Force of Nature

There is an orthodoxy of thought about modern cricket which often seems stultifying. Academies, bio-mechanical analysis and legions of support staff with rigid views on how the game should be played, right down to when and how much nutrition should be taken, have robbed the game of much of its eccentricity and individualism and tempo.

My earliest memory of cricket is watching John Price running in to bowl for England against Australia at Lord's in 1972. For those who don't remember him (and in truth, I barely do), John Price was a Middlesex fast bowler whose run had such a curve in it that he approached the wicket as though he was running round a sharp corner. While batting eccentricities are still tolerated (you only have to watch Shiv Chanderpaul assume his stance to know that), you'd never see an international bowler run in like that now. Such tendencies are coached out of bowlers long before they reach the first-class game.

Another bowler who did his own thing back in those days was Mike Procter. When his vulnerable knees allowed him to slip himself, he was a force of nature. After charging to the wicket with his buttoned shirt practically bursting off his chest, he used, in the vernacular of the time, to 'bowl off the wrong foot'. Back then, Procter wasn't alone. Max Walker and Lance Cairns hit the crease in similar fashion but nobody does that now. If anyone tried it, the average professional bowling coach would have a seizure.

Procter, like many of his compatriots denied the ultimate stage by politics, was a colossus of the seventies game. Most of his best work was done in the colours of Gloucestershire, and thirty-five years ago today, he did the best of his best work: 6 for 13, a hat-trick and four wickets in five balls on the old Northlands Road ground as Gloucestershire laid waste to the Hampshire of Richards, Greenidge and Roberts in the semi-finals of the Benson and Hedges Cup.

Anyone who saw it remembers it. I walked home from school on a sunny afternoon and turned on the TV. I can't remember whether I knew there was cricket on or not, but I probably did. I was that kind of kid.

When the set 'warmed up' (pictures didn't appear instantaneously in those days and there was always a period of pregnant, impatient anticipation) I realised that something remarkable was happening. The packed ground was in ferment, Hampshire were 18 for 3, and John Rice, a man whom I knew as a county stalwart of reliability but little distinction, was walking to the wicket like a man on his way to the gallows.

I was young. I really liked cricket but I didn't know it or love it in the way I later came to. But I instantly knew that Rice was in trouble. Procter was going to have him.

And he did.

Richie Benaud was never as excited again.

It's on YouTube here.

Tom Maynard and the Common Humanity of Cricket

It's a horribly over-used word these days but Tom Maynard's father Matthew was, without doubt, a Glamorgan icon. If you have anything to do with anyone who supported the Welsh county between 1985 and the early years of this century, it's a fair bet that their favourite player, and in many cases a real idol, will have been Matthew Maynard.

A bloke I once worked with who'd served in the St.Helens bar in the days when the big summer crowds still used to pack the ground would talk in reverential terms about Matthew Maynard coming down the fabled Swansea steps and punishing county bowlers till they dropped. The Manic Street Preachers even wrote a song (the dreadful 'Mr.Carbohydrate') which featured him.

He was, of course, Nicky Wire's 'favourite cricketer'.

For all the competing qualities of Hugh Morris, and Steve Watkin, and Steve James, and 'Basil' Barwick, and of course Robert Croft, Matthew Maynard was, in Glamorgan terms, the man.

Which is one of the reasons why so many of those he worked and played with over those years spoke and wrote so feelingly yesterday when his son died at the age of just twenty-three. In most cases they'd seen him grow up and were waiting with anticipation for him to really blossom. He was part of the Glamorgan family.

I can offer no personal recollections of Tom Maynard. I never saw him play in the flesh; only bits and pieces on TV where he stood out as a young, muscular, virile strokeplayer in the modern idiom who, in the world of T20, would probably have gone far. The recollections and memories are left to those who knew him and watched him; as has been said, through his childhood and adolescence and early adulthood at Glamorgan, and, more recently, at Surrey, a club which has had more than its fair share of crosses to bear.

This is the common humanity of cricket. It is trite, but true, to say that cricket reveals character in ways that other games can't approach, with the result that it is possible to feel that you know people more deeply than you really do. And you care.

As George Dobell wrote in his finely balanced obituary of Maynard on Cricinfo yesterday, 'the cricket community is not large'. The point might seem oblique when the game is followed by millions, but in modern Britain, with the more garish charms of football always apparently in the ascendant, you know exactly what he means. Those of us who are part of that community - players, officials, journalists, bloggers - instinctively stick together.

When one of us dies tragically young, we bleed.

This is the West Indies

For a West Indian fast bowler Kemar Roach is quite a small man, and, with his gentle features and unassuming body language, he gives off a slight air of reticence. When it comes to height, aggression and the iron confidence that accompanies great skill, he's no Ambrose, or Croft or Marshall.

The West Indies have been getting beaten for so long that many of their players carry an air of pessimism and fractured confidence without even being aware of it. This, along with the technical issues which are seemingly always there - Roach's no-balls, poor shot selection by the upper order, confused running between the wickets and vulnerable fielding - is what Gibson and Sammy are striving to overcome. Small strides have been made in England over the past week or two, although placid pitches have helped and a relatively small number of players - Shiv (of course), Samuels, Sammy and Roach himself - have really excelled.

More, much more, is needed from others and some may not be capable of it.

This is the West Indies. They never are.

It's easy to feel sorry for modern West Indian players. Even for those of us who lived through it, the era when their predecessors exuded invincibility has long since faded into the past. Documentaries are made about it, YouTube is full of it, but, when all is said, it's just so last century. For more years than is decent, the West Indian Test team has been a pitiful thing.

For me, the most exciting moment of the match which concluded today at Trent Bridge was the second ball which Roach bowled to Jonny Bairstow yesterday. It was a perfectly directed short ball of high pace, heading for the throat, impossible for anyone, let alone an inexperienced Test batsman like Bairstow, to play with composure, or ease, or lack of fear. For a second or two you could have been back watching Close against Holding at Old Trafford, or Peter Willey facing Patterson at Kingston, or Robin Smith battling away, seemingly for his very life, against Bishop and the rest in Bridgetown.

Then there is something as apparently inconsequential as the West Indies cap. A deep and meaningful shade of maroon, bearing the badge which all of the combined territories' very best players - and they have been among the greatest the game itself has ever produced - have worn. With the sole exception of Chanderpaul, none of the players who wore it today will ever be talked of as great, but the cap links them to the past and brings you up short if you ever find yourself thinking of them as just another team.

This is the West Indies. Don't ever forget it.

These evocations of the past must be relished and clung to as tangible representations of the hope of a better future.

For without those there is nothing.

Unforced Power

In modern sport, as in life, time waits for no man. If your career loses momentum to injuries or fading form, people move past you. You can be forgotten as quickly as you arrived.

This time last year people were talking about Ben Stokes. Late in the season, without much fanfare or success, he even played for England. But his form was in decline and a persistent finger injury was causing serious concern. In the early winter, with little publicity, he was ruled out of England's winter programme.

Last Tuesday saw Stokes in Taunton, struggling to re-establish himself as part of a Durham side which is also far from what it was. On the game's first afternoon, he came to the wicket with his side 232 for 2, high at four perhaps, but with the sun on his back and the wind grazing his muscular forearms.

Though he is still only twenty, the left-handed Stokes is an imposing figure. At the wicket he still has the air of an overgrown schoolboy humiliating his puny peers in the under-thirteens and at times the bat resembles a toy in his hands in the way it always did with Andrew Flintoff, but, although he has the customary lumbering footwork of the really big man, his basic technique is good. His head is still, allowing his gifted natural timing to work its spell. He likes to deal in boundaries and at Taunton he hits eight fours and a six in his innings, which lasts just under an hour and a half. Most of these are drives and pulls, and one wristy on-drive off Arul Suppiah which beats long-on with ease, even though the fielder has only a few yards to move, stays in the memory for its casual, unforced power.

On sixty, Stokes strays from his crease after nudging the ball back to the bowler and is brilliantly run out by a reflex shy at the stumps. He leaves, head bowed, frustrated, not for the first time you sense, by his inability to convert a virile start into a big innings. The two aren't necessarily connected, but, after Stokes is out, his side's innings rapidly declines. Two days later Durham are defeated, and Stokes fails to score in the second innings.

There are still many rough edges to smooth. But we will be hearing much more of Ben Stokes.

Far from Crap

There's a frightening amount of stuff out there in the 'Blogosphere'. Some of it is even worth reading. I have no memory of what I was searching for at the time but I recently came across a link to this.

The stuff about the writer's own games can be taken or left. In many cases you have to have some personal knowledge of the people and circumstances involved to really appreciate it, but some of the pieces about cricket and cricketers (and the News of the World) - especially from last year - are absolutely superb. It was no surprise to discover that it's the work of a professional writer.

Highly recommended.

Not the IPL

When 'people' - usually lazy journalists of the type who become disorientated if they're ever forced to set foot outside the M25 - say that county cricket (by which they mainly mean County Championship cricket) is dying and isn't watched by anyone, I tend to get a bit annoyed. This is because I like County Championship cricket, and, where I usually watch it, the number of people who turn up can easily be mistaken for a crowd.

It's not always like that, though.

