Kevin turns pie eater
Kevin pie-eater-sen. Well, it almost works. I suppose the Pakistani bowlers are pie throwers of sorts (with the exception of Saeed Ajmal of course).
KP’s second century in four days won England the fourth and final ODI on Tuesday. It sealed a 4-0 series whitewash – a result that seemed about as likely as Doug Bollinger winning a modelling contract a couple of weeks ago.
Pietersen’s innings was pure unadulterated class. Unlike his knock at the weekend, when England cruised to victory, this ton was made under the most extreme pressure.
England were 68-4 at one point, and Pakistan’s spinners were closing in for the kill. KP not only withstood this barrage, he also nursed the unsteady Craig Kieswetter through the crisis – and thereafter Samit Patel. It was maturity personified.
Yesterday we saw the Kevin Pietersen that I worried we might never see again. I know people go on about his double hundred last summer, and the one he made in Adelaide, but those runs were made on the flattest pitches imaginable. The bowlers almost had no chance (and they had already been demoralised by earlier events during the series). It was easy pickings.
This time it was a different story. KP moved his feet decisively; he drove the ball through cover magnificently; he flicked rising balls outside off stump to the legside boundary with distain. And what’s more, the old swagger was back.
Where on earth did that come from?
The woeful form of Kevin Pietersen, who is supposed to be our best batsman (despite the fact he hasn’t looked himself since about 2008) has been one of the most discussed issues of this tour.
When I watched him in the second ODI last week he looked all at sea: his bat wasn’t coming down straight, the spinners were exploiting his penchant for planting his front leg down the crease regardless of a delivery’s line or length, and his confidence looked even lower than his recent batting average.
I really wondered whether his career was on the ropes. In fact, if we had anyone half ready for international cricket in the Lions squad, I might have been tempted to drop him for a while.
That’s why his outstanding hundred on Saturday was so exceptional. It was a total bolt from the blue.
In an interview with Sky last week, KP insisted that nothing was wrong with his game. He claimed he was in brilliant form in the nets, and it was just a matter of time before he scored a biggie.
We all scoffed. Much as I love Pietersen, it can’t be denied that he talks a load of twaddle sometimes; in the very same interview he claimed that he didn’t have a problem with left arm spin.
All the evidence pointed to another KP failure in the third ODI. Even if he survived the new ball, it surely wouldn’t be long before Saeed Ajmal made him look like a pillock again. How wrong we all were.
The Full Toss quiz – February 2012
Here’s the latest edition of our (vaguely) monthly quiz. Enter your answers below, or to avoid spoilers, send them to maxie@thefulltoss.com. Good luck!
1. Alastair Cook and James Anderson were the pre-eminent batsman and bowler, respectively, in the 2010-11 Ashes. But who was (a) the second-highest run score, and (b) second-highest wicket taker, for England?
2. Who banned one of his bowlers from taking early morning jogs, because they caused him to fall asleep at the bar?
3. No one’s come up with one yet, but if a spinner referred to his ‘chaasra’, what would he mean?
4. Complete this sequence: the white, the off-white, the bone, the ivory…and the what?
5. And complete this sequence: West Indies, West Indies, India, Australia, Pakistan…who?
6. To the nearest fifty runs, what is England’s highest ever total in a test match innings?
7. Which female name would you associate with notable cricket fixtures at Arundel Castle?
8. Which pudding-inspired nickname did Anil Kumble acquire during his county career in England?
9. Which test batting record is held by Courtney Walsh?
10. Of the ten methods of dismissal in cricket, which are the only two never to have occurred in a test match?
Has the cricket world gone bonkers?
England 250-4 (50 overs) beat Pakistan 230 all out, by 20 runs
If you’d told me a month ago that England would get whitewashed in the tests, but lead the subsequent ODI series 2-0, I would have done one of three things. I’d have either punched you in the stomach for wasting my time; reported you to the police for taking illicit narcotics; or suggested politely that you needed psychiatric help.
If you’d gone on to suggest that Alastair Cook – the guy Mike Atherton and others didn’t want in the side – would have scored back to back tons at a strike rate double that of Kevin Pietersen’s, I definitely would have called the men in white coats.
Yet here we are. Could this tour get any more bizarre? Next you’ll be telling me that Ravi Bopara finally looks like proper international batsman …
Our victories in the first two ODIs have been the perfect antidote to our test defeats. I know it’s somewhat hypocritical to go on about them – as we often declare these kind of games irrelevant when we lose them – but they really do signal some positives.
