Extras

Out of the Ashes extra scenes

Worth watching to see Matthew Fleming getting super-nervy whenever a batsman hits a shot towards the car while he’s coaching at the MCC Cricket Camp in Afghanistan.

Win a copy of the DVD:

• 50 words on how you’d get any non-Test playing nation to the 2015 World Cup
• Send your entry to king@kingcricket.co.uk
• Last day for entry

We’d like to see more entries for France, Italy and Germany, quite frankly.

Win Out of the Ashes on DVD (UK residents only)

To be in with a chance of winning one of 10 copies of Out of the Ashes on DVD, simply name a non-Test-playing nation and in 50 words or fewer explain how you would get them to the 2015 World Cup. Funniest and most colourful answers win.

Don’t put your entry in the comments section. Email us at king@kingcricket.co.uk. Entries must be in before we get out of bed on Thursday, so maybe send them on Wednesday to be on the safe side. Include a postal address, so we can send you your prize if you win. (UK residents only. Sorry about that.)

We’ve also been asked to say: “Out of The Ashes is now available on DVD from all good retailers and from Vivaverve.com,” which seems oddly worded to our eyes.

London Tigers tour to Bangladesh – joke needed

London Tigers are sending a team to tour Bangladesh at the same time as the World Cup. London Tigers help underprivileged youths, so we’re having a hard time coming up with a joke for today’s post. Maybe something about them being better than England? Is there something in that?

You’re always on shaky ground with worthy causes. Press releases are better when they’re shoddily written kack about cars or excruciatingly ill-informed drivel about YouTube.

London Tigers operate in Westminster, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Tower Hamlets and Redbridge. Can we do a joke about never having heard of any of those places, or is that disrespectful?

Take a look at this picture:

Could you pretend you hadn’t heard of Tower Hamlets or Redbridge for comedic effect after looking at that picture?

Could you? How do you think they’d feel about that?

Ashes series were already too frequent

We’d like to add a slightly more sober footnote to our post from last Friday.

We described back-to-back Ashes series as being ‘quite literally the worst idea of all time’. We stand by that and would like say that it’s actually the worst idea by an even greater margin that we had previously thought. Here’s why.

Every other year?

Ashes series have long been played every other year, give or take a few months as a result of the different seasons in England and Australia. However, up until fairly recently, there was only an event once every four years.

Up until satellite TV and the internet, only home Ashes series were a phenomenally big deal. Yes, you could get highlights at midnight on BBC1 and you could read the newspaper reports a day late, but an away series wasn’t all-pervasive like a home series was.

An away Ashes series didn’t unfold before you. It was something faintly unreal and distant. You really had to make an effort to keep up with it.

This meant that a home Ashes series was even more significant. The home series was the one you watched. This was the one people most cared about and it only happened once every four years.

Home and away

These days away series are almost as big a deal. You can get up early or stay up late and watch live coverage. You can read a million news reports via the internet. You can follow it on Twitter or on an obscure English cricket blog which unexpectedly goes all serious during the first Test.

An away Ashes series is now that much more vivid, it might as well be a home series. In effect, the big event is every other year, not once every four years. It’s slightly less special.

Now twice the same year? That’s really not special.

10 Ashes Tests in a row

Sweet fucking Christ, does everyone in the world of cricket suffer from all three major forms of retardation? This is quite literally the worst idea of all time.

Back-to-back Ashes series. Ten England v Australia Tests in a row. Does no-one who has control over anything have even the most basic understanding of sport?

We should have seen it coming

The fresh, punchy Twenty20 World Cup that was far, far shorter than the 50-over World Cup was really popular. The overlong 50-over World Cup was massively disappointing.

They decided to shorten the 50-over World Cup and for a very short while we were all full of hope. Lesson learned?

No. They then announced that the Twenty20 World Cup was going to be longer, because that was the popular one.

But back-to-back Ashes? That’s something else

We get that the next Ashes in Australia can’t be played the same year as the World Cup that’s also taking place there. But quite honestly, we’d rather miss a series than have two back-to-back.

Yeah yeah yeah, commercial concerns and all that. We get it. But we also don’t give a shit about that.

Let us spell it out clearly and simply: the Ashes is a big deal because it is an event. That’s the whole fucking point.

It’s not about England v Australia. That’s why no-one gives a toss about these one-day matches. The Ashes is special because it doesn’t happen every day. Looking forward to it is half the point.

