Five Years

Overstepping the mark

OB has a short, but sweet, summation of what we all feel.

What doesn't compute is the sheer banality of what they are alleged to have done.

The 1919 White Sox threw a World Series, other corrupt sportsmen have deliberately lost games, bet against their own team, taken performance enhancing drugs and so on.

But to simply overstep a couple of times? The evidence seems pretty incontrovertible, but it does seem a ridiculously mundane thing to throw your career for.

And as I've alluded to below, how does a bookmaker make a killing with something as trivial as that?

Gambling Man?

Just a thought, but if someone comes up to you in a bar and says "I'll bet you a fiver that the first ball of Amir's third over is going to be a no-ball" would you take the bet?

No, me neither.

Every Mother's Son

"Mum always used to say to me, 'You're gonna blow.''

Mother knows best!

Good interview with Andrew Symonds who, for some reason, has thrown his lot in with a Minor County for the T20 domestic tournament...

Opportunity Missed

It's a shame one of the English counties didn't take the opportunity to offer Tamim Iqbal a short term T20 contract - even if only for a couple of games before the next phase of the international summer calendar kicks in.

East End boys get mugged!

I've played in plenty of club games where the side fielding second have bought on a spinner to open the game up when the batting side seem to have got bogged down chasing their target. We have a left arm googly bowler in our club who is perfect for the purpose, tossing the ball up, happy to concede some runs knowing that wickets will invariably follow. He ends up with figures of 6-0-44-5, and the game will be won and lost in the last over - a perfect result.

Odd though, to see Essex do it last night in a T20 game against Kent.

Chasing 167, Kent had started well but had got well behind the rate against some cagey quick bowling from Napier, Masters, Wright and Ten Doeschate. They were left needing 62 off the last 5 overs.

Cue Mark Pettini who, you can only imagine, thought he'd get in touch with his feminine side and put on Phillips, who delivered an over of slow lobs that Geraint Jones and Darren Stevens hit half way down the A12 to London. 27 runs later, and Kent were on course for an unlikely victory.

The notoriously one-eyed Chelmsford crowd, who make an MCG audience seem paragons of impartiality by comparison, were stunned into a wonderful silence and Nasser Hussain went from smug to gutted in the blink of an eye.

A couple of overs later, after 18 0ff an over from Ravi Bopara - who has gone from 'England's regular number three' to 'has-been' in less than twelve months, and it was all over.

Nasser tried to find solace by bleating on about how such overs were now common-place in the world of T20.

Sorry, that won't wash. It was a good, old fashioned '27 in an over' mugging!

Great Expectations

So Steve Finn takes nine wickets, on his home ground, in - for the most part, favourable bowling conditions, against the worst test team in the world...

And suddenly he's the second coming of Glenn McGrath?

Half as good

At one stage during Australia's run chase against Pakistan, the screen showed 81 required off of 36 balls. And that, in itself, sums up how T20 has completed kicked over the traces of how we view one day cricket.

Back in more sedate times - which is less than a decade ago, the graphic would have been 81 off of 6 overs, and that would have been that. If you'd been in the ground, you'd have probably thought about packing up and leaving to beat the traffic - especially if you factor in the fact that the chasing side were five wickets down.

Now though, T20 has totally rewritten the rules on run chases. Replaces 'balls' with 'overs' is party psychological and a subliminal prompt to the watching millions on TV not to turn over, but partly a recognition that no target is out of reach until the first figure is 'six times plus one' greater than the second figure.

In the early 70's, in the 40 over John Player Sunday League, a first innings score of 150 probably wasn't enough, 170 was considered 'competitive', over 200 was 'challenging' and anything over 220 was pretty much out of reach for the side batting second unless one of two of their batsmen really clicked. Now think that you can transpose those figures almost exactly into the T20 format - that lasts half the time. The only slight caveat being that there were no fielding restrictions in the JPL, though bowlers were limited to 15 yard run ups.

Incidentally, I'm surprised that no one has written a book about the John Player League - or at least the first decade or so of it. Not only have you got the raw statistical data and the revolutionary nature of the tournament at the time it was launched, but there must be a whole wealth of anecdotes surrounding the fact that the games took place mid way through a county game, which might not have even been taking place in the same half of the country. So you'd have a situation where, for example, Kent would be playing a championship game against Somerset at Taunton on the Saturday, have to travel to Headingley for a JPL game on the Sunday, then back to the West Country for the Monday morning resumption of the championship game.

Anglo Saxon Attitudes

Kieswetter
Pietersen

'I before E, except after C'.

I wonder if 'Kies' is Afrikaans for 'Bed'....

Missing you already

Every Monday the Guardian Sport section have a backpage feature called 'Stats that aren't true but ought to be'.

Here's one -

17 seconds - the average length of time after Steve Smith comes on to bowl that it takes one of the commentators to mention another bleach blonde Australian leg spinner.

I Can See For Miles

Or not, as the case may be...

"Although I'm a good psychic, I never saw this one coming."

Hiatus

Sorry about the recent lack of posts.

I got a bit pre-occupied with the election, and even fleeing to Spain to avoid the inevitable Tory crowing didn't work. By the time we got back they'd only just sorted out the mess and the Liberal Democrats had sold their soul for a few seats in the cabinet.

More posts soon, so keep checking in.

That was the week that was

Alleged corruption
Influence peddling
Tax evasion
Bomb explosions (two of them)
Missing documents
Collusion
Two men fighting over a South African model

It makes the 'Stanford Experiment seem positively idyllic.

