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.

And Now the End is Near...

As the year draws to a close, like the final overs of a Test match day ticking over as the shadows lengthen, it only remains for me to say thanks for visiting.

Memories of 2011? Steyn v Tendulkar at Cape Town, touched upon here.

Lord's, Saturday, post-lunch, described here.

Sunday afternoon at Lord's. Prior.

Dravid everywhere, but especially Trent Bridge, which prompted this.

Oh, and Tim Bresnan - as unpretentiously excellent a cricketer as England have had in years - taking his team's score past 700 for the first time since 1930 with a straight six into the Edgbaston crowd.

See you in 2012.

A Sense of Unreality

I didn't see the fall of the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001 as it happened, but people who did reported that doing so induced a sense of unreality. Many of them genuinely couldn't believe what they were seeing.

Today was a bit lke that. As I watched the Australian second innings wickets tumble in the kind of surreal freefall rarely seen away from the game's lower echelons, I briefly felt as though what I was seeing couldn't reallly be happening.

This was Australia.

Australia. The side, if not the players, who used to bestride the world, trampling all challengers underfoot.

And they were 21 for 9.

Precise reasons were hard to come by. There was some fine bowling, of course, and the pitch did its bit, but, as the cliche goes, 'it wasn't a 47 all out wicket'.

There were poor shots, from Hussey and Haddin in particular, but, more importantly, Australia, despite their fine showing in Sri Lanka, remain in an uneasy place. Watson now looks several places too high, Hughes, jumpy and staccato, still fails to convince, and Ponting may be facing the final curtain. Johnson just struggles on.

For all Clarke's class, the many qualities of Steyn, Morkel and the excellent newcomer Vernon Philander were always going to test their mettle to its limits.

They did, and they were found wanting. The game could go either way tomorrow but South Africa are favourites.

Vying for Superiority

Going back to work in January is never great. It's even less enjoyable when it means you have to forsake the TV for the Cricinfo commentary on one of the best day's cricket of the winter.

With Australia and England vying for superiority in Sydney, South Africa and India produced a minor classic at Newlands.

Tendulkar we know to be one of the greatest batsmen of all time. But a few people, especially, perhaps, in England, may not yet have quite realised what a magnificent fast bowler Dale Steyn is.

But not so good that Harbhajan Singh can't drive him for one of the purest straight sixes you could ever see.

With, respectively, two and three days to go, each match is beautifully poised.

Hard As Nails

England's evisceration at the hands of Steyn and Morkel was quick, it was bloodless and it had been coming. With Steyn closer to his outstanding best than ever before against England and Morkel looking once again like a bowler who could terrorise the world, something had to give, and with England's two best batsmen continuing to struggle and the lower order failing to compensate (just what was Prior thinking?) it was always likely to be the precarious lead which they brought north from Cape Town.

On England's side it was a series for low-key heroes; less so South Africa, with the immense Kallis and Smith doing what they do best, although yesterday it was refreshing and appropriate for the frequently overlooked Mark Boucher to take his share of the limelight.

Despite their strange flirtation with Thami Tsolekile and AB de Villiers (not sure what happened to him) under Ray Jennings it's now very hard to imagine or remember a South African side without Boucher behind the stumps. Low-slung, perennially scowling, shuffling up and down the cut strip for hours on end and catching chance after chance off the seamers. His trademark celebration - a leap in the air and the ball thrown skywards - is an island of relative flamboyance in a sea of businesslike reserve.

Boucher now stands as one of the greatest post-isolation South African cricketers; a wicket-keeper of class and consistency, a batsman of timing and fortitude who's at his very best under pressure, a hard-as-nails senior pro who's seen it all and more, and who, with Ntini gone, represents, along with Kallis, the final link with the Cronje era.

He's never exactly been a cricketer to warm to, but this time of all times he didn't deserve to end up on the losing side.

Earning A Living

Earning a living has been my main priority over the last few days, but I caught some fleeting glimpses of the second India-South Africa Test and even less of the West Indies-Sri Lanka game in Port-of-Spain.

In Motera a couple of things stood out: The continuing excellence of Dale Steyn, the most improved and now the most potent quickie on the international circuit, and the fact that AB de Villiers, a player of obvious and vast potential, finally went on to make a truly significant Test score.

Both players, but especially Steyn, will pose more than their fare share of problems for England this summer, a series which seems sure to be tightly-contested and which I'm really looking forward to.

Someone who has had time to produce a more detailed analysis of what went on is Homer, and he poses a number of legitimate questions about the place in which Indian cricket currently finds itself.

Better than at many times in the past to be sure, but as capable of self-inflicted turmoil as any other entity in the sporting world.

Questions, Questions

The last week's action from around the world begs a few questions. Such as, just how many runs can Jacques Kallis get, and how many centuries can he make? The answer to both, of course, is that no-one knows, but there doesn't seem to be any sign of a diminution in his desire for runs or any dilution in the purity of his technique, especially when faced with a New Zealand attack which, on what little I saw, had 'cannon fodder' written all over it.

But then we know all about Kallis. Of far greater significance for South Africa's future have been the runs made by Hashim Amla and the wickets taken by Dale Steyn. Amla, like Kallis before him, owes his place in the side to the belief and persistence of the South African selectors, who've stuck with him through some difficult times, while Steyn's looked like a series of wicket hauls going somewhere to happen since his debut against England some three years ago. I think a good deal more will be heard of them both, especially Steyn.

Another pertinent question after Hobart is 'just how good is Kumar Sangakkara'. Well, I remember describing him once before as 'one of the finest cricketers on God's earth', so it's obvious where I stand. I haven't seen what went on today yet, but Peter English pays a fulsome tribute to his latest epic here.

Going On Abroad

With winter showing its hand in England and little happening on the cricket front - apart from Fletcher flogging his revelations around the nation's TV and radio studios - the eyes turn to what's been going on abroad. India keeping their noses ahead of Pakistan in their ODI series, Australia putting Sri Lanka to the sword at the Gabba, and Graeme Smith's Proteas making short work of a New Zealand side which looks overmatched, especially now Shane Bond is heading home.

It was gratifying, if not surprising, to see Phil Jaques make his first Test hundred. He's played a lot of county cricket in recent years, and, after seeing him make one of his routine double hundreds at Worcester in the summer of 2006 I was sure he was going to be the next opener off the Baggy Green rank. For such a classy operator he's starting his Test career late at 28, but Adam Gilchrist was around that age when Ian Healy finally allowed him into the side, and he hasn't done too badly in the years since. I reckon the world's bowlers will be seeing a lot more of Jaques over the next few years.

In South Africa it was Hashim Amla and Dale Steyn who caught the eye; I've paid enough tributes to the remorseless and peerless Kallis for the time being. The Wanderers innings may be the start of something big for the man with the finest international cricket beard since Saeed Anwar, while the pacy and aggressive Steyn also seems to be settling in for an extended run in the side, taking some of the pressure off the indefatigable Makhaya and dovetailing nicely with the less pacy but more aggressive Nel.

For all these sides it'll be a long English winter. This is just the start.