomly selected groups (rather than the regional ones we have at the moment – I’m bored of the Bears playing the same teams in the group stages every year), followed by the quarter finals, over an 8 or 9 week period in June and July. The games, with the exception of finals day, which should be on a Saturday in August, should be played on a Friday night, so you can have a proper build up to the matches, rather than squeezing 800 games into a 25-minute slot at the end of June. This has two main advantages; weather is unlikely to ruin someone’s chances as it did last year to Leicestershire and Surrey and the punters are more likely to go to every game if they are spaced out a bit, i.e. they don’t have to put their life on hold for two weeks.
The real key to the English Premier League (as it will be known) being a success is television. If the games or at least some of them, are on terrestrial TV, especially the final, it will be a success. If it all stays on Sky, it will meander along for a few years until interest wanes and someone has a ‘brighter’ idea. The government should, at the very least, add finals day (and home test matches – but that’s another story,) to the list of ‘sporting crown jewels’. How good would it be to see domestic cricket on the BBC or Channel 4? We can but live in hope.
The future will be better tomorrow
Dan Quayle
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
Triumphalism
I have always considered that my bowling abilities sat me in the bowlers pantheon somewhere between a dead halibut and Mother Theresa of Calcutta, but just last weekend, and I promise I’m not making this up, I took 5 for 42. Me! One of the least talented cricketers ever to take to the field of play – 5-fer!
My team, batting first, scored 188; lurching from 0-2 to 18-4 to 120ish-4 and finally 188 all out (your esteemed author - 1, plummer than plum lbw to some ancient left arm spinner, hit on the back foot approximately 5cms in front of middle stump – so I can’t really complain can I?) The opposition got off to a reasonably good start, before I was brought on first change. I had, whilst we’d been batting, been shirking umpiring duties and bowling in the nets and sending 99.9% of the deliveries wobbling pathetically down the leg-side, so when informed of my imminent promotion to cherry-chucker, my response was not what you might call enthusiastic, (it was along the lines of “oh for **** sake I don’t want to ******* bowl ‘coz I’m ******* shit – at least I’m honest...) but the captain insisted. By the end of my first over I had 2 wickets in the bag, a very smart bottom edged catch by the ‘keeper and an lbw, where the ball genuinely drifted and turned. I won’t bore you with the rest of the details, but the other 3 were out bowled, caught at cover and caught at midwicket. Like the tortoise, I had proved that slow – or very, very slow in my case – can, on occassion, win the race. In the space of an hour I felt like I had gone from wallowing in the shallows to ascending Mount Olympus to sup with the Cricketing Gods. Self-delusion had set in. I feel more than a little embarrassed admitting this, but I was checking the County Championship scores on BBCi and noticed that Lancashire and erstwhile England paceman Saj Mahmood had taken 5-76 against Sussex, and actually said, out loud, without a hint of irony, “not as good as me, mate”. You’ll be glad to know that I have calmed down since and retained a little perspective. 5 wickets on a Sunday afternoon in the suburbs of Birmingham does not make you Gary Sobers. It did make me think though. When I was bragging to various people about my exploits, it only occurred to me as an afterthought to mention that we’d had won the game. Our teachers may have told us that it is the taking part that counts and we may tell our team-mates that it is the winning that counts, but in our heart of hearts we know it is the personal glory that we really seek. Geoff Boycott didn’t score over 8,000 test match runs at 47 a piece because he was a team man, who only cared for the result. He did it because he was immensely selfish and a devout believer of his own wondrousness and as a consequence of this England rarely lost test matches when he played. (20 lost out of 108 played). Do you believe Kevin Pietersen when he says it’s the team that matters? Of course you don’t. Cricket is the only team sport that I can think of where the opportunities for self-aggrandisement are quite so abundant. When people talk of the great moments, 9 times out of 10 it is the individual who we hero worship, not the team. Think of Botham in ’81, Flintoff in ’05, Warne’s 708 test wickets, Lara’s 400, even ‘Bradman’s Invincibles’, not just the ‘Invincibles’ but Bradman’s own personal entourage of Invincibles . But it is always going to be the case with a sport built on a myriad of statistics that are accumulated through the specific and definable actions of individual players. The desire to excel in cricket may not always be motivated by team spirit, but a certain level of self-centeredness with a splash of arrogance is ultimately what makes a team a winning one.
The roaring Warwickshire Bears have chewed their way into the quarter finals of the Twenty20 Cup. Finishing top of the Midlands/Wales group, suffering just 1 defeat and only after they had already qualified in first place. I have been most impressed. Considering how they were so utterly god-awful in the Friends Provident Trophy, losing to just about everyone and anyone, including Ireland (don’t get me started...) along the way, I feared the Twenty20 would be a similar story. In reality, they have been magnificent. Ant Botha and old-man Salisbury have together plundered 27 wickets @ 11 a piece, whilst Jonathan Trott has scored 255 runs @ 42 and in the process passed 1000 Twenty20 career runs. Chris Martin, of New Zealand Cricket fame, rather than that wanker from Coldplay, has also chipped in with some very tidy and effective new ball bowling. Fingers crossed they can roll over defending champions Kent next week (in Rob Key’s case, that’s a lot of rolling...), so I can have an expensive trip down to Southampton later in the month for finals day.