On a Saturday afternoon in early May which looked and felt more like a Tuesday morning in late November, it briefly seemed like a good idea to try to see some cricket. It may not have felt like it, but it was, after all, supposed to be the cricket season.

After a tour round the suburban cricket grounds of Derby, most of which appear to be under water, there is only one thing for it. We head for the County Ground, where a Second Division match between Derbyshire and Gloucestershire is quietly dying.

We drive into the ground and fortunately no-one tries to charge us for doing so. It is mid-afternoon and any stewards who may once have been on duty have long since gone home. It is a comparatively easy task to count the crowd, which, remarkably, numbers as many as seventy people. In the middle the two Gloucestershire batsmen, Ian Cockbain and Will Gidman, are stroking the ball around with ease against a Derbyshire 'attack' which comprises almost everyone who is still standing. The pitch has preceded the match into a watery grave. The players are cold, the umpires are cold and the crowd is cold. The prevailing atmosphere carries more than a hint of desolation and utter pointlessness. The IPL it ain't.

Tea is taken at 3.40, but, having carelessly neglected to bring either the Laws of Cricket or the playing conditions of the County Championship with us, we are unsure exactly when the game will finish. We assume that it will finally be certified extinct at about five o'clock, so we are somewhat surprised when, at half past four, Peter Willey calls a drinks interval. Conditions being what they are, this is no ordinary drinks interval. The twelfth men bear large metallic flasks which contain we know not what. Tea? Coffee? Soup? Clinical stimulants? For God's sake, we know that everyone is struggling to stay awake but the match will, it turns out, be ending in twenty minutes.

After the drinks interval things start to get even more bizarre. This being a County Championship match, loud music isn't scheduled to play any part in proceedings. However, in a marquee at deep fine leg, a local DJ is warming up for that evening's wedding reception. As the bowler bowls, the increasingly empty ground suddenly reverberates to the sound of Mr.Brightside by The Killers. This annoys Peter Willey (and an angry Peter Willey is a worrying sight). In blunt Geordie tones he instructs a fielder to enter the marquee and tell the person responsible to leave his sound check until the end of the game. He will not have long to wait.

At ten to five, with only eighteen spectators still present, Gloucestershire declare their innings and the match is laid to rest. Few will mourn its passing.

We all go home.

Just Doing What He Does

It is early Spring in England. As I write, the rain is lashing against the window. The West Indies are due back in England soon. This, and the fact that he has just completed ten thousand runs in Test cricket, means that people are writing about Shivnarine Chanderpaul again.

They do this every few years. The rest of the time he just goes on doing what he does.

I can only recommend the outstanding pieces by Alex Bowden and Rob Steen which Cricinfo has carried in the last few days, but I can also add a few thoughts of my own.

The essence of great West Indian batsmanship is as hard to define as most other things in the game. But, if you were going to try, you’d probably come up with something which comprised the trailblazing style and run-hunger of Headley, the savage power of Weekes, Lloyd and Richards, the technical rigour of Greenidge and the elegance and skill of Lara.

Would you even think about Shivnarine Chanderpaul? Well, unless you were Guyanese, or drunk, or possibly both, you wouldn’t. And you’d be right, because, unless you really look, there’s little that Chanderpaul does that is different, or unusual, or exceptional, apart, of course from the crabbiest stance seen in international cricket since the retirement of Peter Willey, and what sometimes appears to be an inability to get out. As with so many players, though, the sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves, and, in the case of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, that sum is really superb.

But, as I say, you have to look.

I started looking back in the nineties. The first time I came across Chanderpaul was when England toured the West Indies in early 1994. When Brian Lara pulled Chris Lewis for four to break the world individual Test batting record at the Antigua Recreation Ground, a slight young left-hander was at the other end, 70-odd not out.

Other people were looking too. I didn’t have Sky at the time so I had to rely on TMS. Trevor Bailey, always a shrewd judge of a player, liked him. During the latter stages of their partnership he posed the question ‘was Lara any better when he was nineteen?’. Of course, nobody knew, but it was pretty obvious that, as players went, Chanderpaul wasn’t bad.

I first saw him in the flesh at Taunton, early in the West Indies tour of England in 1995. Apart from the way he stood at the wicket, the thing that first struck me was the contrast between the way he looked and the way he batted. Seeing him line up, all spiky limbs, furrowed brow and jumpy, unorthodox stance, you fancied him as a journeyman blocker. Then you saw him hit the ball.

In spite of the way he appeared, there was a co-ordinated ease of timing and speed of reaction about Chanderpaul which immediately marked him out as a class player. Anything full was defended with a straightness of bat which belied his whippy, angular backlift, while anything over-pitched and drifting towards his pads would be turned through the leg side with perfect timing, left hand firmly in control. Anything short would be cuffed through midwicket, the same left hand keeping the ball on the ground. The scoreboard always seemed to be ticking over.

Throughout the seventeen years that have since passed, Chanderpaul has remained the impregnable, impassive, rock upon which the fragile West Indies batting has been anchored. Even before Lara retired he was one of the three go-to men for crease occupation and run-hunger in the world, with only the more widely-lauded Rahul Dravid and Jacques Kallis anywhere close. But then Chanderpaul always had a counter-intuitive ability to take attacks apart which those two simply didn't have, and, while as he has grown older and more careworn because of his team's decline he has become more defensively obstinate, the strokes remain there, and, on a good day, when the situation demands, they can still be seen. An overall Twenty20 strike rate of 107, and the memory of innings such as this tell you all you need to know about that aspect of his game. If you need to know more you can just think about the fact that he has batted for more than 1000 Test match minutes without being dismissed on four occasions.

After he had defied England in defeat with unbeaten innings of 128 and 97 at Lord's in 2004, I was hanging around in the pavilion at the game's end when Chanderpaul came down the stairs from the West Indian dressing room. He was later than most of his team-mates, and you fancied that he had taken the defeat a bit harder than the rest. He cut a slight, childlike, pre-occupied figure, and there was more than a hint of distance and unease in his eyes as he prepared to face the crowd of fans outside the pavilion door. What this suggested, and the years since have done nothing to diminish the impression, was that Chanderpaul doesn't really like recognition, or adulation, or confrontation; he simply loves to bat. In fact, he exists to do so.

Watching him against Australia recently, especially in the field, you couldn't help thinking, as with Ponting, about the things he'd seen. This is a man who played with Desmond Haynes, and Richie Richardson, and Courtney, and Curtly, and Brian, who began his career at a time when the West Indies still had a hint of invincibility about them. A man who has done more than anyone else to stem the tide of decline but who has been forced to give best to it time and again while still coming back for more, mainly, you suspect, because he knows no other way.

Next week he will be back in England for his sixth tour. Despite the presence in the side of a young batsman of obvious quality in Darren Bravo, it will be down to him to hold his side together. And in an English early season, with Anderson or Broad or Finn or Bresnan or Onions coming at them, they'll need some holding.

With Chanderpaul, though, you know that there will be no self-pity or reflection or world-weariness. He will not lament his fate.

He will, simply, bat. It is what he does.

A Vague Feeling of Concern

My name is Brian. I like cricket.

Although I still like to think of myself as relatively young, I have been watching cricket for forty years. In many ways my life, especially during the English summer months, is dominated by cricket. I have to wash, and dress, and eat, and work for a living, but cricket is always somewhere near to the forefront of my mind. I've been going to Test and county matches regularly since 1975, and to say that I've watched a lot of cricket on television would be a ridiculous understatement. It would be a bit like saying that Sachin Tendulkar could just about hold a bat, or that Don Bradman made the odd run at a decent average.

I've read many cricket books and I've also been known to write about the game.

For all this, though, I have never seen a match in the Indian Premier League.

I've seen bits of it, of course, but never a complete game. In its formative years it was broadcast on Setanta and I didn't have a subscription. Therefore, I never got into the habit of watching it, and, now that I can see it, I find that I don't really want to bother. Besides which, I am always at work when the matches are taking place and I haven't yet managed to find a job in which I am allowed to watch cricket.

So, largely, it goes on without me.

I have heard about it, though. And I'm not sure I like it.

S.A.Rennie's recent piece Gamechangers, put some of the obvious concerns in typically punchy and elegant fashion:

'The death of Test cricket has been predicted before, and fair enough, it is still with us, but one could also say it’s these continually raised concerns that have reminded us of how much in the way of tradition and history we stand to lose. The erosion, though, has now reached a point of insidious acceleration. Pietersen was bought during the transfer window for this year’s IPL by Delhi in a deal reportedly worth US$2.3 million. For becoming the number one Test team, England received a cheque for US$175,000. Add to that the increasing frequency of two-Test series and the cancellation – sorry, “postponement” until 2017 – of the ICC Test Championship, and while it’s not quite barbarians-at-the-gates stuff, Test cricket’s fortifications could definitely do with some strengthening.

I do enjoy the IPL, albeit in moderation – like the coke-snorting yuppie who gatecrashes your party and drinks all your champagne, it does tend to go on a bit. I’m all for embracing change and accept that the game must adapt in this current economic climate. But some things are so valuable, you cannot measure them in money, and you cannot tear down a load-bearing beam in your house because the woodworm have taken a chomp at it and it doesn’t quite fit in with your snazzy new decor. It’s all about balance. Sure, you could probably make a home in the rubble if you needed to, but would you really want to live there?'

