A Drop in the Ocean

Perhaps it is only fitting, in this centenary year, in a county within a few thousand quick singles of Belfast, that my comeback to cricket has assumed something of the aspect of the Titanic, and after plenty of self-generated hype and an exciting launch has now, somewhat to my chagrin, sunk. Whether with loss of all hands, of course, remains to be seen.

I realise that, of late, I have not been blogging as often, rightly maintaining that time devoted to cricket spent playing is infinitely preferable to that spent talking about it, so let me sketch in briefly the salient details of the nascent season so far. I was selected last week to play for the Third Eleven of my northwestern club-that-shall-remain-nameless at a club rich in facilities and breathtaking in mountain-nestled location against their Second Eleven. We won sufficiently comfortably, and sufficiently quickly, to spend an agreeable evening in the cool April sunshine watching our Firsts succumb nobly to their Firsts in a close-fought and exciting encounter on their exquisite main ground.

My personal contribution to the triumph was underwhelming. No, this is not the time for mincing words. My personal contribution was nil, possibly even a negative. I was a burden. I was playing in an unfamiliar role (although, six years after my last competitive game, I suppose they’re all unfamiliar), which is no excuse whatsoever. If I wish to preserve the veneer of delusion, I was playing as a specialist bowler, although it would be more accurate to say, I was playing because it’s customary to take the field with eleven players. No matter; men of more substance would seize such a slender opportunity and wrest it to their advantage. I did not.

The opportunity came almost at once, and was squandered. To misquote William Carlos Williams, so much depends upon a catch. I was fielding at midwicket and, if we wish to gauge differences between English and Irish cricket, was staggered by just what a peaceful place it was. That, however, is by the by. Not having set foot on a cricket field in a competitive setting for some time, my sense of scale was all askew and, in the third over, I had dropped inadvertently a few metres two deep. In the third over, they, batting first, were already two down, and our two lively young opening bowlers, running in hard and troubling the tentative batsmen, had a wicket a piece. In the third over, one of their batsmen essayed a half-hearted prod and dollied up the easiest of catches to midwicket. Who was me. And I wasn’t there. I was too far back, watching the parabola of the ball horrified, trying to force my feet, which seemed suddenly to have turned to concrete, to scramble forward and make a desperate lunge in what was already a lost cause.

Maybe things would have been different if there had been a rapid chance to redeem myself, though we have no right as cricketers to hang our hopes on such luxuries. There was a six biffed high directly over my head which didn’t clear the boundary by that much which, with a little more piss and vinegar, I might, and should, have chased down, but it would have been one heck of a catch. As it was, aware that with the strength of the side I would be unwise to pin much hope on redeeming myself with a bat, my bowling had suddenly assumed paramount importance, my only chance to prove my worth. I did not rise to the occasion, I wilted. I bowled 3 overs and took nought for eleven, figures which flatter just how badly I bowled. I bowled one ball on the right length on the right stump, and that was the very last. Once the first ball had landed short, a dreadful self-sabotaging fatalism descended upon me and I made increasingly desperate attempts at correction, rather than trusting in the method forged in the nets.

A dismal showing in the field, then, and I trooped off the field to study the methods of our batsmen and banish that unworthy demon whisper that half hopes his teammates fail so that he might get his chance. Needless to say, they did not, and needless to say, the joy and satisfaction at the win far outweighed that petty personal desire, since cricketers, by necessity highly attuned to the urgent biddings of the id, are therefore equally tempered by the calming influence of the ego.

I knew both Thirds and Fourths (who train as a common squad) had fielded depleted sides. I also knew that, having had two opportunities and blown both, that I could hardly expect to hold on to my somewhat undeserved lofty position. Since I had never expected it, I did not feel my anticipated demotion so keenly (and perhaps that in itself is a fault, a weakness of personality that must be corrected). Nonetheless, and here is ego at its less savoury, I expected to drop neatly into the Fourths, since even if I did had done nothing to enhance my stock, neither had I, in my own assessment, diminished it totally. Evidently, however, I was wrong, and when the teams were announced yesterday, my name was not among them.

Since that point, the accurateness of Kübler-Ross Model (known as the Five Stages of Grief) has become readily apparent. Is it flippant to apply such a model to something so ostensibly trivial as a cricket match? I don’t think so. After all, our devotion to the narratives of sport, arguably our devotion to narrative of all forms, is to rehearse in a safe and comprehensible environment our own mortality. Certainly, those of us who play on beyond the acceptable limits of childish enthusiasm and boundless energy must surely do so as a rehearsal for the arc of our lives, a physical embodiment of that comforting illusion that where there’s life, there’s hope.

Denial

I think I knew. I think I knew when the captains gathered us around after a net session somewhat hampered by the unavailability of the nets and began the announcement of the teams with a long conciliatory speech about how some people were bound to be disappointed. Or is that just paranoia? Or worse, the clarity of hindsight? I know that I expected to be in one of the teams, which is not, of course, to say that I necessarily deserved to be. That’s not an assessment I can honestly make, sharing with I presume the majority of cricketers that marvellous paradox of self-awareness that must believe myself the best player on the field, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in order to function at all, while equally suspecting that in fact, I am the very worst.

Anger

I’ve now gone far beyond the age where screaming, sobbing, and swearing are acceptable public demonstrations, if indeed, they ever are, so I stood quietly fuming as the announcement was followed by what at the time appeared to be no more than conciliatory waffle about how everyone’s a winner really, and anyway it’s not the winning it’s the taking part, and would we all like to buy some raffle tickets, and so on with, if not good grace, then at least, I hope, not visible derision. Then I left quietly, confining my public utterances (well, prior to writing a lengthy confessional blog, anyway!) to a remark to an erstwhile teammate equally deemed surplus to all requirements, but a fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy, like Yorick, though notably unlike me, that we had been made the scapegoats for a six wicket win.

