More Neil Manthorp
Neil has been earnestly telling Test Match Special listeners how sandwiches are 99p after 7pm in the shop near where he’s staying.
TMS make a grave, grave error every time they don’t use this man for a match.
Neil has been earnestly telling Test Match Special listeners how sandwiches are 99p after 7pm in the shop near where he’s staying.
TMS make a grave, grave error every time they don’t use this man for a match.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again using exactly the same words, because we aren’t going to improve on this:
For Steve Harmison, every innings is like a brief fairground ride with ghosts intermittently leaping out at you, only occasionally the ghosts give you sandwiches, but sometimes the sandwiches have horrifying fillings.
There, that’s pushed Laurence Elderbrook down a notch. You know what that means?
It means we’re one step closer to the NEXT Laurence Elderbook update. Woo hoo. All aboard the fun train.
Before this match Graeme Smith said that Kevin Pietersen might be successful in the short-term via the ‘balls to the wall approach’, so that’s what must have happened today.
But before half of you try and apply this colourful philosophy to your everyday lives, Graeme Smith also had a warning. He said the approach wasn’t sustainable. Big silent boo to Graeme Smith, everybody.
Wherever their balls were, it was nice to see England’s bowlers having a bit of fun.
England v South Africa, fourth Test at the Oval, day one
South Africa 194 all out (James Anderson 3-42)
England 49-1
Rejoice poverty-stricken victims of Sky. Cricket’s going to be free again. Top Welsh terrestrial station S4C have bought the rights to five Glamorgan matches. All the other stuff’s still on Sky, mind.
A spokeswoman for the BBC explained their decision not to bid for any of the 35 packages available:
“We have always said that any bid for live Test cricket is subject to value for money and ability to schedule. In our view neither of these criteria were met.”
We’re not entirely sure what the ECB could have done to help the BBC fit Test matches into their schedule. Tests are played in the daytime in summer and last for five days. If the BBC’s bid’s always going to be subject to that, then they’re out aren’t they?
We’re massively disappointed that none of the terrestrial channels made an effort to get the Friday night Twenty20 tournament. We really believe that having live Twenty20 on the telly on a Friday night could do wonders for the sport.
There you go. We’ve nailed our colours to the mast and those assorted greys and beiges that you can see fluttering in the breeze indicate our lack of hatred for Kevin Peter Pietersen (yes, that’s his real middle name).
More than that, we don’t quite get why so many people do hate him. He plays for England, averages 50, scores his runs with a clomping glee and is one of the few batsmen in the world who can explode from being smothered by the bowlers and instead make them run scared. He’s amazing.
Maybe it’s the caricature of him as an arrogant mercenary who’s only interested in personal glory. That’s a simplistic depiction.
The treachery of his switch of allegiance goes hand in hand with the iron-willed and successful pursuit of his ambitions; the arrogance is just his toeing the line of supreme, but largely justified, self confidence; and the attention-seeking switch hitting is just a pragmatic way of hitting gaps in the field. When the ball goes for four, the end justifies the means.
We’ve every reason to believe he’ll be a decent England captain. Maybe even a great one. He has little experience, but his track record of achieving what he sets out to do is staggering.
He was a number eight in South African domestic cricket. He came to England, averaged 50, hit four hundreds in four innings on an England A tour to India, then hit three hundreds in five one-day innings against the country of his birth almost immediately after being promoted to the one-day side. If he thinks he can make England successful, it’s worth giving him a go.
We thought that Pietersen should have been made captain when the one-day job was up for grabs. He’s a thinking batsman who comes up with some unconventional solutions. Hopefully he’ll adopt a similar approach with his captaincy.
“The best thing for me is to try and get back to being best batsmen I can be.”
Fair point. If they didn’t have to drop you, you wouldn’t be losing the captaincy and if you scored more runs, maybe the series would have gone better.
Michael Vaughan now knows that everything isn’t scripted especially for him.
He had to convince everyone he could successfully come back from injury a year ago. He made a hundred in his first innings back. That probably sent him over.
All the effort, all the hard work was instantly vindicated. Put that into the head of a captain who’d received one too many plaudits for an unexpected Ashes win and he maybe gets a bit ahead of himself.
Vaughan never makes runs in county cricket, but tells himself and us that he’s above that. He’s not.
An element of complacency seems to have set in - certainly in his own game. It was always a magic ball. A big score was always just round the corner. Maybe he didn’t really mean it when he said things like that, but it certainly seemed like he did.
Michael Vaughan was a great captain, but like most British sports people, he only really paid lip service to the philosophy of constant improvement that’s the hallmark of true success. Either that or he responded to pressure and criticism in an arrogant way that gave that impression.
