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THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVESAUTHOR: THE OLD BATSMAN William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OF Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like the echoes of so many before, perhaps one final hundred to sign himself off. THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: 2017 There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH IV: BIGGER, HARDER, THICKER Like a Steven Seagal revenge-fantasy franchise, each edition more fevered, more heightened, more alluring and more ridiculous than the last, so the new season brings its new weapons, its ammo, its bats. THE OLD BATSMAN: JULY 2013 There was a moment during Howzat: Kerry Packer's War, shown last week on BBC4, when you realised what a life-force Packer must have been.It came after he'd signed up the players and the scale of the conflict he had provoked became apparent, to him and to them. THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? alanmcl said. I think the quick bowlers of old wouldn't have held a candle to modern ones. Pitches are truer, batsmen have helmets and high definition video and the crowded international calendar have demystified both bowlers and batsmen. THE OLD BATSMAN: AUGUST 2012 The Anniversary. Today is the 64th anniversary of Bradman's last Test innings, perhaps the most famous duck ever made, and certainly the most statistically significant. John Arlott was the BBC commentator as Bradman came to the crease. Arlott was 34 years old at the time, five years younger than the Don. Rex Alston had described Bradman's THE OLD BATSMAN: 2011 The Fourth Annual OB Innings Of The Year. On a dank Chelmsford night back in July, Owais Shah played the shot of the season. Under lights, from the bowling of Charl Langeveld, he picked up his bat, pushed forward and sent an 85mph outswinger over the field, over the boundary, over the stand and out of the ground.THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVESAUTHOR: THE OLD BATSMAN William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OF Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like the echoes of so many before, perhaps one final hundred to sign himself off. THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: 2017 There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH IV: BIGGER, HARDER, THICKER Like a Steven Seagal revenge-fantasy franchise, each edition more fevered, more heightened, more alluring and more ridiculous than the last, so the new season brings its new weapons, its ammo, its bats. THE OLD BATSMAN: JULY 2013 There was a moment during Howzat: Kerry Packer's War, shown last week on BBC4, when you realised what a life-force Packer must have been.It came after he'd signed up the players and the scale of the conflict he had provoked became apparent, to him and to them. THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? alanmcl said. I think the quick bowlers of old wouldn't have held a candle to modern ones. Pitches are truer, batsmen have helmets and high definition video and the crowded international calendar have demystified both bowlers and batsmen. THE OLD BATSMAN: AUGUST 2012 The Anniversary. Today is the 64th anniversary of Bradman's last Test innings, perhaps the most famous duck ever made, and certainly the most statistically significant. John Arlott was the BBC commentator as Bradman came to the crease. Arlott was 34 years old at the time, five years younger than the Don. Rex Alston had described Bradman's THE OLD BATSMAN: 2011 The Fourth Annual OB Innings Of The Year. On a dank Chelmsford night back in July, Owais Shah played the shot of the season. Under lights, from the bowling of Charl Langeveld, he picked up his bat, pushed forward and sent an 85mph outswinger over the field, over the boundary, over the stand and out of the ground. THE OLD BATSMAN: 2019 Teddy Sheringham spoke recently about Manchester United’s 1999 Champions League victory. Sheringham was a substitute on the night of the final, and with United losing 1-0, Alex Ferguson told him that if another fifteen minutes went by without a United goal, he’d be playing: “I didn’t want Bayern to score because then it’s really hard to get back in the game. THE OLD BATSMAN: SO YOU'VE BEEN PUBLICALLY SHAMED... BY The sandpapering in Cape Town may be the Ur manifestation of the near-future. Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publically Shamed brilliantly framed the phenomenon, the dizzying and unstoppable speed at which events unfold online, the weight of comment acting like ballast, moving the story in different ways. It looks at the divorcebetween the
THE OLD BATSMAN: 2017 There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: A DAY AT NEWBERY It faced a stern test right away at the indoor school behind the Hove pavilion, where Lewis Hatchett, James Anyon and Steve Magoffin loitered, ready to roll a few down. Young Hatchett bowls left arm over from a tremendous height. Anyon looks as though he's spent the entire winter in the gym. Magoffin watches the first deliveries and leansback
THE OLD BATSMAN: JULY 2017 You probably remember Joel Goodman's wondrous photograph, taken on New Year's Eve 2015 and soon known as The Creation Of Manchester.Goodman's shutter clicked at the moment in which the 'characters' fell into perfect aspects and ratios that, with some glorious light, gave it a posed, painterly quality which has survived long beyond the fraction of a second for which the scene existed. THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH IV: BIGGER, HARDER, THICKER Like a Steven Seagal revenge-fantasy franchise, each edition more fevered, more heightened, more alluring and more ridiculous than the last, so the new season brings its new weapons, its ammo, its bats. THE OLD BATSMAN: ANDY FLOWER PLAYS THE MONEYBALL CARD Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card. It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail. Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which workedbecause
THE OLD BATSMAN: CAREFUL WITH YOUR KINETIC FLOW, SHANE... Neil D'Costa, known for the years he has spent coaching Michael Clarke as well as for his work with Phil Hughes and Mitchell Starc, gave a barbed little interview to the Sydney Morning Herald last week, pointing out various 'fundamental flaws' in the 'non-negotiable basics' of Australia's top order. Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND David Gower is, I think, the first cricketer whose entire international career I was able to watch. I don't quite recall Botham's debut, but I do Gower's, which began, as no-one needs reminding, with a first ball pull for four off a bowler called Liaqat Ali, whose sole contribution to cricket history this seems to be - an unfortunate quiz-question of a career, that. THE OLD BATSMAN: 2011 The Fourth Annual OB Innings Of The Year. On a dank Chelmsford night back in July, Owais Shah played the shot of the season. Under lights, from the bowling of Charl Langeveld, he picked up his bat, pushed forward and sent an 85mph outswinger over the field, over the boundary, over the stand and out of the ground.THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OFAUTHOR: THE OLDBATSMAN
Boucher and Ramps, and the manner of their leaving. Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVES William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: THE CRICKET MATCH IN EVER DECREASING CIRCLES The opposition bat first and rack up 200, partly because Martin won't bowl Paul. In reply, they're 46-7 when Martin is out in ridiculous circumstances, leaving Paul to bat with Howard, a man who, it's revealed, proposed to his wife while stoned on endorphins after making his highest ever score of 11. Paul gets the runs. THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield toGraeme
THE OLD BATSMAN: ANDY FLOWER PLAYS THE MONEYBALL CARD Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card. It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail. Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which workedbecause
THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? Unknown said. It's possible that because of protective gear and the nature of pitches, speed has lost its sting. Lasith Malinga too relies on variation to succeed, and Shaun Tait is a failure because he seemsunable to do that.
THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OFAUTHOR: THE OLDBATSMAN
Boucher and Ramps, and the manner of their leaving. Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVES William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: THE CRICKET MATCH IN EVER DECREASING CIRCLES The opposition bat first and rack up 200, partly because Martin won't bowl Paul. In reply, they're 46-7 when Martin is out in ridiculous circumstances, leaving Paul to bat with Howard, a man who, it's revealed, proposed to his wife while stoned on endorphins after making his highest ever score of 11. Paul gets the runs. THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield toGraeme
THE OLD BATSMAN: ANDY FLOWER PLAYS THE MONEYBALL CARD Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card. It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail. Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which workedbecause
THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? Unknown said. It's possible that because of protective gear and the nature of pitches, speed has lost its sting. Lasith Malinga too relies on variation to succeed, and Shaun Tait is a failure because he seemsunable to do that.