For starters, we can put the debate about Alastair Cook’s role in the ODI side to bed. His captaincy has been sound and his batting an inspiration. He does have some shots in his locker after all. It’s also encouraging because it’s vital to have a captain (in all forms of the game) who can score runs.
Don’t watch cricket, say the ECB: it’s too dangerous
It was late in the evening of December 25th, 2010, and as Christmas Day slipped into Boxing Day, I had a problem. The Melbourne Ashes test – about as important a match as there could possibly be – was about to begin, but I was spending Yuletide at the home of my parents, who can’t afford Sky Sports.
Luckily my brother had a solution, and one which was news to me: watch it on a hookey streaming website. He located one of the many such sites, clicked the mouse, and hey presto – we had the live action from the MCG. Ok, the pictures were a little jerky, but it was cricket all the same – and England were bowling Australia out for 98. What’s not to like?
But as it turns out, it’s a good job that ECB chairman Giles Clarke didn’t gatecrash our cosy little festive cricket party. He’d have given us a right ear-full, and completely ruined the atmos.
That’s because Clarke believes illicit streaming sites are currently the “biggest danger” to the entire game of cricket.
“We all have to be vigilant,” he said in an interview last month. “There are a huge number of pirate websites that stream cricket on the internet taken from television broadcasts, we and our broadcasters closed down 700 during last summer’s series against India.
“These pirate broadcasters are the biggest danger to cricket because they take money out of the game without commercial benefit to the sport. It is an extremely complex procedure to close down websites but it can be done and has to be done.”
What an insult. What arrogance. What complete bollocks. Read more…
The elephant amongst the Lions
If I had a quid for every fan who thinks England should drop a couple of batsmen after the debacle against Pakistan, I’d have enough money to set up my own television channel, re-employ Tony Lewis and Jack Bannister, and put live test cricket back on terrestrial TV. In a way, I can understand where these people are coming from: they see Bell and Pietersen struggling to pick Saeed Ajmal’s doosra and they want blood.
There’s just one problem with this rather knee jerk response. Who exactly do they want to replace these stalwarts who have served England so well? Perhaps they’d prefer someone from the England Lions – the next generation of batsmen who are allegedly poised to conquer the world.
Well, I’ll you a little bit about these up and coming superstars. With the exception of Somerset’s Jos Buttler, none of them are any good. Why else do you think England are persevering with the likes of Ravi Bopara – a batsman similar to Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick in temperament, but with approximately half their talent. I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, the cupboard is bare. That’s why Eoin Morgan, a guy who was elevated to the test team despite averaging just 36 in first class cricket, can’t seem to get dropped.
If you don’t believe what I’m saying, look up the scorecard from the recent warm up match between the Lions and the senior side. Strauss’ men hadn’t played limited overs cricket since September. The Lions, on the other hand, had been playing 50 over cricket for a few weeks – so the young guns had a distinct advantage. Or so you would have thought …
What actually happened is this: the Lions batted first were routed for under a hundred. In fact, their efforts were so dismal that the senior side set themselves an artificial score in excess of 230 to chase, just so they’d get a little more practice in the middle. How utterly humiliating.
Reasons to be cheerful
The Pakistan v England series is over, which for many reasons is a blessed relief.
The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster Every now and again a series comes along which you just know from the outset will be a complete nightmare. Everything which can go wrong, will go wrong – as we witnessed in the Emirates.
One to wipe from the memory banks It’s best to pretend it was all a bad dream, as our opponents tend to do when fortunes are reversed. You rarely hear Pakistan supporters reminiscing about the 3-1 thrashing we meted out in 2010. As someone once explained to me, the 2006/7 Ashes never actually took place: it was all filmed on a sound stage in the Nevada desert.
It was too bloody early in the morning 6.00am is the worst possible time for a day’s cricket to begin, especially when your side is losing. You wake up in a panic, check the score on your phone through bleary eyes, see how many wickets England have lost, and then kick the cat. What an awful way for the day begin – and it’s only downhill from there.
We didn’t get any work done I suppose this applies to many series, but during this one, with play continuing till lunchtime in the UK, no England supporter achieved anything in the office before 2pm. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates a £50 billion hit to the national economy as a result of employees across the land clicking refresh on Cricinfo rather than doing what they were actually paid for. And all this despite our losing. No matter how bad it got, you couldn’t take your eye off it – rather like a car crash. Read more…
Why 0-3 isn’t that bad
Put the razorblades down everyone. Although England might have suffered the ignominy of having the shortest possible reign as world No.1 (it doesn’t get much shorter than one series does it) there are actually reasons to be cheerful.
