Giles Clarke – an unfair but fairly amusing comparison of two pictures
Charged with massive fraud involving $8bn investment scheme
Alleged to have bowled a deliberate no-ball
If England are playing cricket, we’re supporting them. That’s the rule. However, if it came down to it, we’re wondering whether a Pakistan win in the third Test might not be the worst thing in the world. Why? Because of the Ashes.
We know someone who sometimes starts getting miserable about going back to work halfway through Saturday. You can look too far ahead and miss what’s happening today.
Cricket only has a handful of sides. Every time your team is playing one of them, it’s a special occasion. We’re currently midway through a Test series against Pakistan and half anyone says is about a series that hasn’t even started yet. What about now?
No, Pakistan aren’t shit. It’s easy to say that Pakistan are shit when they keep getting bowled out for double figures, but what happens when the ball stops swinging and the momentum of an unfolding batting collapse wanes? They put on 200 with their last four wickets even though one of those batsmen is injured. Imagine if specialist batsmen had been in then.
Similarly, their catching.
So they put down 426 chances at Edgbaston. They still bowled England out for 251 in their first innings. That’s actually terrifying.
Maybe Pakistan will fold again, but it’s worth watching and it’s worth paying attention in order to find out. The first two Tests have been hugely absorbing and have probably featured more excitement than the first three Ashes Tests will later in the year.
No, no, no, no, no. Shut up. Get out. We don’t care what the public think. The public are idiots. The public lap up Chris Moyles and Coldplay. You could put a lump of human excrement in front of them and they’d find it entertaining as soon as it became familiar.
Don’t pay attention to what the public want because you end up in Idiocracy
“… people wrote books and movies – movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting.”
You actually have to point out good stuff to the public because they’re too stupid to identify it themselves.
Variety is good. Different opponents are good. Different match situations are good. Not knowing what’s going to happen is good.
Pakistan are not Australia and that is actually a good thing. There is no cricket team in the world less predictable than Pakistan and that too is a good thing. Despite the success of the Premier League, sport isn’t actually about watching groups of players go through the motions when you know what’s going to happen in the end. It’s about watching a match develop and occasionally being surprised. Pakistan will give you that.
To talk about Alastair Cook’s form in terms of the first Test at Brisbane is disrespectful to Pakistan and also misguided. To talk about James Anderson’s swing bowling in terms of Kookaburra balls and less helpful conditions in Australia is missing the point.
And to ask England’s players what they think about Ricky Ponting saying it’s ‘possible’ for Australia to win the Ashes 5-0? Well, that’s even more mindless than asking the Australian cricket captain whether his team are capable of winning cricket matches, because if you can win one, you can win five.
Because then people might realise that something significant is happening right now.
Martin Crowe says they should stop playing one-day internationals (ODIs). Do you agree?
We can’t honestly say that we pay much attention to ODIs – even England’s – but set against that, we do have great memories of 50-over World Cups. The Twenty20 World Cup is hugely entertaining, but we’re not sure that’s just because it’s a 20-over competition. We think it’s actually the fact that pretty much all the matches are meaningful.
There’s also the fact that we enjoyed the first Twenty20 World Cup more than the next two. Why was that? It was less predictable. No-one had a clue what they were doing and so you actually had to pay attention. If something of this could be injected into the 50-over World Cup, we feel like it would have a lot to offer. It would once again become ‘an event’.
So yes, do away with ODIs except for World Cups. Or maybe play odd exhibition matches as part of Test/Twenty20 tours. Also, don’t muck about with the rules. You only need to do that because everyone’s so wearied by familiarity. It’s not the rules that are the problem, it’s that matches have become formulaic through so much repetition.
We don’t get it. It was only Pragyan Ojha. What’s the big deal?
If we’d taken 800 Test wickets, we wouldn’t be jumping up and down about getting Pragyan Ojha out. We’d have been more worked up about dismissing better batsmen, like Ian Salisbury or Chris Lewis.
Then a chronic inability to spell people’s first names shouldn’t hold you back:
“England cricketers Andrew Strauss, Alistair Cook and Eion Morgan put the Jaguar XJ through its paces”
At least they got ‘Andrew’ right. One out of three isn’t too bad and the surnames are all spot-on. Good work. Were they joined by anyone else on this track day?
“They were joined by ex-Formula One driver Martin Bundle”
Dear Lord. Even we know that’s not his surname and the only thing we know about cars is that they’re bastards who let you down every now and again.
Maybe this is ultra-sophisticated marketing, targeted at pedants who run sports websites.
The leg stump is the poor man’s stump. We think it’s time it got equal rights.
How often have you heard the following, or similar, after an LBW appeal:
“Hawk-Eye shows that would have just clipped leg, so that’s probably a fair decision.”
No it isn’t. If it’s hitting the stumps, it should have been given out. If it was just clipping the off stump, you’d say the batsman had got away with it.
It seems like Hawk-Eye needs to show the ball twatting right into leg stump, clipping middle, before a batsman’s really out. Bullshit.
We’ve heard that they keep leg stumps in a separate place in the groundsman’s shed; leg stump ghettoes where the roof leaks and it’s draughty.