Bargaining

I’m not given to blaming others for long, especially for things that are my fault. That said, some of the resolutions I was making once I calmed down a bit were simply unworkable. I already work hard, which is never an excuse for not working harder, but not everything can be solved by greater intensity and longer hours in the nets. With a clearer head, I can see where there is genuine room for improvement, how I need to use net-time more cleverly and not hide behind soft expectations, but I can also see that these are adjustments, and that no training is wasted training.

Depression

Against all expectations, once my mind had stopped racing and gone numb, I slept well. After a couple of my more horrific batting performances in the nets I have scarcely slept a wink, rehearsing over and over moments of ignominy, of what I should have done. The point at which this crosses over from productive self-analysis to fitful insomnia is hard to gauge. Still, there is much, so much, one can do to remedy specific faults as a batsman, but nothing really one can do about simply not being thought good enough, so perhaps that accounts for it.

Acceptance

If you’ve born with me this far, you’ve probably reached the conclusion that I’ve not reached this stage yet, and you’re probably right. I’m not even sure what acceptance would look like in this context. In the case of a break-up, one is invariably counselled not to compromise one’s own self-respect by yearning to be reconciled, and to avoid reminders of the lost one. I can’t very well do either of those things. I need to keep netting if I’m to stand any chance of clawing my way back in, and I need to net alongside the incumbents without bitterness if I’m not be an intolerable thorn in the side of team-spirit. All at once, I am filled with a new and deep respect for the mental resolves of Ravi Bopara.

I’d like to think that acceptance doesn’t mean accepting that I’ve failed, that I left it too long to return, or was never good enough in the first place. I will be twenty eight in August, I’m reasonably fit (although I should probably be fitter). Hell, the Cleveland Browns just drafted a 28 year old to be their quarterback! I know it’s late to be starting afresh, but I still think there’s time. If nothing else, a season of nets should hone mind and body a little, and at least give me the clarity to understand my limits. Besides, club cricketers (myself included) are all part timers, with other demands on their lives. Sooner or later, someone will be unavailable and I will sneak back into a playing eleven. We have a competitive structure, with pressure on places – you only have to look at the England Test team to know that makes for better cricketers.

Cricket is a strange game, a team game played by introspective, self-conscious individuals. Cricketers are singular, doubtless misbalanced, characters; too gregarious for the singular toil of more solitary pursuits, too cerebral for the mob-handed jollity of one of the football codes. People were forever saying that Boycott, with his single-minded dedication to individual success, should by rights have been a golfer or a tennis player, but I don’t believe it’s so. I believe he would have been lonely. Listen to Boycott now on TMS and it’s quite clear, though he’s unbending, acerbic, and demanding, that the importance of the team, of belonging and of loyalty, is integral to his psychological make-up. Golf, where all triumphs and disasters are yours and yours alone, would surely be too unsustainably intense for such a personality. Without a Bairstow or a Botham to balance himself against, Boycott must surely have pared his own psyche back to its flayed roots in the unforgiving quest for the unattainable.

After I poured out my heart to the internet in the aftermath of hearing the news yesterday (and I have been touched by the sympathy and goodwill afforded to what is, essentially, a preternaturally middle-aged man who has been moderately inconvenienced in his hobby), I responded to a friend’s words of encouragement by quoting Beckett – “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – and a conversation ensued about how Beckett (famously, the only Nobel prize winner to appear in Wisden) could only have been a cricketer, and it’s true enough. RC Robertson-Glasgow’s wry “Whoever hoped like a cricketer?” is a barbed tribute, for Beckett, like all cricketers, hopes in a dark and desperate way; hopes by seeking the stillness that comes from knowing that all silly things, like cricket, are really very serious, because all serious things are really dark, elegant jokes at which we might laugh, should we feel able.

Indeed, if Twitter afforded more than 140 characters, I should like instead to have quoted Endgame:

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness … it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like a funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.

You say you want Souravolution…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love the IPL in a large part because it’s the only cricket I can watch on the television proper (at this point the free marketeers usually point out that I could give money to Rupert Murdoch and his quasi-legal multimedia hegemony, which would be true if I had more money and less conscience). As it stands, though, the IPL on ITV is the highlight of my televisual cricket year. More than that, however, it is a marvellous and joyous spectacle.

Critics say it’s gaudy, and tacky; acolytes tend to concur wholeheartedly. It’s instant-gratification cricket, but it’s done to an incredibly high degree. There are fireworks and cheerleaders and preposterous uniforms and team names – the dichotomy can be overstated, but the IPL is emphatically not a drowsy afternoon in the June sun at Canterbury. This is not a problem. It goes without saying that nobody wants the iconic trumpet motif blasting out between balls at Canterbury to startle them from their pint of Shepherd Neame’s finest, nor Ravi Shastri provoking eye swivelling looks of bewilderment from a wired-for-sound third man with a series of baffling statements in between deliveries, but nor does anyone want T20 to a backdrop of the hushed profundities of a few dozen learned connoisseurs and melodious birdsong. It might be nice to have the option of watching both the IPL and the County Championship, of course, but that is a gripe for another time. The point here is that within the house of cricket, there are many mansions.

A perfect illustration of this, both its frustrations and its fulfilment, might be discovered in the singular person of Sourav Chandidas Ganguly. Ganguly is a divisive figure. Recently, I was discussing the IPL online with an Indian fan. I ventured the opinion that Pune had a genuine, albeit outside, chance of winning it all this year. He scoffed, and asked why I thought such a thing. I said that I thought Ganguly’s captaincy could be a decisive factor; indeed, I may have uttered the phrase “Sourav’s a genius”. “I see,” he retorted, archly, “that you have been drinking the Ganguly Kool-Aid.”

An artist and a scholar: Pune Warriors captain Sourav Ganguly sweeps against King's XI Punjab in IPL5.