I concur with this. As I said earlier, I like to think of myself as being as young and trendy as the average forty-six year-old who remembers Stuart Binny's father bowling England out (which isn't very young or trendy, of course), and I don't have a problem with T20 per se. In fact, when you get home from work on a gloomy June evening and you just want to slump on the sofa and watch some six-hitting, good old English Twenty20 (the original, if not the best) fits the bill very nicely.

It's just that it's the long-form game that I see most of and which I prefer. And, in England, Test matches are still important. Lots of people, some of whom are sober, go to them and they are an indelible part of the nation's sporting fabric. Round my way, County Championship cricket even draws groups of people large enough to be termed crowds. It matters.

Is this still the case in India?

The IPL chimes with contemporary India's perception of itself as a vibrant, thriving, commercially articulate democracy. Increasingly, you have to wonder whether Test cricket, with its recent overtones of decay and repeated humiliation, can ever be made to feel important there again. The IPL is India, modern and highly educated, the world at its feet and at its cricket grounds. Test cricket carries echoes and reminders of a less glorious past. For every cover-driven six (Or 'DLF maximum'. See, I've absorbed the language by osmosis.) by Sachin Tendulkar that hints at the game's (and, by extension, India's) glamorous future there are Praveen Kumar's stumps being shattered by Stuart Broad, which hints at the past, a past where India are 0 for 4 at Headingley or they are bowled out for 42 at Lord's, or it is Sabina Park and half the team is injured as they slide to defeat.

In England the future of the longer game appears assured by a respect for tradition that can be hard to define and explain. In India, it seems (and, writing from distance, I may be wrong), this is a feeling that is not so pervasive or strong. The IPL is modern, it is brash, it is glamorous and it is commercially successful in the free market. For that it is king. Test cricket, in its turn, is left to wither on the vine.

And, increasingly in cricket, where India leads, others follow.

And I'm not sure I like it.

Taunton, Early Season

It is early in April. A long way away, on an island off the south-eastern coast of India, England are playing a Test match against Sri Lanka.

There it is fiercely hot and sappingly humid. At least once in every hour the players take drinks in an attempt to guard against dangerous dehydration.

This is contemporary Test cricket. Except when England are playing, few people watch, but the match is urgently covered by the multi-faceted beast that is the modern media. People, some of whom have even played the game to a high standard, observe what is happening, analyse it and write about it for newspapers, for magazines, for websites. They talk about it on television and on radio. They blog and they tweet. Sometimes, for them, the temperature becomes hard to bear and they complain about the air conditioning in the press box. In a sense they are lucky, but in another they are not to be envied. They are missing the start of the county cricket season.

I am not there. I might wish to be, but I cannot afford to take the time away from work or pay the air fare. No, I am in a small town in the provincial south-west of England, waiting in vain for Somerset’s first match of the 2012 County Championship to start.

The sky over Taunton is a deep cast of grey. Indeed, at times, it barely appears to be properly light. It is also raining. Not very hard - for every English cricket follower knows proper rain all too well - but with too much momentum and persistence to allow a prompt start. It is also jarringly, numbingly, sickeningly, cold. Unlike at the P.Saravanamuttu Stadium, nobody is removing any items of clothing. Instead they are wearing gloves, scarves and coats in an attempt to protect themselves from the north-easterly wind. For many, as a futile final line of defence, a blanket is draped across their knees. The last two weeks of March, when the sun shone incessantly from an azure sky, is a now a distant and unreliable memory.

We are among the faithful. Most of these people will have waited all winter for this, anticipating the time when they can fill their trusty old bags - and many, like their owners, have seen much better days - with their flasks, their sandwiches and their printed works of statistical reference. Indeed, interest in events in Sri Lanka is only lukewarm, but, when an announcement over the public address system informs the ‘crowd’ that the 2012 edition of the Playfair Cricket Annual has just been delivered and is available to be bought from the shop, a murmur of anticipation ripples around the ground. These are people who know what they like and what gives them pleasure.

After the rain stops, the players tentatively make their way on to the field to warm up. For the game’s native Englishmen the conditions are familiar, if far from pleasant, but for a man such as Vernon Philander, born and bred on the Western Cape of South Africa, they are alien and strange. He moves slowly and tentatively, as if fearing that to break into even a brief trot is to invite his taut bowler’s muscles to rebel. But within a while, he, and his new team-mates, are ready to play.

Somerset win the toss and invite Middlesex to bat. On the first afternoon of the game the London county lose four wickets, three of them to Philander, who exhibits the virtues which have enabled him to make an exceptional start to his Test career. But these virtues are, in fact, unexceptional and old-fashioned. He bowls at a brisk fast-medium and hits an off-stump line with painstaking, repetitive accuracy. Occasionally he will move the ball away just enough to pass or catch the edge of the bat and he gains plenty of bounce from the responsive pitch.

Only thirty-six overs are possible before the umpires decide that it is too dark to play on. However, to most people in the ground, the light is no worse than it was when play started and there is a suspicion that the men in white coats simply want to put everyone, themselves included, out of their misery.

The following day, Good Friday, dawns bright, but it is still cold. I recklessly decide to spend the first session of the day sitting in the Old Pavilion, where the re-upholstered cinema seats afford a peerless view of the cricket, but I am compelled to leave when my fingers and toes start to go numb. Whatever the difficulties experienced by the England bowlers as they try to work their way through the determined Sri Lankan batting in far away Colombo, frostbite is not among them.

Somerset make relatively short work of the Middlesex batting and begin their own first innings fluently. They are pegged back when Arul Suppiah and the seemingly invulnerable Marcus Trescothick are dismissed, but Nick Compton and Craig Kieswetter bring the innings round, first slowly and then with increasing fluency, as the day fades to the gloom and cold of early evening.

Compton, playing against his former county, bats with a self-conscious diligence which his illustrious grandfather can rarely have emulated, although any bad balls are dismissed with power and timing to spare.

Kieswetter is different. His crouched stance is slightly ungainly, but, as he begins to feel more secure at the crease, he plays a series of cuts and drives which are distinctive for their clean, unfettered, timing and power. Like his partner he learned to bat on the hard, true pitches of South Africa, but, in his case, it is instantly noticeable. Natural batting class can be hard to define, but you always know when you’ve seen it.

On the following day play is again shortened by the weather but Somerset manoeuvre themselves into a dominant position, with Kieswetter making 83 and Compton finally falling for 99. On Easter Sunday the game is won.

It has been said before, but watching English county cricket is still, for those who love and respect it, one of the finest sporting experiences available in Britain. Crowds are never large - though they are usually larger than the sceptics would claim - and standards are never what they were, but a day or two at a ground such as Taunton gives you a sense that you are inhabiting an oasis, away from all the world’s madnesses.

The game has a lineage that goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and, while they may not realize it - modern professional sporting culture allows little time for contemplation or sentimentality - the players, in their sponsored whites and their sunglasses, are the heirs to the tradition of Grace, Hobbs, Mead, Woolley, the Langridges and so many more. We, the spectators, are the ones who have the time to consider such things, but it is the players themselves who inherit the tradition and maintain it.

And it’s worth something. Even when it’s really, really cold.

Respect

If this long and miserable winter for England's Test team has a recurring theme beyond the obvious one of being skewered by spin, it is the fact that, if you believe what you hear on TMS or on Sky, they've contrived to be repeatedly dismissed by a series of people who, by our, English, oh-so-elevated standards, can't really bowl.

During the Galle demise we had both Geoff Boycott (who at least has some experience of batting against quality bowling to fall back on) and Charles Colvile (who hasn't) dismissing the Sri Lankan attack as a scattergun collection of pedestrian journeymen. While there may be an element of truth in this - Sri Lanka obviously no longer have anyone of the calibre of Murali or Vaas and have suffered for it - they were still too good for a hot and bothered England team that swept too much, too soon and to the wrong balls, weren't (with the magnificent exception of Jonathan Trott) prepared to tough it out and finished the game with their 'World Number One' status beginning to fade into the seaside dust almost as quickly as Andrew Strauss's reputation as an opening batsman.

Boycott, of course, has previous. Shortly before he started to go through England in the UAE in January he had described Abdur Rehman as little better than a club bowler (and, in the insulated and often condescending world of the professional cricketer turned pundit, there are few greater insults).

Herath and Rehman may not be up to much, but, if they are, where on earth does that leave England's batsmen?

The reality, of course, is more nuanced. Sure, in the world of Lock or Wardle or Underwood, neither Herath nor Rehman would be bowlers who should scare anybody, but it's hardly as if the majority of England's batsmen inhabit such a bygone world either. Years of batting on uncovered roads against spinners of limited guile and variation in circumstances in which fast scoring is all, have seen to that.

Herath and Rehman can bowl. That either of them has played Test cricket with any success at all is testament to that, and they have done so for countries with rich spin bowling heritages.

Their efforts deserve a little more respect than they've been given. No wonder, in virtually any sport you can name, everyone who doesn't come from England thinks we're superior and arrogant.

Very often we are.

The Abrupt Death of Hope

Ten years ago this evening, during the morning session of the third day of a Test match between New Zealand and England in Wellington, I was standing in my kitchen listening to Test Match Special when Christopher Martin-Jenkins announced that Ben Hollioake had been killed in a car crash.

