Category: Cricket

Saturday review – 3 Dec

Far and away the best article I read this week, or any of the last several weeks, was Jarrod Kimber’s ‘Occupy Lord’s‘. I can’t really do it justice with a description; it’s absolutely brilliant and you should go read it immediately. (Hopefully then coming back and reading the rest of this!)

Mukul Kesavan has a great article in Cricinfo today about the fallacy of ‘international hundreds’. It’s very cleverly written, and of course it is nice to see a reasonably high profile writer agree with me.

Also in Cricinfo, Sriram Dayanand has an essay on John Arlott, how he affected Harold Larwood and the role he played in getting Basil D’Oliveira to England. Whilst the events described are fairly well known, the extent of Arlott’s involvement is seldom mentioned.

At the Cricketer, Mark Baldwin writes about the County Championship fixtures and the half-baked Morgan Review. It’s an excellent dissection of the confusion the ECB exhibit with respect to the domestic game.

Lastly, on the Guardian Sport Blog Max Benson wrote about the rise of British sport and the new found edge that we see in cricket and elsewhere.

Imprecision

It’s only the third day of the first Test between Australia and New Zealand, but I have been struck by how imprecise New Zealand have been. They have talented players. Vettori is the obvious example, but Jesse Ryder, Chris Martin and Brendan McCullum are all legitimately of international quality as well. They don’t look like they are playing as well as they ought to however. I use the word ‘imprecise’ because they seem to be sharp enough, just missing slightly.

On the first day they won the toss and batted first in conditions that were not ideal for batting, but neither were they unduly tricky. They are conditions with which opening batsmen ought to be familiar, it is their job to see them off after all, but they played foolishly. Both of their openers threw their wickets away playing rash shots away from the body. Whilst there are times in which such shots are acceptable, the first morning of a Test match is certainly not amongst them. All of New Zealand’s top order except Williamson got themselves out in the same way, all of them needlessly. There were some demons in the pitch, yes, but the fact that Brownlie made 77 not out shows that it was not a minefield. The Australian attack is inexperienced and sensible batting would have brought rewards, but they collectively lost their heads.

Their shortcomings are also visible in the field, albeit not as spectacularly. They have had a couple of excellent chances to put a fragile Australian batting order under pressure, but they have let the opportunities slip away. Their bowling has been just a bit too erratic. Ponting in particular looked very shaky early on in his innings, but New Zealand could not get the ball and the fieldsmen in the right places to take advantage. At other times they have dropped catches, including a fairly straightforward one off Clarke when a wicket would have put them almost on level terms. It went begging and now the match is starting to slip away.

The dropped catches aside, New Zealand’s errors appear to be more mental than physical, the rushes of blood leading to collapses especially. It might be tempting for them to say that even good sides sometimes suffer collapses and even good sides sometimes fail to convert pressure with the ball into wickets and even good sides sometimes drop catches and all that would be true. But the best sides are the sides that do so rarely. New Zealand are doing so for the second Test in a row after almost losing to Zimbabwe. It is something at which their coach must work. They aren’t going to become world beaters with the talent they have, but the talent they have ought to do better than what we are seeing.

Australian ‘cricket’ grounds

One of the first things I noticed last night whilst watching the Gabba Test was the odd colouring of the seats. It’s something I remember from previous Ashes; they’re designed so as to give the impression of a full house even when there isn’t one. (One can infer then that there wasn’t a full house and that the seats don’t do a particularly good job of disguising that fact.) I think it’s pretty stupid, but it’s part of a much broader dislike of most Australian grounds.

Many Australian grounds are not owned by their clubs, but by the state government, and are used for multiple sports, most notably Australian rules football (AFL). As anyone who has tried to watch baseball in a multi-purpose stadium knows, this all but ruins the ground. The Gabba and the MCG are the worst. They’re just great monotone concrete bowls. There is no variation, no individuality, no character. Neither of them have individual stands anymore, they are just unbroken rings of seating. The pavilions in both grounds are little more than greenhouses set into the massive stands and the players emerge from tunnels.

What is this, football? (Image from Channel Nine)
Worst, they have to use drop in pitches because the AFL players don’t like being tackled on the hard wicket. (Apparently AFL players, like NFL players in the USA, are soft.) [Edited to add: I have been informed in the comments that this is also to protect the wicket from AFL players.] They aren’t cricket grounds anymore; they are AFL stadia in which cricket is sometimes played. The MCG at least has a history of being a dual use ground and at least it can mostly fill the seats during the cricket. (If Australia are playing well.) The Gabba has shown that it can’t and shouldn’t be used for cricket. The SCG isn’t immune either unfortunately; the gorgeous old pavilion is overshadowed by stands on either side.