THE OLD BATSMAN: 2019 Teddy Sheringham spoke recently about Manchester United’s 1999 Champions League victory. Sheringham was a substitute on the night of the final, and with United losing 1-0, Alex Ferguson told him that if another fifteen minutes went by without a United goal, he’d be playing: “I didn’t want Bayern to score because then it’s really hard to get back in the game. THE OLD BATSMAN: JANUARY 2020 Faf du Plessis is so comically alpha that he can have AB de Villiers as a friend since schooldays and not be overshadowed. AB might be the greater player but he's one of THE OLD BATSMAN: PERIMETER WEIGHTED, BABY... Gray-Nicolls, supplier of bats to Mr WG Grace and other subsequent players of note, have some self-made videos on their site of various pros going into the factory to pick out their glowing, handsomely-stickered blades for the new season. In serried ranks they lie, pods shaved to exacting requirements, a batter's dream. THE OLD BATSMAN: AUGUST 2019 One evening during the Test, I saw The Edge, Barney Douglas' film about England's champion side of 2009-14.I've reviewed it for the next issue of WCM so I won't cover the same ground here, but soon after I'd sent the piece, I sat and watched England fold, and it was striking how the film's themes were being played out again in real time. The Edge is structured around England's ambition to THE OLD BATSMAN: A DAY AT NEWBERY It faced a stern test right away at the indoor school behind the Hove pavilion, where Lewis Hatchett, James Anyon and Steve Magoffin loitered, ready to roll a few down. Young Hatchett bowls left arm over from a tremendous height. Anyon looks as though he's spent the entire winter in the gym. Magoffin watches the first deliveries and leansback
THE OLD BATSMAN: ANDY FLOWER PLAYS THE MONEYBALL CARD Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card. It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail. Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which workedbecause
THE OLD BATSMAN: CAREFUL WITH YOUR KINETIC FLOW, SHANE... Neil D'Costa, known for the years he has spent coaching Michael Clarke as well as for his work with Phil Hughes and Mitchell Starc, gave a barbed little interview to the Sydney Morning Herald last week, pointing out various 'fundamental flaws' in the 'non-negotiable basics' of Australia's top order. Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely THE OLD BATSMAN: JULY 2013 There was a moment during Howzat: Kerry Packer's War, shown last week on BBC4, when you realised what a life-force Packer must have been.It came after he'd signed up the players and the scale of the conflict he had provoked became apparent, to him and to them. THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? alanmcl said. I think the quick bowlers of old wouldn't have held a candle to modern ones. Pitches are truer, batsmen have helmets and high definition video and the crowded international calendar have demystified both bowlers and batsmen. THE OLD BATSMAN: AUGUST 2012 The Anniversary. Today is the 64th anniversary of Bradman's last Test innings, perhaps the most famous duck ever made, and certainly the most statistically significant. John Arlott was the BBC commentator as Bradman came to the crease. Arlott was 34 years old at the time, five years younger than the Don. Rex Alston had described Bradman'sTHE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: GHOST GROUNDS It's hard to write about a feeling as elusive as this one, yet it's that elusiveness that makes it both rare and worthwhile. It happened the other day, for the first time in a couple of years. THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVES William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: 2017 There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: DIRTY SECRETS, UNAPPEALING HABITS 'To get where he did,' Hornby wrote, 'Gus clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation and it still wasn't quite enough. Gus must have known he was good, just like every pop band who has ever played the Marquee know that they are destined for Madison Square Garden, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: KP: OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE KP doesn't need the newspapers to tell him what he's done wrong. He's one of the most intuitive and adaptable batsmen out there. He may wrestle for control of his game and his nature for a THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? Unknown said. It's possible that because of protective gear and the nature of pitches, speed has lost its sting. Lasith Malinga too relies on variation to succeed, and Shaun Tait is a failure because he seemsunable to do that.
THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: GHOST GROUNDS It's hard to write about a feeling as elusive as this one, yet it's that elusiveness that makes it both rare and worthwhile. It happened the other day, for the first time in a couple of years. THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVES William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: 2017 There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: DIRTY SECRETS, UNAPPEALING HABITS 'To get where he did,' Hornby wrote, 'Gus clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation and it still wasn't quite enough. Gus must have known he was good, just like every pop band who has ever played the Marquee know that they are destined for Madison Square Garden, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: KP: OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE KP doesn't need the newspapers to tell him what he's done wrong. He's one of the most intuitive and adaptable batsmen out there. He may wrestle for control of his game and his nature for a THE OLD BATSMAN: ARE FAST BOWLERS GETTING SLOWER? Unknown said. It's possible that because of protective gear and the nature of pitches, speed has lost its sting. Lasith Malinga too relies on variation to succeed, and Shaun Tait is a failure because he seemsunable to do that.
THE OLD BATSMAN: GHOST GROUNDS It's hard to write about a feeling as elusive as this one, yet it's that elusiveness that makes it both rare and worthwhile. It happened the other day, for the first time in a couple of years. THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OF Boucher and Ramps, and the manner of their leaving. Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like THE OLD BATSMAN: SELECTORS' NOTES Yesterday in (or is it at?) the Big Bash, Kevin Pietersen stepped back deep in his crease to make an angle and hit a delivery from Shaun Tait timed at 149.4kph over wide mid off for a one-bounce four, using a THE OLD BATSMAN: ALASTAIR COOK AND THE MONKEY'S PAW The Monkey's Paw is a classic, short horror story by WW Jacobs. I first read it in a compendium that I got from the school book club, and I can still remember how terrified it made me. It's about a strange talisman that grants its owners three wishes. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE ODD BIRD Fred had enjoyed a career renaissance in his middle years, mainly as a glorious, naysaying expert on Test Match Special, but also as the presenter of a lunchtime television programme called Indoor League, in which people played darts, billiards, skittles, arm-wrestling and other pub games in real pubs while Fred smoked his pipe, supped ale and added colour commentary. THE OLD BATSMAN: GONE IN THE SIDE. AND IN THE BOTTOM. On sunday, six English fast bowlers - Maurice Chambers (21), Jonathan Clare (22), Jade Dernbach (22), Chris Jordan (20), Mark Turner (24) and Chris Woakes (19) - head to Bradenton, a charming town on Florida's Gulf of Mexico, and the IMG Institute of Sport for three weeks of strength work with Huw Bevan, a rugby trainer. The ECB's bowling academy man Kevin Shine says. 'we want to treat them THE OLD BATSMAN: KP: OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE KP doesn't need the newspapers to tell him what he's done wrong. He's one of the most intuitive and adaptable batsmen out there. He may wrestle for control of his game and his nature for a THE OLD BATSMAN: CAREFUL WITH YOUR KINETIC FLOW, SHANE... Neil D'Costa, known for the years he has spent coaching Michael Clarke as well as for his work with Phil Hughes and Mitchell Starc, gave a barbed little interview to the Sydney Morning Herald last week, pointing out various 'fundamental flaws' in the 'non-negotiable basics' of Australia's top order. Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely THE OLD BATSMAN: IR BELL: ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED Bell's 12 from 15 balls could be written off as a bad day. Except it wasn't. It was a normal day. In fact, given his strike rate of 80.00, it was a marginally better than average day. THE OLD BATSMAN: ABDUL RAZZAQ FLIES IN Under Manchester's glowering June sky, Abdul Razzaq arrived to play for Leicestershire at Old Trafford last night. He'd been in the country for less than a day and it showed.THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVESAUTHOR: THE OLD BATSMAN William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: ALL BACK TO ALF'S A few weeks ago, I took a journey that I have made many times before, but not for many years. It always used to be by car, but this time it was on foot, at least the last part of it was - around the Wandsworth one-way system, past Zodiac Records (still strange and unwelcoming, still forbiddingly shuttered and with its little sign 'open Saturdays 10-6pm') and then halfway up East Hill, on the THE OLD BATSMAN: GEOFFREY'S ANNIVERSARY Today, as England ground India into what passes for dust in the northern summer, Geoffrey Boycott himself had to be reminded that it was the 34th anniversary of his one hundredth first class hundred, scored in an Ashes Test against Australia on his home ground atHeadingley in 1977.
THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: LORD'S: A NIGHTMARE FOR THE SERFS... NB: The forthcoming retirement of the Human Urn has necessitated some backtracking from Phil Space Trophy contender Paul Hayward: 'The 2005 mythology resists most attempts to assert perspective on what he has achieved since in England colours'. Er, no it doesn't, but luckily, Hayers recovers in time for one more stab at defining exactly what Andrew Flintoff was: 'He was the spirit, the THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield toGraeme
THE OLD BATSMAN: FREDDIE DISSES FIDDY, INDIA, HOTEL In an interesting adjunct to the post below, GQ magazine have just released some details of an interview they'll be carrying with Andrew Flintoff. The highlights:THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVESAUTHOR: THE OLD BATSMAN William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: ALL BACK TO ALF'S A few weeks ago, I took a journey that I have made many times before, but not for many years. It always used to be by car, but this time it was on foot, at least the last part of it was - around the Wandsworth one-way system, past Zodiac Records (still strange and unwelcoming, still forbiddingly shuttered and with its little sign 'open Saturdays 10-6pm') and then halfway up East Hill, on the THE OLD BATSMAN: GEOFFREY'S ANNIVERSARY Today, as England ground India into what passes for dust in the northern summer, Geoffrey Boycott himself had to be reminded that it was the 34th anniversary of his one hundredth first class hundred, scored in an Ashes Test against Australia on his home ground atHeadingley in 1977.
THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: LORD'S: A NIGHTMARE FOR THE SERFS... NB: The forthcoming retirement of the Human Urn has necessitated some backtracking from Phil Space Trophy contender Paul Hayward: 'The 2005 mythology resists most attempts to assert perspective on what he has achieved since in England colours'. Er, no it doesn't, but luckily, Hayers recovers in time for one more stab at defining exactly what Andrew Flintoff was: 'He was the spirit, the THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield toGraeme
THE OLD BATSMAN: 2020 One punch away. Bert Cooper is dead now, and so is Rick Parker, and Tim Anderson is still in jail. Bob Arum is 88 years old and promotes Tyson Fury. Don King is also 88 years old, and much diminished. Don's on the outside, and no-one is getting 45-minute answers any more. Posted by The Old Batsman at 02:27 53 comments: THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OF Boucher and Ramps, and the manner of their leaving. Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like THE OLD BATSMAN: MORE ASHES NOTES: BOYCOTT VERSUS ENGEL There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: CHUCKING, DECEPTION AND SAEED AJMAL Okay, try this: grab a cricket ball, or if not a tennis ball, orange, apple or something like that. Space your index, middle and ring fingers across the widest part of THE OLD BATSMAN: FINAL SCORE Frindall described it as 'long, hot, confused and often bizarre summer'. He was not wrong. The first Test against England was the one when Lillee used his aluminum bat and Geoff Boycott carried his bat for 99 through England's second innings, the first time that had happened in Test cricket. 'I hate to imagine what he said to poor Willis,' noted Frindall, wryly. THE OLD BATSMAN: FIRST TEST NOTES: MOEEN'S IMMACULATE DISASTER Moeen Ali is a poetic cricketer, a cricketer to watch, and almost everything he does is worth watching. When he has a bad Test, or a bad tour, he accommodates failure in his own way. THE OLD BATSMAN: ANDY FLOWER PLAYS THE MONEYBALL CARD Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card. It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail. Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which workedbecause
THE OLD BATSMAN: CAREFUL WITH YOUR KINETIC FLOW, SHANE... Neil D'Costa, known for the years he has spent coaching Michael Clarke as well as for his work with Phil Hughes and Mitchell Starc, gave a barbed little interview to the Sydney Morning Herald last week, pointing out various 'fundamental flaws' in the 'non-negotiable basics' of Australia's top order. Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely THE OLD BATSMAN: CARVE YOUR NAME WITH PRIDE Damith S. said Dont know bout you , but someone needs to give you a writing contract and soon. Love the old school boy analogy to the IPL. The first time I went for try outs we were informed that the teams will be posted on the sports masters door. THE OLD BATSMAN: WHAT MIKE ATHERTON HAS IN COMMON WITH One played 115 times for his country and is the cricket correspondent of The Times.The other is a member of Motley Crue and once accidentally shot his own girlfriend.THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVESAUTHOR: THE OLD BATSMAN William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: ALL BACK TO ALF'S A few weeks ago, I took a journey that I have made many times before, but not for many years. It always used to be by car, but this time it was on foot, at least the last part of it was - around the Wandsworth one-way system, past Zodiac Records (still strange and unwelcoming, still forbiddingly shuttered and with its little sign 'open Saturdays 10-6pm') and then halfway up East Hill, on the THE OLD BATSMAN: GEOFFREY'S ANNIVERSARY Today, as England ground India into what passes for dust in the northern summer, Geoffrey Boycott himself had to be reminded that it was the 34th anniversary of his one hundredth first class hundred, scored in an Ashes Test against Australia on his home ground atHeadingley in 1977.
THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: LORD'S: A NIGHTMARE FOR THE SERFS... NB: The forthcoming retirement of the Human Urn has necessitated some backtracking from Phil Space Trophy contender Paul Hayward: 'The 2005 mythology resists most attempts to assert perspective on what he has achieved since in England colours'. Er, no it doesn't, but luckily, Hayers recovers in time for one more stab at defining exactly what Andrew Flintoff was: 'He was the spirit, the THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield toGraeme
THE OLD BATSMAN: FREDDIE DISSES FIDDY, INDIA, HOTEL In an interesting adjunct to the post below, GQ magazine have just released some details of an interview they'll be carrying with Andrew Flintoff. The highlights:THE OLD BATSMAN
Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance THE OLD BATSMAN: TAVARE: THE LEGEND LIVESAUTHOR: THE OLD BATSMAN William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavare. No-one who saw Chris Tavare bat will forget it in a hurry, even after therapy. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavare was the schoolteacher who took arms. THE OLD BATSMAN: ALL BACK TO ALF'S A few weeks ago, I took a journey that I have made many times before, but not for many years. It always used to be by car, but this time it was on foot, at least the last part of it was - around the Wandsworth one-way system, past Zodiac Records (still strange and unwelcoming, still forbiddingly shuttered and with its little sign 'open Saturdays 10-6pm') and then halfway up East Hill, on the THE OLD BATSMAN: GEOFFREY'S ANNIVERSARY Today, as England ground India into what passes for dust in the northern summer, Geoffrey Boycott himself had to be reminded that it was the 34th anniversary of his one hundredth first class hundred, scored in an Ashes Test against Australia on his home ground atHeadingley in 1977.