English cricket seemed a quiet, stunned place for a long time afterwards.

As the superb Barney Ronay has recently written, in the mind's eye Ben Hollioake will always be the charmingly insouciant kid who effortlessly took the attack to Steve Waugh's Australians in 1997. However, he then struggled to define a place for himself in an England team which still laboured in the shadow of years of failure, and his memory captures a time, now easily forgotten, when Australia seemed omnipotent and any brief shaft of light amid the gloom was seized upon and grasped for more than it was perhaps worth.

In the last summer of his life I saw Ben Hollioake play in a one-day international against Australia at Bristol. It was Owais Shah's debut and he partnered Hollioake to a coruscatingly promising unbroken stand of 70 at the end of the England innings, before, as usual, Australia took the game away from them through a century of crushing, inviolable certainty by Ricky Ponting.

But there were fragile shafts of hope. It was easy, too easy, to find yourself wondering what Hollioake might achieve if he could ever find consistency.

If he had lived, Ben Hollioake would now be thirty-four. His career would probably be winding down, if it hadn't long been lost to the winds of the off-field world and its temptations. It's impossible to know what he might have achieved, but, had he lived to reach the latter years of the Fletcher era and experience the captaincy of Michael Vaughan, he might just have been among the England players who celebrated in Trafalgar Square on 13th September 2005.

And if he hadn't, there's a stronger likelihood that he would have formed part of the England one-day side for many a year. A good few of the thousands of excellent runs made by a man who also made his debut for England in the summer of 2001, Paul Collingwood, might instead have been scored by Ben Hollioake.

But if all else had failed, there does seem to be one near-certainty. Unless something very strange and unforeseen had happened, Ben Hollioake would have become one of the very best Twenty20 players in the world. The game might have been invented for him, with his easy yet powerful strokeplay, effortlessly fast bowling and athletic fielding. Success with Surrey, and for England, and the riches of the IPL would surely have been his.

Of course, given the fragile, if massive, nature of his talent, all the promise may simply have faded. But, for an England fan of a certain vintage, Ben Hollioake, and the icy suddenness of his passing, represented the abrupt death of a little bit of hope.

As The Guardian headlined its report of his funeral:

'So long, Benny boy, you were special'.

A Serious Player

In July 2011, after watching Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar in the Long Room at Lord's prior to their post-lunch duel with the England attack, I wrote this about Dravid:

'First there is Rahul Dravid. A native of the city of Bangalore in southern India, he has played in 154 Test matches and has scored more than twelve thousand runs. In this innings he has just fifteen to his name. Before lunch he was settling in at the crease, but now he needs to do so again. He is a slim, serious man with distant eyes which carry the memories of thousands of hours at the crease. On the dusty, unforgiving grounds of his homeland, on the palm-fringed greens of the West Indian islands and of Sri Lanka, on the fast tracks of Australia, where players’ reflexes are tested to their very limits. This, batting, is what he does.'

Seriousness - not in the sense of humourlessness but of mental and emotional rigour and precision - often seems to have little place in the modern game. In the age of Twenty20, different virtues are celebrated, and the ability simply to repel bowlers without hitting them for four or six every other ball isn't usually one of them.

For Rahul Dravid, batting was a serious business. Of the great modern Indian trinity he never had the flair or the aura of Tendulkar, nor the elegance or relative unpredictability of Laxman. But, when all is said, he was every bit as good - in the case of Laxman you'd have to say he was better - and as important for the game in his country, and the world, as either of them.

My own relationship with Dravid goes back to his first tour of England in 1996. In my mind's eye I can still see him working the ball around against the Gloucestershire attack while on the way to 86 not out at Bristol. The bowling is largely weak but the impression is of a neat, controlled - yes, serious - young player, if not one who is going to become one of the world's best batsmen.

A few weeks later I am in the Tavern Stand at Lord's when Dravid is dismissed for 95 in his first innings in Test cricket. He immediately becomes a name to watch.

A few years later I am at Bath watching Somerset play Kent. Dravid holds the Kent batting together and the clean lines of his strokeplay, even his many forward defensives, match the exquisite architecture of the city which surrounds the ground.

Then I am at Lord's last summer and he is going out with Tendulkar and returning a few hours later with a century to his name. It feels like a swansong, but we aren't to know that he will do the same, and better, at Trent Bridge and the Oval in the coming weeks.

At first on the 2011 tour he is overshadowed by the attention given to Tendulkar, who has ninety-nine international centuries to his name and is expected to make it a hundred soon. But this passes as people are reminded - or shown for the first time - what a great batsman Dravid is.

I am well aware of how good he is, but one stroke confirms this. When he has about sixty, during the Trent Bridge hundred, he plays out a prolonged defensive duel with Graeme Swann, who is bowling a penetrating line. Dravid does what he has done to many bowlers over many years; he sees out all the good balls, but, as soon as Swann drops errantly short, he rocks on to his back foot and eases the ball through the covers for four with a completely straight bat and an alchemic combination of timing and power. It is a stroke of such class and timing - both in the sense of the way he strikes the ball and the way it fits into the structure of his innings - that it's obvious that this is a batsman as good as any to have played international cricket in a very, very long time.

Tendulkar's words on Thursday, when he said 'I will miss Rahul in the dressing room and out in the middle. All I can say is there was and is only one Rahul Dravid and there can be no other', were touching and true. In the context of the Indian team, one of Dravid's many significances was that he became, along with Laxman and Sehwag, one of the players who mitigated the weight of expectation on Tendulkar's shoulders as the team moved from the era of Azharuddin into the era of Ganguly, and a time when they could challenge the best, both at home and away. And the legend that is Sachin Tendulkar's career would not now appear quite so legendary without the reassuring presence of Rahul Dravid.

It is a cliché, but, when people like this retire, or even die, people say things like 'we shall not see his like again'.

This time it is true. With the way cricket is going, we probably won't.

Defining an Era

Vivian Richards was, is, a proud and unusually gifted man, defiant and mentally impregnable. Like the team with which he dominated the world between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, he was the best of the best of the best.

And the late Runako Morton, another Leeward Islander, with all his wasteful indiscipline and squandered talent, could equally be seen to represent all that has gone wrong with the Caribbean game.

I never bowled to Richards (thank God) and I've never met him, so it's impossible for me to match the sublimely recalled memories of Mike Selvey and The Old Batsman, but, throughout my cricketing childhood and adolescence and young manhood, he was always there.

When he made 291 at an implausibly brown and parched Oval in August 1976, I was ten years old. When, on the same ground, greener this time, he chipped a catch to Hugh Morris to bring his Test career to a close in 1991, I was twenty-five. I wasn't present on either occasion but I can remember exactly where I was and how I felt.

In between those times I was there for some of his greatest innings. The 138 not out in the 1979 World Cup final, concluded by flicking Mike Hendrick into the old Mound Stand with all the ease of a man on an Antiguan beach lifting a small child's best ball into the sea, or the unbeaten century against Surrey in the Benson and Hedges Final in 1981 when Sylvester Clarke became the first bowler we'd ever seen to truly, even slightly, hurry him. Later there was the decimation of England at Old Trafford and the time he took Warwickshire for 322 in the day at Taunton.

Even though I could always see how extraordinary Richards was, I was always just a little ambivalent about him. My elder brother idolised him but I had a preference for players who were just a little smoother and more technically measured. Greg Chappell, Old Trafford, 1977, Gavaskar, The Oval, 1979. They were my batsmen, but Richards was always there.

For people who were around then, Richards defines a world cricket era. You hardly need to think about the shots or the runs, just the rhythmic swagger of his walk to the wicket, and, as Selvey says, the signature, unnecessary tapping of the pitch which was usually the prelude to carnage.

Of course Runako Morton was no Richards, but, to have your five minutes of fame as part of the dying West Indies team of the 2000s, you didn't need to be. In 2007 he came to England and showed something of what he could do. He could have done more, but, like many a West Indies player of his era he came and went like a thief in the night, with few people noticing he had gone, their only memories his frequent brushes with authority.

This week Morton lost his life at the age of thirty-three and Richards celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Test players die young from time to time - since the turn of this century Trevor Madondo, Ben Hollioake, Manjural Islam and Morton - and old cricketers reach sixty all the time.

This conjunction, though, has deeper resonances with the past.

Richards will never really be old, and the West Indies will never really be great again.

The Man on the Train

In thinking about great English batsmen the other day, my thoughts turned to Peter May. Not because I remember seeing him play - his first-class career ended more than two years before I was born - but because he tends to be the player most readily named when people talk about England's last truly great batsman.

This may or may not be right. It's a matter of opinion after all, and I favour David Gower, a player I certainly did see and whose style is simply unmatched by anyone in the world these days. But, if you examine the figures and read and listen to the testimonies of those who watched him, it's obvious that May was a very, very good player.

And whenever I think of Peter May, because I don't have any memories of games or innings to sustain me, I think of a time in the late eighties and early nineties when, for a couple of years, I commuted into London from the suburbs to go to work and to college.

Apart from the day of the Clapham Junction disaster, I have few lasting memories of the journeys which I took then. However, on a number of occasions, I saw Peter May.

