18th Century Cricket advice

Magnificent.

The batsman I want to be

Every so often you play a village team and a man comes out to bat.

I can picture him rather well. He is somewhere in his 40s. He has a droopy moustache, and he's wearing the club kit. Probably all wrong. His thigh guard is usually on the outside of his whites. One of the buckles on his pads is undone. He's probably - but not always - wearing trainers. Occasionally he's wearing pumps. Very occasionally, black ones.

He's only turning out because the captain begged him.

He says hello to the wicket keeper, asks for middle - he knows you're supposed to do that - and scratches his guard.

He will score between 0 and 10 runs - usually closer to the former - with a series of ungainly swipes, most of which won't connect with the ball. He won't play a defensive shot, because he doesn't know how to. In his head, it's probably a bit like one of those tailend blokes he saw on the telly - Sam Finn or Greg Swann or something - but who knows how it looks? Who cares? Bosh!

He'll have walked out with a smile on his face, and when he's out - almost always bowled - he'll leave with one too.

First game on Saturday. I might get 0. I might get 20. I might get 50. The statistics suggest it's very unlikely, but I might get 100. Who knows? Hence, the nerves are already jangling.

Why do this, year after year? Do I actually enjoy this sodding game? One thing's for sure: I certainly don't enjoy it as much as that man.

Shane Warne on Carl Hooper

Shane Warne on Hooper's ability to use his feet:

"During the 1995 series, this really nagged away at me, because I couldn't spot any of the usual clues even though I knew there had to be a sign that would give him away. On a number of occasions, I stopped at the point of delivery to see if he was giving anything away with his footwork. Most batsmen would be looking to get out of their ground at that point, whereas Hooper just stayed set. In the end, after watching him closely time after time, I managed to crack it. When he wanted to hit over the top, he just looked at me instead of tapping his crease as usual and looking down. Of course, my knowing what he was going to do did not always stop him from doing it." (From Shane Warne's Century: My Top 100 Test Cricketers). 

Telegraph blogs gets it wrong on Sarah Taylor

Yesterday "A professional cricket gambler" (and how extraordinary a way to byline a piece) wrote a Telegraph blog on Sarah Taylor's possible role for Sussex CC's Second XI. I thought it might benefit from a quick fisking.

I pretty much watch every single professional cricket match there is and study each of the players and teams for a living.

Impressive stuff. Right now is a particularly quiet day, with no international matches, but from Pakistan alone he's presumably watching Faisalabad and Rawalpindi, Hyderabad and Karachi, Islamabad and Sialkot, Lahore and Abbottabad, Sui Gas and Habib Bank and Quetta and Peshawar. The TV room must be a sight to behold. Of course, he'll also be keeping an eye on four more games from the West Indies and India, and will be keeping an eye on the Big Bash in Australia too. We should definitely take this guy seriously.

Odds and cricket are my life. My colleagues and I essentially try to predict what is going to happen in the cricket world every day there’s a match on. However, what no odds can predict is a) whether the talented Sarah Taylor, England’s women’s wicketkeeper, is going to indeed make history by becoming the first woman to play for a men’s team (Sussex’s second XI) this summer, and b) if she does – whether it will work out well.

Oh, maybe not then.

Cricket is 80 per cent a game of technique, speedy reactions and sharp coordination - so in a lot of ways there's no reason why women can't compete with men. I cannot deny Taylor’s debut for a men’s team would be great viewing from a curiosity point of view. It would be fascinating to see her batting against spin bowlers. Plus, as she's a wicket-keeper, which is a very technical and athletic position, there is no reason why a world-class women's cricketer couldn’t well be up to standard in county 2nd XI.

This is true.

However, I still think it will be a huge challenge for her because the remaining 20 per cent of the game relies on power. Having watched a fair bit of women's cricket in my time – it is that element which makes the big difference - as a full-blooded whack from a female cricketer only goes two-thirds the way that a man's hit goes - making it very hard for Taylor, despite her immense skill, to score 4's and 6's.

