Keep Calm and Carry On

One of the chief qualities of limited-over cricket is the way in which it compresses and intensifies the pressures which the participants are under, while one of Andrew Strauss's impeccable strengths is the ability to look calm in the field when all logic would suggest that his head should be about to explode. Take yesterday: The greatest batsman the world's seen in many a generation going well on a Bangalore shirtfront with a potent range of supporting actors at the other end, and the job of trying to stem the flow of runs is down to you and your bowlers. That, in a cricket context, is real pressure, but with Strauss it rarely - if ever - shows.

Then, just when you might fancy sitting with a towel on your head for a couple of hours, no such luck. A twenty minute break and it's down to you to mastermind the chase: All but seven an over under lights, with a partisan crowd willing you to fail. So you make a superb 158, the only fault being the fact that you don't quite stick around long enough to assure the victory which should really have been your ultimate reward.

It's difficult to be sure who will take most from yesterday's epic. England should have won and still have form and selection concerns, India's bowling and fielding doesn't look what it needs to be. But, with weeks and weeks to go, there's plenty of time for teams to find form, lose it and find it again. And it still might not be enough.

We rarely use the word 'great' around here, but what we can definitely take away from yesterday is that Andrew Strauss is a very, very, good cricketer indeed, and not just in the game's longer forms.

It's a pretty safe bet that he'll need to show how just how good again if England are still going to be in with a shout when April comes around.

A General Air of Predictability

From a distance the World Cup so far has seemed like a succession of fairly predictable non-contests, although, as far as the 'debate' about Associate Members' participation in future tournaments is concerned, I'm happy to come down on the side of what their players think. And the majority seem to prefer the experience of being there and getting beaten to not being there and hence not having the opportunity to win. The ICC, in their wisdom (of course, I use the word satirically), have clearly forgetten all about the past successes of Kenya and Ireland. For all that it may seem like the future, increased Associate participation in future World Twenty20s is a poor substitute, always assuming ODIs in their current format remain a central part of the game.

An exception to the general air of predictability was England's relatively shaky win over the Netherlands. While all the Dutch players deserve huge credit, it applies especially to Ryan ten Doeschate, because to be your side's best player and the focus of everyone's expectations and then deliver the goods in such coruscating fashion takes real strength of temperament. Jonathan Agnew, with a lack of awareness of the county game that is typical if understandable, described ten Doeschate as a 'journeyman'. As more than a few Essex fans will tell you, he's a good bit more than that.

As for England, well, they were shambolic at times, but, at the tail-end of a winter itinerary like they've had, where's the surprise in that? Most of them are probably either knackered or sick of cricket or both. Add some ring-rustiness, poor form, experimentation and subsconscious complacency, and you have a recipe for problems.

They'll need to be a bit better on Sunday.

(Not) Being There

A nice piece from Siddhartha Vaidyanathan's excellent, varied blog.

This must strike a chord with anyone who's ever struggled to follow cricket as they go about the rest of their crowded lives. It certainly did with me.

With all the major cricket events of my lifetime I can instinctively remember where I was. And, while there are many exceptions - The Oval, 12th September 2005, Shane Warne's hat-trick in Melbourne, the Broad-Trott stand, Michael Vaughan's 197 at Trent Bridge - more often than not I wasn't there.

I was often in front of a TV set, which is the next best thing, but I've frequently been in all kinds of other places - exam rooms, weddings (not my own), hospitals, trains, planes and automobiles. For the last twenty years, during which period I've had a full-time job which only occasionally allows me to listen to the radio, I've mostly been at work, at least in body.

Apologies to anyone with whom I've had a work-related discussion while my mind was elsewhere. And equal apologies to my colleagues for the odd disappearing act down the years. As Brian Lara was gaining on 365 at St.John's in April 1994, I retreated to the toilet with a radio and nobody knew where I was for about half an hour.

As you get older it gets harder and harder both to follow the cricket exclusively and to convince people who don't know or care about the game that you have as much interest as they do in what's going outside the Test match bubble.

