That was what we wrote as a little aide memoire to ourself and we see no reason not to use it as the title of this post.

Mohammad Asif has again tested positive for ‘banned substances’. Rumour has it that traces of finest unobtainium showed up in his urine. Unobtainium is outlawed because it’s too valuable to eat and it makes you glow like the Ready Brek kid.

Asif was rather leniently treated the first time he tested positive. He got a one year ban which was subsequently overturned, seemingly for the reason that he was a bit naive, which isn’t really any kind of a defence.

Now he’s tested positive again. The stupid thing is that Asif would probably be a world-class bowler without medication. He’s a line and length bowler with a lot of guile. He’s not a pace bowler who relies on searing pace or anything. It’s so needless.

Cricket needs its bowlers. It could lose a batsman or 20 with no ill-effects, but there are so few bowlers with real impact. Mohammad Asif was one, but unfortunately it seems that he’s also an idiot.

Tags: Mohammad Asif, Pakistan by King Cricket
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Umpires accuse Pakistan of ball-tampering. Pakistan refuse to play in protest.

After an investigation, Pakistan are found not guilty of ball tampering, but Inzy is banned for keeping his side off the field, so they’re saying that while he was right, he was also wrong.

Now the match is being reclassified as a draw, meaning Pakistan weren’t wrong when they refused to play. Ordinarily, if you refuse to play, you forfeit the match. By saying that they didn’t forfeit the match, this is tacit approval.

So Inzy got banned for correctly protesting against unproven allegations of ball tampering in a now acceptable manner. Is that where we are?

Tags: Inzamam-ul-Haq, Pakistan by King Cricket
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With Virender Sehwag doing some spectacular repairs to his surprisingly ordinary one-day record, it’s easy to overlook his juvenile, boundary-hitting accomplice, Suresh Raina.

Sehwag followed his 44 ball 78 against the might of Hong Kong with a 95-ball 119 against Pakistan’s increasingly mediocre attack. Suresh Raina took 68 balls to hit 101 against Hong Kong and kept his eye in with 84 off 69 balls yesterday.

We liked what we saw of Suresh Raina when England toured India a couple of years ago. He was 19 at the time and we thought him organised, composed and dynamic as well as loads of other adjectives which we haven’t really thought about, but which make it sound like we know what we’re talking about.

Tags: India, Pakistan, Suresh Raina by King Cricket
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Two things struck us about India’s defeat of Pakistan today. Actually, no things struck us. Two things gently bobbed towards us after we’d stared at the scorecard blankly for what seemed like forever.

Firstly, India fielded quite a lot of youngsters. Yusuf Pathan’s 25 and most of his team mates probably envy his deep voice and lack of self-consciousness when wearing a cardigan. Kids admire people at ease in a cardigan, right?

Rohit Sharma, Suresh Raina and Praveen Kumar are all 21, while Ishant Sharma and Piyush Chawla are both 19.

And then the second thing strikes you: They’re all REALLY good. It’s a more-than-decent international side that’s only unusual for the fact that none of the players have ever had a conversation about ‘whether it would be better to go with Nomadic Glow or Magnolia in the hall’.

Tags: India, Pakistan by King Cricket
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It’s over two years since we tipped Shakib al Hasan for great things. It’s been a bit of wait, but he might be getting somewhere.

After 75 in his last innings, he’s now hit a hundred. It was against Pakistan as well. Without wishing to be too harsh on Canada, who Shakib’s first hundred was against, Pakistan aren’t rubbish - like, say, Canada are.

Bangladesh were 10-3 when Shakib arrived at the crease and fell to 109-8 via 16-4 and 84-7. He hit 108 and Mashrafe Mortaza batted like a grown-up for 38. Bangladesh still lost, obviously, but if they find a couple more Shakib al Hasans, things are going to start getting interesting.

Tags: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Shakib Al Hasan by King Cricket
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Yes, Bangladesh lost again, but Shakib al Hasan had an all-round good game and that warrants coverage.

He took 2-50 as Pakistan pummelled their way to 308 and then he hit 75 off 73 balls. Shakib now averages 32 with the bat in one-day internationals and 33 with the ball. For a 21-year-old who’s played 46 matches, that’s not half bad, even if not all the matches were against Test standard opposition.

He has done things against Test teams though, even if his solitary hundred was against Canada. He’s taken wickets against every Test side he’s played against bar Australia - and he’s only bowled five balls against them, so let’s not judge him too harshly.

He’s also hit fifties against Sri Lanka, against India, against England, against India again, against South Africa and now against Pakistan.

It’ll be sad when other people start writing about him. We won’t be special any more. We won’t be Shakib al Hasan’s sole, special, mental media outlet.

