Everyone's Favourite Australian

For all his 310 Test wickets, Brett Lee was a bowler who never quite fulfilled his potential. For, as a younger bowler, he had most everything needed to cut a swathe through the world's batting: the athletic, innately rhythmical action, the searing pace, and, in the right conditions, the ability to do unusual things with the ball. He probably should have been the next great Australian fast bowling hero, but the consistent excellence of McGrath and Gillespie, together with the later litany of injuries which has finished his Test career, cost him some of the plaudits which should have been his.

From an English viewpoint memories of Lee will always centre on 2005. Tearing in from the Pavilion End on the first afternoon at Lord's after Australia had been bowled out cheaply, vainly attempting to win the closest of matches at Edgbaston, nailing Flintoff as England's chase faltered at Trent Bridge and terrorising Pietersen on the last day at The Oval in a spell which touched heights of pace and aggression unseen on an English ground since the days when the West Indies pace attack stalked the earth.

And then there was the fact that he always seemed to be smiling, his demeanour embodying a warmth, sincerity and quiet charisma which I think made him as popular in England as any Australian cricketer in the thirty-plus years that I've been watching the game. Many Australian cricketers have achieved grudging respect in this country, but this was something different.

When it comes to genuine pace, two bowlers from the past twenty years or so stand out in the tableau of the mind: Lee and Shoaib Akhtar. With Shoaib never likely to recapture his best form, it'll be good to have Lee around for a while longer in the limited-overs arena, where he has often done his best work.

The incessantly demanding modern game mitigates against fast bowling excellence. As time passes, bowlers like Lee are going to become rarer and rarer. And, where they do break through, they surely won't smile as much.

Enjoy him while you can.

Harsh?

Five years for criticising the Pakistan board? Shoaib's punishment sounds unduly harsh and it remains to be seen whether it sticks. Over at Cricinfo Osman Samiuddin tries to make sense out of the confusion.

Whether or not we see him again, this is what he could do when he was at his best:

Volatility

With the players coming out at Lord's, one's thoughts switch back to the latest drama of the volatile, episodic, unfulfilled career of Shoaib Akhtar, sent home from South Africa before the Twenty20 World Cup has even started after a 'fight' in the dressing room with Mohammad Asif. Of course, it's hard to determine the truth at this stage, but it appears that Shoaib hit Asif with a bat, leaving him with a 'bruised thigh'.

It doesn't sound much, but, with Shoaib's record it might not take much to render the damage to his career terminal. It'll be interesting to see how Geoff Lawson tries to tackle a problem which many of his predecessors have failed to solve.

Meanwhile, at Lord's, India, toss won, are batting. Game on.

Pace Like Fire

With New Zealand progressing smoothly to the semis at South Africa's expense and England facing the future with uncertainty (Should Fletcher stay or go? Who will be dropped from the Test team to accommodate Vaughan?), it is Shaun Tait who's made the most vivid impression on me these past few days.

I can always remember where and when I saw the best fast bowlers of the past couple of cricketing generations for the first time:

Waqar Younis at Uxbridge, 1990, Shoaib in the World Cup at Bristol, May 1999, Brett Lee at Perth, December 2000. All typifying the sort of raw speed which makes you suck in your breath and wonder (but not too hard) what it's like to face bowling like that from 22 yards away with a stick of wood in your hand.

So it was when I returned from work on Friday to see Shaun Tait ripping out the heart of the Irish batting in Barbados.

If he can get his fluctuating line and length sorted Australia have an interesting and possibly deadly prospect to help their attack adjust to life after McGrath and Warne.

World Cup News

An interesting piece from Cricinfo by Osman Samiuddin, which suggests that the PCB's decision not to take Shoaib and Mohammad Asif to the World Cup may have had more to do with drugs than injuries.

Meanwhile, Jacob Oram states that he'd be prepared to have his injured finger amputated in order to allow him to make it to the Caribbean.