There's so much wrong with this I'm not entirely sure where to start. Let's, out of kindness, not attempt to work out how our commentator quantified the magic figures of "20 per cent" and "two thirds" - let's instead think about this. The boundaries in women's cricket are not two thirds the size of men's. Runs come from timing far more than they do strength - that's why, say, Ian Bell has hit a lot more boundaries than the hundreds of club cricketers who are bigger and stronger than him. Jonathan Trott didn't hit a six for England until 2011 and has still yet to do so in a Test. There are many male players who make use of their immense power. But in the longer form of the game, it just ain't that important.

The fast all male bowlers on will be bowling up to 20 per cent quicker (roughly speaking the fastest woman = 78mph / fastest man = 93mph) and that difference in speed makes an enormous difference. The balls they use in men's cricket are also a fraction bigger and heavier.

True. The bowling will be faster. Mentioning 93mph is ludicrous, because it's an outlier - very rare that you see that kind of pace in a county game, let alone in a 2nd XI match. What Taylor will see is a lot of bowling around that 78-early 80s mph pace, which is a few yards quicker than most women quicks. And yes, this means she might struggle. But just as power's not everything - neither is pace. This leads into the next point:

I am not saying that Taylor couldn’t handle herself – but what I am concerned about is whether the male fast bowlers would be happy about bowling to her – in the same (sic) they would to her other male team mates – should this situation arise in the summer. 

A massive part of their tactics is physical intimidation, i.e. bowling fast and so that it bounces towards the head or chest. If she hits a bowler for a boundary then they might want to bowl a 'bouncer' at her in normal circumstances, but the vast majority of them are just not going to want to injure a woman, (a nice touch of benevolent sexism) so it places the other players in a tough situation.

Taylor's played for Darton CC's 1st XI. She'll have faced plenty of bowlers sending it down in at least the high 70s. She'll presumably have had the bowling machine at Loughborough higher than that. The leap up to County Second XI cricket is not so far in terms of standard. Knowing what I do of the club game, I find it very unlikely they'll have shirked bouncing her if they felt the need. Injuries are a part of sport, whether they involve being hit by the ball or twisting your ankle. The pros will bounce her, as they will anyone else. She's a professional sportswoman, and would expect no less. And like everyone else, she'll sink or swim.

As Mike Selvey as pointed out, Taylor doesn't play like a lot of women. She has a technique uniquely suited to the men's game. None of this is to say she'll fail. But if she does, it won't be for the reasons described in this blog.

On Warne, and another great spinner

Reviews of On Warne by Gideon Haigh and Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilika

So it came to pass that the greatest cricket writer of his generation tackled the greatest spin bowler of his generation. I expected a weighty tome - that it's a slim volume of 'essays' rather surprised me. How would Haigh tackle a life imbued with so many moments of shame, triumph, embarrassment, glory - not to mention the small matter of over 700 Test wickets - in so few pages?

He does so successfully. One section of the book which received heavy trailing, having been featured in the Times, is a masterful description of Warne's bowling action. Here is Warne at the start of the run up, flipping the ball from hand to hand – “languidly, voluptuously, like somebody feeling warm sand run through his fingers”. And sometimes it's the simple lines that work best: "There was a leg break, and then there was a leg break from Shane Warne."

This incredible section is really all we get to see of Warne in action on the field of play. There's hardly any mention of his batting and fielding. Haigh makes the oft-repeated point that Warne only had two balls - the leg break (with different degrees of overspin), and variations of a straight one (though fuck me if it felt like he had another 17 when bowling to Alec Stewart). He mentions the fact that Warne changed his style a little after the shoulder injury. But really, that's it. If you want a description of exactly how Warne operated on the field of play, you'd be better off turning to Amol Rajan's Twirlymen. A little later he discusses the moment when Warne talked his viewing audience through a wicket, but pauses only to make the point that as a piece of bowling, it's a fairly unremarkable trick.