But I like it that way.

Giving it the Big Build Up

Tweets and blogposts from people employed in the heart of the cricket media are usually good reading. It's what they're there for after all. This week I've had the pleasure of knowing that Jonathan Agnew, Michael Vaughan and Patrick Kidd (of the Times and The Questing Vole) have all been on their way to the World Cup and have now successfully arrived.

I've been watching my letter box intently for the last few weeks in the hope that some kind soul would be prepared to pay for me to go to the competition and send me some tickets to the sub-continent. Sadly, it hasn't happened. Instead I'm going to be spending the duration of the tournament in England, relying on Sky to keep me in touch with events in the east.

There are compensations, though. For me this is still very much the rugby season, and there are plenty of big games coming up, both for the club I follow (the major success story of the English season) and in the Six Nations. I'm happy to be at home for these. Also, I experienced a deep frisson of world-weariness when Ricky Ponting said something the other day about having to play well 'over the next six weeks'.

Six weeks?! Well, I knew that the mistakes of the last World Cup were going to be repeated this time, but with so much interesting Test cricket going on over recent months I hadn't been thinking about it too much and it's hardly as if the world hasn't already got enough ODIs going on to last an epoch.

I'm sorry to sound so negative, and I'm happy to admit that my views would probably be different if I was fortunate enough to be there.

I gather it all starts in half an hour, so I'd better go and turn on the TV...

Trevor Bailey (1923-2011)

I was surprised by how sad the death of Trevor Bailey on Thursday made me feel. He was just a couple of years older than my own father, and the circumstances in which he died were tragic. But I think the strength of my feelings had as much to do with the fact that another key element of a central part of my childhood, adolescence and cricket-infected maturity had gone for good.

Despite his illustrious playing career, as The Old Batsman says, those of us in our forties and below knew Bailey only as a radio summariser. If you grew up in Britain in the 1970s, the 1980s or the 1990s and were interested in cricket, you will have listened to Test Match Special. In fact there's every chance that you will have listened to it for hours and hours and hours.

And this will mean that you will have become very familiar with Bailey's particular brand of acerbic perspicacity, individualistic, clipped delivery and precise, orthodox vocabulary. At times he could appear pompous and slightly deficient in the humour department, but, having had the pleasure of meeting him during an England supporters' tour to South Africa in the mid-nineties (when, for a range of reasons, a good sense of humour was required), I know that this impression was illusory. He was a genial and tolerant man, who, in a cricket sense, had really been around the block but wore his vast experience and knowledge lightly.

Like everything, TMS has changed and evolved. In some senses for the better, in others for the worse. But the loss of Bailey, following Arlott, Johnston, Trueman and Frindall, means that one more link with what many regard as the programme's golden age has been lost.

No Backward Glances

With the dust still settling, this probably isn't the time or place for a homily on the verdicts handed down to the Pakistan Three.

However, a couple of things require comment. Firstly, the strong implication in Osman Samiuddin's Cricinfo report that the tribunal would have preferred to hand down more lenient sentences, and then the sense of injured pride embodied by Amir's statements - such as 'two no-balls should not be five years' punishment' - both of which tend to indicate that both the accused and those judging them still don't quite appreciate the seriousness of what went on at Lord's last August.

The fact that it was 'only' two no-balls (if that's all it was) is irrelevant. Players deliberately under-performed as a result of outside influence. They cheated their fellow players, they cheated the spectators and they cheated the integrity of the game. They weren't the first, sadly they probably won't be the last, but they deserve everything they've got.

As this shows, I thought Mohammad Asif was a genuinely outstanding bowler who could have been great. In all probability, though, his career at the highest level is now over, and nobody who cares for the game should shed a single tear or cast him a backward glance. The same - apart, of course, from the possibility of greatness - goes for Salman Butt.

Mohammad Amir, who will only be 23 when his ban finishes, may yet have the opportunity to fulfil his huge potential.

Let's leave it there for now.

