Graeme Swann

Graeme Swann, his cat and drink driving

Another day, another cricket story where all the most important facts are being omitted. Graeme Swann’s defence for being caught driving while slightly under the influence at 3am was that he had to go and get some screwdrivers from Asda because the cat was caught under the floorboards.

So many questions unanswered:

• Does the cat piss in his kit bag to claim it as its own?
• Why doesn’t Graeme own any screwdrivers? What does he use to ruin screw heads so that no-one can ever get them out again?
• Why does he drive a sportscar?
• What had he been drinking?
• Has the cat apologised for being an idiot?

As a spin bowler, Graeme Swann is England’s most important player

Hopefully no-one’s told him yet and hopefully he never realises, but England’s performance hinges on how well Graeme Swann plays.

Obviously, taking nine wickets for not a lot had a huge impact on how England won this Test, but nowadays Swann HAS to perform.

That’s not because England’s other bowlers are mediocre. They’re not. It’s because England are only picking four bowlers and Swann is therefore bowling far more than a quarter of his side’s overs. If he bowls badly, the seamers have to get through more work, meaning they bowl worse.

On top of that, being the sole spinner, Swann’s got to be the man taking wickets on fifth day pitches as well. His batting is merely a bonus.

We move that all words such as ‘talisman’ and ‘linchpin’ be reclaimed from Andrew Flintoff and are instead applied to the chinny tweaker.

Graeme Swann is probably underrated

Graeme Swann saved England with five wickets and in an earlier pre-referral era, he might have had seven. Not bad for an off-spinner in the first innings of a match.

Not bad for an off-spinner in any innings, many say. Maybe Warne and Murali are to blame, but everyone thinks you need mystery these days. You don’t. It helps, but it’s not like a spin bowler can’t take wickets with turn and a bit of nous.

Swann compliments tend to take the form ‘he’s doing very well considering’. Graeme Swann’s doing well full stop: 53 Test wickets at 29.60. In this day and age, that’s actually pretty special.

It’s a tough life being a spinner because you’re generally on your own. Fail to take wickets in the fourth innings and everyone says you’re rubbish; that you should always take wickets when conditions are in your favour. Yet batsmen always have conditions in their favour and they all fail often enough. Batsmen have the benefit of six or seven mates to support them though.

Swanny’s alone and he’s doing all right.

Graeme Swann interviews

You want Graeme Swann to be man of the match every time he plays, because he’s head and shoulders above everyone else in world cricket when it comes to the post-match interview.

Today’s offering after a consolation win that followed six consecutive defeats:

“Everyone talks about this big word ‘momentum’. We’re on a roll now, aren’t we?”

He’s such a consistent performer these days. There are a lot of young players who could learn a lot by poring over some of Swann’s interviews on the laptop.

Graeme Swann’s joyous bat throwing

After his lower order skittering, Graeme Swann claimed that Mushtaq Ahmed was his batting mentor. Graeme Swann’s pleasingly unafraid to tell outright lies every now and again, but we think he was serious about this.

Mushtaq Ahmed shouldn’t be anybody’s batting mentor. You can’t just find the nearest person who’s older than you, call them a mentor and hope something productive comes out of it. Where would we be if Kris Kross had used some passing wino as a mentor?

Actually, maybe they did, judging by the fact that they wore all their clothes backwards for no discernable reason whatsoever. And thinking about it, Kris Kross didn’t make a huge contribution to the world in which we live. They could have had Mark E Smith as a mentor and achieved no less.

Mark E Smith’s not our mentor, but we do consider him a role model.

Graeme Swann loves dismissing left-hand batsmen

We dare say Graeme Swann quite likes dismissing right-hand batsmen as well, but he doesn’t do it half as often.

Of his six wickets in this match, only one was right-handed – Jerome Taylor. This is by no means unusual for Swann. Against right-handers he looks an everyday bowler. Against left-handers, he bowls one ball to size them up and then dismisses them with the second ball.

Good. Test cricket’s long been sullied with more than its fair share of cack-handers; weaselling around, stinking up the place with their sickening wrong-handedness.

