Month: January 2013

India v England ODI preview

England start the final leg of their tour to India this week with a five match ODI series. I don’t tend to pay much attention to pyjama cricket and certainly I won’t be staying up all night (the start of play in my timezone is 00.30 for the first four matches and 21.30 for the last one) to watch them. But there are some interesting aspects.

Pyjama cricket has generally been a strength for India and a weakness for England and especially in India. England’s last three ODI series in India have yielded a combined 16-1 advantage for the home side as well as a tie in a World Cup match. But England go into the series in good ODI form whilst India do not. England beat Pakistan, the West Indies and Australia to love last year before drawing the ODI series against South Africa. It’s not true to say that India have struggled in that time, but their results have been much more mixed. Most recently they lost a home ODI series to Pakistan which I doubt will have gone down well. I don’t think the fact that England lost their first two warmups will indicate much. They failed to win any of the warmups ahead of the successful Test series and when they played an ODI series in India last October they won both warmups before losing badly in the actual series.

I think England are probably marginal favourites for the series; both sides are difficult to predict, but England are in form and confident. What they will need to do is tighten up the bowling; with players being (rightly) rested from the series and Broad injured it means that there is not a lot on which to rely. James Tredwell is a decent spinner and I’d like to see Danny Briggs bowl alongside him. (Actually, I’d prefer to see Simon Kerrigan bowl alongside him, but he isn’t in the squad.) It would be an interesting blend of different styles and vastly different experience. The seam bowling relies on Steven Finn to be fit and effective; none of Jade Dernbach, Tim Bresnan, Stuart Meaker or Chris Woakes really inspire confidence yet. England’s batting looks strong enough, however, that even if India do manage to exploit the weak bowling (and their batting is out-of-form, so they may not) England will probably still be in the game.

I think the series will see at least couple of one-sided affairs in each direction, but will ultimately go down to a 3-2 margin in favour of England. If India can get their batting going, however, we may see a repeat of the last few series.

Timing of intervals

Last night, as the last Test of the Australia v Sri Lanka series wound to a close there was a slightly odd situation where tea was taken with Australia needing just five runs to win. The timing of the intervals is something that comes up occasionally in cricket; both can be moved slightly to try to make them match up with things like innings breaks, but we still get occasions like this or like the one exactly a year ago in South Africa where tea was taken before the hosts chased two runs to win. It’s very easy to shake one’s head suggest that cricket be less rigid and inflexible, but I think the issue is more complicated than that.

Whilst it certainly does look ridiculous on the face of it, I think a lot of the criticism that ensues every time there is an oddly timed interval or close of play is harsh. For instance, part of the problem was that in both of the specific occasions named above tea had been delayed already. The way to avoid it being taken with five to win would have been to take it at the scheduled time. But I suspect that this would still have not been palatable to many; after all it seemed like an appropriate occasion to delay tea when it happened. And those are specific cases anyway, there is a more general point.

The problem is that as strange as it seems on the face of it, there is really not much to be done that would not be even worse. It’s all well and good to say that ‘common sense’ should be used, but what is common sense to one person is not to another. I think it is common sense that someone who averaged under 44 should not be in a team of the year, but quite a few disagree. This is why the laws and regulations are written down in the first place and hopefully (but not always) written so as to be unambiguous. Even if odd situations arise there is consistency and everyone knows what to expect before hand. There can be no blaming of the umpire’s judgement if the timing goes against a particular team. The timings of the intervals is a minor matter overall and so it would probably not be a problem if it was simply left up to the umpires, but I think doing so would actually cause as many problems as it solves.

I actually think the current regulations are pretty good; I don’t like by how much lunch and tea can be delayed, but it’s fairly clear and reasonable which cannot be said of a lot of the ICC regulations. If a side is nine down then the interval is delayed and it is taken early if a side is bowled out. There are some tweaks that can be made, but I don’t think there is any inherent improvement that can be made and I don’t think there is a way to get rid of these ‘ridiculous’ situations. It’s really only a mild nuisance and most changes would make things worse.

South Africa win by an innings and 27 runs

In a way it is a bit difficult to know what to make of New Zealand’s performance in the Cape Town Test. On the one hand, it was clearly poor; they were bowled out for 45 in the first innings. But after that they actually fought back well and although there was never a chance to win the match they actually came rather closer than they ought to have to avoiding an innings defeat. The fact that they were bowled out so cheaply cannot be glossed over, but at the same time there are teams who would not have bothered to show up on the second day after being bowled out for 45 and then conceding 252-3. It’s also worth remembering that the Kiwis were up against a very good South African side who bowled Australia out for 47 on the same ground 14 months ago.

The 45 all out cannot be ignored, but I do think New Zealand would be well advised to put it out of their heads for now. It was perhaps not a freak occurrence, good bowling and poor batting will generally produce low score, but the magnitude was such that at least for now they should treat it as a one-off. I suspect that dwelling on it ahead of the next Test would be counter-productive. The bigger problem is that I don’t think they would have won the Test even without being bowled out so cheaply. The 275 they put up in the second innings was a decent effort in the circumstance, but it was effectively a first innings pitch and would still have represented a sizeable deficit had they made it in the first innings.

It is hard to say what New Zealand ought to do because they have the problem that South Africa are simply a better side and everyone knew that even coming into the series. The batting will be the obvious thing at which to look and it does need to be more disciplined (which has actually been true for some time), but it might be worth working on the bowling too. They were a bit slow to recognise the value of simply bowling line and length on that pitch (although some of that might be put down to shell-shock at what happened to the batting) and South Africa actually scored quite freely for much of the innings. The improvements on the second day meant that it wasn’t a bad bowling performance overall, but with the batting consistently suspect they can ill-afford to concede 250 runs in two sessions at any time. This is not to excuse the batting, but the problems with that are much deeper and probably cannot be fixed in between Tests. The bowling can improve though.

After being bowled out for 47 a year ago, Australia came back to win the next Test. Although New Zealand have tended to play rather better in the second Test of their recent series, Hobart and Colombo being the most notable examples, I doubt that they will manage to win in Port Elizabeth. They might, and hopefully will, make the Test interesting. But South Africa are rather better than Australia and Sri Lanka and I think they will simply be too good for the Kiwis. Even if Vernon Philander does not pull up fit for that Test I do not think that New Zealand have the batting to put up a competitive total and even if they bowl well I think South Africa will score too many for them. I had similar thoughts before Hobart and Colombo, however, and would love to be wrong again.

RIP CMJ

There aren’t many worse ways to ring in the new year than to wake up on 1 January and see that Christopher Martin-Jenkins has died. I don’t really have much that I can say about it, but I am sad. It was listening to him and others on TMS many summers ago that helped get me really interested in cricket with which to begin. Even above Aggers, he was always the person of whom I first thought when I had to imagine or mimic cricket commentary.

CMJ always seemed to me to be the perfect radio commentator. Not only was his voice and accent a very good one for radio (and especially cricket on the radio) he had a command of the English language which I think was unrivalled by any other commentator. Combined with his incredible knowledge of the game, it made him a joy to whom to listen and a joy to read. He was always one of my favourites in both fields and I will very much miss having him on TMS.