It’s raining man. Hallelujah!
Can you remember an April as bad as this one? Not a single result was possible in the County Championship yesterday as rain washed out play across the country. In the Surrey versus Durham match, all four days went down the drain; not a single ball was bowled in the match.
Most newspapers and blogs have been full of woe – lamenting how this interminable weather has ruined the start of the season. But has it? We’d like to look at things from a player’s perspective; a very cynical player’s perspective that is.
If I was paid to play cricket – and I was forced to play most days between the beginning of April and the end of September, I’d be praying for rain every single day. It’s a day off for heaven’s sake. You’d get paid for lounging around the dressing room, playing cards and executing ridiculous practical jokes on unsuspecting team mates – like putting deep heat in their jockstraps. What a life!
How much would you give for a job where you can wake up in the morning, look out the window, see that it’s raining and enjoy a day off? No more trudging to the station in the cold and wet. No more drives around the M25 when the spray is so bad that you can hardly see the car in front. Nope. You just get out of bed, open the curtains, do a celebratory jig and phone your boss: “Sorry guv, I can’t come in today, it’s raining”. Result.
Now obviously professional cricketers say the right things in public. When the Sky cameras are at a fixture that’s affected by the weather, the players always express their frustration: “we just can’t wait to get out there and entertain the paying public”. Yeah right. You just know they’re up in the dressing room doing rain dances and giving each other high fives when the latest pitch inspection is moved back a couple of hours.
Alastair Cook for parliament
Anything you can do he can do better. He can do anything better than you. That’s our message to Sachin Tendulkar today.
If you don’t have a penchant for bizarre stories – and you actually have a life – you might have missed the news that Tendulkar has become a member of parliament in India. The bloke is like a God over there, so why not? Imran Khan did it in Pakistan, so it’s not without precedent.
However, Sachin’s position was appointed rather than elected. He’s joined India’s equivalent of our House of Lord’s, which is called the Rajya Sabhah.
Apparently Tendulkar meets the criteria because he has ‘special knowledge or practical experience in respect of such matters as literature, science, art and social service’. I didn’t know Sachin was a boffin or culture vulture, but there we go. I suppose shoehorning someone into the upper house of parliament via a dodgy definition is better than the British system of buying your way in.
Although we don’t doubt that Sachin could’ve taken a more legitimate route into politics – if he stood for prime minister he could probably get elected without actually having any policies (sound familiar?) – taking a place in an appointed upper house is a bit of a cheat really. Therefore, there’s an opportunity for someone to out-do India’s cricketing deity …
But who I hear you ask? Who would dare to out-Sachin, Sachin? Well, we believe we’ve got the perfect candidate (if you excuse the pun). It’s England’s very own golden balls, Alastair Cook.
Is there hope for West Indian cricket?
I was watching a bit of Fire in Babylon last night – the documentary about the Windies in their heyday. It’s well worth watching if you haven’t already. It’s easy to forget just how brilliant they were – and how they physically battered opponents into submission with bat and ball.
The current Windies team is a complete contrast I’m afraid. Their captain is a medium pacer – something unthinkable twenty five years ago – and their best bowlers are mostly spinners. Meanwhile their best batsman is Shiv Chanderpaul; surely the antithesis of great stroke makers like Clive Lloyd and Sir Viv.
There have been loads of inquests into the demise of West Indian Cricket. Some of them are even more boring than Tony Crozier, so we won’t waste your time doing the same. Besides, they can usually be summed up in three letters: NBA.
Instead I’m going to discuss whether, as an impartial observer, their test team is making any progress. After all, Darren Sammy’s bowling might be about as intimidating as Emile Heskey in front of goal, but he actually seems like a good leader.
If I was writing this article twenty four hours ago, it would have been completely different. It’s because my view oscillates wildly from day to day. In the recent series against Australia, the Windies have put in some brilliant work in the field. Kemar Roach is the best seamer they’ve had since Ambrose and Walsh. The young spinners Bishoo and Shillingford have impressed me (the latter has a doosra which amazingly isn’t a chuck), and the out-fielding has also been committed. They’ve blown away the Aussies’ top order in every innings, only to lose the plot when the tail comes in. Their fans must be so frustrated.
County championship roundup – with an eye on England
Right then. Two rounds of the county championship have been completed. Lancashire have lost twice and Andrew Strauss has been dismissed for a low score twice. I’ll leave you to decide which is the more surprising.
As an England fan first and foremost, my main interest in Championship cricket is seeing which players are on the cusp of test selection. It’s even more interesting this year as there’s actually a vacancy in the test side to fill; if Patel plays against the Windies in May I’ll eat Samit’s body weight in jellied eels.
With Paul Collingwood retired, Eoin Morgan playing in the IPL (where presumably he will be sorting out his technical frailties rather than earning bug bucks), and Ravi Bopara apparently not trusted by the selectors, there’s a real opportunity for the likes of Notts’ James Taylor and Alex Hales to stake a claim for the sixth batsman spot.