THE OLD BATSMAN: CRICKET & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NUMBER 1: HOLT Cricket & psychogeography number 1: Holt Pound. It's the morning of 23 August 1791. In the field behind this gate, George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, has been dismissed hit wicket for four while batting for Surrey against Hampshire. His opening partner Charles Anguish is out for nought. THE OLD BATSMAN: THE MEANING OF 77, OR THE DON RECEDES The meaning of 77, or The Don recedes. 99.94 is the one stat that, to cricketers, does not need to be explained or contextualised. You don't need to be told what it means or who it belongs to. 99.94 stands as the landmark number in the sport. It's widely known, too, that 99.94 makes Bradman not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best THE OLD BATSMAN: OBJECTS OF FETISH Objects of fetish. The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind. St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into THE OLD BATSMAN: LORD'S: A NIGHTMARE FOR THE SERFS... NB: The forthcoming retirement of the Human Urn has necessitated some backtracking from Phil Space Trophy contender Paul Hayward: 'The 2005 mythology resists most attempts to assert perspective on what he has achieved since in England colours'. Er, no it doesn't, but luckily, Hayers recovers in time for one more stab at defining exactly what Andrew Flintoff was: 'He was the spirit, the THE OLD BATSMAN: WOULD DAVID GOWER GET IN THIS ENGLAND Beginning with the non-arguments: Ian Botham would get into any England side of any era, first name on the sheet. Disregarding the captaincy for now, Boycott would displace Andrew Strauss. As much fun as they were, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb, with Test averages in the 30s, would not crack this middle order. John Emburey would yield toGraeme
THE OLD BATSMAN: FREDDIE DISSES FIDDY, INDIA, HOTEL In an interesting adjunct to the post below, GQ magazine have just released some details of an interview they'll be carrying with Andrew Flintoff. The highlights: THE OLD BATSMAN: 2020 One punch away. Bert Cooper is dead now, and so is Rick Parker, and Tim Anderson is still in jail. Bob Arum is 88 years old and promotes Tyson Fury. Don King is also 88 years old, and much diminished. Don's on the outside, and no-one is getting 45-minute answers any more. Posted by The Old Batsman at 02:27 53 comments: THE OLD BATSMAN: BOUCHER AND RAMPS, AND THE MANNER OF Boucher and Ramps, and the manner of their leaving. Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like THE OLD BATSMAN: MORE ASHES NOTES: BOYCOTT VERSUS ENGEL There is an outtake from Death of a Gentleman, just a minute or so of footage knocked off by whoever had the camera outside the Oval after a Test match, a fraction of the many hours that ended up in the pixellated digital scrapyard once known as the cutting room floor. It shows Geoffrey Boycott crossing the road, wheeling his suitcase behind him. His back is to camera, but the figure is THE OLD BATSMAN: CHUCKING, DECEPTION AND SAEED AJMAL Okay, try this: grab a cricket ball, or if not a tennis ball, orange, apple or something like that. Space your index, middle and ring fingers across the widest part of THE OLD BATSMAN: FINAL SCORE Frindall described it as 'long, hot, confused and often bizarre summer'. He was not wrong. The first Test against England was the one when Lillee used his aluminum bat and Geoff Boycott carried his bat for 99 through England's second innings, the first time that had happened in Test cricket. 'I hate to imagine what he said to poor Willis,' noted Frindall, wryly. THE OLD BATSMAN: FIRST TEST NOTES: MOEEN'S IMMACULATE DISASTER Moeen Ali is a poetic cricketer, a cricketer to watch, and almost everything he does is worth watching. When he has a bad Test, or a bad tour, he accommodates failure in his own way. THE OLD BATSMAN: ANDY FLOWER PLAYS THE MONEYBALL CARD Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card. It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail. Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which workedbecause
THE OLD BATSMAN: CAREFUL WITH YOUR KINETIC FLOW, SHANE... Neil D'Costa, known for the years he has spent coaching Michael Clarke as well as for his work with Phil Hughes and Mitchell Starc, gave a barbed little interview to the Sydney Morning Herald last week, pointing out various 'fundamental flaws' in the 'non-negotiable basics' of Australia's top order. Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely THE OLD BATSMAN: CARVE YOUR NAME WITH PRIDE Damith S. said Dont know bout you , but someone needs to give you a writing contract and soon. Love the old school boy analogy to the IPL. The first time I went for try outs we were informed that the teams will be posted on the sports masters door. THE OLD BATSMAN: WHAT MIKE ATHERTON HAS IN COMMON WITH One played 115 times for his country and is the cricket correspondent of The Times.The other is a member of Motley Crue and once accidentally shot his own girlfriend. skip to main | skip to sidebarTHE OLD BATSMAN
The consolations of a cricketing life WEDNESDAY, 7 AUGUST 2019 FIRST TEST NOTES: ENGLAND ON THE EDGE (AGAIN); RETHINKING THE LASTDAY
One evening during the Test, I saw _The Edge_, Barney Douglas' film about England's champion side of 2009-14. I've reviewed it for the next issue of WCM so I won't cover the same ground here, but soon after I'd sent the piece, I sat and watched England fold, and it was striking how the film's themes were being played out again in real time. _The Edge_ is structured around England's ambition to become the number one team in world cricket. It takes them two years to get there and another couple, give or take a few months, to fall apart. There is a core of players together for the whole span, others who drop in and out, but they all become part of something bigger, something that controls them as much as they control it. After England beat India in 2011, Andrew Strauss is handed the ICC mace, a trophy so ridiculously grandiose it could only have been conjured by sports administrators. In his talking-head interview Strauss - and what a man he is - says, "I thought, _is this it_?" That sense of anticlimax is not uncommon in sport. The golfer David Duval was so driven in the early part of his career that he briefly knocked a peak-era Tiger Woods from the top of the rankings, but when he won the Open Championship in 2001, it was his final victory on tour. Ten years later, when Woods had won 14 Majors to his one, Duval lost his tour card. His decline, which he likened to "a train wreck, and the train is loaded with toxic chemicals," had many causes, but one of them, as he admitted, was that same feeling as he held the claret jug: "is this it?" It's a complex thought, but it must stem from the emotional release of achieving a long-held goal. What's missing is the goal itself, the meaning, the purpose, the journey. That's a wholly personal experience. Sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn't. This England team, like Strauss', also had a four-year project, and it was also successful. This week, Jos Buttler spoke about the World Cup win. He'd kept England alive in the final, then batted in the super over, and then gathered Jason Roy's last, fateful throw during New Zealand's. A few days later, he moved house. "What was scaring me," he said, "was that if we lost, I didn't know how I'd play cricket again. This was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a World Cup final at Lord's. It felt like destiny, and I was thinking, if it doesn't happen, I will have no motivation to pick up a cricket bat for a verylong time."
For a pro sportsman, this is a wonderfully frank thing to say. It has an obvious flipside, too. Having won rather than lost, but having gone through the ringer either way, what motivation is there to pick up a bat again, anyhow? At least, not a week or so later. Part of what _The Edge_ is saying is that we get so close to sport, we disassociate the performers from real life, real feelings. They never move house. They are held to impossible standards, often by their own will, but by the collective will too. We've won the World Cup, but now we want the Ashes, after you've played a game against Ireland, because that will be the perfect summer, Boy's Own stuff. The teams of Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook played Ashes series in 2009, 2010-11, 2013 and 2013-4. They'd won the T20 World Cup, and contested series against South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, home and away, too. The film finishes, but the schedule goes on, a World Cup disaster, a Champions Trophy, another Ashes... This summer has put the current team through the same thing. We're still throwing brickbats from the sidelines about Jos Buttler's only Test century, Jason Roy's mad charge, the 'declines' of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali, Joe Root not converting again... We look with great and rightful sympathy at the plights of Trescothick, Flintoff, Harmison, Trott, Finn, at the broken bodies of Prior, Swann, Tremlett and the rest. You may watch _The Edge_ and find yourself re-evaluating Kevin Pietersen's "it's hard being me" moment, as I did. And then you realise, it's happening again, and it's happening now, to a different group of people. It's happening because this is the modern game, but we're caught up in the moment and don't take a step back to see it. England looked shot at Edgbaston because they are shot. Who the hell can blame them, and who is going to do something about it?RETHINKING DAY FIVE
In Duncan Hamilton's wonderful new book about Neville Cardus, _The Great Romantic_, he recalls the Melbourne Test of 1937, when Don Bradman outflanks Gubby Allen by reversing Australia's batting order in the Aussie second innings (Chuck Fleetwood-Smith asks why he has to open, and Bradman tells him that the only way to get out on this wicket is to hit the ball, and as Fleetwood-Smith never could do that... Chuck gets a duck anyway). Bradman made 270 from number seven and Australia won by a street. If I was a proper journalist I'd try and find the stats of England batting out day five in the modern era. I'm not so I won't, but it doesn't happen very often. And yet every time, they do exactly the same thing. And they lose, and we all get annoyed about 'white ball techniques' and lack of sticks of rhubarb or whatever it is that causes them to be all out by 3pm. What they never try is something different. Maybe not reversing the order (although if it's good enough for the Don...), but at least attempting to fit some tactics to the situation, rather than the meaningless "bat time" or "see where we are at lunch" (five down,usually).