The Appeal

Until it ceased publication a couple of years ago I was a regular contributor to a magazine called Cricket Lore. Sometime in 2001 or 2002, the editor, Richard Hill, wrote to me and a number of the other writers to ask us to produce a piece of writing which summarized how we came to love cricket, to be called 'The Appeal'. In the autumn of 2002 - with Michael Vaughan's 197 at Trent Bridge, and the reception it received, still at the forefront of my mind - I wrote this.

For one reason or another, though, Richard never got round to publishing it, so it's appearing in print here for the first time. To me some of it now appears a bit dated, but it's generally a faithful reflection of what cricket means to me.


In adulthood, you somehow expect to recover from all this.
You assume that, as youthful zeal fades, the grim drudgery
of daily life will supersede all such nonsense. But it doesn’t
happen. Your obsession remains as vivid as ever. For once
cricket has claimed you, it never lets you go.

Marcus Berkmann, Rain Men - The Madness of Cricket
(London, 1995)

Berkmann was right. Cricket claimed me sometime in the early seventies, and I’ve never yet managed to kick the habit. Not that I’ve ever really tried.

I can’t really say how it all began. Like most addicts, I suspect, I simply can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in cricket. If I try a little harder I can recall going out into the back garden and attempting to bowl in the manner of Gary Sobers (using my left hand for added authenticity, which, for an overwhelmingly right-sided person, wasn’t easy) because my father and elder brother had told me that I had been watching (for this was 1973) the greatest player of them all. I can also remember getting up at strange hours of the night for the first (but hardly the last) time to listen to radio commentaries from Australia in the winter of ‘74-75 and Lillee and Thomson scampering runs in the Lord’s twilight as the first World Cup Final drew to a close. By the time the West Indian summer of 1976 began with us in our new home a few streets away, cricket had become an integral aspect of the fabric of my life. It’s difficult to pinpoint what it was that I liked about cricket then, but it seems logical that the things I like about cricket now are the same things that got me hooked on cricket then.

I love the physical beauty and vivid visual dynamics of the game. The balanced tempo of any good first-class match - the sense of rhythm, comprising history and mystery and latent expectation, which keeps you watching, ball after ball, session after session, day after day. Season after season.

As time moved on I started to play seriously, encouraged by my father, who’d seen Compton and Edrich batting together, and my brother, who once bowled a whole side out on his own, hitting the stumps on nine occasions. A bit of fine-tuning was provided by my friend Gary’s father, who’d played for the Club Cricket Conference and had been on the fringes of the Buckinghamshire side in the sixties. He knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t, and some of his guidance certainly rubbed off, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. I joined Sunbury Cricket Club, on London’s south-western fringes, a club with an exceptional colts section which has since set Richard Johnson and David Nash on their way to the county game. These days, when I’m watching Johnson bowl at Taunton, my mind often drifts back to those days, as it always did with Graham Rose who was nearer me in age and once came to the club with a Middlesex junior side. Could I have done what they did? Well, no, actually. I was - and remain - a player whose enthusiasm and appetite for the game compensates for a moderate ration of ability. I played in the school team, which was quite successful for a while, and also made the district schools’ side. Some of my friends got into the county side as well but I was never that good. A few runs here, a wicket or two (or five) there, the odd catch. That was cricket for me as the seventies ended - minibus trips to away games all over south London and Surrey, roughly equal helpings of celebration and commiseration, a developing awareness of the game’s wider resonances. And, of course, I was still watching the game at the highest level. Between 1976 and 1981 I attended all the major limited-over finals at Lord’s, including the 1979 World Cup Final, and several Tests at both Lord’s and The Oval. These are some of the things which I saw during those years:

Thomson and Lillee in their pomp, 1975. The young Michael Holding turning within a few yards of the pavilion ropes at Lord’s in 1976 and embarking on the most beautiful and artistic bowling action I’d ever seen. Procter, Richards, Collis King and Gooch infusing Lord’s finals with their coruscating skills and dominant personalities. Gavaskar stroking the England bowling all over The Oval as I sat transfixed in front of the television one late summer day in 1979.

