How bad were England in the Nineties?

We’re concerned that some English people don’t fully appreciate their team’s success. Specifically, we worry that younger cricket fans don’t have perspective. We want to provide that perspective by documenting English cricket in the Nineties.

Why would we do this? Well maybe if these people can appreciate how bad the national side can be, they’ll stop whinging about boring top-order batsmen and maybe they won’t dementedly wish for closer ‘more exciting’ Test series. Winning is good. Make the most of it while it lasts.

Please send your England Nineties lowlights to king@kingcricket.co.uk and we’ll compile them into a horrific web page that should scare people into sanity. We want to create the definitive record of how bad England were back then.

Try and be specific. The devil’s in the details.

For example, between Alec Stewart’s 107 against Australia in December 1998 and Mike Atherton’s 108 against South Africa in December 1999, no English batsman scored a century. Somehow that expresses the abject misery of the period very well.

There were 35 ducks in the same period. That expresses it well too.

Pick what you like. It could be a particular delivery, a run of failures, the inevitability of a particular defeat, the agony of a breathtakingly unexpected defeat, the triumph associated with an especially narrow defeat. Anything.

We’ll try and put something up before the first Test against Pakistan. Our innate pessimism’s returned with a vengeance for this series. We want to make the most of this period of glory before it’s shat on.

Travel time reclaimed from County Championship

“Hi, I’ve only got seven quid. Could you cut 80 per cent of my hair?”

Some things have to be done in full. Incompletion is unsatisfactory. As another example, if you have some sort of sports competition, it’s preferable to have everyone competing on an equal footing. If each team plays most of the other teams in its league twice and a couple of them once, that doesn’t really work.

Yet that’s what’s happening with the County Championship from 2014. It’s a spectacularly literal and mindless solution to there being too much cricket, like trying to make a Formula One car lighter by removing the brake pads.

Cricket has a staggering ability to present you with a bowl of soil and bones after you’ve given it chicken and mushrooms to work with. It’s like people go out of their way to leave you dissatisfied.

To comprehensively underline the fact that the entire point of the exercise has been missed, there will also be at least 14 Twenty20 matches for each county in 2014. Attendances for the shortest format dwindled in 2011 and there will be a reduction to 10 matches in 2012. This decision is being reversed before the effects have even been seen.

Basically, the days saved by the amputation of two vital first-class fixtures will instead be used so that the nation’s cricketers can sit in buses on their way to a few Twenty20 matches which no-one gives a toss about.

When did England last have to deal with good spin bowling?

England are overrated. We’re not saying they don’t deserve to be considered the best Test side around at the minute; we’re saying the best Test side isn’t automatically the favourite to win a given series.

While England have mullered most sides in home conditions, it’s been a while since they played any of the major subcontinental sides away from home. American readers will be intrigued to learn that the United Arab Emirates isn’t in Pakistan. However, this doesn’t alter the fact that conditions will suit the ‘home’ side more than les Rosbifs.

Most significantly, this series is likely to give us more spin than Malcolm Tucker burying bad news by doing cartwheels on a roundabout. Spin is something England haven’t really had to deal with for a surprisingly long time.

Spin, spin, spin the wheel of justice

Spin is a major facet of Test cricket and most of the England team are relative novices. Two Tests in Bangladesh a couple of years ago amount to little more than a solid and largely-forgotten warm-up. Before that, we have to go back to 2008 to find the last time England had to deal with the more obtuse angles presented by 55mph bowling. They didn’t fare well, losing 1-0 to India.

In three innings in that series, their top score was 316. Andrew Strauss batted well and Kevin Pietersen got a hundred, but the man they’ll miss most from back then is the one who supposedly lacked talent – Paul Collingwood.

We always thought Collingwood looked pretty skilful when confronted by the tweakers. Contrast his uncanny ability to find singles with the efforts of many of his team mates who looked like stiff-legged automatons despite supposedly being blessed with that most desirable of qualities – ‘class’.

‘Class’ has a couple of different meanings. Maybe we were wrong to assign it a cricketing one.

P.S. Paul Collingwood and spin bowling

Officially, this article ends with that pithy, chip-on-shoulder sign-off. However, we’ve got some statistics that we want to include, so consider this a postscript.

Here are Paul Collingwood’s Test batting averages in various places where batsmen tend to face a lot of spin bowling.