There’s even the chance for a seam bowling all-rounder to grab a test berth, in case England decide to play five bowlers. It might happen – if only because the selectors aren’t yet convinced by any of the specialist batsmen in the running. Consequently, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone like Ben Stokes earns a surprise call up if he starts the season brightly. In theory, he’s more than capable of batting six or seven and bowling a few overs.
So how have the likely lads performed so far? Well, it’s been a miserable start to the season for Hales and Taylor. They’ve only mustered one score over forty between them. Fortunately however, the other candidates haven’t exactly set the world on fire either; although to be fair, it’s pretty difficult to set anything on fire in the current weather. Rain ruined quite a few of the matches last week.
Are the Australians becoming the new England?
Those of us who came of age during the 1990s – a time when Blur, Oasis, Harry Enfield and Chris Evans were bigger than Merv Hughes’ moustache – will remember pre-2005 Ashes series as a sequence of traumatic events. It was only fairly recently that we actually got to experience what victory felt like. Before that, success against the Aussies was something you could only watch on grainy 1980s VHS tapes; the images seemed to reveal that England were captained by a fat bloke and a geezer with no neck opened the bowling.
How times have changed. England have won three of the last four Ashes and only Bill Lawry on acid would back the Aussies to win in 2013 – judging by their performances thus far against the Windies that is. The cricketing order has therefore been turned upside down since 2005.
However, other than the results, there’s another reason why England have swapped places with Australia: the baggy greens are now picking up the injuries that used to scupper England’s chances.
Do you remember the days when all our decent players got injured? Alec Stewart used to snap the bones in his fingers so regularly one suspected they were made of twiglets. Then there was Atherton’s chronic back condition, Thorpe’s depression, and Chris Lewis’s entire body.
The really galling injuries happened to our bowlers. Every time we unearthed a player with world class potential, they picked up a serious injury and lost two yards of pace. The result? They became about as effective as Mark Ealham in the subcontinent.
It all started with Super Gus Razor (ahem) I mean Fraser. Most people remember him as a bit of a carthorse, but in his younger days – before a serious hip injury – he wasn’t only accurate, he was also got a fair amount of nip off the pitch. He was like a young Glenn McGrath but without the ‘my Mum cuts my hair’ look.
Then there was Darren Gough. Fortunately, Goughie ended up having a good career in the end, but England were still robbed of his services far too often – usually immediately before, or actually during, an Ashes series.
Banger the queue barger
For cricketing celebrities there is no place to hide. That’s right, The Full Toss is watching you. We’re kind of omnipresent you know.
Indeed, just this morning one of our spies (ok, some bloke we know) had a run-in with a rather famous ex-England player. One who should know better ….
Our informant, Mr Simon Taylor, was at Heathrow Airport earlier today. He’d just returned from a week’s holiday on some paradise island (or the Isle of Dogs – details are sketchy at this point).
However, despite being refreshed from his holiday, he was suffering from air rage; a condition that affects over 100% of English passengers when they’re confronted with enormous queues at immigration after a long haul flight.
Tutting and mumbling swearwords under his breath, Simon spotted what appeared to be a queue barger (most likely a German one) slipping under the ropes to escape the crowds and cheat his way to the front.
Having been deprived of sleep for 24 hours, Simon grumpily gave the etiquette violator a piece of his mind (well, he suggested in no uncertain terms that he should ‘get to the back of the queue mate’).
When the toerag in question turned around, it was none other than ….. wait for it …. Marcus Trescothick.
Who’s got it better than Michael Vaughan?
Whenever the San Francisco 49ers won a game last season, the players – all six hundred and eighty of them (or however many they have in NFL these days) – all stood in a circle, put their hands together and shouted “who’s got it better than us? noooo-body”.
They were wrong. I can think of one person in particular who’s living the dream at the moment. His name is Michael Vaughan. You might remember him from the English summer of 2005.
When cricketers hang up their boots (or in Vaughan’s case his copy of Mike Brearley’s book The Art of Captaincy) they usually do one of four things: (a) travel the world as an ambassador for a travel company, watch cricket and slowly get fat (b) go into coaching, as the outside world frightens them, (c) get a proper job in a random business, or (d) launch a career as a media pundit (the success of which depends on whether Sky need to scrape the barrel further in their search for guest commentators).
The latter option is tailor made for the educated and eloquent (see Mike Atherton), the useless but telegenic (see Nick Knight), and even the miserable but knowledgeable (see Bob Willis). But the really really good ones – the intelligent, humorous and charismatic – get an even bigger honour: they get to join the TMS team on radio four.
Phil Tufnell made the transition from buffoon to TMS treasure a few years ago. Much to our surprise he proved to be a winner – even if he was more fun to listen to than insightful (well, he spent half his career asleep in the dressing room, so he only knows half as much as other former pros).