After the thrash and bash of Twenty20 the counties have returned to the more sedate world of the County Championship. Suddenly watching batsmen carefully playing out maidens when they have spent the previous 2 weeks belting the living daylights out of anything that’s not speared into the base of middle and leg is a little bewildering. But after watching batsman getting down on one knee and reverse paddle-sweeping good length deliveries over the top of wicket keeper’s heads for a fortnight, it has been nice to see some ‘proper’ cricket shots.
"The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else" - Martina Navratilova
My team, batting first, scored 188; lurching from 0-2 to 18-4 to 120ish-4 and finally 188 all out (your esteemed author - 1, plummer than plum lbw to some ancient left arm spinner, hit on the back foot approximately 5cms in front of middle stump – so I can’t really complain can I?) The opposition got off to a reasonably good start, before I was brought on first change. I had, whilst we’d been batting, been shirking umpiring duties and bowling in the nets and sending 99.9% of the deliveries wobbling pathetically down the leg-side, so when informed of my imminent promotion to cherry-chucker, my response was not what you might call enthusiastic, (it was along the lines of “oh for **** sake I don’t want to ******* bowl ‘coz I’m ******* shit – at least I’m honest...) but the captain insisted. By the end of my first over I had 2 wickets in the bag, a very smart bottom edged catch by the ‘keeper and an lbw, where the ball genuinely drifted and turned. I won’t bore you with the rest of the details, but the other 3 were out bowled, caught at cover and caught at midwicket. Like the tortoise, I had proved that slow – or very, very slow in my case – can, on occassion, win the race. In the space of an hour I felt like I had gone from wallowing in the shallows to ascending Mount Olympus to sup with the Cricketing Gods. Self-delusion had set in. I feel more than a little embarrassed admitting this, but I was checking the County Championship scores on BBCi and noticed that Lancashire and erstwhile England paceman Saj Mahmood had taken 5-76 against Sussex, and actually said, out loud, without a hint of irony, “not as good as me, mate”. You’ll be glad to know that I have calmed down since and retained a little perspective. 5 wickets on a Sunday afternoon in the suburbs of Birmingham does not make you Gary Sobers. It did make me think though. When I was bragging to various people about my exploits, it only occurred to me as an afterthought to mention that we’d had won the game. Our teachers may have told us that it is the taking part that counts and we may tell our team-mates that it is the winning that counts, but in our heart of hearts we know it is the personal glory that we really seek. Geoff Boycott didn’t score over 8,000 test match runs at 47 a piece because he was a team man, who only cared for the result. He did it because he was immensely selfish and a devout believer of his own wondrousness and as a consequence of this England rarely lost test matches when he played. (20 lost out of 108 played). Do you believe Kevin Pietersen when he says it’s the team that matters? Of course you don’t. Cricket is the only team sport that I can think of where the opportunities for self-aggrandisement are quite so abundant. When people talk of the great moments, 9 times out of 10 it is the individual who we hero worship, not the team. Think of Botham in ’81, Flintoff in ’05, Warne’s 708 test wickets, Lara’s 400, even ‘Bradman’s Invincibles’, not just the ‘Invincibles’ but Bradman’s own personal entourage of Invincibles . But it is always going to be the case with a sport built on a myriad of statistics that are accumulated through the specific and definable actions of individual players. The desire to excel in cricket may not always be motivated by team spirit, but a certain level of self-centeredness with a splash of arrogance is ultimately what makes a team a winning one.
The roaring Warwickshire Bears have chewed their way into the quarter finals of the Twenty20 Cup. Finishing top of the Midlands/Wales group, suffering just 1 defeat and only after they had already qualified in first place. I have been most impressed. Considering how they were so utterly god-awful in the Friends Provident Trophy, losing to just about everyone and anyone, including Ireland (don’t get me started...) along the way, I feared the Twenty20 would be a similar story. In reality, they have been magnificent. Ant Botha and old-man Salisbury have together plundered 27 wickets @ 11 a piece, whilst Jonathan Trott has scored 255 runs @ 42 and in the process passed 1000 Twenty20 career runs. Chris Martin, of New Zealand Cricket fame, rather than that wanker from Coldplay, has also chipped in with some very tidy and effective new ball bowling. Fingers crossed they can roll over defending champions Kent next week (in Rob Key’s case, that’s a lot of rolling...), so I can have an expensive trip down to Southampton later in the month for finals day.
After the thrash and bash of Twenty20 the counties have returned to the more sedate world of the County Championship. Suddenly watching batsmen carefully playing out maidens when they have spent the previous 2 weeks belting the living daylights out of anything that’s not speared into the base of middle and leg is a little bewildering. But after watching batsman getting down on one knee and reverse paddle-sweeping good length deliveries over the top of wicket keeper’s heads for a fortnight, it has been nice to see some ‘proper’ cricket shots.
"The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else" - Martina Navratilova
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