This is not altogether an unjust accusation. I may be an Irish-dwelling Englishman, but I spent eight months living in Kolkata, and they put that stuff in the bottled water there. I had admired Ganguly the batsman since he toured England in 1996, that brief and glorious flowering at the start of his career, where his star effortlessly outshone those of Tendulkar and Dravid. Now, as I heard tales of his courtesy and his commitment, and saw the all too obvious fervour which accompanied his every action, I came better to appreciate his depths as a man; not, of course, uncommon amongst the superstars of Indian cricket, but, I suspect, rare amongst those cricketers who have ascended to the stratosphere in gentler climes.

Yet beyond the confines of the City of Joy, who knows, perhaps now even within that sanctuary, he is a man perceived to have been a failure. If this is not altogether unjust as a pragmatic assessment, it is to impose an unswerving devotion to facts and figures, straight lines and accounting ledgers, which ill becomes the appreciation of an artist, and from the sensible tyranny of which cricket, like any sport, like any art, is supposed to be in some ways a refuge. Certainly, as a cricketer, Ganguly is lodged squarely within the second tier, very good, not great. It was always likely to be so – few batsman of such grace and beauty can maintain the unflinching consistency demanded by greatness, and so Ganguly inevitably matured into a Dexter, not a Hutton; a Dean Jones, not an Allan Border; a Coleridge, not a Wordsworth.

More damaging by far has been his captaincy. Ganguly was an unpopular, unsuccessful captain of India. So runs the judgement of history. As judgements of history tend to be, it’s neither wholly undeserved nor wholly fair. Longevity plays a part: no-one has captained India in more Test matches, only Azharuddin in more ODIs – this suggests he must have been doing something right, and also shows why the Indian public had plenty of time to grow weary of him. Furthermore, his record was far from stellar, though also far from dismal. With a certain irony, his Test match captaincy record is almost identical to that of Greg Chappell – a captain of the middle rank, competent but unspectacular; the best man for the job unless someone better shows up. His ODI win percentage, tellingly, is worse than anyone who has captained India in more than 30 matches with the exceptions of Tendulkar and Gavaskar, each of whom are recipients of adulation to all intents and purposes blind to any practical failing.

In a sense however, Ganguly’s reputation has little do with either the feats of Ganguly the batsman or Ganguly the captain, but with the caprice of circumstances. Ganguly the batsman would have been more cherished and revered had his apex not coincided with a period of almost ludicrous richness for Indian cricket. Toiling alongside Tendulkar and Dravid, the two greatest batsmen India has ever had, somewhat lost in the dazzling light cast by Sehwag the astounding innovator and Laxman the mercurial genius, Ganguly was in some respects superfluous. Had he been a South African, a West Indian, or a New Zealander in the same time period, his luminosity would have been far greater.

The same and more is true of his captaincy. Ganguly is one of the best captains in cricket history, and no roles could be conceived as less suitable for him than captain of India and captain of Kolkata. The captains who have bought glory to Indian cricket in the form of World Cup wins, MS Dhoni and Kapil Dev, have not been technicians. Their tactical nous has been average, their instincts rarely inspired. What they have delivered is solidity, an unquestionable air of authority derived from their on-pitch exploits and commitment and, from these, the ability to weld the disparate identities of eleven cricketers from a vast and varied nation into a team. The same is true of the IPL: Dhoni has been so successful as captain of the Chennai Superkings because he has been able to bring together international stars, fat in ego and wallet, their high-flying Indian compatriots, and the less conspicuous Indian domestic cricketers who are the bedrock of a successful IPL franchise, and use the heat of a fervent and partisan fan base, largely focussed on his own person, to weld them into a formidable team.

Ganguly is a well-spoken, highly-educated man with the air of an aristocrat about him. For a while, this permitted him the respect and admiration accorded to a stern autocrat, a latter-day Pataudi guiding India forward, yet it could not be suspected to last in a nation as fiercely and justly proud of its democracy as India. No-one is ever going to mistake Sourav Ganguly for a man of the people. Again, for the captaincy of England or South Africa, this would have been enormously in his favour; in India, it meant that love and respect would always be tempered by fear, by the instinct to resist.

It should not, however, have prevented him from steering the Knight Riders to expected IPL glory, for the staunch, good-natured regionalism of domestic cricket loves a king. Year after year, however, the Knight Riders faltered. The blame can not, should not, and has not, by and large, been placed at Ganguly’s door, yet it was a never a place in which he should have been expected to thrive. If Ganguly is a prince, it is a scholar prince, not a warrior prince, who would sooner spend his days perfecting ingenious irrigation solutions for far-flung fiefdoms than storm and plunder beneath fluttering banners. The task in Kolkata was always too easy, too obvious, for his mindset; for great captains have thrived on degrees of difficulty. You suspect Mike Brearley was far happier masterminding Ashes success with his strategically deployed band of misfits and miracles than he would have been in Clive Lloyd’s boots, ruthlessly overseeing the movements of irresitable heavy artillery; just as Ray Illingworth was a far more fulfilled captain winning unlikely championships with lowly Leicester than skippering the Yorkshire destroyer.

Nobody thinks Pune have a prayer; the English near homophone with ‘puny’ is all to easy, all too apt. One of their contracted overseas players is Luke Wright, for heaven’s sake, and even Luke Wright’s own mother would probably balk at describing him as an ‘international cricket star’. Their biggest Indian star is Murali Kartik, a spinner who even journeymen might regard as a bit of a journeyman. Yet there they are, .75 of a run away from the top of the table, perched, in the words of Bob Dylan, just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine; outrageous, ridiculous, magnificent. There are reasons, and they go beyond underachievement by the ‘big’ teams. Partly, everybody had forgotten just how good the journeyman’s journeyman actually is, and nobody realised that Steve Smith was that good. Mostly, though, they’re there because, as I told my correspondent, Sourav’s a genius.