The rot is spreading too. The Adelaide Oval is being renovated to increase capacity for the AFL and there are plans for the SCG to become more like the MCG. (Though that is at least for partly cricketing reasons, specifically the World Cup.) The WACA is the only ground that is not often used for AFL and it’s also the only ground with a sensible renovation plan.

I should point out that English grounds are not perfect. The Point at Old Trafford is a monstrosity which at the very least ought to have been placed opposite the pavilion instead of literally overshadowing it. And the Edgbaston renovations aren’t brilliant either. They are both an attempt to improve the grounds suitability for cricket though, which is their actual function. They aren’t built for football at the cost of cricket.

Samit Patel and the IPL

I’m very glad that Samit Patel declined to play in the IPL this year. He says that he needs to focus on Championship cricket to improve his chances of selection to the Test side. It would be easy for him to try to get some of the money on offer in the IPL with the knowledge that he is very unlikely to get a Test place anyway, but I am glad that he has chosen to fight for that slim chance all the same.

Right now his best chance of getting into the Test squad is probably as a second spinner for subcontinental tours. He’s probably still behind Monty Panesar for that spot and may soon be behind Simon Kerrigan, but he can bat better than either of them. It’s probably too late for him to get into this winter’s tours, but a full season next summer could boost his chances for selection against India, where he performed well in the recent ODIs. I’m not sure how much going to the IPL may have jeapordised those chances (it didn’t really hurt Eoin Morgan), but it would have caused him to miss almost half of the Championship. It probably can’t hurt for him to make his priorities clear to the England management though and a good season will ensure that his name is at least mentioned.

Aus v NZ preview

On paper this ought to be a one sided series. New Zealand have played varying degrees of poor cricket for years now and barely beat Zimbabwe. Meantime Australia are historically a pretty strong side. The recent contests haven’t been worth watching; New Zealand haven’t won a Test in Oz in 26 years. The fact that it may be any sort of a contest this year is a mark both of how far the Aussies have fallen and the extent to which injuries have taken their toll.

A lot of the build up to this series has focused on the Australian injury crisis, with five players pulling out before the first Test. The speculation about the replacements was curtailed, however, when the selectors named a squad of only 12. Peter Siddle was named leader of the attack, though since he is the only one of the pacemen to have ever played in a Test match he was rather the obvious choice. Nathan Lyon will probably also play (though Clarke said that if the wicket looked juicy he would be willing to play four quicks) meaning that one of James Pattinson, Mitchell Starc or Ben Cutting will probably be carrying the drinks at the Gabba. It will also mean that Chris Martin will have twice as many career wickets as the entire Australian attack combined.

There are still question marks about Australia’s batting as well. In the absence of Shane Watson, David Warner will open with Phil Hughes. Warner is in form, but unproven in first class cricket and Hughes is a bit rubbish. The middle order of Clarke, Ponting, Khawaja and Hussey is also a bit suspect. Ponting managed to get some runs against SA and now he’ll have a pretty weak Kiwi attack against which he can boost his credentials for the series against a pretty weak Indian attack. Clarke scored an incredible 151 in his first innings against South Africa and then managed just 15 for the rest of the series. He struggled in the Ashes last year as well, so it’s hard to be sure how he will do. Khawaja is still yet to really get going internationally, but he did score important runs against South Africa. Hussey looks like the weakest link of the chain. He was under considerable pressure before the last Ashes and responded by scoring buckets of runs in the first three Tests (and very few in the next two). With the dearth of Test cricket played by Australia since then he hasn’t had many more questions asked about his place in the side, but he scored just 60 runs against South Africa with a top score of 39. Combined with the last two Ashes Tests, his last eight innings against high quality bowling have yielded just 113 runs. Admittedly he won’t be up against strong bowling during the Australian summer (NZ and India) but it must still be a worry for the Australian selectors. If he doesn’t excel against the Kiwis I think they ought to look very hard at him being the one to miss out when Watson returns from injury.

New Zealand look like they will play a very similar side to the one that scraped to victory in Zimbabwe. Jesse Ryder and Tim Southee will almost certainly come into the side and both are probably good additions. Ryder certainly is, he is a very powerful batsman. Southee is in for Jeetan Patel and is good in that he is a seamer replacing an unneeded second spinner, though he isn’t necessarily a better bowler. The Kiwis still don’t have a lot in the way of batting however; Ryder and the captain Ross Taylor are the only two who average over 40. Their only world class bowler is Vettori, though a case could also be made for Chris Martin. Bracewell looks a decent talent, but has only played against Zimbabwe. Southee is essentially a county bowler.