The latest to join Aggers and Co was Michael Vaughan. Unsurprisingly he proved to be a complete natural; he is, after all, interesting, sharp, perceptive and personable. It looks like he’ll be on TMS for years to come – unless he proves so popular that his media career expands beyond the realms of cricket (see Mark ‘smashing baby’ Nicholas).
Indeed, Vaughan’s transition from popular captain, to TMS doyen, to broader celebrity has already begun. Those golf enthusiasts amongst us would have spotted him at The Masters last weekend, interviewing the players on BBC2 (the lucky sod). Read more…
Are we jealous of the IPL?
Kevin Pietersen thinks so. Speaking ahead of this year’s Indian T20 jamboree, he provided his analysis of why the glitzy tournament is widely ignored in England.
“The IPL is very much struggling to find acceptance back home. It saddens me because I have had an amazing time at the IPL.
“It’s down to a lot of jealousy I think, which is sad. It saddens me, all the negative publicity the IPL gets in the [UK] media, I don’t know why.”
Is he right? I’d deign to suggest not. The reasons why the IPL has failed to spark the English imagination are fairly prosaic, and are mainly to do with context.
There’s nothing at stake in the IPL which means anything to English people. Why should we care which of the franchises wins? None of them have any significance to us, not least because they are ‘invented’ cricket teams – ersatz business operations, or even brands, created specifically for this very tournament. They have no history, no hinterland, no resonance. The sides are little more than playthings for their owners – the trinkets of tycoons.
In sport, especially in English culture, context is everything. The Ashes mean the world to us, but if England play Australia in a dead-rubber ODI, we’re barely aware the match is even taking place. Read more…
Australia on the road to nowhere
Aussies are celebrating what they consider to be a famous victory this morning. It was a good win, I’ll grant them that. At one point they were 285-8 in their first innings after the Windies had posted 450+. To win from that position is a good effort by anyone’s standards. But what does the victory really tell us about the Australian team? It actually tells us a lot. It tells us that the Aussies still aren’t very good.
What Aussies need to ask themselves is this: how on earth did they let the Windies score a big first innings total in the first place? And how on earth did their top order batting fail twice against such an inexperienced attack? In the end, the Aussies scraped home by three wickets with just minutes to spare. And they wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if it wasn’t for Mike Hussey – a batsman who will surely retire soon.
Let’s look at the current Australian team. The openers are David Warner, until recently a T20 specialist, and poor Ed Cowan, who is probably the most limited Australian test batsman to don the baggy green for twenty years. His inability to hit the ball off the square in fading light on day five almost cost his side the chance of victory.
Shane Watson is a worthy adversary, but he’s now batting at three to make up for Ricky Ponting’s diminishing skills. The linchpin of the side is Michael Clarke, who is a good player but has a very average record against England. Meanwhile, the combined aged of Australia’s five and six is 74.
Now let’s look further down the order … The current keeper, Wade, is a rookie. Siddle is batting at eight, Harris nine, Hilfenhaus ten and the off spinner Lyon at eleven. It’s hardly Bresnan, Broad and Swann, is it?!
Having said that, it was the tail that rescued Australia at Barbados: Harris made 68 and Lyon 40 (a feat that’s likely to be repeated as often as Glenn McGrath scored a half century).
The truth is, however, that the Windies lost their nerve and handed them the initiative on a plate. Fidel Edwards in particular bowled like Devon Malcolm after ten pints. England have therefore got nothing to worry about. Our bowlers have always made short work of Harris and Hilfenhaus, and we see no reason why this won’t continue in the future. Rabbits don’t turn into Bradman overnight.
It may only have been one win after four consecutive defeats, but what a vital victory it was. There’s no over-stating the significance for England of last week’s success in Colombo. The difference between five losses, with two lost series, and a comeback which secured a creditable drawn rubber in Sri Lanka, is vast.
Our side finally delivered the authentic all-round performance which they should have done all winter, which only makes you wonder still further why it took the batsmen so long to get their act together.
On paper, it may not seem much to have overcome a relatively modest Sri Lankan team. But all test victories for visitors in Asia are probably worth double their value at home. And the victory in Colombo was achieved in the teeth of severe pressure. As everyone involved with the match understood, England simply had to win – somehow, anyhow. The fact they succeeded gives much-needed credence to their number one status – champion teams are the ones who win in those situations.
Swords were hanging over several necks – in particular those of Kevin Pietersen, who responded with one of his best-ever test innings, and of the beleaguered captain, who channelled his nervous energy into a combative performance which built the foundations of our match-winning first innings total.
If only this had been a proper, three-match series – with a tantalising decider to come. Most people would have fancied our chances.
Our players can now head into this summer’s home series with improved confidence and self-esteem, but only time will reveal the full legacy of this winter’s travails. Read more…