In a fairy tale world, Pune would win an unlikely IPL title and a triumphant Ganguly would raise the trophy aloft and announce his retirement from the game, vindicated and fulfilled. I doubt it will work out like that. The narratives sport weaves for us a rarely as straightforward as those we conjure in our minds, which is what makes it so compelling. But whatever happens, an extraordinary story is being told in Pune, and its hero is a man of misfortune and magnificence in equal measure, a man who has earned the tempered and just accolades accorded to an artist and a scholar.

Stand Up and Be Countied

I had planned to write a long, 2 part County Championship preview, breaking down in detail what I thought would happen. As it is, time has caught up with me – the season starts tomorrow, and the column remains unwritten. It is a long season, and I’m sure I’ll find ample opportunity to share various thoughts. Before we get going, however, I do want to place my predictions on the record, just in case I am harbouring some as yet dormant gift of cricket prophecy:

Division 2

1. Yorks (P)
2. Derbyshire (P)
3. Hampshire
4. Gloucestershire
5. Kent
6. Essex
7. Northamptonshire
8. Glamorgan
9. Leicestershire

 

Division 1

1. Nottinghamshire (champions)
2. Somerset
3. Warwickshire
4. Surrey
5. Durham
6. Middlesex
7. Lancashire
8. Worcestershire (R)
9. Sussex (R)

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All White

England’s much vaunted policy of consistency of selection is applied only to white players.

Maybe, if you’re English or a supporter of the England cricket team, seeing the nasty, ritually unspoken fact of English cricket stated so plainly makes you uncomfortable. Probably it does. Social racism in England may be endemic, but it is also wedded, however paradoxically, to a jealously guarded concept of fair play. The standard premise of tabloid-stoked mainstream racism is that ‘they’, whoever they are supposed to be, are receiving different and preferential treatment from ‘us’, whoever we are.

But isn’t that precisely what I’m doing here? I don’t believe so. There is clear, simple, mathematical evidence that non-white English cricketers are picked later and dropped sooner. The omission of Monty Panesar in Colombo is merely the most visible and unjust manifestation of a longstanding and insidious racist malaise.

But there are sound cricketing reasons, comes the cry from the stalls! Aren’t there always? There are sound cricketing reasons for dropping Strauss and Pietersen, yet they remain in the team. This is not to say necessarily they should be dropped, there is much to be said with sticking by players and allowing them to prove themselves. It smacks of hypocrisy, however, to stick by players who have batted consistently dismally for four Tests, while dropping another who has had one bad innings as a bowler. With the exception of the second innings in Galle, Panesar has consistently out-bowled Swann this winter.

Swann and Panesar are very different bowlers – a perfect complement, in fact. It is instructive, however, that Swann’s weaknesses, his inconsistency, and his tendency to be either irresistible or utterly mundane, are glossed over, while Panesar’s, a metronymic consistency that can become too unimaginative, are endlessly trumpeted. Could it be, however, that Panesar would be trifle more inclined to experiment if he felt secure in his place? England have enormous pressure on bowling places, unquestionably a good thing, but when Panesar has played alongside and consistently outperformed the incumbent spinner, the harder it becomes to suggest what more he can realistically do, the more Swann’s oft cited ‘contribution in the dressing room’ comes to sound like a knowing code.

Yesterday, Cricinfo ran a piece on Ajmal Shahzad. The article itself was a simple enough affair, interesting, and welcome attention for a courageous and thoughtful player, but what is instructive are the user comments beneath. One user dared to broach the subject, discussing Shahzad, Bopara, Adil Rashid and ‘others’, who we might name ad infinitum: Saj Mahmood, Amjad Khan, Vikram Solanki, Usman Afzaal, and so on, and posed the rhetorical question of what they all had in common. Another user responded with the party line, but particularly well articulated: “What do they have in common? Well they are all english born cricketers … who are talented but haven’t quite got what it takes to play international cricket”.

Just prospects who haven’t made it. Nothing sinister, just one of those things. It’s true up to a point, but it’s still a cozy answer. No-one seems to want to ask why it’s true? How come Owais Shah, the best English batsmen of his generation, will end his career having played just six Tests, while his near contemporary Paul Collingwood, a player of far less extravagant gifts, played 68? How come Saj Mahmood, occasionally wayward but the fastest bowler England have ever fielded, played 8 Tests, and Steve Harmison, almost as wayward, almost as quick, played 63? How come, of Essex’s two prodigies, Alastair Cook is well on his way to the upper echelons of England’s pantheon, and Ravi Bopara is well on his way to obscurity? If you say, correctly, temperament, you must in conscience follow that by at least considering why ‘suspect temperament’ and skin colour are so invariably entwined. Coincidence has limits. Whether by negligence or malice, England is failing, consistently and institutionally, its young non-white cricketers.

But hang on a minute, cry the naysayers once more. This team in Colombo isn’t all white! Samit Patel’s playing. Indeed he is, although it would take a braver gambler than I to stake an internal organ, even a relatively minor one like a pancreas, on his being in the team at Lord’s on May 17th. Furthermore, he has already been the recipient of a dubious and extraordinary accolade: England adjusted their batting order to accommodate him. England have not altered their batting order significantly since they finally settled where Bell and Pietersen played best. Prior and Broad were cemented at 7 and 8, the capstone of the tail.

With the introduction of Patel, however, ostensibly as a replacement for Eoin Morgan, hence playing as a batting all-rounder, Prior moved to six, and Patel was buried at seven. Certainly starting a debutant lower in the order is a wise precaution, but there are limits. Seven is a more pressurised spot than six, it bears more responsibility. Furthermore, Patel has a better First Class average than Prior! England sent out a clear message: we don’t trust Patel, we think he’s too fat, he’s a stop-gap. If he succeeds, it will be an acute embarrassment to the English hierarchy. More likely, he will fail, as has been pre-ordained, and be discarded. Call it temperament.