Of course, for an infatuated teenage cricket follower, 1981 was the season which topped the lot. I’m sure many new converts to cricket were won that summer and if I hadn’t already been hopelessly devoted to the game, 1981 would have confirmed the extent of my obsession. But I already knew what I liked about the game and, if I’d bothered to think too far into the future, I would have felt that my views weren’t going to change.

They did, though. I continued to play the game, but as adulthood approached I found that I wasn’t quite as successful as I used to be. I was playing with men rather than boys and I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. So, as the eighties wore on, I gradually played less and watched more. The Tests came thick and fast and I started to watch county cricket with seriousness and passion. In comparison with the long, barren period which was to follow, these were rich years. England maintained some of the veneer of success which had been established during the Brearley years, culminating in the dismantling of Australia at home in 1985, the year in which I did my A-levels and enjoyed a long summer off before going to university. University came and went, punctuated by days at the cricket, and, in 1990, I found myself in Brighton to see Middlesex claim the championship. I’d become fond of Gatting’s Middlesex side, but, within a few months, I was living in Devon. More than a decade on, I’m still here. These days I can usually be found in the Ian Botham Stand at Taunton, and occasionally at Tests at Lord’s, The Oval or Trent Bridge. Also, after several years of inactivity on the field, I began playing again in 1996. Village cricket in Devon is far from the cricket environment I grew up in and I haven’t achieved much but it’s a decision I’ve never regretted.

When you watch a huge amount of cricket it can all start to blend together and you can find yourself wondering what you’ve been left with. In my case it’s a kaleidoscope of random memories; unconnected but often conjoined by events and the passage of time. The young Steve Rhodes keeping to Richard Illingworth in the New Road shadows, 1988; Bob Woolmer and Keith Piper conferring in the nets at Coventry, 1992; Dave Richardson and Paul Adams driving England to distraction at Newlands, 1996; Shoaib Akhtar bowling to Sherwin Campbell at Bristol in the World Cup, 1999.

I instantly liked the look of Rhodes and thought he’d be the England wicket-keeper for years. I got that one wrong, but years later, when I finally saw England play abroad, he was wearing the gloves. When England crumbled in the shadow of Table Mountain, Woolmer was in charge of the South African side. I never thought I’d see a quicker bowler than Thomson or Holding. More than twenty years passed before Shoaib emerged, but he was quicker than anything else I’d ever seen. In 1987 I was at Lord’s when the entire ground stood to mark the conclusion of Sunil Gavaskar’s career; in the summer of 2002 I was again privileged to be present as the Nottingham crowd rose to acclaim Michael Vaughan’s 197. The applause spanned the years and reminded me of the essential humanity of cricket.

So, in cricket, as in life, what goes around tends to come around. And in cricket you can enjoy it again and again.

Elsewhere on Planet Cricket...

Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif saw their drugs bans waived on appeal, Damien Martyn decided to jump before he was pushed, and New Zealand beat Sri Lanka before what looked like a few men and their dogs in Christchurch.

I haven't followed the ins and outs of the Pakistan case very closely so I can't really comment, but the decision didn't come as a surprise. Nor, of course, did Percy Sonn's reaction, although whether that means he can do anything about it is another matter. Expect them both to be taking wickets again at an ODI venue near you soon.

Martyn was the most understated member of the great Australian sides of recent years, and he did his best work in Asia, so the memories of this Englishman are limited and hazy. He was at his best in England in 2001 and I recall seeing him make a typically elegant 176 not out against Somerset at Taunton, although the lasting impression is of an innings which was just too easy to be truly captivating. Wisden reveals the Somerset 'attack' to have been average to say the least, but one vague point of interest is that Shoaib was 'guesting' for Somerset. He took two early wickets (Justin Langer and Simon Katich, since you ask) before disappearing from view and leaving a group of tyros to take a hiding from Martyn.

Planet cricket can be a small world...