As Mad as O'Keefe, as Good as Trott

One of the only entertaining aspects of the deathless one-day series between England and Australia (for anyone who's fallen asleep, it's still going on but mercifully ends tomorrow) has been the commentary of the one and only Kerry O'Keefe. I've heard snatches of him before, but the fact that TMS has taken the ABC coverage wholesale has brought his genius to a wider audience.

With O'Keefe you get some of the most bizarre comments you'll ever hear, delivered with the wit and timing of a superb natural comedian, but mixed in with the stuff that makes you laugh are shafts of observation which make you sit up and think, even if he's not saying anything that's unusual or extraordinary. An example of this came the other day, when O'Keefe described Jonathan Trott as 'the best leg-side player to come to Australia in the last twenty years'.

This was noteworthy, not because it isn't true but because it still seems a little strange that people who have really seen some cricket are saying such things about Jonathan Trott. Yes, that's Jonathan Trott. Plays for Warwickshire, rising 30, losing his hair, with a perpetual scowl on his face and a batting style which even his best friend wouldn't write home about. But currently the owner of some of the best damn batting stats on the planet and a man who looks as sure of his place as anyone in an England side which is as stable as they come (in Test cricket, anyway).

Before Trott came into the England team in the late summer of 2009 I'd seen bits and pieces of him on TV. At times he looked quite classy, but he never seemed to have that many runs to show for it, and it's hard to assess people's temperaments on the basis of a truncated innings in a county hit-and-giggle game. He made runs here and there for the Lions, but if anyone had told you that two years on he'd be up there with the world's greatest run-machines, you'd have thought they were as mad as Kerry O'Keefe.

Trott, though, is tough. His unemotional demeanour reflects both his upbringing in a country where cricket is taken a bit more seriously than in England, and the fact that he has had to fight every step of the way to establish himself in an England side to which many people felt he didn't belong. Like Marcus Trescothick and Michael Vaughan before him, this is a man who breathes more easily in the rarefied air of Test cricket than the safer surroundings of the county game. In a country which has had more than its fair share of players who have done things the other way round - at least one of whom also began life in Africa - such players are like gold dust.

Late in a long winter, two English batsman stand out. Alastair Cook, who had the good sense to get out of Australia before a constant diet of limited-over cricket started to sap his will to live, and Jonathan Trott. Both could be flashier and more elegant, but both hate, really hate, getting out.

To use the oldest phrase in the book of timeless cricket cliches, it's not how, but how many.

And Jonathan Trott is currently making as many runs as anyone, anywhere.

Decisions, Decisions

Andy Flower is an outstanding cricket coach. Well-organized, tough, uncompromising, but flexible and sensitive when he feels he needs to be. The latter quality is underplayed but it was evident in the way he spoke about Samit Patel.

It was obvious that England wanted to pick Patel for the World Cup. As Flower said, 'all we were saying was 'get into reasonable shape'. It didn't have to be perfect. In fact, all we wanted to see was an improvement...'.

The fact that Patel will be at home in Nottingham when the World Cup starts, is, therefore, nobody's fault but his own.

I've written about Patel and his fitness issues before here, but I'm less sympathetic now. It's clear that the management were prepared to cut him a small amount of slack but he simply didn't want to do the work.

But, as The Old Batsman says, the inability, or unwillingness, of certain players to conform can be symptomatic of a less tangible fear of exposure at the highest level of the game. In the days when the England team was rubbish and county cricket was a cuddly oasis of mediocrity, the county game was full of players like that. Times have changed now, and Patel, for sure, knows it.

Flower also knows stuff. Like the fact that when you're doing his job you have tricky, sometimes ruthless, calls to make. The decision to replace Davies with Prior was one such, and, while it didn't look too bad when it was made, it's not looking quite so sound now.

Kumble

Having put it to one side a few days ago, I've finally got round to reading this by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, about Anil Kumble.

The story which opens it is another brick in the wall of tales of Kumble's legendary modesty, and the later stuff about bowlers' tactics offers a valuable glimpse into the mind which made him such a terrific bowler.