As a poster on the Guardian website said -

"All this, and Cameron imploding too. It's been a good week for Schadenfreude fans."

It's a rich man's world.

KP feels that England bowlers should have made more of an effort to get involved in the IPL. (Link)

He has a point, in terms of making yourself into a better player by competing against the best opposition you can find, but his main contention really is symptomatic of where cricket is heading at the moment -

"The difficulty in England when the IPL came about was that it was all a question of money, money, money. But it has become a 'World Cup' tournament."

In my book 'World Cup tournaments' don't take place every year - or at ten month intervals, which is the gap between the T20 World Cup in England last summer and the next one in the West Indies in a few weeks time.

And it's still very much a question of 'money money money'.

Crossing the Indian Ocean with the Adverts

A friend of mine is currently working out in Mumbai. We spoke on the phone a couple of days ago and his default position had moved to permanent incredulity when discussing the IPL.

'Every game is sold in the same way the FA Cup Final is in the UK - massive build up, pre-match analysis, posters and flags all over the place - and that's just for a simple group game. Lord knows what it's like when the final is on - the whole country is likely to explode.'

'The quantity of ads during play is remarkable. It makes Sky look restrained. They even manage to slot ads in between balls!'

The commentators are like that Hollywood director who said 'start with an earthquake and build up from there'

'One ball' or 'No ball'...

There's no other word for this but mind-boggling.

“He had come to them one day and asked whether he might watch an eleven of cricket at play so as to become initiated into the mysteries of our national game,” writes Locker- Lampson. “They welcomed him, of course, and wrote out the rules for him in the best British sport-loving spirit.”

First reaction was the check the dateline, making sure I hadn't accidentally slept away 14 days and it was now April 1st.

On closer perusal, you start to see the cracks - Rothermere actually owned The Daily Mail, not the Mirror - coining the charming headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' as Mosley's thugs were marching through the East End. Would Hitler have still been 'recovering from his wounds' five years after the war ended? And why were the British officers still in Germany at that time?

Then you realise that Mr Locker-Lampson MP was one of a frightening large group of Nazi sympathisers in the Tory Party at the time, so there's a big potential ulterior motive for trying to 'humanise' Hitler in this way.

So I'm calling 'bluff'.

Thanks to Tone for the heads up though.

A stroll round the boundary edge

A meander round the cricketing blogosphere, going from post to comment to post and so on, stopping to add our two-pennorth...

Starting with The Old Batsman's timely comparison of Graeme Swann and that chap who was going to be England's No. 1 spinner for about a decade... what was his name again?

From there, via the comments box, we have Wes's thoughts on the Australian top order and a possible replacement for Marcus North.

Then Andrew F at the alarmingly named 'Cricket or Death' site is hell bent on bigging up Angelo Matthews.

At Bored Cricket Crazy Indians, they manage to shoehorn Vince McMahon, Volleyball and Sepp Blatter into the same piece...

Remaining on the sub-continent, which after all is where all the action is at the moment, Naked Cricket starts a post by asking what if Sachin Tendulkar played for Pakistan? Brave man!

Finally, for now, Soulberry looks at the whole issue of cricketers with potty mouths.

If a picture paints a thousand words...

John Howard set to become head of the ICC.

That'll be this happy old soul!

Happy Idiot

A positive and negative from yesterdays victory over the 'mighty mighty Bangladesh' -

Positive - Eion Morgan's innings, which was the best English ODI effort I've seen since Paul Collingwood in Australia on the 2006/2007 'tour that never gets mentioned'.

Negative - Bob Willis's commentary. I know I've banged on about this before but, seriously, it almost made the broadcast unwatchable. At times it was like watching the game with an eight year old schoolgirl, but one with a whole series of petty vendettas she wants to carry out against most of the England side.

The sound of relish, approaching jubilation, in his voice when Broad spilled the skyer off of Collingwood was astonishing (this from someone who was a veritable carthorse in the field during his career) as was the similar reaction when Wright, Swann and Bresnan got themselves out in quick succession.

It seems that his pre-ordained agenda is that England are pathetic - anything that supports that contention is treated with a strange mixture of barely disguised glee with faux outrage.

It's just a shame that the slight time delay means you can't turn the sound down and listen to the radio broadcast instead, like in the good ol' days.

Clear Blue Water

The Tories have come out against listing the Ashes as a protected 'free to air' sporting event.

To be honest, you'd hardly expect them to do anything else now they've kissed and made up with Rupert Murdoch. Note - the kissing was very much one way, and it wasn't simply a kiss on the lips...

But I'd question some of the figures that are being bandied around - like the ECB could lose up to 75% of their revenue if they don't get Sky's TV money. That seems to assume that no one else bids for any of the TV rights and they are given to a terrestrial channel free-of-charge, which is a ludicrous assumption. It also assumes they can't come up with some sort of deal of the kind I outlined here.

I'd guess that much of the ECB outrage is prompted by the fact that a lot of the Sky money goes to support the cushy lifestyles of their senior honchos, and having to live on reduced rations - flying economy class perhaps, might be rather a shock to the system.

Then there's the issue of what the counties actually do with the money they get given by the ECB. Steve James actually argues in favour of Sky keeping the Ashes here, but does make some excellent points about how the counties waste the money they get from the ECB -

They talk about grassroots cricket when in fact they are thinking just as much of the counties, those 18 bodies full of anachronism, self-interest and conservatism.

Too many decisions made now are downright myopic.