You can’t have the best thing all of the time because it rapidly becomes devalued. Too much of anything and it becomes mundane.

Any idiot knows that your 10th slice of cake isn’t as good as your first. And don’t you dare disagree – we’re not in the mood. Eating cake all the time would be fun for about half a day. Then it would be boring. Then it would be miserable.

What possible excuse can you give for having the same two teams play 10 Tests in a row against each other?

Let’s ask ECB marketing boss, Steve Elworthy. Why, Steve? Why?

Why the fuck are you ruining one of the last decent events in cricket?

“It’s important to maintain momentum.”

Jesus. This is what we’re up against.

We are completely fucked. Cricket will be dead within a decade.

Overheard in our local

Three of the least cricket people you could ever imagine. One guy had been explaining how he could never move abroad because he’d just bought a 50 inch plasma TV.

Here are some sample quotes.

“It’s like the World Cup, but the Ashes is only ever played between England and Australia. It lasts for weeks and weeks and it’s all one thing. This last one that’s just finished – with England beating them down there after God knows how many years – it was ab-so-lute-ly mag-NIFicent.”

“You know me, I’m not into sport, but this Ashes was just magic.”

“The one-day stuff that’s happening now is good, but with all the different types of bowlers and the field changes and that, an Ashes series is something else.”

Bet these guys have never taken part in market research carried out on behalf of the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Casual cricket fans giving the impression that it’s the nuances of cricket that are the real draw? Don’t they want ‘maximums’ greeted by upbeat pop music (the sporting equivalent of sitcom canned laughter)?

Are they SURE they don’t want that?

Paul Collingwood – an England professional

The days of Gentlemen and Players are long gone, but Paul Collingwood would have been the latter – a man who never lost sight of the fact that it was all about scoring runs; taking wickets and catches; and occasionally missing the ball often enough that your team salvaged a draw.

He was a state school batsman where his contemporaries were generally more privileged or from overseas, so he was our representative in the top six. And maybe it all goes back to that era of Gentlemen and Players, but he was subtly patronised by the public school, brahmin-esque cricket establishment for much of his career. He ‘made the most of his talent’ they said. He didn’t have much style.

Substance

Let’s get something straight: batting is about scoring runs. If you score runs, you are a good batsman; if you don’t score runs, you aren’t a good batsman.

Suggestions that Paul Collingwood ‘got the most out of his talent’ so that he could score more runs than ‘better’ batsmen are spectacularly illogical. Getting the most out of his talent is what made Paul Collingwood a better batsman than all the weak-willed stylists and technically correct teasers who trailed in his wake. Every international cricketer should make the most of their talent. That should be a given.

What is style, anyway?

Why should one stroke be more aesthetically pleasing than another? Is there something inherently beautiful about a textbook cover drive or do we learn to appreciate it because of what we hear from other people? Off-side strokes are invariably considered more stylish than leg-side strokes and this arises from the fact that the amateur Gentlemen of yesteryear played into the off-side having been brought up on true pitches, while the Professionals worked the ball to leg, because it was all about the runs.

Paul Collingwood was all about runs.

In India

It was in Nagpur that we realised that Paul Collingwood brought more than just ‘a bit of ginger’ to the team, as he had once claimed. He scored 400 runs at 57.14 in India, which is better than almost every English batsman who’s ever gone over there. That Nagpur hundred held England together.

In Australia

Forget the 2010-11 series. In 2006, an Aussie paper called him England’s worst ever number four. A lot of people said he was out of his depth. Paul Collingwood promptly scored 206.

Far from being out of his depth, Collingwood showed that he was in fact the complete antithesis of the spineless Pom who crumbles at the first ‘g’day’. It should have been no surprise. When he and Alastair Cook had both scored hundreds against Pakistan earlier in the year, Cook had revealed how Collingwood had kept the score ticking over when he himself couldn’t even get the ball off the square.

Cook was openly admiring Collingwood’s ability when he said that, but memories are short when it comes to Paul Collingwood. Where a poor series for some batsmen would be branded ‘poor form’, Collingwood was more likely to be dismissed with a curt ‘he’s crap’.

The grit

You can’t talk about Colly without talking persistence of motive and effort – grit.

Great bowling? Duff pitch? Impossible match situation? Personal poor form? All water off a duck’s teflon-coated umbrella to Paul Collingwood.