To some people, Mani is Ehsan Mani, former president of the ICC and a man who once mistakenly shook hands with special correspondent Dad. To us and to many of our generation, Mani is ex-Stone Roses bassist, Gary Mounfield, now with Primal Scream and also working on Peter Hook’s hilariously-named Freebass project – so called because it features three (’free’) bassists.
All of which is just our way of saying that we feel a little disorientated when we read quotes like this:
“I think the lessons to be learnt for Cricket Australia would be big ones after this incident,” Mani said. “Australia threw all their eggs into one basket over the last few years and it’s come back to bite them because they lost support from other boards while pursuing the BCCI.”
Wise words from the man who brought you the distinctive, timeless opening to I Wanna Be Adored as well as the rumbling threat of Kowalski.
Frank Duckworth says that if there is a problem with his and Detective Sergeant Lewis’s method of deciding rain-affected games, it is in the fact that the ICC deem five overs to be sufficient to constitute a match.
We agree. If we could characterise a five-over minimum requirement as Naomi from 90210 after she’d made allegations about Mr Cannon, we can then reproduce her stirring apology speech:
“He’s not the pervert. I am… I perverted justice… morality… and the truth.”
You’re forgiven Five-Over Minimum Requirement. Mr Cannon/the Duckworth-Lewis calculations are in the clear. We can all see that now.
But what do we do with Naomi/the five-over minimum requirement?
Bert writes:
A few days ago, I enrolled Bert Jr. (aged 7½) at our local cricket club. This is Phase 1 of Project Free-Test-Match-Tickets-For-Life-Because-Son-Is-England-Captain. The club was holding its junior indoor net. Eighteen kids, aged between 7 and 12, all being “organised” by two coaches (or, as I shall see them from now on, heroically misguided masochists).
As regular readers will recall, Bert Jr. is already a county cricket aficionado, having been to two days of the same match last summer. Keen therefore to become a fully rounded cricketist, he leapt at the chance to join a club. Obviously, Bert wasn’t without some knowledge of the basics of playing cricket. I had spent many a summer hour teaching him the fundamentals of a proper dead-bat defence, instead of his preferred pull for four over the patio table (and in one case his step-down-the-wicket lofted drive back over the bowlers head and, it must be admitted, over the house).
The session was all about running. As far as the coaches were concerned, this meant running between the wickets, carefully controlled by clear and decisive calling, aligning the body so as to maintain a view of the ball during the running and the proper technique for sliding the bat home. As far as the eighteen were concerned, it just meant running. Did I say heroic? The way they managed to keep going with the lesson to the widest possible distribution of children was truly magnificent.
“So you need to keep the bat in your left hand if the ball goes to the… Norman, sit down… goes to the leg… and you, Brian… side, so that you can… yes of course it meant you as well, Brian, why would you think it didn’t… can see the… stop throwing that ball, Derek… the ball at all… it’s your own time you’re wasting here, you know… times.”
The following morning, Bert Jr. elected not to watch CBBC while having his breakfast and instead tuned in to the last day of the first Test at Chittagong. He watched fascinated as the Bangladesh players put into practice (sort of) exactly what the coaches had said to do, stealing a yard or two as non-striker, clear calling and watching the ball. Bert’s mother came in, ashen-faced and clearly distraught at the turn our family life had taken. “But he’s learning,” I said, helpfully. “What can I do?”
Bert’s mother would consider a successful outcome to Project FTMTFLBSIEC to be the worst possible scenario. I’ve tried to warn her that it is inevitable and even more so with Bert’s younger brother, Ernie, who on top of having our family’s innate cricket skills was also born with David Gower’s hair.
We never wrote about Andy Caddick when he retired. We should have done.
Say what you like about Andy Caddick. Say that he was mad as pies; say that he got picked for England because people wanted him there to fix stuff while they were on tour; say he was a nutcase who thought he should get picked by England when he was 40; say that Nasser Hussain had to treat him like he was eight to get the best out of him. Say all of those things, but he was a fine bowler.
The defining statistic about Andy Caddick is that his bowling average was 37 in the first innings of Test matches and only 20 in the second. It says it all really. It says that he didn’t shape Test matches and it says that he should have done because he could run through a side like undercooked chicken through a digestive system.
His last Test performance was 7-94 against Australia (3-121 in the first innings), which isn’t a bad way to go out, but we’ll remember him most for his performances against the West Indies in 2000.
We’ve written about Caddick’s four wickets in an over at Headingley before, so we won’t repeat ourself (it’s worth clicking that link though, if you’ve not read it before). What we haven’t written about is his 5-16 (1-58 in the first innings) at Lord’s a couple of Tests before that. That spell of bowling was right up there with anything we’ve seen for England. On his good days, in the second innings, Andy Caddick could produce a sublime blend of swing and seam that few have ever matched.
We can picture it now and it’s not something you ever really see from other bowlers. Maybe it’s because tall bowlers rarely swing the ball.
Caddick would run in robotically, all elbows, legs and ears. As he got into his delivery stride, the hand holding the ball would jag out sideways for some reason and that would signal an end to all the angular awkwardness. From there, the limbs would sort themselves out and the ball would arc through the air, swinging and making it difficult for the batsman to line it up. As it pitched, it would jag off the seam AND rear up towards the bat handle.
If the batsman was really good, he’d edge it.
Animals being conspicuously indifferent to cricket
Cricket bats in unusual places
Live cricket commentary