It’s almost like they don’t know it’s a genetic flaw. It’s like they think they’re as good as normal people. We’ve even heard rumours that at some grounds they’re allowed to use the same changing rooms as the right-handed players.

Graeme Swann takes five Test wickets

It’s a big deal. Andrew Flintoff pretty much never manages it and he’s supposed to be the best bowler since the Bowlinator 9000 perfected the 95mph googly.

We don’t know for sure whether anyone ever followed our instructions as to how to help Graeme Swann into the England side from back in 2006, but it seems highly likely that someone did. Who says that persistent, mindless, entirely inappropriate shouting with no regard for the legal consequences never paid dividends?

Graeme Swann is bowling pretty well, batting a bit better, proving us right and acting as one of the better interviewees in Test cricket. We should be pretty happy, but the edge is taken off a bit because his presence constantly reminds us that Monty isn’t in the side.

Graham or Graeme Swann?

Graeme Swann’s selection for England has opened up an old, rancid can of worms. Worms of spelling. Spelling worms.

To rid the world of these vile spelling worms once and for all, Graeme Swann is a Graeme, not a Graham.

Here are some more famous cricketing Grahams/Graemes:

Graham Gooch
Graeme Hick
Graham Thorpe
Graeme Smith

We’ve long had a belief that people who use Yahoo! Answers are the dregs of humanity, so imagine our delight when we found that there was a Graham/Graeme issue on there.

Yahoo! Answers is a website where people ask a question and ‘the public’ provide answers. It’s a massively flawed concept – as with anything involving the public. It seems to attract the kinds of people who are moved to answer questions when they don’t actually have answers.

If you enjoy being irritated and hating all of humanity (like we do) it’s well worth a read. People will actually answer a direct question with ‘don’t know’, as if the world can’t get enough of their words.

In answer to the question, ‘should I name my son Graham or Graeme?’ the user ‘graybear’ (no capital) answers:

“I had no clue how to say Graeme when I first read it. I left off the R and thought, ‘Gay-me?’ The next thought was Gray-me. You and he will get really sick of correcting people.”

graybear eventually concludes that the child shouldn’t be called Graeme, because “it’s not worth it.”

Graeme Swann fails to conquer his bail addiction

For years Graeme Swann has secretly suffered from a rare and debilitating disease. Graeme is addicted to bails.

Graeme’s been through a number of treatments – enforced withdrawal, hypnosis, various types of medication – but in the end he just has to accept it. He’s a bail addict and he’ll never be fully cured.

During the second one-day international between Sri Lanka and England at Dambulla, Graeme fell spectacularly from the bail wagon.

Standing at third-man, he was suddenly overcome by bail lust. He charged in and snatched the bails before the astonished eyes of his team mates.

His latest treatment is to always carry two small pieces of dowel as a substitute for his beloved bails.

Graeme Swann the hero for England

We’ve been waiting to write that headline since March 31st last year, when we made Graeme Swann one to watch for that season. Graeme let us down then, but since being given a chance in the England side, he’s been encouragingly solid at a time when solidity has been at a premium.

4-34 is a tidy day’s work for an England spinner, even if you are in Sri Lanka. In fact being in Sri Lanka is of arguable benefit. In Sri Lanka, toddlers’ first steps typically involve coming down the pitch to off-breaks. Speaking of walking, it was nice to see Kumar Sangakkara doing so. He’s a different man to the gobby one who Nasser Hussain rapidly came to hate.

To return to Graeme Swann, he also made a nice 25 (the second highest score for England) before permitting Stuart Broad centre stage for his customary low-scoring one-dayer victory batting. Whatever the pitch, England’s batting’s still fragile in one-day cricket. Worryingly so. At least we would worry, if one-day cricket seemed at all relevant at this exact moment.

Sri Lanka v England, third one-day international at Dambulla
Sri Lanka 164 (Tillekeratne Dilshan 70, Graeme Swann 4-34, Ryan Sidebottom 3-19)
England 164 (Farveez Maharoof 3-34)
England won via Duckworth-Lewis calculations