Eulogies

Retirement. Over the near ten years that this blog has been running, many great players have slipped, always voluntarily, from the limelight: Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist, Lara, Ponting, Tendulkar.

There is usually a pattern, certainly for those who, even marginally, outstay their welcome. The form starts to slip, the player's age is repeatedly mentioned, possible retirement dates are proposed and debated. Then, when it has happened, eulogies are written.

I should know. I've written many of them myself.

When Shivnarine Chanderpaul recently announced his 'retirement' (He bats on for Guyana, which is hardly surprising. Will there ever be a time when, even in his head, Shiv isn't batting?) many tributes were paid. The best of these, by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan and Liam Cromar, emphasized Chanderpaul's status as almost the last of a kind. The batsman who is best known for being very, very difficult to dismiss. In the art, or the science, or perhaps just the bloody-minded discipline, of outlasting bowlers, Chanderpaul was the nonpareil.

He was, of course, far more than a mere accumulator; the thing I always liked most about him was the counter-intuitive contrast between the ugliness of his stance and the transparent class of many of his strokes. With Chanderpaul gone we have Alastair Cook, who does a very similar job, but without quite the accumulative powers or the class. This, perhaps, is the greatest mark of Chanderpaul's status as an outlier; he batted longer, and harder, and in poorer teams, and in greater denial of the traditions of his country's batting (the country, lest we forget, of Kanhai, of Fredericks, of Lloyd, of Hooper), than anyone else in the last twenty years, even Alastair Cook. With the way the game is changing, nobody will ever do that again.

When anyone retires, personal memories come to the fore. After the Test match between the West Indies and England at Lord's in July 2004 - a match in which Chanderpaul made undefeated scores of 128 and 97 in the face of heavy defeat - I stood at the door of the Long Room as he prepared to run the gauntlet of the supporters massed outside the pavilion's rear door. His face is a mask of characteristic seriousness and intensity; he has felt the pain of defeat once again, despite his best efforts. He wants away, but you sense that he would rather be able to leave in private, without having to deal with the adulation which he will receive. But the thing that leaves the strongest impression is his physical stature. He is one of the slightest people I have ever seen in an adult sporting context. Seemingly he is a boy in a man's world. Except, of course, in the matter of batting.

Now we have had the international retirement of Brendon McCullum. This is different in many senses; for one he is still at the peak of his powers, and, much to his credit, he is finishing while people are still asking, as the old aphorism goes, 'why?' instead of 'why not?'. For another he was never anyone's idea of an accumulator. While Chanderpaul would keep a contest alive to the end of his days, McCullum's way was to grab a match by the scruff of the neck and throw it out of the window.

As Rick Walton's superb, thought-provoking piece on the 'Wondrous Carnage' created by McCullum at Christchurch shows, he can provoke varying and contradictory emotions, but what McCullum deserves most respect for is the way in which he has been at the fulcrum of everything that has changed the world's perception of New Zealand cricket. New Zealand play uncomplicated, attacking cricket, but they do it with a lightness of touch and a lack of sourness which is refreshing and distinctive. Apart from the short period in the eighties when they had the advantage of one of the greatest bowlers of all time, New Zealand have never been anyone's idea of world-beaters, least of all their own.

Now, though, if you watch cricket in New Zealand you can watch it at the Hagley Oval, the sanctuary of post-earthquake Christchurch, and you can watch the batting of Kane Williamson, which is as good as anything of its kind that can presently be seen anywhere on earth.

In population terms, New Zealand is a small country at the end of the earth. It has its vivid natural beauty, it has its rugby, parodically it has its sheep.

Now, thanks in large part to Brendon McCullum, it has cricket.

Vettori

Last week a cricketer retired. This happens all the time.