He worked in the City and lived somewhere in Surrey or Hampshire. He wasn't a regular on my line but one day something went wrong with the trains and I noticed that he was sitting in my carriage.

When we arrived at Waterloo Station and the train emptied, May remained seated in the corner, seemingly happy to wait for it to be completely empty before he made his departure. Although I considered making an approach I realized that there would be little I could say beyond the banal. All I knew was that he was Peter May, and some of the broad details of his career. I didn't remember anything of his playing days and so had no personal context (apart from some of his later eccentricities while an England selector) in which to place the encounter.

But at least I knew who he was. To everyone else he was just another nondescript commuter, and I was seized with a strange desire to tell everyone that this was a man who had once made 285 not out in a Test match.

But I didn't. They wouldn't have been impressed, and May, who gave off an almost tangible air of reticence - a sort of reverse charisma - would just have been embarassed.

I left the train.

On another occasion I was in an upstairs bar at Waterloo when May walked in, ordered a drink and stood at the bar in complete solitude and silence while he drained his small glass before thanking the barman and turning on his heel. This was obviously a man who felt that he had received enough applause and attention in his life. The lowest of low profiles suited him.

Some years later I was in Australia watching England when May's death was announced. He was remembered with affection there and the flags at the MCG, where, precisely forty years before, he had made 91 to set up Australia for Tyson's demolition, flew at half mast.

I don't think he would have enjoyed the attention.

Short Memory Syndrome

When I described Alastair Cook as a great batsman last week I was getting carried away. Carried away on a cocktail of admiration for his batting, especially since he became England's one-day captain, and the type of mellow 'everything's right with the world' feeling that a walk in the Devon countryside in the late winter sunshine can bring on.

For all Cook's precocity, and runs, and undeniable rightness for what he's doing, it's hard to see him ever quite being great. He'll break a few run accumulaton records, sure, but you can do that without being great (just ask Geoffrey Boycott. Well, no, actually, don't ask Geoffrey Boycott.). He'll do for the future, though.

Kevin Pietersen, though, is different. As his century in the final ODI between England and Pakistan last Tuesday showed, he is capable of breaking bowlers in a way that no other English batsman from the foreseeable past has.

I always thought Pietersen had it in him to be great, but the type of long silence which he has endured in the one-day game over the past three years can lead even those of us who don't earn our living from writing to be sucked in by the short memory syndrome which habitually affects full-time journalists.

Apart from the reminder of just how good Pietersen can be, the lasting fascination of the innings was the way in which it illustrated how a prolonged period of under-performance can diminish the confidence of even the best.

The Pietersen who went to the wicket in the final match of the series wasn't very different in a technical or physical sense from the one who began the previous game.

He, like the rest of us 153 balls later, had just remembered what he could do.

Look in the Book

After a period of well-deserved success in the one-day arena - and it's not as if that's never been known before, only for it crumble to dust at the next time of asking - England will currently be feeling a bit better about themselves. While Ian Bell has had no opportunity to redeem himself, Kevin Pietersen went some way yesterday towards bolstering his faltering reputation and Eoin Morgan has done what is customary for him while wearing a blue shirt (not that anyone ever doubted that he would).

Alastair Cook, of course, didn't really need to rejuvenate his reputation. As becomes more and more evident as he plays, Cook doesn't really do self-doubt, or failure, or long periods of scorelessness. He just - and this is especially true if his merits are questioned - scores runs.

England have had plenty enough players over the years who have flattered to deceive, or that everyone thought would dominate the world, without ever producing the scores to justify the hype. Cook, too, had the scores from a young age, and this precocity of achievement was sustained throughout his early years in the Test arena, but nobody ever seemed convinced that he wasn't riding for a fall. In Test cricket this came with his prolonged slump in form in 2009 and 2010, in the limited-overs arena with a persistent inability to score runs quickly and consistently enough.

Of course, all players fail, but the real test of a player's quality is how he deals with that failure. Not for Cook the retreat into obscurity or the meek acceptance that anything was beyond him. No, just do the work and come back to score 766 runs in an Ashes series before starting to churn out one-day hundreds at a strike-rate beyond reproach while shouldering the additional burdens of captaincy.

Cook always appears a man without artifice or self-regard. He is happy to let his runs do the talking, secure in the knowledge that his record - in terms of runs and centuries scored in Test cricket at a young age - stands comparison with the greats. And, as has been said here before, he always looks as though he is one of those fortunate people who has found something that he can do really, really well, and is determined to make the most of his luck and timing. This is a man who was put on earth to bat. And bat he does.

But this gift, and the ability to make the most of it, is not coincidental. Cook rarely shows much emotion but look at him in the moments after he is dismissed. This is someone who, no matter how many runs he has made, really hates getting out.

Regardless of his runs, most of us have probably been guilty of underestimating Cook. I, for one, always felt that the next truly great English batsman would be Ian Bell, or by adoption, Kevin Pietersen.

I was wrong. The next truly great English batsman is Alastair Cook.

The Fragility of Acclaim

If ever there was a cricket tour which symbolized the fragility of widespread acclaim in the modern media world where shades of gray only exist to be shunned, it has been England's tour of the United Arab Emirates.

One minute England are 'World Number One', and supposedly the best cricket team on the planet, the next they're spinning to repeated defeats at the hands of their age-old nemesis, Asian bowlers who can really turn the ball. Maybe they weren't so good after all, as Barney Ronay discusses in this work of genius.

One minute Ian Bell is a player who is finally fulfilling all his time-honoured promise, gorging himself on the Indian bowling in the secure surroundings of Trent Bridge and The Oval, the next he's back to looking like a little boy lost, a weak swimmer in the shark-infested waters of Planet Doosra. Maybe he wasn't so good after all.

One minute Kevin Pietersen is cementing his reputation as a minor genius, even if he can't make runs in one-day cricket, the next he's an arrogant Saffer brought to ground by his hubristic reluctance to admit he has a problem playing left-arm spinners. Maybe he wasn't so good after all.

And then there's Stuart Broad. One minute a juvenile hot-head who spends too much time appealing without reference to the umpire and calling for reviews even when he's as out as they come. Not to mention banging the ball in half way down the pitch in a doomed attempt to be some sort of 'enforcer'. The next, well, a terrific bowler, and one who, with his fundamentally orthodox and powerful batting and innate competitive instinct, could go on to bestride the world game in a way few English players have.

Whisper it, really whisper it, but some of Broad's bowling on the dusty tracks of the Arab winter carried echoes of McGrath at his best.

For him, the acclaim may last a little longer.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Last summer, after seeing Danny Briggs bowl and liking it a bit more than was strictly sensible or healthy, I told a friend that I wouldn't be surprised if Monty Panesar never played in another Test match.

A couple of months ago or less, I and a good few others were charting what seemed to be Ricky Ponting's inevitable and terminal decline.

Back in October, when he was cutting England to pieces in the one-day arena, I wrote some glowing things about Virat Kohli.

But at least I never said England could play spin bowling.

Nostalgia

On Wednesday morning Lawrence Booth, the editor of Wisden, tweeted (Can you imagine Norman Preston tweeting? No, neither can I.) that watching England slide in Dubai was 'just like the old times', at the same time inviting us not to 'pretend you're not feeling at least a tiny bit nostalgic'.

This struck a chord with me, and, yes, it did feel a bit nostalgic, because I remember the old times. Although this, really, wasn't much like the old times.

This wasn't Qadir in Lahore, turning it square with the worst umpires in history at his shoulder (you can say what you like about Billy B, but Shakeel Khan he ain't), or Kumble and his henchmen mopping up the prawn curry refugees at Chepauk (That was the old times. Sachin made a hundred.). This, somehow, didn't seem to quite have the essence of English humblings in Asia down pat. The stadium looked modern, antiseptic and largely deserted, and, while the Gaddafi Stadium in 1987 was equally empty, the old concrete terraces lent it an air of starkness and brutalism which 'Dubai Sports City' will never match. The air was clear and the ambience calm, with the odd desultory Barmy Army chant replacing the call of the muezzins. The smog and searing heat of old India were enviably absent with some English travellers even complaining that it was too cool in the shade.

Other things were different too. Pakistan looked a smooth, competent, resurgent unit, desperate to atone for past slights and failings. DRS mopped up any loiterers with as much finality as Shakeel and Shakoor used to, but marginally more accuracy. Saeed Ajmal looked the bowler he is - good, not great - with the modern off-spinner's facility to make the ball go in more than one direction, although often the trickery seemed to be confined to the wandering minds of England's ring-rusty batsmen.

But this is hair-splitting. The wider truth is that the game in Asia has always been different from that played in England, or in Australia, or in New Zealand, and it remains so. Pitches are slower, spinners come on earlier and bowl better, with more variation and confidence, than they will ever do again in the world's temperate zones. English teams, even one as successful as this, will always struggle to adapt, especially if they haven't quite had the practice they need and the soft, warm feeling of Christmases and weddings and being 'World No.1' hasn't quite faded. A few hours in the middle against Ajmal and Rehman ought to sort that, but most didn't make it that far, bamboozled either by Ajmal's variations, Gul's persistence or, in Pietersen's case, their own brainlessness.

This is an England team with many qualities. They could come back from this.

In the old days, though, they never did.