Tags: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sakib al Hasan by King Cricket
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The opposition’s best batsman, Mohammad Yousuf, scored a hundred. Shahid Afridi hit 27 off 11 balls. Bangladesh’s top scorer was their number ten, Mashrafe Mortaza. Shakib al Hasan was out first ball.

There are four more of these fixtures. How are we going to get through them? Does anybody know anything about being really dangerously into gambling? How do you do that? Television has taught us that you win and win and win and then, when you bet an extraordinary amount, you lose. But in our experience, you lose straight away, get disheartened and don’t bet again for another three years.

Tags: Bangladesh, Pakistan by King Cricket
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The hyper-extensible elbows, double joints, injuries and banned substance-taking couldn’t stop Shoaib Akhtar. Unfortunately, the one thing he’s never been able to protect himself against is his own idiocy.

Shoaib misses matches for a million reasons, the million-and-first reason, his mouth, is the biggest problem. If only someone could have grabbed him by the shoulders, shaken him and told him to shut the hell up. Maybe then everyone would rate him alongside Imran Khan and Wasim and Waqar. As it is, only Shoaib himself thinks he belongs in that pantheon.

After barely playing for years, getting banned for drug-taking and hitting Mohammad Asif with a bat, it was hardly surprising that Shoaib Akhtar didn’t get a Pakistan contract at the start of the year. Shoaib thought otherwise and called the Pakistan Cricket Board incompetent, which is true on the whole, but probably unfair in this instance.

The PCB promptly banned him for five years because he was supposedly in breach of the players’ code of conduct. Shoaib isn’t a Pakistan player, however, so this doesn’t really make any sense.

So Shoaib will appeal and doubtless the ban will be overturned, but he’ll still not turn out for Pakistan for some other reason. Osman Samiuddin sums it up best over at Cricinfo:

“It is not a drama anymore, just a series of pathetic jousts between an unruly fool and a succession of inept administrations.”

It’s increasingly difficult to gauge whether it’s even worth worrying about Shoaib Akhtar any more. He doesn’t appear often enough for us to know if he’s still any good or not. Pakistan’s coach, Geoff Lawson, says he was bowling at 93mph in the nets last week though, so maybe we are missing something.

Tags: Pakistan, Shoaib Akhtar by King Cricket
5 Comments »

Our toast is dry and the larder is empty. To the jam shed!

This is tricky. Nasir Jamshed’s made a fine start to his career, walloping a 48 ball 61 and now a 64 ball 74. The problem is that both innings have been against Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe aren’t actually a recognised cricket team.

We don’t recognise them, that is. Put the Zimbabwe cricket team in front of us and we could mistake them for a loganberry or a Dyson Airblade. We’d never have them down as a cricket team though. Never.

Even so, you can’t ignore Nasir Jamshed. Pakistan may vomit short-trousered debutants with clockwork regularity, but for every Mohammad Sami, there’s a Waqar Younis and for every Salman Butt, there’s a Saeed Anwar. You just can’t turn a blind eye, or even two myopic ones.

Consider Nasir Jamshed acknowledged, but not yet embraced.

Tags: Nasir Jamshed, Pakistan by King Cricket
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Do you want the better batsman or the better wicketkeeper behind the stumps for your team? That argument’s been represented by any number of individual duels over the years. Recently though, we think you’ll all agree that the better batsman’s been winning out, in general.

Blame Adam Gilchrist. He’s a great wicketkeeper, but his batting’s so spectacular it easily overshadows that fact. International sides want wicketkeepers who average 50 now, let alone 40. They’ll never get it because Gilchrist’s a one-off, but it won’t stop them trying.

But there might be some hope for the thoroughbred stumpers. Might Twenty20, that impure bastard version of the game, bring wicketkeeping skills to the fore once more?

Here’s our rationale - obliterate it in the comments with your usual gusto. How many batsmen do you need in Twenty20 cricket? How many do you really, really need? We reckon five - five specialists at any rate.

Presumably at least one of your five bowlers won’t be Tufnell-esque and presumably any eligible keepers are at least half-competent with the bat. If you’re serious about winning, then you don’t really want to be losing more than five wickets in 20 overs. Things aren’t going your way if that happens.

So you can fairly happily pick your best keeper. And you know what - there’s an added incentive.

In Twenty20 cricket, with scoring being so low and tight, batsmen get cheeky. It’s not totally unknown for them to take a run off a ball which goes straight through to the keeper. They like to jump around as well to disrupt the bowler’s line and length, coming down the pitch or batting out of their crease.

So wouldn’t it help if you had a keeper who was good enough to stand up to the stumps to fast-medium bowlers? No cheeky byes. No batting out of the crease. The wicketkeeper’s having a real impact there.

Twenty20: saviour of the wicketkeeping tradition. There’d be a touch of irony in that.

Tags: Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Zimbabwe, county cricket, wicketkeeping by King Cricket
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