He was in dire form against South Africa in 2006 and about to be dropped. In what had appeared likely to be his last Test innings, he worked his way to 94 not out.

Kevin Pietersen had been dismissed going for the glory hundred when on 94 earlier in the day. Did Collingwood learn from this? Yes, of course he did – he learnt that you should middle it when trying to reach your hundred with a six.

How dour and functional of him.

More obviously gritty were the four-hour 74 at Cardiff in the 2009 Ashes, for which every England fan will be forever grateful, and the even more gloriously lumpen twin innings in South Africa that also led to nine-wickets-down draws. A 99-ball 26 at Centurion and a one-man leaving/missing case study at Newlands that saw 40 runs scored in more than four and a half hours.

Apologies if you think this post is a bit long, but we’ve always wanted to do Paul Collingwood justice because we feel like other people won’t. Frankly, he’s one of our heroes.

England’s Test selectors got everything right

It’s not cool to say that. But we’re not cool. We once did a live Twitter review of a cricket computer game while drinking real ale.

On the face of it, picking a Test side is simply a matter of finding your 11 best players and then saying their names out loud in front of some microphones, but in reality there’s far more to it than that. We’d say England’s selectors got it bang on leading up to and during the 2010-11 Ashes, so hats off.

Ian Bell at six?

Not strictly speaking a selectorial decision, but linked. Some people will say that Ian Bell should have moved up the batting order and while we think that’s ultimately a good idea, it wasn’t a bad move to leave him at six in this series.

England traditionally use number six as a dumping ground. All-rounders, wicketkeepers and debutant batsmen slot in there and four wickets down so often seems like it’s going to be five wickets down.

In the fifth Test, England lost their fifth wicket and because there had been a nightwatchman, Ian Bell strolled out in the form of his life. How dispiriting must that have felt for the Aussie bowlers? Bell promptly hit a hundred, as did Matt Prior, batting at eight.

That they achieved this from down the order probably had more impact than if they’d been batting at four and five. Plus, it didn’t undermine Paul Collingwood, which was wise (even if it didn’t actually work out in practice).

Dropping people

Ian Bell was in the side after a famously galvanising dropping. The same thing happened to Andrew Strauss. In effect, selection decisions made good players better.

Perservering with people

Alastair Cook HAD to be dropped before the Ashes, according to quite a large number of people. We disagreed and so did the selectors – thank Frigg.

Selection and rotation of bowlers

Chris Tremlett – masterstroke. Tim Bresnan – masterstroke.

Picking the right players in the first place

James Anderson could have been abandoned plenty of times in years gone by. Graeme Swann was actually quite a leftfield selection when he first appeared.

Matt Prior was identified as England’s wicketkeeper some time ago and has ridden it out, even though barely a day goes by without someone pushing some county keeper’s case on the grounds that he hit a six in a Twenty20 match once. Foster, Kieswetter, Read, Davies? None of these would have been a patch on Prior in our opinion.

The players made the selectors look good, but the selectors allowed them to do that.

An Ashes graph

Bert writes:

Ged has proved that life is better explained by diagrams, so I’ve made a graph.

It shows the innings scores from this Ashes series. The fall of wickets is indicated by numbers. I’ve used blue for England because they play ODIs in blue, and yellow for Australia because they play all their sports in green and yellow.

It is a thing of beauty, possibly the single most beautiful image ever created that doesn’t involve a cricketer straddling a hairy pig. When it was completed, I had a little cry. I followed that with twenty-five minutes of laughing.

Analysis abounds, but my favourite is that every time England reached 300, they also reached 500. In fact, Australia took only six wickets in that range in the whole series.

This is in diagram form what KC said the other day (or last year, depending on when he posts this) about England being ruthless.

My other best graph-fact is that if you examine it carefully you can just about see that Australia are rubbish.

No doubt people can find their own little favourite bits. That’s the thing about great art – it has something for everyone.

Another reason why Australia lost the Ashes

Beer sales are down. Moisturiser sales are through the roof.

The metrosexualisation of Australian society has damaged the cricket team immeasurably.

No-one eats steak any more; they all eat scallops in an Indonesian-style jus. When Simon Katich isn’t in Sydney, male body hair in the city is down by a quarter.

In a recent survey, Australia was voted the ponciest country in the entire wo-

[Hubris overload. Hubris overload. Abort post. Abort post.]