What is particularly sad is that this should continue with the England team under the stewardship of Andy Flower, a man of high principle, and orchestrator of one of cricket’s most powerful moments. Born in apartheid South Africa; raised in Rhodesia, whose racial policies were almost as repugnant; as an adult, captain of a multiracial Zimbabwe side playing against the backdrop of Mugabe’s increasingly racially intolerant tyranny, it is inconceivable that he is not highly attuned to the charged significance of race. Yet as England’s coach, he has seemed unable to challenge English cricket’s complacent undercurrent of racism.

With the passing of Basil d’Oliveira last autumn, the events of 1968 were revisited. What is sometimes lost amidst Dolly’s own dignity and the eventual correct outcome is that England initially did not select d’Oliveira for the South African tour, despite his average of 87 and three wickets at 16 a piece in the preceding Test series. Only with the fortuitous withdrawal of Tom Cartwright were the selectors able to placate the ensuing uproar by picking d’Oliveira in his stead, at the expense of the balance of their side.

Their initial squeamishness overcome by righteous indignation, what followed is history: the loathsome BJ Vorster declared, “We are not prepared to receive a team thrust upon us by people whose interests are not in the game but to gain certain political objectives which they do not even attempt to hide”. The MCC had no choice but to cancel the tour. Within a year, South Africa were excluded from International cricket.

And there’s the rub. The English may be sluggish, and diffident, and loathe to speak up, but confronted by genuine, overt discrimination, from Nazism to apartheid to genocidal Serbian nationalism, they are roused, and once roused, are indomitable and unbending and, more often than not, prevail. Sooner or later, the English cricket community will be roused, and will confront the odious racism in their midst. If they do not, then cricket in England will wither and die.

The Joy of Six

The recent, sadly curtailed, Dunedin Test, in which 3 South African batsmen scored centuries in the second innings prompted me to wonder whether this South African top six – Petersen, Smith, Amla, Kallis, Rudolph, de Villers – isn’t the greatest top six in Test history. After all, it features Kallis, as frequently noted as disbelieved one of the greatest batsmen of all time, and Smith, also undisputedly amongst the greatest his country has produced. It features Amla, the most beautiful batsman in the world right now, who could easily join the ranks of the game’s greats, if he is not deemed to have ascended that lofty perch already, and no disservice is done to de Villiers, one of cricket’s most underrated players, by batting him at six. Rudolph has blossomed from his Yorkshire sabbatical into a mighty and intractable batsman, the sort of player who would be called a run machine if such an epithet did not lend an unwarranted air of bland mechanism to the triumph of human will. Only about Petersen are there doubts, and they are merely those raised by comparison with his illustrious colleagues.

The greatest of all time, then? Well, upon more sober reflection, no. To my mind, though, they are sixth, which in wonderfully convenient fashion permits a gimmicky chart rundown of the top six top sixes in Test history. I have looked for the best iteration of the best top sixes, which sometimes came together only fleetingly, but the key components invariably endured. I have also taken into account the arc of players’ careers. Great players have not always been inclined to melt away as their powers have waned, nor have youngsters always begun with the flourish they would later embody. A top six boasting Walcott, Weekes, and Headley, for example, becomes less formidable when one remembers that Headley at the time was 44 years old. What makes these South Africans such strong contenders is not merely the gifts of the individuals but that all are near, and only Kallis is past, their peaks. Strong, but not stronger than…

5. India 2004/5

• V Sehwag
• G Gambhir
• RS Dravid
• SR Tendulkar
• SC Ganguly
• VVS Laxman

Only with his retirement last week has cricket finally, belatedly, grasped what a rich and valuable gift Rahul Dravid was to the game. He was destined to be overshadowed his whole career by Sachin Tendulkar but, modest fellow that he is, such perverse anonymity might have suited him. Without fanfare, he became the second best batsman India have ever had, a joint flowering of mastery no other Test nation can boast. Alongside them Ganguly, it should not be forgotten, was at his languid peak one the most elegant stroke-makers to have graced the game whilst Sehwag, when he was on song, was one of the most destructive. That said, Gambhir really only came into his own once the powers of Ganguly and Sehwag were markedly on the wane, and Laxman, because of the audacious manner of his triumphs, currently enjoys an inflated reputation. Nonetheless, in their heyday, it was a mighty top six, as is attested to by the difficulty India are finding in dismantling and replacing it.

4. England 1912

• JB Hobbs
• W Rhodes
• RH Spooner
• CB Fry
• FE Woolley
• JW Hearne

A hundred years on, the Test world of 1912 seems a strangely topsy-turvy place. The South African team relied heavily on English-born players, and cricket administrators were falling over themselves to organise a workable Test championship. The Triangular Tournament was an audacious experiment, ruined by rain, but it afforded England an opportunity to field an almost outlandishly superlative-laden top six. Here was the greatest opening batsmen of them all, and though 1912 may seem too early for Hobbs, that’s an illusion caused by the sheer breadth of his remarkable career; he was already 30, and at his mighty zenith. He opened with Wilfred Rhodes, the only serious rival to Garry Sobers as the greatest all-rounder of them all. Then there was Woolley, by contemporary accounts the most beautiful of batsmen, and certainly in the mix with Sobers, Lara, and Pollock for the accolade of the game’s preeminent left-hander, and C.B. Fry, the most accomplished all-round sportsman there has ever been. Spooner was renewed for the beauty of his strokes, though his record suggests this may have been a victory of style over substance, and Hearne, although his Test career was ultimately something of a disappointment, was a mighty batsman and in 1912 a 21 year old fresh from a successful maiden tour of Australia, full of promise and gusto. Nor did the batting menace end at six; number 7, as often as not, was Jessop.