We Could Be Heroes

With India again dismantled and humiliated in an away Test series, questions, changes and further problems will surely follow. Duncan Fletcher, for one, must be wondering what the hell he's got himself into.

All the greats, suddenly and not so suddenly, appear to be slipping. Tendulkar looks good but can't make a century; Dravid, last summer's form increasingly looking like a mirage, has his stumps broken almost every time he goes to the wicket; Laxman is a prisoner of his own hesitancy and Sehwag is going through one of those periods - and they've always been there - when he looks a simplistic, shallow player, without footwork or runs.

With changes now certain other questions will be prompted, the most obvious of all being to ask how a country with a population of more than a billion people, where cricket is followed with ultimate fanaticism, can't produce a better team than this.

In time, new heroes - Yadav, Kohli, perhaps Pujara and Raina - will emerge, but things, for India, may well get worse before they get better.

Australia, meanwhile, go forward. They have a bowling attack which is adhering to the basics with persistence and skill (and they haven't required much more against these opponents), they have a captain who is a magnificent batsman and is in the runs, and they have Warner.

Warner who will soon assume Sehwag's mantle - in fact perhaps he already has - as the greatest attacking opener in the world. Warner who, with insouciant logic, pointed out that there often aren't many fielders in front of the wicket in Test cricket. Warner who, as someone said on the television yesterday, is changing the game. Warner who is the first world-class cricketer to graduate to Test cricket from the game's shortest form.

Warner is this week's all-Australian hero. For English cricket, even without its national team in action, this has been a challenging week. Its hero is a man that I saw bowl with impressive pace and verve for Derbyshire last season at a time when nobody knew anything about his role in the most concerning story to hit the county game in many years.

This week's English cricket hero is Tony Palladino.

Runs and Trust

Michael Clarke could always bat.

He could bat when he came to England with the Australian Under-19 side in 1999. He could bat when he made his Test debut in India in 2004. He could bat when he took over the captaincy of his country a year ago and he can bat now. If you wanted, you could even take his Sydney epic as evidence that he can bat. But why would you need to do that when he has proved his worth, his mettle, and his skill many times before?

Australia remains a country with a deep, knowing, vital relationship with cricket. Not as visible, or as showy, or as brash as India’s, but important nonetheless. In Australia, as in India, one of the leitmotifs of the game’s growth was the way in which it enabled a young country to show its nascent capabilities to its former colonial masters. Because of this, and because it’s just a great game, cricket remains a central part of Australia’s cultural DNA.

And Australia produces great cricketers. Among batsmen there is Trumper, there is Ponsford, and, of course, there is Bradman. There is Archie Jackson. There is Greg Chappell and Border and Ponting. There are the Waugh twins. Well, Steve, certainly. Perhaps there is Hayden. At a stretch you could possibly even consider Mike Hussey. And if you can consider Mike Hussey you can certainly consider Michael Clarke.

With the exception of Greg Chappell - a man who some of us feel doesn’t quite receive his due either - all Australia’s post-war greats have been simple, unembellished players and men, their personalities as reflective of the characteristic Australian capacity for bluntness and distaste for pretension as the way they go about building an innings.

Clarke is perceived to be different. He has tattoos, has dated models. As Mike Selvey put it so well this past week, he is ‘a smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, baby-faced fellow from the metrosexual generation’. Someone, perhaps, a little out of step with most Australians’ perceptions of themselves and how an Australian man - and especially its most senior sportsman - is supposed to be.

All this is true, but it doesn’t stop you being surprised by the way in which he has often appeared to be held in such lukewarm regard by his compatriots. For Clarke is as good, and mature, and passionate a batsman as it is possible to find on the contemporary world stage.

In traditional Australian style his batting is without artifice. Early in an innings he will be watchful, maintaining his shape, leaving when necessary, working the ball around. Once set he will look to attack, especially against spin, his decisive footwork and range of shot keeping him one step ahead of the bowler. There is little that stands out or makes him unusual, apart from the smooth edges of his technique and his calling, which is as loud and definitive and easily identifiable as you will ever hear, repeatedly reminding the watcher of his assertive commitment to the task at hand. In front of a microphone he is balanced and jauntily articulate. His love for the game, the way it lives inside him, is obvious and unaffected.

All the truly great players who made Australian cricket what it was in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first were born well before Clarke: the Waughs in ‘65, Warne in ‘69, McGrath in ‘70, Gilchrist in ‘71, Ponting in ‘74. With the exception of Ponting all have left the stage. Now is a time of adaptation and adjustment such as Australia hasn’t known for a quarter-century

Clarke, born in 1981, is comfortably the best Australian batsman of his generation, and he, as captain, will be his country’s standard-bearer as the coming years unfold and a different, younger side seeks to regain its place at the top of the world game.

All the signs are that Clarke, orthodox but adaptable, and a more instinctively perceptive captain than his predecessor, is the right man to do this. What is more, it increasingly appears as though the Australian public know this to be so. It may, strangely, have taken 329 undefeated runs at the cradle of the Australian game to convince them, when 151 at Newlands, or 136 at Lord’s, or many other past innings, should have done just as well.

This time last year, with Ponting deposed and Australia humiliated by their oldest foe, things were very different. Clarke was captain, but he neither had runs nor trust. Now he has both.

As someone once said, form is temporary but class is permanent.

Michael Clarke could always, always, bat.

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.

Reverting to Type

After a couple of weeks with the total number of posts here standing at 666, I felt I ought to check back in.

Nothing evil seems to have happened. Apart from another lame Indian failure overseas.

India should be better than this. They have at least two - well, three actually - of the greatest batsmen in history, plus another who's eaten better Australian attacks than this for breakfast in the past. Then there's Dhoni: brazen, ingenious, competitive, talismanic. And you can add Zaheer, hugely skilled and possibly even fit, Ishant, persistently under-achieving but with much more to give, and two discoveries, Ashwin, a deliciously artful spinner who can bat, and Umesh Yadav, the latest in a long line of Indian seam hopes, and one who looks as though he might stick around.

It's hard to pin down a reason, but the really disappointing thing about India's recent serial defeats in England and Australia is the way they've carried uneasy echoes of the times when Indian sides were pushovers abroad. God knows, Australia have their problems, but, as they've shown in various locations these past few months, they compete until they drop.

They have their fair share of quality, even if, in some cases, it is ageing, and they have thrilling seam bowling promise. What they also have - and Peter Siddle, with bat and ball, embodies this - is an eyeballs-out streak of bloody-minded competitiveness which is a by- product of their entire cultural DNA. Even when they're bad, they're still pretty good (apart from when they're playing England).

Indian cricketers, raised in a gentler environment, where the pitches and bowling tend to be slower, don't quite have this. They've got nearer to it in recent years, to be sure, but old habits die hard. International cricket is a big, unforgiving place. You can't always be laying waste to the West Indies in your heartland with two spinners in the side. Sometimes you have to go to Lord's or The Oval or the MCG or the SCG and stand toe to toe.

This Australian side has many weaknesses. This Indian side has many strengths.

India should be better than this.

Shifting Sands

For Australia, little is easy at the moment. The sands have long since closed over the era of the greats, and the side which drew another unsatisfactory two-Test 'series' with New Zealand had a strange, unbalanced look to it.

Ballast, experience and expertise (theoretically, at least) was provided by Clarke, by Ponting, by Haddin and by Hussey, but, in at least one case they're not what they were, and the side was completed by a range of inexperienced players who in some cases don't belong where they are and in others don't look as though they believe that they belong where they are.

On the face of it things don't look too bad, but this impression may be illusory. As was widely repeated yesterday, Australia have become very adept at losing matches over the past few years, and, of their recent opponents, Sri Lanka continue to struggle in the shadow of Murali's retirement, while South Africa had them 21 for 9.

If the superb Pattinson continues to look as impressive against India as he has against New Zealand, and Cummins returns, they will have an attack capable of causing problems. Consistent, big runs may not be needed and Ponting may get some more breathing space. What seems more likely, though, is that because the series is twice as long and India's batting line-up is stronger than New Zealand's (and is backed by superior spin bowling), something extra will be needed, like big runs from number four.

Australia's decline, while inevitable, has required both collective and individual psychological adjustment. For players like Pattinson and Cummins, who grew up in a time when their national side was the best on the planet, it has been necessary for them to come to terms with the way the world has changed, relish the pressure placed on their young shoulders and respond to it. They have.

For Ponting it is a little different. For all the contrary evidence provided this year by Dravid, almost two years his senior, it is probable that the great years won't return. But he will not want to reprise the ignominy of his departure from the Bellerive arena he knows so well.

He may have to be happy with a big score somewhere, and a dignified exit on his own terms.

He'll need the score, though.

Doing the Impossible

As with most things that go on in the mad, hectic world that is twenty-first century international cricket, I simply didn't have the time to comment on Virender Sehwag's 219 at Indore last Thursday. A pre-Christmas ramble round the pubs of St.Albans and some of London's most scenic open spaces saw to that.

I didn't, of course, fail to notice.

I can't do a better job of paying tribute to Viru than The Old Batsman did here, but, as usual with Sehwag, a few things - a few simple things - stood out.