Some go when it's not what people expect - or when, as the old, somewhat trite, advice goes, people are still asking 'why?' instead of 'why not?' - others go when they have no choice, when thier virtues are starting to be forgotten as a result of their inability to face up to the future. You could perhaps put Ricky Ponting in the first category, and Sachin Tendulkar in the second, although Ponting had his share of moments when the leaving became inevitable. Even now, with years having passed, the vision persists of him face forward in the Adelaide dirt, his stumps rearranged by another ageing great. When things like that happen, retirement is the only way to go.

As in so many things, Daniel Vettori didn't fit any of the obvious templates. Over recent years, as injuries took their toll on a body that had spent half its time on earth playing international cricket, you could be forgiven for thinking that he'd slipped away quietly. As New Zealand's cricket has been transformed over the last few years, the days when he was the fulcrum of a struggling side have faded into the background, but the closing weeks of his career, with all that they meant for New Zealand as a cricket country, were a fitting and memorable way to go.

As with Ponting and anyone else, visions will persist. In Vettori's case, from his very last weeks it will be the sight of him jumping off the ground with perfect timing and catching a ball with his left hand as it heads inexorably for the Cake Tin crowd, but this, brilliant and remarkable as it was, will never capture the essence of a cricketer, who, in New Zealand terms, ranks with the very best.

No, with Vettori the sights to fix in the mind's eye include that of a gangling, floppy-haired teenager with long hair taking his first steps in international cricket against England in 1997. This is about how long his career was: the grainy video on YouTube, with the England of Caddick, Croft and Tufnell in their MCC sweaters against the New Zealand of Blair Pocock and Heath Davis, fixes the match in an era that might as well be prehistoric. Then there is Vettori the batsman, bottom-handed, rigid, consistently looking overmatched, but counter-intuitively capable, with all the temperamental soundness, courage and timing you could want. And Vettori the bowler, with the perfect pivot, the control of flight and pace, the under-recognized subtlety. 4,000 Test runs at 30 and 362 wickets say that he could play, really play.

But perhaps most of all, the thing to take away is that, as Brydon Coverdale said last week in a fine distillation of his career, 'soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, Vettori is the very essence of what New Zealand cricket has become'. In the immature and mean-spirited universe occupied by Brad Haddin and his apologists, virtues such as playing the game in the right spirit count for little. Success justifies everything. The New Zealand which goes on from here - not the New Zealand of Vettori, but the New Zealand of McCullum, of Boult, of Guptill, of Southee, of BJ Watling - will, I am sure, continue to show that playing the game with passion and with flair does not have to mean playing with disrespect.

Perhaps it is a failing in me, perhaps it is the effect of getting older and growing softer, but I hate, really hate, what Haddin did. This is not a partisan issue. I detest Jimmy Anderson's tedious, shallow, false, aggression too.

For Vettori's virtues, read New Zealand's. International cricket need not be a war zone. There are enough of those around the world already.

How to Do It (and how not to)

One of the more salient aspects of England's defeat to New Zealand was that, even in the alternative universe in which England win games like that, you simply couldn't imagine them doing it in that way.

Why?

McCullum, that's why.

Or, more precisely, the type of cricketing culture which McCullum represents. A culture in which flamboyance, optimism and spontaneity are embraced. Alright, McCullum may be a one-off, or near enough (this, perhaps, may have been how Shane Warne would have captained Australia had he been given the opportunity), but the way in which he was prepared to attack, attack and then attack some more, simply threw the pedestrian, conformist, tactically bewildered nature of the England team's collective mentality into sharper relief.

Tim Southee is maturing into the world-class bowler he always threatened to become, and his work at the Cake Tin was devastating. But England have, and have had, outstanding bowlers too. On another day, in another time, Jimmy Anderson could have bowled like that. Even - though in the light of his brainless performance in Wellington this appears to be stretching credibility - Stuart Broad could have done the same. But you know, you just know, that a captain like Cook, or Strauss, or probably Morgan, wouldn't have backed his bowler in the way McCullum instinctively did. McCullum's tactics were innovative in that they went against what has become ingrained thinking about how one-day innings should be conducted, especially in (or by) England, but they weren't used in a self-conscious or hesitant way. They were simply what he felt to be the best way to win the match. It's been said many times - though more, one suspects, in stands and commentary boxes than on the pitches of the international world - that the best way to slow a side's scoring rate down is to take wickets. But how many captains will actively try to do that? How many bowlers would love to feel the type of confidence in them which such an approach represents?