Even though our former colonies are currently revelling in our miserable defeat to Pakistan (haven’t these bitter sad cases got anything better to do?) things could be a lot, lot worse. In fact, I can’t think of the last time a 0-3 drubbing produced so many positives.
Let’s forget the drama and disappointment and look at things objectively. We’ve always known that English batsmen are fallible against spin. So what’s new? I’ll tell you what: the fact that our bowling attack has proven itself to be potent in any conditions. Taking twenty wickets is half the battle.
But isn’t the batting a bit of a worry going forward? Well, no it isn’t actually. I don’t blame our batsmen for performing so badly. How many mystery spinners had they faced before? And how many spinners in world cricket are as good as Saeed Ajmal? None.
The good news is that Ajmal is 34 years old. He can’t have long left in the game – and there’s always the chance that the ICC will grow a pair and ban him. I doubt we’ll face him in a test match on the subcontinent again. So what have we got to worry about?
As bad as it gets: day four at Dubai
Pakistan (99 and 365) beat England (141 and 252) by 71 runs
You wait more than a year for an England defeat in a test match, and then three come along at once. So how did our team transform themselves from world-beaters into a fleet of London buses? And have we been watching an aberration – a mere blip – or is this the shape of things to come?
The sheer scale of our defeat has yet to really sink in. Three-nil, for goodness sake, a scoreline absolutely no one envisaged, from the most bullish Pakistani to pessimistic Englishman. It’s all a brutal shock to the senses. We were hammered, humiliated, and beaten into the dust – the kind of treatment we can only remember getting from Australia.
Five years have elapsed since our last whitewash, Down Under in 2006/7. Apart from West Indies in the 1980s, it’s only ever been Australia who’ve really taken us to the cleaners, never the likes
of Pakistan. Even in series they dominated, we usually managed to get at least a draw somewhere, and that was with teams less talented than our current XI. We are world champions at the moment, remember.
So it’s all been very bewildering. The obvious reaction – as an England supporter – is this: it was all too good to be true. The last two years have been a ridiculous dream from which we have just been abruptly woken up. England could never carry on being so good. We’re England, after all. We lose – that’s how cricket works. The whole world-number-one business, meanwhile, was a cruel trick designed purely to taunt and torture us. The cricketing gods snatched away our toy before we’d barely had time to play with it.
An optimist might view this series as a reality check for England; it’ll give the players a healthy kick up the bottom. In the long term it might prove to have been beneficial – by providing experience, perspective, and motivation to put matters right. Our bowling was superb throughout – it was still good during Pakistan’s second innings, despite the fatigue of three back-to-back tests – and the hugely successful return of Monty Panesar ranks as a massive positive. Read more…
Hands up who thinks we can win? Day three in Dubai
Strauss reacts to the news that a delusional cricket blog thinks England will still be No.1 on Tuesday
Pakistan 99 & 365. England 141 & 36-0 stumps (Eng need 288 more runs to win)
It’s hard to look at the bright side when you’re staring down the barrel, but we’re going to try. Someone’s got to.
Firstly, if it wasn’t for Younis Khan and Azhar Ali (Pakistan’s answer to Chris Tavare) England would only need four runs to win tomorrow. They’re the only batsmen who have made a fist of batting of batting on this pitch. Without them, England would be walking away with a consolation victory – and their number one ranking still intact. Perhaps, we haven’t been as bad as everyone says we have.
The obvious question, I suppose, is this: how did Younis and Azhar defy the bowlers and the DRS for so long in their mammoth partnership? There’s no simple answer, but two things spring to mind:
Firstly, the pitch seems to have calmed down somewhat. Yes, there’s still spin; but it’s slightly slower turn and therefore easier to deal with.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, England don’t have a mystery spinner. It’s so much easier to play the line of the ball, without using your pad as a second line of defence, if you know the ball can only spin one way.
Ajmal really is the difference between the sides. Although Rehman took more wickets in the first innings, he surely wouldn’t have been as effective without his spin twin at the other end. Ajmal has got into England’s heads and undermined our batsmen’s confidence. How many of Tim May’s wickets were really down to Shane Warne, and the pressure Warney exerted at the other end?
The other glimmer of hope is that England managed to survive until stumps without losing any wickets. Although I fear this is just giving us false hope, an England victory isn’t totally out of the question if the pitch continues to play more easily. It has been such as strange series, maybe England can pull an unlikely win out of the bag?
And four legged animals that live in filth, and look uncannily like Ricky Ponting, might fly.
James Morgan