Australia's pressure at Edgbaston was always going to come from Lyon bowling all day at one end and the seamers the other. As Jason Roy discovered, it was a risk trying to hit the GOAT out of the attack, but on a different day, or with a method agreed before play started, it would be no more risky than trying to block out. It's just less palatable, less easy. But sometimes audacity has its moment, too. Posted by The Old Batsmanat 09:44
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SUNDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2019 THIRD TEST NOTES: NO-ONE BORN SLOW GETS FAST Pace bowling remains one of the game's great unknowables. There is mystery inherent within it, and very few men on earth can do what Mark Wood did in St Lucia last week. As the old sprinters' proverb goes: 'no-one born slow ever got fast'. It was interesting to hear Wood describe it as "feeling like a superhero." When I worked with Simon Jones on his bookThe Test
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he made the same analogy: "It's like having a superpower, it's a surge, an urge. It's a feeling like no other, to know that the opposition are worried about you, sometimes frightened of you... I've had guys throwing up in the dressing room toilets before facing me. I've had guys refusing to come into bat." And Simon was always quick, he was born fast. When he was fifteen years old and still five feet six inches tall, he toured Zimbabwe with a Welsh schools side and removed the front teeth of a 30 year old sheep farmer who refused to wear a helmet against a kids team. He felt he was at his quickest, and his wildest, when he first played for Glamorgan. Their wicketkeeper Colin Metson thought he was the fastest he'd kept to since Wayne Daniel. Bob Cottam saw Jones almost hit a keeper on the Lord's groundstaff during practice on the eve of his Test debut against India with a delivery he later called the fastesthe'd ever seen.
Simon's genetic line illustrated something. His father Jeff Jones was England's leading wicket taker in the 1965-6 Ashes, and regarded for a while as the quickest on the county circuit. Yet Simon has a fraternal twin, Matthew, and an older brother Richard, "who can bowl quickly, but not as quick as me". We are in the age of sports science, when almost everything in every sport is undressed and analysed, and everyone and everything is getting faster, stronger, longer. And yet fast bowling isn't, and arguably, it never has. Those who saw Larwood or Thomson, or Holding, or Croft, or Patterson, or Wasim, or Shoaib, or Johnson or Simon Jones, or Mark Wood, have seen men bowling about as fast as anyone can, give or take the vaguaries of the human eye and the speed gun. While the science and analysis might make it happen more consistently (and that's debatable) its arrival is dependent on particular genetics. If you're born slow, you may get less slow, but you won'tget fast.
Simon Jones and Mark Wood are often compared. Simon endured some horror injuries that curtailed his career, yet he played in teams that beat West Indies home and away, South Africa away, and of course in the greatest series of all, the Ashes of 2005. Wood has struggled with injury too, though happily not to the same degree. Both generate a lot of their pace from their action rather than the impetus of their run. Simon can still bowl at more than 80 mph from four paces, and, in common with Mark Wood, cut down his early, long approach to something much shorter - six paces at one point. It's a far more complex process than you may think, and when Jones decided to extend his run again because the strain on his body was too much, he had to consult with Lynn Davies, the champion long jumper, to find something that worked. Wood has a much smaller and more slender frame than Jones, and it seemed like madness that his run had been made so short. His body couldn't possibly survive that amount of repetitive strain. Even in St Lucia, watching the super slo-mo of his ankle when the force of delivery went through it was like a video nasty as the joint kinked one way and then the other. And yet as both men say, it is a superpower, and it does strange things to batsmen. The West Indies players who had stayed in for days on an Antiguan minefield against 85 mph were jerked from that comfort by Wood's pace on a far more predictable deck. After he faced Brett Lee for the first time at Lord's in 2005, Simon Jones said that McGrath from the other end "felt like spin". It's just a few miles per hour, but it is the vital few, at which physiological limits are reached. Fast bowlers who can do that live on in the imagination of batsmen. Mark Wood is something rare, and it is impossible to guess how long it may last, or when it might come again. Posted by The Old Batsmanat 05:45
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MONDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 2019 SECOND TEST NOTES: ROOT MATHS - THE HEAD OF THE SNAKE; HOLDER'S BAN The parsing of a player's stats in order to sustain a particular argument about their game has a name of quite longstanding: Root Maths. It generally fails because it assumes that stats are somehow infallible as well as immutable, when the truth is that they are as open to interpretation as a Jonny Bairstow straight drive. But after the Antigua Test, when Joe Root's batting average as captain - 1,954 runs at 42.47 - fell more than ten runs behind his average when he's not - 4,594 at 52.80 - the urge for some Root Maths about the original victim of it becomes irresistable. It was Glenn McGrath who put the concept of targeting the opposition's best batsman into the public arena, although the notion of Bodyline was constructed around it, as was the idea that the good Dr Grace's irascibility might occasionally be used against him. Cutting the head from the snake is especially attractive when it involves a captain: it rots authority; it opens psychic wounds. So a specious bit of Root Maths appeals. Does team performance align with Root's when measured against his opposing skipper? Series by series, it looks like this: ENG V SOUTH AFRICA (HOME, 2017), ENG WON 3-1 Root 461 runs at 57.62 Faf du Plessis 171 runs at 28.50 ENG V WEST INDIES (H, 2017), ENG WON 2-1 Root 268 runs at 67.00 Jason Holder 86 runs at 17.00; eight wickets at 39.12 AUSTRALIA V ENG (AWAY, 2017-8), ENG LOST 0-4 Root 378 runs at 47.23 Steve Smith 687 runs at 137.40 NEW ZEALAND V ENG (A, 2018), ENG LOST 0-1 Root 142 runs at 35.50 Kane Williamson 124 runs at 41.32 ENG V PAKISTAN (H, 2018) DRAWN 1-1 Root 117 runs at 39.00 Sarfaraz 31 runs at 10.33 ENG V INDIA (H, 2018), ENG WON 4-1 Root 319 runs at 35.44 Virat Kohli 593 runs at 59.30 SRI LANKA V ENG (A, 2018), ENG WON 3-0 Root 229 runs at 38.16 Dinesh Chandimal 34 runs at 17.00 WEST INDIES V ENG (A, 2019), ENG TRAIL 0-2 Root 40 runs at 10.00 Holder 229 runs at 114.40; seven wickets at 17.85 Superficially, an argument could be made that there's some kind of link. Yet it has too many flaws to list. An Ashes of monolithic Australian dominance bears little relation to the delicate, butterfly-wing interventions of weather and fate that tilted the India series one way and then the other last summer. Root was outbatted in both. The batsmen around Root have collapsed like the post-Brexit Stock Exchange on several occasions, fatally in New Zealand and the West Indies, and so on, _ad infinitum_. Notably, though, Root has been outmatched by the other 'Big Four' club members, Smith, Kohli and Williamson, whose hundred in the first Test of the short New Zealand series helped set up the win. And Root's decline as a batsman is evident. He has not averaged 40 in a series since the Ashes, and much of the old certainty that showed itself in the rapid, rhythmic starts to his innings has been whittled away. Perhaps there is something more obvious. Root's reluctance to bat at three is understandable, as with England it's essentially opening. The captain should bat where he wants, and if Root, as the leading player, needs time to decompress then he should take it. But given the frailty of England's top order, does he get it? Root has batted 47 times as England captain, eleven of those at three and the rest at four. Here's the breakdown of the team score at thetime he went in:
0-10 - 6
10-20 - 9
21-30 - 6
31-40 - 6
41-50 - 2
50-100 - 13
100+ - 5
In 27 of his 47 innings, Root has gone in with England at 40-2 or worse. In 45 per cent, it's less than 30. The bulk of those have been after his first three series as captain, when the oft-maligned number three batsmen were Tom Westley and James Vince. There was moment in the India series, during the Southampton Test, when I thought that if India had drawn level at 2-2, Root might have seriously considered his position. His agony was palpable, and he is not good at hiding it. Perhaps his feeling is that he will only truly be able to shape a team once Anderson and Broad have gone, although the hole they will leave is terrifying. Maybe he sees the Ashes next year as some kind of watershed, as it so often is. Root Maths is Root Maths. But at some point, England and Root will have to decide whether his captaincy is worth the missing runs. In so many ways, it may not be.BANNING JASON
Jason Holder's ban for slow over-rates is pedantry of the highest order, which I accept is the definition of having rules, too. Yet there is an element of Root Maths to it. England batted for a total of 103.1 overs in a Test that was done in less than three days. It is the role of the match officials to make a calculation based around a minimum over rate of 14.28 per hour (which gives 85 in a six-hour day, plus an extra half-hour to reach 90). From that, they must deduct time for drinks, stoppages while adjusting sightscreens and kit, injuries, use of substitutes, use of DRS and so on. This time is within their gift, and many of the stoppages that they stand there and watch are against match regulations. The game itself, in terms of time, was incomplete. Just as DRS must predict the path of the ball and has a Schrodinger's Cat element, so Holder could suggest that, had England been less inept, the fourth and fifth days would have incorporated the use of his spinner, Roston Chase, as selected, and had its effect upon the rate. The travelling fans that paid to visit Antigua have been sanctioned not by Holder's over rates but England's terrible cricket, and have missed two days' play. Those that have shelled out for St Lucia must now watch one team that has been manifestly weakened (it'll probably be a better game then, etc etc). Either way, they are denied spectacle. No-one, apart from the match officials and some ex-pros in the commentary box, gave a fig about the over rate in Antigua. As Jason Holder might ask: were you not entertained? And anyway, do you want to be the one telling Shannon Gabriel he needs to walk back faster? Posted by The Old Batsmanat 02:04