Australia are weak and have serious questions about most of their squad, but those questions are unlikely to be asked by New Zealand. For the Kiwis to make the series close they will need virtually all of their players to step up. Their batsman in particular need to put pressure on the inexperienced Australian attack. The Australian batsmen have the motivation of knowing that one of them will be dropped when Watson returns and should not have undue difficulty facing the Kiwi attack, though it will be interesting to see how Bracewell fares. If the Gabba track is as flat as it was last year I think the first Test will be drawn, though I doubt either side will score 517-1. I think some life in the pitch will help Australia more than New Zealand though. The last thing the Aussies want is for their debutant bowlers to toil for hours on a flat surface and return 0-100. With a bit of encouragement from the wicket they could put some real pressure on a fairly brittle Kiwi batting order. Ultimately I think there will be enough in the pitch and the Kiwis will be sufficiently ill-disciplined that Australia will win both Tests.

2012 county fixtures

The 2012 county fixtures have finally been announced! And it was roughly five minutes before I was vaguely cross about them. England play six Tests next summer and Lancashire are playing a Championship match during every one of them. It’s not too bad during the series against the West Indies; Lancashire are actually playing every week during that time so there is no real way to avoid conflict. But, as usual, during the midsummer gap between Test matches Lancs are only playing limited overs cricket. It’s quite frustrating. To make matters worse, during the South Africa series Lancashire aren’t playing in the gaps between the Test matches, only during the Tests themselves! And, as we already knew, our curtain raiser falls during the first Test in Sri Lanka. There is some improvement though; this year none of the matches completely overlap with a Test. There is always at least one day that does not.

For most of the counties the season starts the week after the curtain raiser. That gives a start date of 5 April, the earliest ever for the County Championship. Lancashire don’t start until the next week, playing a rematch of last season’s opener against Sussex at Aigburth. Lancs then play a match a week for the next nine weeks, meaning that once again the season will be half over by the beginning of June. Warwickshire will try to exact a measure of revenge for last season early, as they come to Aigburth on 19 April. (21 April will be a long day for me. It’s the third day of the match against Warwickshire, but also on the calendar are Bath v London Irish, Liverpool v West Brom and Royals v Blue Jays.) The first two home matches are at Aigburth and the first match at Old Trafford is against Notts on 2 May. Newly promoted Middlesex come to Liverpool on 23 May, but unfortunately our trip to Lord’s isn’t until the penultimate round of matches on 4 September. The last match of the season is at Old Trafford against Surrey, starting 11 September. We won’t be visiting the Oval this year; our match in Surrey will be at Guildford.

Overall it’s roughly what I expected. (By now I just assume that the ECB will schedule Tests at the same time as Championship matches.) The interest lies in the details, of course, and every year I enjoy going over the fixtures. The Christmas decorations are up and it is below freezing outside, but spring feels just a bit closer now.

SPOTY shortlist

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist has been announced and both Strauss and Cook are in the running for the award. I’m hoping one of them wins, of course. I’m leaning toward Cook, he had the better year on the field. (Though since it’s the sports personality award I fail to see how Graeme Swann, or at least Jimmy Anderson, doesn’t win every single year. It should at least go to someone with a Twitter account.) The full list is on the BBC website. It’s been noted that it is not a particularly diverse list, there are no women on it at all this year. There also aren’t any footballers or rugby players in the running, though that’s less surprising given the state of the national teams.

There is also an award for team of the year, which must surely either go to the England cricket team or to Lancashire. I’d give it to Lancs. We all knew England were good at the start of the year, if not that they were so good as to beat India 4-0. No one expected Lancashire to win the County Championship though; some even predicted we would be relegated! We had a team comprised almost entirely of homegrown talent, mostly very young and inexperienced. Lancashire were a team in that they were greater than the sum of their parts this year. To an extent this was also true of England, but the national side had the services of the second best fast bowler in the world a lot more often than the Red Rose. I think Lancashire are clearly the most deserving team.

Turning pitches

MS Dhoni expressed a desire the other day for Indian pitches to turn from the first day. It’s easy to be cynical about it, (‘It’s only because he hasn’t got any seamers’ e.g.) but I quite agree. If there is nothing in the pitch for the bowlers at all we get lifeless, boring tracks. These can turn into exciting matches as we saw at Mumbai, but only very seldom and only when the bowlers find some help late in the match. The vast majority of cases turn into stupefyingly boring draws, which are bad for everyone in the long term. It’s bad for the bowlers for obvious reasons and it’s bad for the administrators who face a declining interest. It’s also problematic for batsmen; for one thing it cheapens batting records, but also because they then do not know how to play when the ball is doing a bit.

We are seeing more and more instances of batsmen falling cheaply when they play on a good track. The most spectacular was Australia’s 47 all out at Cape Town, but I think the more damming example was in England last year. Rahul Dravid was the only one to succeed and he is one of the only batmen in the Indian order who plays with a good technique. On the other side of the coin was Virender Sehwag. On the subcontinent, where there is no venom in the new ball, Sehwag can attack with impunity and take the match away from the opposition. (As we saw in Chennai in 2008.) When he tried to do the same in England, however, he picked up a king pair. Sehwag is the best example, but few of the Indian batsman displayed the ability to play the moving ball. To an extent it isn’t their fault; many of them had never had an opportunity to play on a seaming pitch before.