He's right - if it was another bowler, it's unlikely that clip would have received half the coverage it has. That's why Haigh is probably right to dedicate most of his attention not to Warne the cricketer, but to Warne the man. And on this, he's predictably insightful. He posits Warne as a certain kind of Australian - the boy from the suburbs, perhaps never more at home than when guest-starring in Neighbours - and from this he begins to look at how Warne created himself - and sought confidence - by aligning with the likes of Ian Chappell and, of course, Terry Jenner.  He shows how he therefore could never have really got on with the likes of John Buchanan and Steve Waugh - because cricket came to him (through what was a very good development system) and not the other way around. Boot camps and uptight professionalism don't square easily with such a mindset.

Haigh's particularly good at spotting instances of the "Rashomon" effect -  whereby different players' autobiographies give somewhat varied impressions of different incidents. Ponting's decision to bowl at Edgbaston in 2005 either elicited some murmurs of disapproval or outright dressing room warfare, depending on whose autobiography you read. And he's even better on Warne in the context of his bowling partnerships - one with MacGill (Warne was always outbowled by him) and one with McGrath.

The only problem is that for all the intricate research and beautiful prose, there's a sense that when you scratch beneath it the book has nothing new to offer. Haigh is strong in defence of Warne's various scandals - particularly on how the ACB mishandled the approaches made by a bookmaker to him and Mark Waugh in 1994. But we kind of knew all that: the Barmy Army had a (by their standards) rather amusing song on the subject only a few years later. He's likewise strong on the hypocrisy of the media when it comes to Warne's adultery, but there's nothing new under the sun here either: public figures who are serial adulterers usually understand the price of the game they're playing. And while Haigh's good on Warne's cricket brain, pointing out (though again, he's not the first) that Warne predicted Gibbs' infamous 1999 World Cup dropped catch, he doesn't do enough on this. I rather wish he'd written about Warne's leadership of a young Rajasthan Royals side in the early days of the IPL. As cricket achievements go, it was something else, but barely gets a mention.

The weird thing is that for all these flaws, you come away from the book feeling you understand the man a great deal more than from any ghost-written autobiography. No interviews, no research beyond flicking through a few tomes that were sitting on his shelves - and yet the whole thing just works. I guess it's the power of good writing.

*

Speaking of spin bowlers, how well do you know Pradeep Mathew? What do you mean you don't? He's the greatest spinner who ever lived! Have a look at this website about him, for a start. Mathew could bowl equally well with either hand, and was possibly his country's best bowler whether bowling quick or slow. He did have 17 different deliveries, including a ball that pitched twice, and which spun both ways on each bounce. He once took 10-51 against New Zealand, but the record was disallowed due to the security situation at the ground. Among the batsmen to have been clean bowled by him were Border, Chappell, Crowe, Gatting, Gavaskar, Gower, Hadlee, Imran, Kapil, Lloyd and Miandad.

Of course, he didn't exist at all. He's the subject of Shehan Karunatilika's Chinaman, a novel about W.G Karunasena, an alcoholic, middle-aged hack who sees Mathew bowl a couple of times in the 1980s, is staggered by his talent, and then wonders why he's disappeared, never to be seen again.

The man may have been involved in match-fixing. He may have been forced out because he was the product of Tamil and Sinhalese parents. Who knows? W.G. is drawn deeper and deeper into his country's underworld as he attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery and, of course, Mathew's story becomes something of an objective correlative for his country's history. Just as the web link above might suggest, fact and fiction blur - we see Sri Lanka win the world cup in 1996, and we see all that hope soon betrayed. Meanwhile, the war to the north rumbles on in the background. 

It's a quite brilliant novel. The ending is, it must be said, rather trite. But the writing just prior to this conclusion, when W.G. defends his life and his obsession with fripperies like the game of cricket, is among the very best few pages of prose I've read in years.

And that goes of the whole book. Line-by-line it's moving, hilarious, and foreboding. By any measure it's a great piece of literature. For a first novel, it's simply incredible.

Sir Viv vs the forgotten demon

Othelloesque. What I love is that Viv is clearly struggling, clearly past his best - but his swagger's even more exaggerated - for once it really looks like he's desperate to show he's not scared. And you get this sense - just for a flash - that behind all the great innings there was a whole load of bullshit and bluster, that actually he was just as scared as everyone else. I love the little narratives the game produces.

Waqar explains fast bowling

Essential reading.

Bonus - Jayawardene speaks for a nation.