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MONDAY, 28 JANUARY 2019 FIRST TEST NOTES: MOEEN'S IMMACULATE DISASTER Moeen Ali is a poetic cricketer, a cricketer to watch, and almost everything he does is worth watching. When he has a bad Test, or a bad tour, he accommodates failure in his own way. The first innings in Barbados was a lovely example of this. Advance publicity on Moeen is that the short ball can unsettle him. His instinct is to hook, but he knows that he probably shouldn't, and in going against instinct he has created a problem for himself. When his first delivery from Kemar Roach came flying down, chest high and on the line of his body, he did no more than offer the bat horizontally before the ball was on him, but being Moeen, a poetic cricketer to whom things happen, the merest shiver of the blade in his hands was enough to send a top edge almost eighty yards into the maw of long leg. It was an immaculate disaster. With players like Moeen, it doesn't always matter what they do, but how they do it. His dismissal may have left the team in further trouble and the dressing room in high dudgeon, but it had flair. It had drama. It had humour, the very black kind that makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of it all - of cricket and of life. When he was thirteen years old, Moeen scored 195 in a T20 game, a knock of which his younger brother Omar says, 'it is nearly twenty years since that evening, but it is by far the greatest innings I have seen in cricket.' That's because Moeen is an aesthete and the things he does and the way he does them live on in the mind. In that sense he's kin to any number of otherwise disparate sportsmen, from Alex Higgins to Herol Graham or even George Best, where it's not really about numbers or statistics but what you remember of them.
It's something that pragmatists, of which there are many in sport, never get. England didn't so much have a bad day at the office in Barbados as drive to the office pathetically late and then crash through the wall while trying to park the car. But like Prince Philip, they'll simply have a gleaming new Land Rover delivered the next morning and start driving again, ignoring the deeper problem that it's not the broken car, it's the fact that they're 97 years old - or in England's case, that they are a team full of all rounders, three of which are wicketkeepers. Moeen's destiny is in sharp focus because of it. He is, clearly, a batsman who bowls, yet England need a bowler who bats, and he will be caught in this cleft forever now. Perhaps his personality is not quite forceful enough to escape, in the way that Ben Stokes' has been. Moeen's batting is as under-rated as Stokes' is over-rated, and in both cases that is by a little rather than a lot. Steve Harmison once said of Stokes that if England treated him like a number eight, then he would bat like one. Well Moeen has not so much been treated as a number eight as something mutable, shiftable, disposable. Imagine, briefly, that England had the top five that took them to the number one ranking they again crave: Strauss, Cook, Trott, Pietersen, Bell. Would Stokes get into that? He would not, which suggests he is a not a genuine Test match number five, any more than he is a number eight. Of England's other middle-order players, Bairstow at his best might challenge an out of sorts Bell; Jos Buttler for sure has some of the mad and imaginative genius of Pietersen, if not the adrenalised swagger that enabled Pietersen to do it from debut. And Moeen? Well not now, but there is an alternative universe in which his talent and difference were embraced and nurtured in the way that Ian Bell's were. At his best, Moeen is that good, that beautiful, that aesthetic and it is England's loss that his is a path not taken. The pragmatists will never get it, but this is an immaculate disaster. * From memory, the upshot of this stoush was that Higgins refused to yield and spent three days sleeping in the bath. Posted by The Old Batsmanat 03:25
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WEDNESDAY, 22 AUGUST 2018 THIRD TEST NOTES: ISHANT SHARMA KEEPS RUNNING IN; THE CONVERSION OFJONNY BAIRSTOW
Ishant Sharma was born in 1988. The Indian cricket team began that year by playing West Indies in Chennai, the final game of a four Test series. Opening the bowling for West Indies were Patrick Patterson and Courtney Walsh. Opening the bowling for India were Kapil Dev and Mohinder Amarnath. India won by 255 runs. Kapil sent down eleven overs in the match, Amarnath, in what was his 69th and last Test, just five. Mohinder Amarnath took 32 wickets in his Test career and was really a batsman, but that didn't matter, because India was no place for fast bowlers. Kapil was simply the exception that proved the rule. Any cricket-mad parent would wish first that their kid was a batter, second that they were a spinner, thirdly, and impossibly, that they may be as good as Kapil. A fast bowler... Well in India, that was a calling of a different, far harsher kind... When Ishant Sharma made his Test match debut in 2007, only four Indian fast bowlers had ever taken more than 100 Test wickets: Kapil, Karsan Ghavri, Javagal Srinath and Zaheer Khan, and of those, only Zaheer was still playing. At Perth in January 2008, Ishant Sharma, nineteen years old and running in like Peter Crouch trying to beat the offside trap, did something extraordinary. During the second innings he bowled a spell at Ricky Ponting that lives in the memory of all that saw it. Lightning-quick and with hurtful bounce, he barked the knuckles of the great number three, speared his head backwards on his neck, had him kicking at the crease-line open-eyed and rattled during eight overs that one reporter called: "as good as anything seen from a visiting fast bowler in a decade". Almost out on his feet, Sehwag urged him to bowl a ninth, and in it Ponting nicked to Dravid. India won. A starwas born.
But it was just the fourth Test match for this nascent star. Ishant Sharma - gauche, gummy, rail-thin, accident-prone - had many miles still to travel. On dead pitches and in white-ball shoot-outs, he lost first his pace, then his confidence. When it happened, he stood out for the wrong reasons, too tall, too lanky, hidden in the field, lost at the bowling crease. His first fifty wickets cost him 31.76. By the time he had seventy-five, it was 37.40. He came to Lord's in 2014 with 174, behind only Kapil, Srinath and Zaheer, the average _still_ over 37, and bounced England out in one mad and glorious afternoon. With the old ball he produced what David Hopps described as "one of the most memorable spells in the history of Indian fast bowling," a careening rocket ride either side of lunch that brought India their first overseas Test win for more than three years, and only their second ever at Lord's. Hopps went on: "India... will have eyes only for the performance of Ishant, who returned career-best figures of 7 for 74 and invited comparisons with the brilliant spell in Perth in 2008 when he roughed up no less a player of fast bowling than Ricky Ponting and encouraged India's hopes that they had a great fast bowler to reckon with. Ishant's career has never quite turned out like that..." Ten months after Ishant had bowled that spell at Perth, Mitchell Johnson debuted for Australia against Sri Lanka. And the winter before Ishant destroyed England at Lord's, Mitchell Johnson had destroyed England in Australia. Johnson, who shared Ishant's capacity for haplessness as well as brilliance, had the classic, redemptive career arc, a three-act structure beloved of all scriptwriters: early promise, then rocky road, followed by last-reel, feel-good fulfilment. In the week that Mitch hung them up for good, Ishant came to Trent Bridge with India needing something, _anything_, from a player other than Virat Kohli. They got it, too. England resumed their second innings miles behind but with their openers intact as the fourth day began. By inducing edges from first Jennings and then Cook, Ishant kicked open the door. On the radio, Jonathan Agnew said of him: "He's not quite a one-trick pony, that would be harsh..." It was a backhanded compliment and you knew what he meant. Everyone understood how Ishant would bowl to England's left-handers, including Alastair Cook, who Ishant had dismissed ten times. Stopping him was another matter, and that is a hallmark of quality. We invest great hopes and dreams in fast bowlers, yet even the real bruisers like Ryan Harris and Pat Cummins are physically fragile, always at the limits of what their bodies can do. Many of them, like Mitch and Ishant, are at the whim of the fates too, subject to a muse and rhythm that descends when it feels like it, rather than when we all think it should. Things have changed for Ishant and for India. On TV commentary, Michael Holding noted that pitches for domestic competition there have become more conducive to fast bowling (well, it would have been hard for them to become _less_ conducive...) and around Ishant were Jasprit Bumrah bowling in-slanting rockets for his first Test five-fer, and Mohammed Shami with his reverse swing touching 90mph. They have another swing bowling, hard-hitting all-rounder on the books, too, and plenty more where they came from. Ishant has walked the bridge between then and now, and at times it has been a treacherous one to cross. The average is down to 35.16, and he has 249 wickets, behind only Zaheer and Kapil on the list. He has served his calling the best he can. He may not get Mitchell Johnson's final-act finish, but Ishant Sharma keeps running in. _NB: Sky produced an interesting stat: At the Trent Bridge Test, every Indian seamer bowled at least one delivery quicker than any of theEngland seamers_.