There has to be a touch of arrogance in it, sure - 'you're pissing on this lot, just keep bowling' was what McCullum was saying to Southee - which goes against the natural English instinct too, but it sure as hell beats putting the field back and brining on someone to bowl darts hook when you have a side on the slide. Okay, it could all have gone wrong, but on this day you knew it wouldn't. This was a rapidly improving side, brimming with confidence and feeding off home advantage, against a team that have long since forgotten (if they ever knew) how to play one-day cricket.

English cricket has been mired in ponderous, hubristic conservatism for as long as you care to recall. Though he was complicit in his own downfall and there are a myriad nuanced complexities to it that most of us will never know about, this is what fed the long-term distrust of the greatest batting genius England have ever had. This is what fed the retention of Alastair Cook as one-day captain long beyond the point where his position had become untenable. This is what fed England's part in the carve-up of international cricket by the 'big three' (the idea of England being part of a big anything in cricket terms just seems mad). And this is what fed the rejection of a different type of domestic Twenty20 competition when the chance was there. Possibly most damagingly of all, this is what feeds the underlying feeling that, because England can still win the odd Test series, and people actually turn up in numbers to watch it, that continually failing in one-day cricket doesn't really matter.

McCullum can bat, too.

Cricket in Winter

English winters come in varying forms. There is difference - some are cold, this one has been wet, wetter than anyone alive has ever seen or experienced - and there is also similarity, uniformity. There are always long months of predominantly grey skies and early darkness. This is normal.

For anyone who loves cricket, and, for reasons of time, or money, or both, cannot travel to those parts of the globe where cricket takes place throughout the English winter, the months between October and April are strange ones. Cricket goes on; indeed, if you have access to Cricinfo and Twitter, and, most important of all, Sky Sports, cricket is everywhere.

But it is not cricket as it really is. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn on your television and see cricket; one day it is Perth, the next it is Sydney, then it is Wellington, Dubai, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Antigua. But as much as you can see the skies, and marvel at the depth of their blueness, rare in Britain even in summer, or almost convince yourself that you can feel the heat or the humidity by thinking back to a time and place when you were there - or somewhere similar - you cannot really feel the rhythm of the game. It is refracted and distended through the lens of the TV camera, while the commentators' perceptions - skewed by experience and biased by nationality and personal taste - can influence the way in which you see things. Moreover, you can never feel the wind on your face, or properly hear the shouts of the fielders, or the crowd. If you tire of watching from behind the bowler's arm, you cannot watch from midwicket, or low down at long-on, or chatting at square-leg. You have not travelled to the ground, or arrived there; you will not have the experience of packing your bag and leaving at close of play. Unless you have an unusually barren life, perhaps one where you have no work to do and little need to eat or sleep or leave your house, it is rarely possible to watch entire sessions of cricket in the way you would do if you were there. Thus, some of the light and shade of batsmen's innings - fluctuations of tempo and mood - and bowlers' spells - changes of pace, of flight, of spin, of field, are lost. If a bowler's field is altered it may be mentioned by the commentators, or the moved fielder may be shown, but the way in which that changes the impression and the purpose of the field as a whole can be obscured.

What a winter of televised cricket can do is reduce the game, with all its grandness and glory, to a series of distilled impressions, presented to you by the director and his cameramen and mediated by the commentators' personal tastes and opinions. It is a very different way of experiencing the game, but it is by no means an entirely bad thing.