3. Pakistan 1978/9

• Majid Khan
• Sadiq Mohammad
• Zaheer Abbas
• Mustaq Mohammad
• Javed Miandad
• Asif Iqbal

It is fortune enough to have two great batsmen of any stripe come together on one team; to have two of such perfectly complementary styles as Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad stretches happenstance to its plausible limits. Upright, implacable, perfect Zaheer, the most elegant of accumulators, was at his imperious peak; brilliant, audacious, inventive Javed was a lively young tyro with a Test average of 60. Pakistan cricket was in those days a dynastic affair and around its two superstars assembled a supporting cast of two Mohammad brothers, and Majid Khan, cousin of Imran. Both Majid and Sadiq Mohammad have suffered in the eyes posterity by comparison with their kin, an injustice to both. Asif Iqbal, meanwhile, may be rather more deserving of retrospective diminution, but was notwithstanding by all accounts a breathtakingly exciting cricketer. So extraordinarily strong was Test cricket in the late-70s, however, that this top six, third finest of all time, was only second finest in its own time…

2. West Indies 1979/80

• CG Greenidge
• DL Haynes
• IVA Richards
• AI Kallicharran
• LG Rowe
• CH Lloyd

The main difficulty with choosing the great West Indian top six is knowing precisely when to set it in aspic. A little earlier, and Lloyd is all all the mightier. Haynes is lost, but in his place is Roy Fredericks, a man who could out-Greenidge Greenidge. A little later, and Richie Richardson, Gus Logie, and Carl Hooper make their presence felt. At no point between Viv Richard’s Test debut in 1974 and his retirement in 1991 was the West Indian top six anything other than awe-inspiring. The only 1-2-3 punch that even comes close to Greenidge, Haynes, and Richards is Hobbs, Sutcliffe, and Hammond. In both cases, the two greatest opening partnerships of all were followed by one of the greatest batsmen of all, but England in 1930s had nothing like the comparable, ferocious will and desire to succeed. Nor did they have a batsman like Kallicharran, a fleet-footed genius and a perfect foil to the bludgeoning Richards and Lloyd. So, let us freeze them here, and let this be the memory for a while, not Kallicharran and Rowe’s subsequent disgrace.

1. Australia 1930

• WM Woodfull
• WH Ponsford
• DG Bradman
• AF Kippax
• A Jackson
• SJ McCabe

This was why Jardine resorted to Bodyline. Far from being a disproportionate response, removed from the more absurd niceties of thirties presumptions about gentlemanly conduct, it is tempting to suggest that he’d have been more or less justified had he resorted to kidnap. Kippax was the weakest of them, and he had a first class average of 57. Bill Woodfull, quite apart from being a masterful captain, had a better Test record than Justin Langer. Archie Jackson, dead at 23, has justly assumed a legendary air of romantic poignancy. Judges who had watched the two as youngsters thought him a better bat than Bradman. And then there was Ponsford, whose feats of run getting, including a pair of quadruple centuries, are so outrageous, so improbable, that the recent trend has been to pretend they never occurred, a trend nascent even to R.C. Robertson-Glasgow in 1943, which he vigorously rebutted: “when the sun rises, it is a mistake to forget the moon.” And then there was McCabe, as gritty as Ponting, as graceful as Trumper. And then there was Bradman. It was an almighty top six, as deep as the Pacific, as inevitable as the Himalayas. It will never be bettered.

A Bat of One’s Own

Today is International Women’s Day. Wherever you stand on the great ‘IWD – important focal point or patronising tokenism’ debate, it seems as good a day as any to discuss a couple of issues relating to women in cricket.

Cricket doesn’t do too badly in relation to women’s participation in the sport. Certainly huge bounds forward have been made from the days, which I dimly recall as late as the early-90s, when women played cricket in white PE skirts and got referred to, if they got referred to at all, with a kind of befuddled condescension, as though they were Gloucestershire cheese rollers or collectors of clockwork toys, harmless eccentrics whose activities were amusing but absurd. Now, women’s international cricket teams wear the same kit as the men, and most cricket fans could name at least a couple of their country’s women players.

It’s certainly progress, even if there’s a long way to go before cricket gets to the level of tennis, or even golf. Nonetheless, there are any number of issues facing the game, some big, and some small; some which can be changed at a stroke, and some which will require some work.

To start small: ESPNcricinfo are the largest and most prominent global internet provider of cricket news. As a rule, they do a good job, they carry a wide variety of news and magazine features, spanning on- and off-field activity in pretty much every cricket playing nation on Earth. On their front page, they carry score summaries of matches currently in progress – ‘International’, ‘Domestic’, and ‘Other’. If you wish to instantly check on the progress of a match between, say, England and New Zealand, you look under International.

Or at least, you do if the players involved have testes. If not, you look under Other. The implications are intriguing. Do England and New Zealand only count as nations when represented by men? If so, doesn’t the fact that both have a woman as their head of state cause something of a dilemma? And Cricinfo does not simply use ‘Other’ as a euphemism for ‘Women’, it lumps these results in with games played by Affiliate nations’s mens teams. The best female cricketers in the world, according to Cricinfo, are just about worthy to be listed along side the exploits of the men from Belize or the Falkland Islands.

Clearly, it’s nonsense. There’s a Twitter campaign underway using the hashtag #InternationalnotOther to tell ESPNcricinfo this. If you feel able to get involved, that would be marvellous – it’s a small thing, but it’s easily changed, and it would be a change for the better.

There’s a more fundamental problem exposed in that final comparison, though. With due respect to the mens cricket teams of Affiliate nations, I am absolutely certain that the top women’s teams are better. It stands to reason. Top women’s teams have better resources at their disposal, and come from countries with more supporting structures for the game at all ages. The best women cricketers could hold their own in any form of cricket at any level.