THE CONVERSION OF JONNY BAIRSTOW In a moment that felt like a Passing Of The Gloves, Jonny Bairstow got a broken finger and a golden duck, departing the crease moments after the standing ovation for Jos Buttler's century. The Gods seem to be pointing one way: Bairstow as the specialist batsman England crave, free from the onorous physicality of keeping wicket, Buttler as keeper, batting enforcer and captain in waiting. England have middle order problems for sure, but they're nothing like England's top-order problems, where the openers don't score any runs and the number three looks tired, haunted and desperate to come in at number four. A thought emerged, from some knowledgeable ex-pros and commentators, that perhaps Bairstow, _sans_ gloves, should open thebatting.
My view, which is becoming, like many of my views, less popular by the second, is that Bairstow is not an opener in five-day cricket. His technique for the short forms is radically different, as demonstrated by the trouble he had in the first Test of the India series when he was so leg side of the ball he was almost conversing with the squareleg umpire.
But there's a more interesting reason too. Bairstow would be making a strange kind of history should he successfully make such a switch. Trent Bridge was his 56th Test. He has batted 98 times, once, in 2016, at number four, and that aside, never higher than five. It poses the question, has anyone in the modern era successfully converted to opening so late in their career having never batted in the top four? I couldn't think of anyone immediately, so I put out a Tweet, which produced this list of suggestions: Virender Sehwag; Justin Langer; Sanath Jayasuriya; Brendon McCullum; Simon Katich; Shane Watson; Tillakaratne Dilshan; Alec Stewart; Michael Vaughan; Ravi Shastri; Graham Gooch; Greg Blewett. A pretty quick and unscientific search of cricinfo turned up the following info on when each first opened in a Test; their average as opener; and overall career average (F/T = full-time opener): Sehwag: First opened in 6th Test; 8027 runs at 50.04; career 49.34 Langer: 2nd Test (F/T 42nd Test); 5112 runs at 48.22; career 45.27 Jayasuriya: 14th Test; 5932 runs at 41.48; career 40.07 McCullum: 1st Test (F/T 52nd Test); 1316 runs @39.87; career 38.64 Katich: 24th Test; 2928 runs at 50.48; career 45.03 Watson: 9th Test; 2049 runs @ 40.98; career 35.19 Dilshan: 55th Test; 2170 runs at 42.52; career 40.98 Stewart: 3rd Test; 3348 runs at 44.64; career 39.54 Vaughan: 16th Test; 3093 runs at 45.48; career 41.44 Shastri: 11th Test; 1101 runs at 44.04; career 35.79 Gooch: 3rd Test; 7811 runs at 43.88; career 42.58 Blewett: 34th Test; 588 runs at 29.40; career 34.02 On closer examination, many of these are easy to discount. Sehwag, Vaughan and Jayasuriya shifted early in their careers, and were top order batsmen already. Shane Watson also moved early and later dropped back down, as did Ravi Shastri. Justin Langer spent almost all of his first 40 Tests at number three. Simon Katich had been out of the Australian side for two and a half years when he returned as an opener. Graham Gooch spent the 1978-9 Ashes at number four plus a portion of the following summer, but opened for virtually all of his international career. Greg Blewett moved relatively late, and his record as an opener was worse than I remembered. The remaining three are more intriguing. Tillakaratne Dilshan had played just two Tests fewer than Bairstow when he began opening, and like Bairstow, had never really batted higher than five. McCullum and Stewart both kept wicket for long periods of their careers, and their key stat is perhaps average with and without the gloves. McCullum averaged 34.18 as keeper and 42.94 as a batsman. Alec Stewart was even more affected, averaging 34.92 with the gloves and46.70 without.
Bairstow turns that stat on its head, averaging 42.33 when keeping and 28.96 when not. Surrendering the gloves and moving up to open after more Tests than anyone in the modern era would be quite a feat - according to the numbers at least. Posted by The Old Batsmanat 05:35
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THURSDAY, 16 AUGUST 2018 SECOND TEST NOTES: IN THE FLESH It was the first day of the second Test... Well it was the second day if you're being like that, but it was the first day on which there was any play, so that makes it the first day in most people's minds... Inmy mind, anyway.
So, it was the first day of the second Test, my first day at a Test since last year, first time seeing India for four years, and well... you forget don't you. The TV coverage is brilliant now (I saw a clip of Botham's Ashes the other day - the picture was almost square, the resolution like looking through a pair of someone else's glasses... Beefy's beard smeared across his face, the pitch-invading kids Lowry stick men...), it's brilliant but much of the depth and speed, all of the sensory joy, is lost among the pixels. We were still on the stairs at the back of the stand when the first wicket went down, but everyone stuck outside knew what had happened. The noise was unmistakable. The wicket cheer. Slightly different to the wicket roar, which you only get occasionally at Lord's (it came later in the game though, when Broad got himself on another hat-trick), and to the DRS cheer (recent addition to the canon, but easy to distinguish). We pushed up to the top of the steps and could just see a thin line of the electronic scoreboard by the Pavilion: 'India 0-1', glowing quite orange-ly under heavy skies."What happened?"
"Jimmy bowled him...""Bowled who?"
"Vijay..."
Pujara was already out to the middle, radiating innocence in his usual way. He bears the look of someone whose dad still drives him to the game while the cool kids sit together on the coach (as someone whose dad used to drive him to games, I know it when I see it...). "Who have they dropped then?" The replay goes up on the big screen at that moment, Vijay, Bollywood hair falling from his helmet, trying to hit an outswinger through midwicket. A shame because on the last tour here, he was one of the few who batted well. Very solid. On the scoreboard I see 'KL Rahul', so poor Shikhar has gone the way of all flesh. Wouldn't have minded seeing the old moustache stroke a few of those glossy cover drives...Ah well...
The clouds banked up to the left of the Pavilion, unyeilding as tower blocks. Rahul drove Broad for four, and although Broad was 'only' bowling about 80mph, it happened quickly and with such precision, the small movement of the feet and hands, the batswing just a sweet little punch, like the ones that old boxers don't see coming. Rahul has a Kohli-esque beard, perhaps a subconscious act of hero worship, and his cover drive is like Kohli's too. He seemed to be compact and strong, a reaction to his terrible shots at Edgbaston, probably, and the likely Shastri bollocking that followed. The groundsmen came on to the outfield behind the boundary rope with the hover cover. Rahul hit another four but then Jimmy Anderson nicked him off, and instead of signalling the grounsmen on with the cover, the umpires let Kohli walk out and face two deliveries. This was very poor, I thought. They knew they were going off, and within a minute it was raining and dark, the Pavilion looming like a mansion in a ghost story. How was that fair to Kohli, or to India, or to a lot of the people in the ground who'd paid out for their tickets in the hope of seeing Kohli have a go at the England bowling? By 3pm, when the ground was essentially underwater, Kohli had comically run out Pujara, whose dad, if he was like mine, was probably sitting in the car quite annoyed. Kohli showed the self-preserving instincts of the superstar, and Pujara at least had the luxury of being able to graciously forgive his captain over lunch, and not have to worry about being out through his own error. We'd sneaked into the Mound stand, and we sat and watched the standing water get funnelled off through little drains in the outfield until somehow the sun broke through and what had been a series of small lakes receded and Lord's became a jewel glowing in the luminousafternoon light.
