Please don’t wake me

India v England round two: ‘This time there’s curry’ starts later this week. Specifically it starts at 04.00 CDT on Friday. Which is quite early, especially for a completely pointless series. It isn’t even a proper ’round two’, it’s only an ODI/T20 series. The real round two will be in a year’s time, when England go back for a four test series. England aren’t playing the tests now because… well… I’m sure there’s some reason. Anyway it’s an ODI series in India, which means that England won’t win. Douglas Adams explained why in Life, the Universe and Everything: ‘They care, we don’t. They win.’ And history supports this; England haven’t won an ODI against India in India since the sixth ODI of the 2006 tour, which was a dead rubber. England lost that series 5-1 (with one match rained off) and lost the next ODI tour 5-0 (with two matches cancelled after the Mumbai terror attack). To be fair to England, they have improved considerably since those tours, albeit more in test matches than in limited overs ones.

I was tempted to suggest that the most recent match in India (in the World Cup) was the best barometer. This may be the case, but that match featured a 120 off 115 balls from Sachin Tendulkar, 5-48 from Tim Bresnan, 158 off 145 balls from Andrew Strauss and a brilliant spell from Zaheer Khan in which he took three wickets for one run in six balls. Of those four players, however, Khan and Tendulkar are injured and Strauss has retired. India have sustained numerous injuries since the World Cup, whilst retirements and a youth movement have rendered England almost unrecognisable from the team that performed so mercurially during the World Cup.

England will have the momentum coming off their home ODI wins, but I don’t think this is worth much, if anything. (In the last Ashes England had the momentum going into the Perth test, which they lost heavily. Subsequently Australia had the momentum going into the Melbourne test and were bowled out for 98 on the first day.) What may have more an effect is India’s desire for revenge. TMS’s Adam Mountford says India are billing this series as ‘The Payback Series’. (They don’t seem to be short of confidence.) England should do better in this series than in ODI series past (they could hardly do worse, mind), but I don’t know that they’ll win it. England have a lot of inexperienced players, and I doubt they’ll do much better in the unfamiliar Indian conditions than the Indians did in the unfamiliar English conditions over the summer. (Though Bairstow and Borthwick didn’t seem troubled in the last warm up match.)

It is an odd series in that it’s interesting on paper (England’s first trip to India since their revival under Strauss and Flower) without actually being interesting. It isn’t a test series, but there is one coming up in a year. We just played India anyway, so it doesn’t stir up any interest in that regard. Obviously the series is good for the ECB coffers (a good thing), but I think England (and probably India) would be better served by having a bit of a break. A win would allow England to rub India’s nose in the dirt a bit, but a loss would allow India to say that the series in England meant nothing, so England really have nothing to gain.

I’m not sure how much of the series I’ll listen to. As motivations to get out of bed before dawn a meaningless ODI does not rank in the top ten. And even upon successfully getting up it is hard to stay awake through the middle overs of an ODI on just three hours of sleep. (I know from experience.) I’ll see how I feel when the alarm goes off at 03.30 on Friday morning.

Painting testimonial pictures, oh-oh-oh-oh

One of the things on which I’ve had my eye in the past week (in the couple of hours I’ve had to spare between the MLB playoffs, RWC, and both premiership and international football) is the ongoing spot-fixing trial. I thought about writing about it at the weekend, but I’m (obviously) not a lawyer and thus the events are thus a little bit removed from what I can really analyse. And whilst the first few days had some very interesting evidence presented, it was mostly stuff that was already known, or was more speculative. Today, however, more of the video of the exchanges between Mahmood (the journalist) and Majeed was shown, in which Majeed claimed that the fixing was much deeper than no-balls and even included throwing an ODI. The video looks quite damming (as did the phone records last week), but a lot of the quotes sound like Majeed was talking out of his arse, trying to impress Mahmood. (Apparently Majeed knows just about every famous and important person in the world.) Majeed himself is not in the dock, so we’ll be denied a chance to see him use the ‘I was lying to try to get more money out of this guy’ defence, but I expect Butt and Asif will use roughly that tactic.

But what does seem to be true (since it was the thing for which Mahmood was pretending to pay the money, as opposed to an aside boast) is that the no-balls were to prove that the players would be involved in more serious fixing. The video today was of Majeed explaining about the ‘brackets’ that were allegedly fixed. If true, these would not be a few inconsequential no-balls, but would mean that the fixing was affecting the outcome of the match. (Haemorrhaging runs for a few overs, as the Majeed said they would, would let a batsman get set and possibly set him up for a big score.) If this is true (and again, that’s a bigger ‘if’ than if a skywriter started doing Kipling) then it certainly casts doubt on all the matches in which Pakistan have played in the past few years.

I’m very much looking forward to see the arguments of the defence. The evidence so far looks quite damming, but the original ICC case, after presumably hearing the same evidence and arguments, handed down surprisingly small bans. It makes me wonder if the defence won’t reveal some hole in the more serious allegations, without being able to explain away the original no-balls. (According to Cricinfo, Sky Sports statistician Benedict Bermange calculated to odds of innocently predicting those three no-balls at one in 1.5 million.) I’ll be keeping a slightly closer eye on the upcoming proceedings.

There isn’t any cricket on right now

Which makes things difficult for a cricket blogger, especially one, like myself, needing to write some sort of first blog post to make the site look less empty. Of course I also blog, or will blog, about baseball, football and rugby and in those sports I have the postseason, upcoming internationals and the quarter finals of the World Cup about which to write. But this is primarily a cricket blog, and I want the first entry to be about cricket, so I have a small problem.

‘But wait!’ I hear you exclaim, flattering myself that I already have readers. ‘There is the T20 Champions League!’ Ah, well that’s technically true. But I’m not watching it, because I don’t really care about it. It’s only a T20 tournament, and not even an international one. Please note that I don’t hate it. Actually I think it’s a decent idea in theory, just not in practice.

I just can’t be arsed to care about it. The problem is not the T20 bit, at least not entirely. The problem is more one of context. There isn’t any. The various domestic cricket leagues are not in competition with each other in the way that European football leagues are. There is no unifying central body analogous to UEFA and all the leagues act independently of each other. In addition, the leagues themselves are not all that well established. The clubs competing in the UEFA CL often have massive histories behind them. Even if not, they are from some of the most famous leagues of any sport in the world. This is not the case with T20 cricket. (It would probably not be the case with four day cricket either, since the history and popularity of the County Championship is not seen in other nations’ domestic competitions.) I don’t know any of the IPL teams, but even if I did, they barely even exist. There have only been a handful of six-week tournaments, with a very high player turnover rate. There has not been time for teams to develop the kind of characteristics that is necessary to make these kind of tournaments interesting, at least for people like me with no vested interest in a specific club.(Though it would be nice if Somerset won, after all they’ve been through the last few seasons.) The CLT20 boils down to a group of unheard of sides playing for a meaningless trophy. I just don’t care.