Marcus

This was also the first week in which Marcus Trescothick has ever been dropped from the England team, being replaced in the side for yesterday's game by another player for whom I have a lot of time, Middlesex's Irishman Ed Joyce. Joyce began well, striking two boundaries off Shoaib before edging a catch behind off Mohammad Asif, but anybody can do that. Hopefully he'll be around for a lot longer.

As for Marcus, well, I'm not so sure. He's been struggling for form all summer, and his exclusion from the side came on the back of an announcement that he was suffering from an unspecified 'stress-related illness', and wouldn't be travelling to the ICC Champions Trophy, although there seems no question, as perhaps Fletcher's ultimate protege, of him failing to make the plane to Australia. His days on the international cricket treadmill, however, seem numbered. His premature return from India earlier this year was shrouded in mystery, although it seemed obvious that domestic problems were at the root of it, and this week came the acknowledgement in the press that his wife has been suffering from post-natal depression, not an easy thing to cope with if your partner is in constant attendance but even harder if he's away playing cricket on an almost permanent basis. However, it now appears as though the explanation given by the ECB 'media machine' (hardly an appropriate metaphor, but you know what I mean and I can't think of anything better just now) and himself some time after he returned from India - that he was suffering from 'a virus' - may have had more truth in it than was supposed at the time by most people. The bottom line is probably that more than five years of almost constant travelling and playing has taken a toll on Trescothick's health, and it may be that he needs to take a permanent step off the treadmill in order to regain the equilibrium that used to be such an admirable and essential facet of his character, and, by extension, his batting.

Although I've never met him, I have watched Marcus bat regularly for more than a decade now, from his days in the England Under-19 side, through his early struggles with Somerset to his years at the top of the England order. As a number of media commentators have said, he's a humble, personable, consistent man who loves cricket and especially batting. But it's becoming increasingly clear that he's finding it harder and harder to cope with the amount of time he has to spend away from his family.

My money would be on him retiring from One-Day Internationals sooner rather than later, perhaps after the World Cup, a move which would hopefully prolong his Test career. He will, though, need to score some runs.

Brisbane wouldn't be a bad place to start.

That Was The Week That Was

Almost a week has gone by since I last posted and a lot has happened. But then I find that most weeks are like that - a lot happens but they seem to go incredibly quickly. I've had many a conversation with friends and colleagues (wage slaves all) about this over recent years and we never come to any very firm conclusions about what's behind it other than 'the pace of modern life'. Perhaps that's what Marcus Trescothick is suffering from, or perhaps it's just the pace of Shoaib Akhtar, something to which I've thankfully never been subjected.

Since I was last here England have played two more ODIs against Pakistan, losing at the Rose Bowl (where Younis Khan's magnificent century stood out) and then, just when otherwise sane people (and some journalists) were almost starting to wonder if they'd ever win another match against a major country, completing a handsome victory at Trent Bridge yesterday. I only really saw the England innings after returning from work, but it looked as though Lewis, Yardy and Dalrymple bowled well, and Andrew Strauss, and especially Ian Bell, certainly batted well. In fact, if anyone who hasn't got a Sky subscription is reading this (or even if anyone is reading this), get one. It's well worth the money, and when all is said and done, it allows you to watch Ian Bell bat.

And that, as the 2006 English season draws to a close, is about as good as it gets.

Interesting Times

It's often seemed as though the cricket world's been going mad these last two weeks and I've been away in Derbyshire visiting my family, so I haven't managed to post anything for a while. Now that things are returning to normal (England are losing a One-Day International as I write) it seems as though it's time to jot down a few thoughts.

I haven't got much to say about England's continued problems in limited-over cricket apart from stating what seems to be obvious, namely that if they'd been up against the current Pakistan attack - with Shoaib Akhtar, Rana Naved-ul-Hasan and the massively impressive and skilful Mohammad Asif all firing - earlier in the summer, it seems highly unlikely that they would have won the Test series. In fact, in all probability they would have lost it and would be going to Australia having failed to win a series since the conclusion of the last Ashes contest. However, as the pros (and various other people, including me) always say, you can only beat what's put in front of you. This England did, but their uneasy and complacent performance at The Oval until they were let off the hook by Pakistan perhaps gave a clearer pointer to how tough things are likely to be in Australia than their comfortable wins at Old Trafford and Headingley.