• In Bangladesh – 49.33
• In India – 57.14
• In Pakistan – 47.25
• In Sri Lanka – 28.25 (shit)
• In the West Indies – 61.42

Some of you might quibble with the inclusion of the West Indies, but don’t be swayed by the region’s old reputation. Collingwood only played there in the 2009 Wisden Trophy – a series in which Sulieman Benn, Chris Gayle and Ryan Hinds between them bowled 371 overs.

Still ahead of the curve

The fourth instalment of our episodic short story has been published over at Cricinfo and there’s still little sign of administrative fiction becoming a popular new literary genre.

• Part one
• Part two
• Part three
• Part four

The final part should appear later in the week.

Giles Clarke given CBE

We know this isn’t ‘news’ as such, but Giles Clarke was named in the New Year’s honours list. We believe he was awarded with a CBE for associating with known felons.

Some might say that we shouldn’t hold one mistake against a man, which is true. It’s all the other stuff as well.

Thanks to David for pointing this out to us. We long ago discarded the New Year’s honours list as a complete irrelevance. No offence to the lass, but we don’t really see the point of the monarchy and can’t get too worked up when its head hands out chunks of the alphabet.

Jacques Kallis is fitter than he looks

Jacques Kallis bowled a ball at about 90mph today. Generally speaking, he was bowling faster than Philander, Steyn and Morkel.

Despite looking more like a rugby player, Kallis has always been pretty slippery when the mood’s taken him. It’s astonishing that he can still do this when he’s 36-years-old. Few can do it at all at that age, let alone those who’ve played 400-and-odd international matches.

The average quick bowler covers about 15 miles a day during a Test match. Even the wicketkeeper averages about 10. Kallis doesn’t clock too many overs, but he does bat a bit. In fact, wait a minute – didn’t he hit 224 earlier in this match?

Maybe his new hair is impregnated with nandrolone. You thought it was vanity that led to his new mane, but it was actually a desire for an intrafollicular supply of anabolic steroids.

Vernon Philander takes wickets for fun

Other than Angus Fraser, few bowlers have appeared to do it as penance.

Many people’s definition of an all-rounder is that they should average more with the bat than they do with the ball. Vernon Philander isn’t a million miles away from that and his batting average is only 7.75.

His bowling average is 12.82 at the time of writing. Being as the website’s barely working at the minute, that figure will be totally wrong by the time you read this, but still, you get what we’re saying.

If you don’t get what we’re saying, we’re saying that Vernon Philander has a very low bowling average.

A few Tests away from home will see his figures fatten up like a family that’s just moved to the United States, but for now he can feel pretty pleased with himself and South Africa can stick with their entirely unexpected plan of having Dale Steyn as a supporting act.

Ricky Ponting earns a hundred

There have been times when we’ve thought that a fat man doing naked limbo in the office would have more dignity than Ricky Ponting. However, he can have his moments.

He often speaks well these days and he seemed dignified when he reached 100 against India at the SCG as well. This might seem an odd thing to say considering he had a mouthful of turf, a dislodged helmet and a stain on his front that made it look like a giant had used his shirt as toilet paper, but it was the way he reacted that made an impression on us.

He was happy. He was genuinely delighted. He wasn’t jumping around, punching the air and bellowing swear words at the sky. He was just sort of dusting himself down and smiling.

He was unarsed about looking like a complete dickhead. It was a triviality compared to the hundred he’d been working towards for almost two years. We’d say he deserved it and the effort is why he so obviously appreciated it.

Fit and misfiring

We don’t try and steer clear of stupidity altogether – that would be unrealistic – but we do generally try and avoid saying anything too moronic until both sides have batted. Even so, we’re tempted to get in early today after India were again bowled out easily by Australia.

India have some good bowlers, but a first innings lead seems unlikely. MS Dhoni has been quick to point to the injuries his team were suffering when they lost to England, but that doesn’t apply here. The batting is letting them down. The only question is whether Australia’s batting will let them down to an even greater degree.

It is now exactly a year since Gautam Gambhir did anything of any consequence. That’s nowhere near our personal best, but people are starting to write articles about him. Does our lack of effort not warrant the same recognition?

Two more parts of a thing

We did consider upping our game with regards to post titles, but then we thought: ‘Why risk it?’

Cricinfo have published two more episodes of our increasingly bleak cricket administration short story.

Happy New Year. Here are some links.

• Part one
• Part two
• Part three