Advances in technology increasingly mean that a television viewer has a closer view of the action than someone at the ground will ever have. Seam position, rotations of the ball as it spins, the way in which batsmen's eyes instinctively close upon impact as they play a hook or pull off their nose, or the way the blade of the bat wobbles on impact with the ball, are all evident to the television viewer in ways they will never be to someone watching from the boundary. And in the Test match arena, as in anything long, and stirring, where emotion and feeling play their part, you can draw many conclusions from being able to see the whites of the players' eyes or the precise way they use their bodies.

Over recent English winter weeks it has been possible to experience the impression of surprise and incidental pride on BJ Watling's face as he hears the announcement that he has broken a world partnership record, and to see him shake hands with Brendon McCullum as the crowd on one of the Basin Reserve's banks rises to acclaim them. Or it has been possible to look in detail at the way in which, as his form slowly returned at St.George's Park, Hashim Amla's bat emerged from its distinctive backlift with all its straightness and ethereal timing, relying on the nuances of wrist and hand positioning for its power and direction. As Australia slid to defeat in the same game, it was possible to see the way in which reverse swing took hold of the ball in the split second between it leaving Dale Steyn's hand and destroying the stumps of Brad Haddin. Or, also from Wellington, it has been possible to enjoy the beautiful, persuasive neatness of Ajinkya Rahane, or Brendon McCullum's return to the changing rooms, 302 to his name and a small, vulnerable, but immensely proud cricket nation saluting him. Week in, week out (it seems), there is the compactness, power and technical efficiency of the man who currently looks like the best opening batsmen on the planet, David Warner. And there is Kohli. There is always Kohli.

Cricket viewed through the prism of television is different. In many ways it is a more limited, less rounded, less involving experience. In others it is richer and more concentrated, while also more artificial.

Now it is March in England, things begin to change. It still rains, but the days are longer, and, when the sun is out, there is a meagre warmth in the air and the quality of the light is indefinably distinctive.

Soon, as surely as the world turns, it will again be time in England for the real thing.

Just Enjoy

So, the IPL has finally started. And with a bang, Brendon McCullum making the highest score ever in a major Twenty20 game.

It wasn't a huge surprise; as McCullum showed recently in New Zealand, he can do things like that. No, what was more significant was the fact that McCullum's knock, and the massive total it led to, emphasized one of the central weaknesses of T20 cricket - when the side batting first makes a really big score, the side batting second rarely gets anywhere near it and usually collapses in a heap as their batsmen try to score at a rate they simply can't cope with. And if you wanted to be mischievous you could suggest that if your opening pair is Rahul Dravid and Wasim Jaffer (one great player and one rare timer but two players with somewhat uneven records in limited-over cricket) you're probably going to find it even harder.

Still, I'm sure everybody enjoyed it. And a quick glance at the sides illustrates one of the less obvious but more valuable aspects of the league: the fact that the composition of the teams gives young players like Kohli and Saha the opportunity to mix and learn from the likes of Dravid, Kallis, Ganguly and Ponting.

Readers of some of my past posts will know that I have no problem at all with T20 as long as it its hand isn't overplayed. In fact, in an Engliah county context and watched on TV, I love it. I didn't see any of last night's game as I don't have access to the channel which is showing it it here in the UK, but my initial feeling about the IPL is that it won't mean armageddon for the game, it has value and it's here to stay (for a while at least).

Nobody can be entirely sure where it'll lead, so, for the time being, let's just enjoy it for what it is.

Power to Add

Among the most optimistic sides at this stage must be New Zealand, whose performances against Australia over the past couple of weeks may rank as their best in One-Day International history.

Their bowling has been steady and their fielding much improved after some shambolic showings in Australia, but it is their batting that has really stood out.

The half-discarded Craig McMillan has once more shown the type of punchy competitiveness that was once his trademark, Brendon McCullum and Peter Fulton have hit hard and long in their differing styles, and Ross Taylor has looked like New Zealand's most significant batting discovery since Fleming and Astle in the mid-nineties.

For them the Caribbean can't come soon enough.