Meanwhile, on the domestic scene, two tales from the last few days stand out. One, Graeme Hick (you may remember that I follow his career quite closely) scored two centuries for Worcestershire against Essex, and two, a pair of leg-spinners, Yorkshire's Mark Lawson (6-88) and Adil Rashid (4-96), bowled out Middlesex at Headingley.

The first time that's happened for a while, surely, but hopefully not the last.

As The World Turns

It seems these days as though on any given day there's usually at least a couple of Test matches going on somewhere around the world. We've just seen Sri Lanka defeat South Africa by one wicket in what was obviously a thrilling finish, and England draw away to a much more comfortable win over Pakistan.

I didn't see much of either game (well, I didn't see any of the Sri Lankan one) so it's difficult to comment in depth, but it's enough to say that I've always regarded Mahela Jayawardene as a truly special batsman and it's been good to have his greatness confirmed these past few months.

It's also true to say that I couldn't stand Dean Jones as a commentator - something to do with his excessive mateyness and his inability to say anything remotely original - and I won't lose any sleep if he's never heard from again after his, er, 'clumsy' remark during the Colombo game.

Back in Leeds (I can't quite bring myself to refer to the ground as 'Headingley Carnegie'), England were excellent, while Pakistan were very disappointing, capitulating lamely to an England side that played increasingly tight and powerful cricket on either side of the Pennines.

Prior to the series much was made of the influence of Woolmer's coaching, his relationship with Inzamam and the players' discovery and re-discovery of Islamic devotion in turning the Pakistan side from a perennially inconsistent blend of disparate talents and personalities into a lean and mean unit that was good enough to challenge the world's best. While there appeared to be something in this during the last English winter, especially in the home series victory over England, they have fallen away badly on this tour, something which they, and their many followers, must feel very uncomfortable about.

True, they have been denied the services of Shoaib Akhtar, the vaunted Mohammad Asif and the Hove favourite Rana Naved-ul-Hasan by injury, but, unlike England, who, since Lord's, seem to have drawn strength from the absence of Flintoff (and Vaughan and Giles), Pakistan have withered. They have frequently appeared little more than a three man team, relying almost completely on Mohammad Yousuf, Inzamam and Younis Khan (who didn't even play at Lord's), with no opening pair, a pronounced tendency to drop catches and run each other out, and a range of mediocre bowlers (although we all know what Kaneria is capable of and I maintain that much more will be seen and heard of Umar Gul). All in all, in the last two Tests, much of their cricket has bordered on the shambolic.

England's progress must be set against Pakistan's decline, but there can be no doubt that England have rediscovered an intensity and bite to their game which largely went missing in the first six months after The Ashes were regained.

While life is certainly easier when you're playing at home and have a new player who's better than the hitherto established one whom he's replaced (and no prizes for guessing who I'm talking about), England have shown a desire and mental toughness which has been absent from Pakistan's displays.

Strauss must take much of the credit for this - Fletcher has rightly praised his mental strength, as evidenced by his centuries at Lord's and Leeds and his increasingly assured captaincy - but we've also started to glimpse a little of what Saj Mahmood could be capable of, both with the ball and in the field, where his first innings run out of Younis set the tone for some bristling English out-cricket.

I've already said enough about Harmison and Panesar, Bell, Cook and Collingwood, so the final word on Headingley has to go with Chris Read. As I said after his recall here, I was pleased that he'd been picked again but was concerned about how he would cope with such an intensely pressurized situation. I needn't have worried. He appeared to keep flawlessly, and, after some early luck, batted just about as well as could be expected in both innings. I'm still not convinced that Jones won't be back for Brisbane but Chris has at least given himself a fighting chance.

It's all he ever wanted, and with Fletcher even starting to praise Panesar, you never know where it could lead...