If it’s the latter, he’s screwed. That basically just means that he’s not good enough and gets a bit defensive about his shortcomings.
If he did just get a bit lazy, then at least there’s something he can do about it - and he’s the kind of guy who would do something about it. His pride’s been clean bowled first ball and Vaughan’s a proud man.
Half-cut and half-asleep. We’ll come back to this another time.
Paul Collingwood is made entirely out of balls. It must be downright murder to walk, eat or do pretty much anything. To get a hundred in what seemed likely to be your last Test innings is one thing. To do it with a six is quite another.
Kevin Pietersen was caught by mid-on trying to reach his hundred with a six. Collingwood learnt from that mistake. The key is to middle it. Whoosh. 100. It was a similar shot to the one that took him to 200 against Australia.
He’s gritty, they say. He’s a fighter. He’s a scrapper. He’s got character. Normally the emphasis is on what’s not being said. He hasn’t got any real talent is the subtext. We’ve all come to hear only that subtext, but after an innings like that you remember that all those adjectives do actually apply.
Hope he shovels a few more runs today.
England v South Africa, third Test at Edgbaston, day one
England 231 all out (Alastair Cook 76, Ian Bell 50, Jacques Kallis 3-31, Andre Nel 3-47)
South Africa 314 all out (Neil McKenzie 72, Jacques Kallis 64, Andrew Flintoff 4-89, James Anderson 3-72, Ryan Sidebottom 3-81)
England 297-6 (Paul Collingwood 101 not out, Kevin Pietersen 94)
Shove Michael Vaughan down to number six - that’s where England keep their worst batsman.
Paul Collingwood seems likely to lose his place. He has another innings, but does he honestly look like a man who’ll make use of it? It’s the latest chapter in England’s number six saga and after Tim Ambrose’s brief appearance in the slot, the chapters are getting shorter.
Where other nations value their number six batsman, England use it as a dumping ground for the newest arrival to the team, the most likely departure from it, or, in the case of Ambrose, whoever’s left over.
South Africa have vehement letter C denier, AB de Villiers, batting at six. India have VVS Laxman. India’s number sixes have averaged 13 runs more than England’s since 2000. Even Bangladesh’s average more and you’re not even supposed to include Bangladesh when you talk about Test cricket, because it’s an unwritten rule that they don’t count.
Vaughan won’t move to six, because he’ll see it as a demotion, but that’s because of the way England treat the slot. If number six weren’t such a tainted limbo, maybe the fall of the fourth wicket wouldn’t send such shockwaves through the side and maybe the earlier batsmen wouldn’t live in constant fear of that.
England v South Africa, third Test at Edgbaston, day one
England 231 all out (Alastair Cook 76, Ian Bell 50, Jacques Kallis 3-31, Andre Nel 3-47)
South Africa 38-1
We’re generally in favour of Twenty20, but one downside is that it seems to necessitate the reading of one too many articles about cricket politics.
Cricket politics is dull and it eats into time that could better be spent keeping abreast of developments in the monkey kingdom. Hopefully someone’s on top of that. The last we heard, they’d developed a barter system and had been experimenting with various alloys. Have they developed the wheel yet?
In other news, a Test match starts and despite the format’s long history, two previous Tests between the sides and years of watching experience, pretty much nobody’s got any idea how it’s actually going to go.
Brilliant. You couldn’t artificially manufacture a better sporting contest.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India, the BCCI, wishes to run a Champions League featuring Twenty20 sides from around the world. The BCCI backs the IPL Twenty20 league and says sides featuring players from the rival ICL can’t appear in its Champions League.
Various county cricketers have played in the ICL, so the England and Wales Cricket Board, the ECB, is unhappy. They’re also unhappy because the BCCI want half the money from this Champions League.
The BCCI are sick of the ECB now and have told them to piss off. The ECB have said, ‘fine, we’ll go - but we’re starting our own Champions League and it’s going to be better than yours’. The BCCI said: ‘Do it. We’ll see whose is best,’ and then they’ve each taken it in turns to say ‘fine’ as the ECB have stormed out of the building in a huff.
The question is, have the ECB irritated the BCCI so much that the BCCI will crush the ECB’s Champions League or have the ECB pissed off the BCCI so royally that the BCCI will crush the ECB’s Champions League and the EPL and whatever else takes their fancy.
Because they can. India brings in three quarters of the money in the game and that fact wins pretty much every argument.
In a way it’d be best if there were two Champions Leagues, because then they’d both fit the Champions League template, which of course dictates that there should be as few champion teams as possible.
Champions leagues should really be stocked with ‘big’ teams who owe their status to repeated appearances in the Champions League, not sides who’ve ever actually won anything.