When interviewed afterwards, his words were unassuming, trite even. As with his strokes, little energy is wasted on thought or analysis, and, like any genius, Viru can no more explain what he does than teach someone else to do it. To him, the things he does aren't extraordinary because he can do them.

Sometimes they may even seem as simple to him as they appear. Us mortals will never know, but we do know that many of the things he does are, for most people, impossible. They can never truly be easy.

If they were, everyone would be doing them.

Old and New

For all the carnage of Cape Town, perhaps the most significant of the many vignettes thrown up by the worryingly truncated series between South Africa and Australia was the partnership between Khawaja and Ponting which did most to secure Australia's victory in Johannesburg. The old and new of Australian batting, coming together in a dicey situation and playing as if their careers depended on it.

In at least one case, it probably did.

The evidence, statistical and physical, is that Ponting has been slipping for a while now, even if he claims not to realize it himself, and much about his innings of 62 carried the air of a man sliding towards a precipice and trying hard to dig his heels in.

He watched the ball like a hawk, took big strides, forward or back, to everything, while forcing his hands through the line of the ball with exaggerated care and leaving anything he didn't have to play with an emphasis which was just a little overstated for effect.

'Look at me. I could always bat and I still can. You won't see the back of me for a while yet', was what Ponting appeared to be saying.

When the dust had settled and his side's victory had been secured, he may even have found himself reflecting on the fact that batting never used to be quite such hard work. Time does that.

The left-handed Khawaja, a man at the opposite end of his career, impressed in a different way. After the outlandish praise heaped upon him in the wake of his debut innings of 37 at Sydney last January, he'd failed to build on it, and one or two people may have been wondering if he was all he was cracked up to be. At the Wanderers he was largely cool, stylish and precise in his judgement and appeared to have the valuable gift of time. He will be seen again, many times, in his baggy green.

Starting from a low base, Australia have had a good start to the English winter. The team is still wracked with apparent weaknesses: both openers look vulnerable, Harris excels both as a bowler and a collector of injuries, Johnson, with the ball anyway, may be finished. There is no decent spin to speak of. But they have Clarke, they have Khawaja and, for the time being they have Ponting.

And they fight. They always do.

Plain to See

Another weekend, and another old cricketer leaves the crease.

However, while many of the tributes to Peter Roebuck - including, perhaps, my own - were a little equivocal as a result of the man's enigmatic nature, there has been no such doubt where Basil D'Oliveira is concerned. What D'Oliveira did, with the assistance of John Arlott and others, helped to change the face of world sport, and, perhaps, in a small way, the world itself.

For one thing, apartheid is confined to history and South Africa is an accepted member of the international sporting and political community. For another, the current England team is what it is to a large extent because of the influence of players born and brought up in South Africa.

While, as someone who remembers cricket in the seventies well, it's all too easy to feel old these days, my memory doesn't quite stretch back as far as D'Oliveira's international career. However, I was at Lord's on a gloomy midsummer evening in 1976 when D'Oliveira, at least forty-four years old and badly injured, did his level best to pull round a hopeless cause in the Benson and Hedges Cup final against Kent. Despite what my father told me, I was too young to appreciate D'Oliveira's political significance - and the man himself would have played it down anyway - but I could see that he could bat. That much was plain to see.

Cricket, like any game, has its heroes and its sacred theatres. For anyone who knows it, the county ground at Worcester is up with the greatest of them. Many exceptional players - Graveney, Hick, D'Oliveira himself - have played out their greatest days there.

This has been a long time coming, but the shadow of the cathedral will hang a little heavier when next season starts.

A Lot on His Mind (Peter Roebuck, 1956-2011)

Unlike many of the people, such as Peter English, who have been writing so well about their memories of Peter Roebuck, I didn't know him.

But then the impression you're left with after reading the tributes that have followed his tragic death last night is that nobody really did.

I saw him around a lot, though.

My earliest memories of Roebuck come from his days as one of the younger members of the great Somerset sides of the late seventies and early eighties. A man of intellectual gifts, if not great cricketing ones, he could never have been expected to exert a major influence in a team that contained Viv Richards, Ian Botham and Joel Garner. But he was always there, striding rapidly, purposefully, across the field with the air of someone with a lot on his mind, and making his fair share of runs in a style that was functional and effective, if rarely visually pleasing.

This went on for years. As captain he survived the fallout which followed the club's decision to release Richards and Garner in 1986, and then did his best to shore up a team that wasn't what it was. In those days he really did have a lot on his mind.

After he left Somerset and began captaining Devon, he made runs, took wickets and drove his players with a hardness and focus which was foreign to the minor county game. The result was a number of years of unprecedented success, the legacy of which persists to this day.

My chief memories of long days spent watching Roebuck's Devon by the sea at Sidmouth, Exmouth and Instow are of a transparently and unashamedly driven man, often fielding in unusual positions as he sought the tactical key to unlock victory, while occasionally breaking out of his carapace to lambast his players for any percieved lack of intensity or to bowl a few overs of strangely penetrative slow-medium, regularly taking wickets through sheer desire.

In an environment in which it was fashionable to drift along, he really, really cared, and he took others along for the ride. A lot of those players, waking up today around here in Devon, in south-east Wales, and in Sheffield, will be grateful that they had the chance.

In those days I also often saw him striding around the Taunton boundary on sunny midweek days. Rarely still for long, usually leaving behind an oblique comment, he gave the overwhelming impression of someone who inhabited a slightly different, more remote, place than the rest of us. This is probably why I never quite summoned the courage to speak to him.

Probably the fullest expression of Roebuck's love of cricket came on the page. Slices of Cricket, It Never Rains... and Tangled Up in White are among the finest written evocations of late twentieth century cricket from the standpoint of someone who had been both a participant and a shrewd, knowing observer.

All people ever said about Roebuck was that he was hard to fathom and that he could be difficult to get on with.

I don't know, but, when it came to cricket, he really cared.

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.

Corrupted Idealism

For me, match fixing seemed an abstract concept until the Lord's Test between England and Pakistan in August 2010. I knew it had gone on, of course. I'd seen the fall of Cronje, and Azhar, and Salim Malik and the rest. Years ago I'd read the Qayyum Report from cover to cover and briefly wondered about the future of the game.

But, whatever the doubts, it was soon time to get back to the game. The battle between bat and ball was all that mattered, even if Pakistan were playing. Some things - such as cricket itself - just seemed too great to be corrupted, especially if you were prone to romantic idealism.

All that changed at Lord's. I saw virtually every ball (and no-ball) of that game, bought the News of the World for the one and only time in my life and then thought about what it all meant and what was likely to happen next.

Now we know.

Two and a half years for Butt, one year for Asif and six months for Amir.

Nobody should mourn Butt and Asif for a moment. Butt was a decent opening batsman and a promising captain, though, in truth, nothing above the ordinary at Test level. Asif was a really outstanding bowler, but there had been enough troubles in his career even before Lord's to show that he was never likely to fulfil his huge potential.

Amir is different. His statement of contrition and regret, though overdue, is very sad, and I hope that, one day, he can return to the game he was so very good at.

My enduring memory of those days at Lord's still has Stuart Broad and Jonathan Trott walking off on Friday evening with an unbroken stand of 244 to their names, but there is another.

Before the game started I was walking through the door which leads from the Lord's Long Room to the stairs up to the away team's dressing room when I nearly bumped into Mohammad Asif. He was tall and stick thin, with a faraway look on his face. Neither of us quite felt the need to apologize, but then I got the impression he'd barely noticed my presence.

As this shows, I really admired him, and so I readily forgave him, assuming he was thinking about the day's play and what he had to do.

That's the trouble. He was.

Other Writings

Some of my time away from this blog recently has been taken up with getting things together for another website, which contains a lot of my writing which hasn't appeared on the Web before.

Among other bits and pieces are some long articles whch I wrote in the nineties and later, mostly for Richard Hill's superb Cricket Lore, together with my personal favourites from among the many thoughts I've recorded here over the past five years.

More will follow.

If anyone wants to take a look, the site can be found here.

There Was a Time

There was a time, years ago, when Mark Ramprakash wasn't the cause célèbre he later became. The man who embodies both all that is good and pure and true in batting technique, but at the same time the player who, more than any other modern Englishman, represents a certain type of failure. The man who simply couldn't cope with the pressure of performing at the highest level of the game, of living up to everybody's expectations, including his own.

There was a time - such as when I first glimpsed him, scything away at Paul-Jan Bakker on a London club ground in the late eighties - when Ramprakash just used to go out and bat. His technique wasn't the thing of beauty it subsequently became, but it didn't need to be. All he needed was his eye, his footwork, his bravery and his bat. He was relatively unsophisticated, but he was also endlessly aggressive and very good.

I say this because Virat Kohli reminds me strongly of the Ramprakash that once was. Like the young Ramprakash he has a brilliant eye, an orthodox yet uncomplicated technique which works, and he approaches bowlers as though they exist only to serve up balls for him to hit to the boundary. While the statistics which accompany his embryonic Test career are anaemic, his one-day career is taking vivid shape as part of an Indian team which is attempting to create an identity which distinguishes it both from the old guard who are going or gone, and from an England tour which should have shocked it to its foundations. At the moment it is succeeding and there is little chance of mistaking England for a team which knows how to stem the flow.