Of course, India’s travails in England were against the swinging/seaming ball. Dhoni would like to see the ball spin, but I think it’s still fair. It’s very hard to get the ball to seam or swing in India, the conditions simply aren’t suited for it, so having the ball turn from the start is the next best thing. However it is achieved, it is very important for the bowlers to have some help throughout the match and I quite agree with Dhoni’s suggestion.

Australia’s XII

In between Swann’s comments about ODIs yesterday and the thrilling finish to the Mumbai Test I have neglected to look carefully at the Australian squad for the first Test against New Zealand. There are only 12 in the squad this year, instead of the 17 they famously picked before Brisbane last year, so it gives a pretty clear indication of the likely XI.

David Warner will open, as I predicted, though Eddie Cowan made 145 for Australia A. It’s an interesting selection in many respects. Warner has some international experience in the limited overs realm, but he has played just ten first class matches. (He has played over a hundred domestic T20 matches.) He does average almost 60 in those matches however. Cowan, by contrast, averages 37 in over fifty first class matches, but he has passed fifty in twenty of them. He is also in very good form recently, as his score for the ‘A’ side shows. In essence, Cricket Australia have gone for a basher. It’s not surprising given the traditional ethos of the side, but one might think they would know that T20 stars are not always the best Test batsmen. Last winter they got to watch Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott score a combined 1211 runs at an average of 110, but with a strike rate barely above fifty. Philip Hughes looks like he might be the next to get the axe though, so Cowan may yet get his chance.

It’s possible that my predicted XI will be off by one. Ben Cutting was also included in the squad and could come in for Peter Siddle. Siddle might have been axed for Jo’burg if Harris hadn’t been injured, so it would not come as a shock if Cricket Australia wanted to look at someone else before India arrive. It’s also possible that they will choose all four seamers and Lyon will miss out. I’d be a bit surprised if Siddle were dropped. Whilst he looks a long way off from the bowler who took a hat-trick on the first day of the Ashes last year, to drop him would be to select an pace attack with precisely zero Test caps. (And a spinner with only five.)

The most notable omissions to the squad were probably Trent Copeland and Matthew Wade. Copeland played in the series in Sri Lanka and whilst he did not look like a world beater he did not do anything specific to cost him his place in the side. Wade, meanwhile, scored 53 against the New Zealanders for the ‘A’ side. With Haddin under some pressure it might have been worth to give Wade a call up. He at least looks like he knows better than to try to cut a ball on the stumps with the score 18-5. I’m not surprised that Australia left them both out, but with a weak opponent touring it is a good time to gamble.

I don’t think too much should really be read into the squad though; it’s an injury hit side and they are only playing New Zealand. Selecting Warner over Cowen and leaving out Copleland are sure to raise questions however. Australia will almost certainly win regardless of the XI they select so I think the selectors could have been a bit bolder, but this is a decent start.

Saturday review – 26 Nov

My weekly look at my favourite stories and blogs starts with one that I saw just after finishing last week’s review. Sky Sports’ Dave Tickner argues that Test cricket is not dying, but changing for the worse. The statistics about the rise of two Test ‘series’ like the one we saw in South Africa are troubling, if not outright alarming. It’s an analysis with which I am inclined to agree, for the most part.

Giles Clarke today wrote a piece reaffirming the ECB’s commitment to Test cricket. It’s a response to a piece in the Telegraph yesterday and it’s a pretty good one. Although I still don’t agree with the logic of having extra World Cup preparation instead of a Test match, he does well to explain why the decision is not all about money. Oddly though, he also says that international cricket is not allowed to clash with the Olympics, despite the fact that the second Test against South Africa is scheduled to do just that. I assume some part of that is mistaken, but I don’t know what.

At Cricinfo, Anantha Narayanan has a piece looking at the most significant hundreds under a variety of conditions. It’s a very good read if you like statistics. (And who doesn’t like statistics?)

Andy Bull writes for the Guardian about a WWI naval battle and cricketers who have read their own obituaries. After one of the better introductions to a cricket article, it eventually gets around to a discussion about the possibly premature obituaries for Ricky Ponting’s career.

The Lancashire website has a lovely story about the scorer for the club. I’m not sure exactly when it popped up, but I didn’t see it until this week (Tuesday I think) and it’s a very good read.

Anyone who regularly reads these will have noticed that I tend to follow cricket more closely than the other sports about which I blog. I don’t read cricket blogs exclusively though and this week there was an amusing post by Bath Rugby’s Sam Vesty on Living Rugby. (Living Rugby is an excellent site all round, it should be noted.)