Jerome Taylor

About even for the Taylors

Yesterday, we were presented with the following two headlines via our RSS feeds:

Taylor delighted by ’special’ MBE

and

Taylor charged after bar scuffle

Slightly disappointingly, Claire Taylor didn’t celebrate her MBE by going on an all-dayer that culminated in a drunken argument with bar staff because they wouldn’t give her any more change for the fruity. It was actually West Indies’ Jerome Taylor who was in the scuffle.

Just goes to show that it all balances out in the end. One Taylor gets an MBE, one gets pissed-up and scraps with a copper. Don’t let the Taylors tell you that they’re any better than you. They’re not.

Jerome Taylor bowls fast, full and straight

Jerome Taylor routed a batting side. You have to like someone who does that, even if they do it against your team. Given a choice between England ‘bowling with discipline’ again or Jerome Taylor taking 5-11 again, we’ll go with Taylor’s display thank you very much.

Taylor’s not ludicrously fast, but he’s fast enough and he actually pitched the ball up, which was something of a novelty in this match. The pitch was slow and the shorter you bowled, the more time the batsman had. They still couldn’t score easily, but it was no way to take wickets.

England’s lanky bowlers all bowled fairly short. They all bowled fairly sedately as well. It was by-the-book stuff and was unsuitable for the conditions. Jerome Taylor negated the pitch by barely letting the ball bounce at all. He wasn’t going to get anything much out of the surface, so why bother with it at all?

The ball he bowled to Kevin Pietersen was better than The Wire, evading KP’s bat as he played to leg before leaping into the arms of off stump as if it hadn’t seen it in years. Not many people can bowl balls like that, although Jimmy Anderson is one who comes to mind.

Jerome Taylor somehow hits a Test hundred

Jerome Taylor had a Test average of 13.66 before this match, a first-class average of 12.61 and a top score of 40. Somehow he hit 106 against New Zealand.

After his hundred, Taylor said:

“It was the sort of pitch that, once you got in, it got easier.”

How did he know? Has he ever got in before? As far as he’s concerned all pitches could be like this.

He also revealed the advice that he’d received from Shivnarine Chanderpaul. Shiv said: ‘bat and bat and bat’.

Taylor interpreted this as advice, but it might just as well have been Shiv on autopilot. Some people – like ourself – stare into space and stop thinking as our default mental state. Lord Megachief of Gold merely repeats his mantra and pops the ball about for singles.