Just a few short weeks ago England were humiliating India. Now, with home advantage reversed, everything is very different. At a steaming Wankhede Stadium tomorrow, a transformed Indian side will be confident of extending their series lead to 4-0.

Kohli will be more confident than most, because this, you feel, is how he is. It remains to be seen whether he can succeed where Ramprakash failed in the long game, but he will surely have further opportunities.

Rahane is deeply impressive, and the hunch is that more will be seen of Pujara before too long. Kohli, though, with equally outstanding centuries against England at venues as diverse as Cardiff and Delhi over the last five weeks, is India's real diamond.

There was a time when Ramprakash seemed to have the world at his feet. He never quite did.

Kohli really does.

Pausing to Remember

Cricket is a game of pauses. Although there is always activity, there is the sense of a pause between each and every delivery. The bowler walks back to his mark, the batsman regroups and prepares for the next ball. Fielders pause too, their thoughts momentarily elsewhere.

The most noticeable, most pregnant pause of all, is the pause between a skied catch leaving the bat and it falling into the hands of a fielder who may or may not hang on to it. For those moments, everything is uncertain. Sessions, innings, games, entire series have been turned by dropped catches. The batsman knows it, the bowler knows it, the crowd know it and the fielder sure as hell knows it.

And when old cricketers die, people who saw them play - and especially so if they did so in childhood or adolescence, or they were part of a team who did something truly special - pause to remember them.

Graham Dilley was never famed as a fielder. Like many a quick bowler from the days before diving, and sliding, and all-round fitness became compulsory, and before the magnificent Jimmy Anderson showed what was possible, he just did his bit.

What he did best, and really well when everything clicked, was bowl. With his mood right and his fragile confidence bolstered, often by some powerful runs, he could be distinctly quick, with swing and sharp bounce as additional and potent extras. Like many an England player from the bad old days he never came close to fulfilling his potential, but he was admired at Canterbury, and at Worcester, and remembered with affection by all who lived through and witnessed the 1981 Headingley Test. Botham and Willis took the glory but neither of them could have done what they did without the help of Graham Roy Dilley.

A thirty year-old memory has the young Dilley, with a visorless helmet perched unsteadily on top of his blond mane, creaming Lillee and Alderman and Lawson through the covers on a grey Leeds afternoon and sharing a joke with Botham as Australia wilted and the course of history changed.

For me, though, the strongest image of all sees him the following day, steadying himself on the long-leg boundary as Rod Marsh's uncontrolled hook shot to a Willis bouncer directs the ball his way. A brief glance to check his distance from the rope, hands cupped upward, body braced to absorb the ball's impact.

Everything pauses.

Then he catches it.

He staggers back, but manages to steady himself. Marsh is out, Australia are 74 for 7 and defeat is on the cards.

He leans back and throws the ball high, high into the Yorkshire air.

Time for Lunch

I've been writing this blog since July 2006. It's often been hard work but it's usually been enjoyable, and, for what it's worth, it's taken my writing and views to places and people I'd never been able to reach before. Thanks to anyone who's read anything I've written or expressed an opinion. I really appreciate your interest.

This year, though, I've found it progressively harder to be original or even to find the time to come up with anything at all. The number of comments has been down, too, and, unlike the early days, when I was content to write reams of stuff in the knowledge that it could be read around the world (even if hardly anyone was going to do so), when you get a bit longer in the tooth you require the reassurance and stimulation that regular feedback gives you.

My day job has become increasingly busy and stressful this year and this will reach a crescendo over the next few weeks, so I've decided to retreat to the metaphorical pavilion, have a bite to eat, change my shirt, have a rub down and contemplate my tactics for the rest of the day. The new ball is due in mid-afternoon and I want to be ready to take it from the umpire (I'm thinking Billy Bowden here for some reason) and fire a few out.

England will go on playing India, Sri Lanka will go on playing Australia and Zimbabwe will go on playing Pakistan. The English season will conclude. And then it will all begin again.

As someone in a film once said (and possibly Geoff Boycott too after he'd been caught behind off Eknath Solkar at Old Trafford on 8th June 1974):

I'll be back.

Time in the Sun

The modern cricket world moves on quickly, and England - even if it wasn't quite the same team - were in Dublin yesterday. For them, of necessity, the recent dismantling of India lies in the past. The future is what matters.

For me, coming late to it, it's impossible to be original about the Pataudi Trophy. My take, though, is that for all England's excellence, the series lacked something.

Opposition.

After the first session of the second day at Trent Bridge all we had was a slow, inexorable, tediously smooth ride towards a 4-0 scoreline. Individual and collective achievement, yes, but no suspense. If it stayed dry, England - better, stronger, faster, more skilful and more purposeful in every area - were always going to win by a mile. For large parts of the series India were a pitiful shambles.

In some ways, the performances of two players can be viewed as a microcosm of their team's collective efforts, and of their cultures.

The rigour, precision, elegance and consistency of Ian Bell's strokeplay summed up England. A team developing some of the machine-like quality which Australia once had, while Sachin Tendulkar, deified by repeated standing ovations which eventually descended into cliche, was, for much of the series, a shadow of his usual self: uneasy, scratchily uncertain and ultimately left without answers by a superior foe.

For all the visceral thrill provided by Tim Bresnan belting the ball into the Edgbaston crowd to bring up England's first total over 700 since 1930, or the spirited combativeness of Praveen Kumar, the lasting memory of the series will be the batting of Rahul Dravid. A reminder that batting based on defence and judgement, with strokeplay of style and grace when applicable, can be as enjoyable to watch as anything else the game can produce.

Dravid has been a great player for a very long time. This, with Tendulkar struggling, was his time in the sun.

Related Pasts, Different Futures

Ravi Bopara and Alastair Cook are both still young men, but they have played together for a very long time. For a string of Essex junior sides, for England Under-19s, for Essex, and for England.

Bopara's career remains in an uncertain place: inconsistent but occasionally dominant at county level, unfulfilled and flatteringly deceptive at international level. Cook is one of the most prolific batsmen in the world.

So you have to wonder what was going through each of their minds when Bopara came to the wicket yesterday afternoon, on the hiding to nothing to end them all, and with Cook already 247 not out.

Bopara doesn't appear the type of person to lack confidence or retreat in the face of others' achievements, but, this time, he could be forgiven the odd stray thought about where, in their 27th years, each of their careers is heading.

Bopara, out cheaply, will, as night follows day, return to Essex and a doubly uncertain future. Such is the stature, stability and brilliance of this England team that opportunities are not going to come along very often these next few years. And by the time one does, it is likely that someone else - Taylor, or Stokes, or Bairstow - will be chosen. There is a strong possibility that Ravi Bopara will never again bat in a Test match for England.

The way in which both men returned to the new Edgbaston dressing rooms said much for their fates. Bopara was ushered from the field by an uncertain smattering of applause, people displacing their embarassment by rummaging in bags or chatting to their neighbours. Cook, in his turn, received an unconditional standing ovation, but there was also a certain poignancy to it.

Bopara looked unemotional, but was, you suspect, quietly shattered. Cook, his iron concentration having for once slipped at the last, was more visibly disappointed, his failure to reach 300 for a brief moment all he could think about. For all his peerless appetite for batting and hatred of dismissal, Cook knows that few players get more than one chance to make a triple-hundred in Test cricket. He is certain to make many more centuries for England, but, in all probability, he won't quite pass this way again.

But at least he will be there. And soon, as England's next captain, the team will be his. For Bopara, life on the county circuit (perhaps embellished by an IPL contract and some one-day international appearances) may be all there is.

Bopara and Cook have played together for a very long time. But for the next few years they may not be seeing very much of each other.

523 and Counting

There is something elemental and magnificent about huge partnerships.

I've been a personal witness to a few big ones - Adrian Dale and King Viv at Sophia Gardens, 1993, Robin Martin-Jenkins and Mark Davis at Taunton, 2002, Trott and Broad at Lord's last year - and it always seems just a little bit amazing that players can bat for so long against professional bowling and not be parted. Many components go into stands like this: skill, timing and patience of course, but also, to be sure, plenty of luck.

During the early days of this blog, in late July 2006, I wrote about the experience of following the Cricinfo commentary as Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara advanced on the world record in Colombo.

Yesterday was different. It was a busy day at work, and while I sneaked the odd glimpse at the scores from Northampton and Scarborough, events at the Rose Bowl passed me by until the day's end.

When I discovered that Michael Carberry and Neil McKenzie had put on 523 for Hampshire's third wicket, batting together through 135 overs, I reflected on the fact that it was a far cry from the days when the newly-minted pitches at the Bowl used to favour the bowlers, but I also considered the fates of the players involved.

Neil McKenzie, from the Highveld of South Africa and with his 36th birthday in clear sight, always was a good player. Reliable, unfussy, with plenty of strokes and also the broadest of dead bats when necessary (as I discovered to my cost during two of the longest days' cricket-watching of my life at Lord's in 2008). In the autumn of his career, he would have formed an ideal partner for the star of the show, Michael Carberry, a fine player from the south London suburbs whose struggles with serious illness over the last year have come close to ending his career.

Both have played Test cricket - McKenzie has 58 caps for South Africa, Carberry one for England - but both are unlikely to wear their country's colours again.

They will always, though, have Southampton.