Except they couldn’t. They are capable, but they are not allowed to. Unless I have missed something in the ICC and ECB regulations, “boys and girls” are allowed to play cricket together up to Under-17 cricket but no further. After that, rigid segregation is, if not explicitly stated, certainly assumed (“a player will be qualified if he…“). Since not all clubs can support a senior women’s team, and some smaller clubs are struggling to assemble even a male eleven, this segregation is appalling from a purely practical level, quite aside from being an affront to human dignity.

Women are physiologically different from men. These physiological differences mean that the biggest, strongest, fastest men are bigger, stronger, or faster than the biggest, strongest, fastest women. In some sports, where physical attributes are defining factor in success, athletics, boxing, even soccer, this makes separate competitions for men and women desirable. In cricket, however, physical attributes are negligible. I was in the presence of Adam Gilchrist once – he’s a tiny man, built like a jockey, yet he remains one of the most powerful strikers of a cricket ball there has ever been. I myself am taller the Sachin Tendulkar, faster than Virender Sehwag (mind you, so are some of the nippier tortoises, these days), yet so far inferior as a batsman that it barely seems reasonable to suggest we’re engaged in the same activity.

Certainly huge, powerful men like Vincent van der Bijl, Joel Garner, or Steven Finn would present different challenges of height and bounce from any bowler in the women’s game, but they are exceptional figures in all cricket. When Garner first started playing for Somerset, he accrued many of his wickets on smaller grounds in part because the sightscreens were too low to accommodate his action. Nor is pace an argument. The top women players have access to bowling machines, and they’re cricketers, so at some point, every one of them will have turned the machine up to 95mph, because that’s what cricketers do. They have to see, they have to know, to feel what it would be like. No doubt that’s deeply irrational and indicative of some profound evolutionary flaw of being, but it bears not the slightest relation to what tools are carried between stomach and knee.

Besides, all men are not Shoaib Akthar. Pace is a part of the game, but far from the only part. Matthew Hoggard was a better bowler the slower he got, because he became more adept at thinking batsmen out. Bowling is mostly done with the brain, with physical attributes merely suggesting further weapons to the arsenal. The argument that women are somehow physically inadequate to play top class cricket boils down to the assumption that women lack brains and courage.

To be clear, I do think there is a need for women’s cricket. An enormous amount of residual social iniquity means that women are far less likely to participate in sport as adults than are men, and the macho posturing that is too prevalent in men’s sport means that women might not always feel comfortable in a mixed, but male-dominated sporting environment. At the same time, however, the fact that Nottinghamshire could not select Jenny Gunn, a batsman who has been with them since the age of 10, or that Andy Flower could not invite Charlotte Edwards to fill the vacant number 6 spot in the England side for Sri Lanka, simply because they are women is a profound and damaging shame to the sport.

 

Update: 16/03/2012

Lots of people tweeted ESPNCricinfo on International Women’s Day asking them to change their classification of Women’s International Cricket. ESPNCricinfo responded by ignoring them completely. This morning, their website carried this particularly (in)glorious example of the absurd lengths to which they are prepared to carry this thing:
That match at the very bottom was contested by cricketers from the Commonwealth of Australia and the Republic of India, representing the ICC sanctioned cricket teams of their UN recognised nation states. The fourth match from the top was contested between the England cricket team and eleven cricketers representing, depending on your source, the Sri Lankan Board or the Sri Lankan Board’s President. Assuming the Sri Lankan Board is the former Board for Cricket Control in Sri Lanka, now Sri Lanka Cricket, then the president is Upali Dharmadasa. Neither Sri Lanka Cricket nor Mr Dharmadasa is recognised by the UN as a nation state. It is not possible to obtain a Mr Dharmadasan passport, or to claim citizenship of Sri Lanka Cricket. In no sense is Sri Lanka Cricket or Upali Dharmadasa a nation, therefore a match between their XI and that of a country is not an international match. Perhaps, of course, the match would have been listed elsewhere if the president in question was Ms Dharmadasa…

The Legside of the Moon

It is an unintended, although with hindsight inevitable, consequence of beginning to maintain a cricket blog, and thus devote more of my thought to the game: I have decided to resume playing, after a hiatus of five years, with any luck in the fourth eleven of a cricket club in the north of Ireland who shall, in order to protect the innocent, remain nameless. I always wanted to be a good cricketer; I never was, and towards the end of the time leading to my inevitable withdrawal from the game, I was a positively bad cricketer. Still, older is, so it’s hoped, wiser and besides, I need the exercise. Since I am also in my modest way, a cricket writer, I intend to document the progress of this probably inglorious come-back here. I realise this is wildly self-indulgent and quite probably to many of my readers ineffably tedious but I will continue to produce more journalistic posts in addition to these ramblings.

Yesterday, for the first time in five years, I took part in an indoor net session. It was exhilarating, and reawakened some long buried joy. It was also mortifying, of which more anon. For the meantime, in order to give an account of this first sortie of my minuscule addition to the history of ill-advised cricketing come-backs, I must give some indication of what sort of a cricketer I am. As a bowler, my method is effective, if old fashioned. For ease of reference, I refer to myself as an off-spinner, but I am actually something more akin to a slow-medium bowler. It’s not an issue of pace – I know many proper spinners who bowl quicker than I do, but of trajectory. I eschew the loop of a classical spinner, accepting as a consequence of this the loss of teasing drift and dramatic degrees of spin. In recompense, I acquire a greater degree of similarity in action between balls of different intent, and a machinery less prone to bouts of waywardness.

My stock ball is an off-break, which to a right-hander I aim to pitch on or a fraction outside off stump and turn the ball into the batsman, hoping for wicket leg before or bowled, and acquiring more, inevitably, caught in the deep. Occasionally, sometimes, it must be said, more by accident than design, I drag my hand across the ball at the point of delivery, scrambling the seam. This causes it to move straight on or, occasionally, to catch the seam and move the other way (I have never yet successfully passed this pleasing effect off as a doosra, but live in hope). This at present is the extent of my armoury, although I had for a while a pair of quite satisfying cutters, the mystical remnants of which I hope to reawaken in the coming months.