From side-on it was easy to see why Kohli has a bad back. He likes to stand with his feet almost parallel to the stumps and then twist his torso so that his head is out in front of his body and looking squarely down the pitch. He managed to miss most of the miracle deliveries that England sent down by keeping his hands close to his chest, and then smiling phlegmatically at the slips as they moanedabout him.
The slips were both brilliant and terrible. Root kept changing them around and joining in himself, which didn't help. The problem seemed obvious, especially when Anderson and Broad were on, in that they had to stand close enough to catch the soft-handed edges from balls bowled at eighty miles an hour, but then Anderson or Broad would occasionally send one down in the mid-eighties that bounced and then flew at Bairstow, threatening his chin. Then when Woakes came on the slips didn't really seem to move back, even though he was noticably quicker. Buttler dropped a couple, one from Hardik Pandya that he went for like a wicketkeeper, hands cupped and trying to ride the bounce, and missed completely. Woakes didn't look too happy and gestured at Buttler to catch Australian style, with his fingers pointed up. Pandya nicked the next one too and this time Buttler did catch it, so, much like Pujara and Kohli, he and Woakes could be friends again. It was that sort of day for India. They were on the wrong side of everything from the toss to the weather breaks. I suppose as a professional you get used to that happening occasionally. Everything seemed fated, and, like the rule that says work expands to fill the time allocated to it, so India's innings fitted perfectly inside the final session, with only the remarkable, redoubtable, spider-like Ashwin really resisting Woakes, with his bruiser's run-up and boxer's rhythm, and Anderson, who flitted around like Roger Federer and sent the ball swimming through the claggy air, its rough side resisting the path the smooth side wanted to cleave. 107 all out at nineteen minutes past seven. Cricket in England in theraw, in the flesh.
Posted by The Old Batsmanat 05:21
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SUNDAY, 5 AUGUST 2018 FIRST TEST NOTES: VIRAT BREAKS BAD; ROOT-MATHING ROOTY'S FIFTIES;WORST SHOT AWARD
In _Breaking Bad_ Season Three, Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine kingpin of New Mexico, is almost exactly halfway through his transformation "from Mr Chips to Scarface". Walt has already, with varying degrees of willingness, killed several people, but now he is dealing with the genuine article, his dead-eyed boss in the crystal business, Gustavo Fring. Fring has manipulated the near fatal shooting of Walt's brother in law, the swaggering DEA agent Hank Schrader, and in doing so, steered the assassins away from Walt himself. For Walter it's a revelatory moment. Not only does he puzzle out the "much deeper game" that Fring has designed, he admits - both to Fring and, implicitly, to himself - that "I would have done the same..." Less than a year later, he organises Gus Fring's murder. Walter loves chemistry because chemistry is "the study of change". It's the metaphor for the show's five seasons, as Walt, in the words of his partner Jesse Pinkman, "breaks bad". Yet it becomes apparent, as Walt meets his fate, that change is also about accepting your true nature. Walt did what he did, he confesses at the end, "because Iliked it..."
Okay, it's a writerly leap from _Breaking Bad_ to Test match cricket, from Walter White to Virat Kohli. But what is Kohli if not a man who has embraced his true nature as India's alpha-dog player and the game's latest supernova, a man for whom batting is absolutely thestudy of change.
Sam Curran many have been the man of the match at Edgbaston, but the award fooled no-one. This Test match revolved around the powerful gravity of Kohli's star. By the game's third evening, England's players were openly admitting the obvious: that the result was intimately bound up with Virat's fate. Graham Gooch's 154 of England's 252 at Headingley in 1991 has been called Test cricket's greatest innings. Kohli's 149 of India's 274 walked in the foothills of such mastery. At Headingley the next best score was Mark Ramprakash's 27; at Edgbaston, it was Dhawan's 26. Much has changed since 2014, and you can read about Kohli's transformation anywhere. He will talk happily about the small technical changes, tiny shifts of back foot and hip position, that have allowed him to do his thing. What is more impressive and more important is the act of will that has accompanied it. Kohli changed because he wanted to, because it is his nature, because he likes it. He has evolved a preternatural, majestically orthodox style of batting that works in every format: all he does as he swaps between them is alter the tempo, retune himself to different frequencies. It is pure and beautiful. He is 29 years old and has 57 international hundreds. Only Kallis, Sangakkara, Ponting and Tendulkar have more, and all of them played over 500 games. Kohli has played 340. More than this, Kohli's desire to fulfil himself and to leave his mark on history is important politically. India and the BCCI's commitment to Test cricket must match his - Kohli demands it, and the whole game benefits. He lifts us up. ROOT-MATHING ROOTY'S FIFTIES After Joe Root's first-innings run out, Jonathan Liew tweeted: 'You hear lots about Root's (very poor) conversion rate from 50 to 100, but very little about his conversion rate from 0 to 50, which is insane. It's 43%, which is the highest of any batsman since Bradman'. It kicked off the old debate about whether it's better to have a champion player who scores fifty all the time, or one who scores 100 and then nought but averages fifty. Since his last century, against West Indies in August 2017, Root has played twelve Tests, batted 21 times and made eleven scores of fifty-plus. Of those twelve Tests, England have lost seven and drawn two. All three victories have been at home, against West Indies (in a series win), Pakistan (draw) and India. England players have made hundreds in some of those games: Stokes against West Indies at Leeds (lost); Malan and Bairstow against Australia in Perth (lost); Cook against Australia in Melbourne (drawn) and Bairstow against New Zealand in Christchurch (drawn), so the argument, when refined, is not just about one batsman making fifties. The significance of course is that England came up against players that did convert, notably other members of the current Big Four, Steve Smith, Kane Williamson and Kohli. Steve Smith batted seven times, making three hundreds and two fifties; Williamson batted three times and made one hundred; Kohli has batted twice and made a hundred and afifty.
It's a (too) small sample size, but it suggests a ruthlessness that shows up in their overall stats. Smith has batted 117 times in Test cricket for 23 hundreds and 22 fifties; Williamson 116 times for 18 and 26; Kohli 114 times for 22 and 17. Root stands at 128 innings, 13 hundreds and 41 fifties. England are below India, Australia and New Zealand in the Test rankings. The question of which is better, consistency or big scores from players with similar averages and overall output, seems to have an answer - not that Bradman would have been in any doubt... AND THE WORST SHOT AWARD GOES TO... Has there been a Test match in recent times in which so many good players have got out to such truly terrible shots? Not just the usual nick-offs, hole-outs and brain-fades, the workaday lapses of concentration and moments of fear and panic (of which there were plenty on both sides), but the kind of shots that you would be deeply embarrassed to play yourself. There was KL Rahul determinedly dragging on a wide half volley second ball having edged his first through the slips. There was Ajinkya Rahane playing the weirdest of half-bat wafts to Ben Stokes - if he was trying to edge it to slip, he couldn't have done so any better; and then there was Stokes himself, essaying a magnificently atrocious, almost indescribable caught and bowled to Ashwin. He looked like an indulgent dad on the beach, contorting his arms to make sure that he directed a wayward tennis ball back at his three-year-old to catch. Almost as culpable was Joe Root, who lollied Ashwin to leg gully off the face of the bat having just stared at the _two_ (count 'em) fielders placed there, and Johnny Bairstow, following him in, playing the same shot _to his first ball_... It was a wonderful Test match, made in part by its participants'fallability.
Posted by The Old Batsmanat 11:58
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