It’s a method that works well on grass, especially on the worn pitches usually found in the club game. It’s a method that’s more than adequate, with minor operational tweaks, on matting. It’s a method that is entirely pointless in a sportshall. Even taking full advantage of loop and drift, finger spinners struggle to derive much turn from a thin mat laid on a hard and gripless floor. I derive next to none.

Objectively, of course, this is no matter. The function of indoor nets for a bowler, and particularly a bowler of my type, is to groove the action and encourage consistency of line and length, and to provide a supply of bowling for the batsmen. The fact that my stock delivery will pitch and continue on or just outside off and can thus be confidently driven (or impetuously slogged, depending on the temperament of the net’s incumbent) is neither here nor there. I well know which heaves that sail so gloriously onto the net roof in here would nestle comfortably in the hands of deep mid-wicket once the protective veil is drawn away. No cause for consternation. Simply calibrate the mechanisms ready for the important action outdoors.

The worst possible thing a bowler can do in indoor nets is begin experimenting, devising effective methods for the habitat. What earthly use is a surefire means of containing batsmen in a sportshall? It would be as useful to expend time and energy perfecting a means of fighting off a tiger attack in the bath. Certainly if one were subsequently to be confronted by such a circumstance, the skill would seem admirable, but by far the more likely outcome is a lifetime of inability to fend off dangerous animals on dry land, or to take a bath without battling imaginary tigers. Good batsman should hit every good ball I bowl in a sportshall for four, and that’s an end of it.

Except, of course, it isn’t, for a bowler’s ego is fragile, vengeful creature. It goads the body into all manner of vindictive, self-wounding acts. It pushes the wrist across and arrests the follow through striving for spin on the unforgiving surface. Worse still, it pushes the length forward, seeking to york the batsman. This is not wicket taking behaviour, but retreat, self-protection. Slow yorkers are a valuable weapon, especially at the death of limited-overs games, but there is no reason save ego for sending them down in profusion in the middle of February. Even these are more forgivable, however, than getting in tight to the plastic cone and slanting the ball away from the right-hander’s off stump. This is a tactic of pacemen, but a catastrophe for a bowler of my kind. Seek to replicate it on a sympathetic wicket, and the ball will turn obliging back to the batsman’s crashing drive. The aim is to make the batsman play, not to make it easy. Suffice it to say, I bowled badly.

That’s nothing on how I batted, however. A little must be said here of my history as a batsman. As a youth, I batted right-handed, and was a blocker. This was fine so far as it went, but I had no real attacking shots, just bottom-handed prods. Eventually, I realised that the problem was that my bottom hand was my stronger hand, that in fact, I should be batting left-handed. I tried it out. The results were remarkable; all at once I could play fierce, fizzing straight- and cover-drives. I could also cut properly. Sadly, these results were also short-lived. Unused to the new angle of attack, a problem compounded by bowlers unused to facing left-handers, I grew wary of the ball. This wariness grew until it became essentially phobic. I began to back away, or to move too far across my stumps, seeking to remove my body from the line of the ball and swipe it as it passed.

It was this catastrophic loss of form and confidence, I think, that precipitated my exit from the game. I had always been what would once have been given that grandest of epithets, an all-rounder, but is now called a ‘bits and pieces player’. I could bat solidly at around six, and take a few wickets. If I couldn’t bat, however, I was not a strong enough bowler to justify a place in any team on that alone. I had become irrelevant, a Duchy Originals cricketer, a disappointing luxury.

If this return to playing is to have any kind of a satisfactory outcome, reversing my batting decline is imperative. I have resolved to bat circumspectly, to rebuild from the ground up. Focus on getting in the right positions and getting bat on ball. No absurdity, no attempted T20 swipes and flicks. Block ‘em all, if necessary, just learn to bat again.

I got a short, late net, but I doubt whether it would have mattered much if I had one earlier. For a ball or two, things seemed well. I was not instinctively shying away from the ball, I was moving towards it. I was moving my feet. Third ball in, I even essayed a drive. Not an especially beautiful or scorching drive, but it would have got me off the mark. Which is as well, because I’d have been out next ball. I was bowled leg and middle. Horrifying. Nobody should ever be bowled leg and middle unless they’ve died in the interlude between the bowler releasing the ball and it arriving at the stumps, and even then a rigour mortic twitch should suffice to allay the danger. In my backing away days, I made a habit of it, but this was different. I had moved to the ball, I had simply gone to the wrong place and missed it. Still, it was my first net in five years. It wouldn’t happen again.

A few balls later, it happened again. These were chief amongst my sins, but there were others. For the most part, though I played and missed atrociously, I maintained my resolve, but at one point, I found myself trying to flick a legside delivery off my hip. Needless to say, I missed it; I have never been able to play that shot. It is a legacy of cowardice masquerading as audacity.

The infuriating thing is, as a left-hander frequent loose legside balls should be one of the perks of the job, a source of free, safe runs. Perhaps part of the problem, however, is that I am too acutely aware of that, too conscious of what I’m missing out on. Nevertheless, there are clearly big problems to be addressed; a mental blindspot that is fatally undermining my response to anything on the legside. It must be eliminated. Missing out on free ones is one thing, getting bowled leg and middle is quite another. And it must be eliminated soon. I know I can bat, but the club won’t take my word for it. Not having played in five years only gives me so much leeway. Soon they will decide, quite rightly on yesterday’s showing, that I can’t bat a lick, and then it’s Duchy Originals time again.

An ignominious return, then. I do not intend to despair so early in the endeavour, but a salutary lesson has been learned: this return to fun and games will not all be fun and games.