Many in the Anglo-Australian cricketing world have probably forgotten about Kumble already, but, in an understated way, he was something very special.

Faint Praise Be Damned

When I wrote about the sense of underachievement that attached itself to Shane Watson during the Test series, I didn't necessarily mean to damn him with faint praise. As part of the uncertain batting efforts of a poor side, his muscular if unconsummated fifties were valuable as far as they went.

More was needed though, and today he provided it, with a one-day innings for the ages.

Of course, facing a denuded England attack in the artificial environment of a one-day international on a benign MCG pitch isn't the same as doing the hard yards against Jimmy Anderson armed with a red ball, but you still have to make the runs.

In a changed Australian landscape this is a player of quality and high importance, somewhere near peak form, fitness and performance. The more complex and troubling demands of Test cricket can wait awhile.

A Long Road Ahead

In many ways Shane Watson is representative of the difficulties faced by his side, the only diference being that he was (at least while he lasted) in something resembling decent form.

Talented, sincere and competitive, but also lacking in concentration, fitness, and, when it comes to running between the wickets, basic technique, he's made a decent fist of filling one of the openers' berths in the Australian side over the last eighteen months. One's suspicion is, though, that his natural home lies further down the order and that he ought to be bowling more, and with more intent, than he currently does. Given his history of injuries, this is partially understandable, but, watching him over the last couple of Tests, it was hard not to think of him as a player who simply isn't achieving anything like his potential and wouldn't be worth a place in the England side.

He's not alone.

Everyone knew before the series started that Australia were in decline. This impression was confirmed and hastened by some strange decisions by their selectors and the confidence, virility and power of England. For now Watson himself, Khawaja, Hussey, Clarke (who, let no-one forget, is a superb batsman) and possibly Ponting offer the nucleus of a batting order, but Hussey and Ponting will soon be gone for good and the bowling cupboard looks bare. Some extra work on fielding, fitness and running is essential.

All the things that are being said about Australia now used to be said about England. For them it's been a long road back, starting with the appointment of Duncan Fletcher as coach in 1999 and the subsequent adoption of central contracts.

For Australia it will be no different.

The Best of Times

For virtually anyone associated with the England cricket team, and especially the young men talented and fortunate enough to play for it, the 43 days between 25th November 2010 and 7th January 2011 will have been among the best times they will ever know on a cricket field.

For some among them those times have been better - or more memorable for different reasons - even than that.

To many, Alastair Cook seemed destined by virtue of his hesitancy and looseness to be Mitchell Johnson's fall guy. He leaves Australian shores an unlikely hero - still young, undemonstrative, slightly coy - but with a counter-intuitive stamina and toughness which nailed the Australian coffin shut. He may never quite pass this way again, but simply to watch the shape of his body as he defended the ball in Sydney was to see a man at ease, doing what he was put on earth to do.

Ian Bell is a man who, after years of wondering, knows his limitations. He knows that when it comes to batting he has no limitations. With Cook the lingering feeling is that he has surpassed himself in recent weeks, but with Bell there is the certain knowledge that there is much more to come.

Watching Bell these days can be an almost epiphanic experience. This was never true of Paul Collingwood, but few England players have ever made as much of their talent, responded as well to adversity or fielded with as much versatlity and athleticism. His vital role in the development of what could be England's side of sides should never be forgotten.

In a similar way to Ian Bell, James Anderson is now a mature man of high skill who knows his own game and his own mind. And, as with Bell, this should be no more than the beginning.

In 1956, John Arlott, looking back to 1947, wrote of a 'fair-haired, athletic-looking young man with a sweeping run-up and a high, easy, natural delivery-swing. It was as exciting a spell of bowling as I have ever watched and in the poverty of our post-war game, the man responsible for it was a heady promise of resurgent greatness in English cricket'. The man Arlott was writing about was Chris Tremlett's grandfather Maurice, and, at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, his late-flowering grandson exemplifies the future promise of another England side in a similar way.

These have been the best of times. But, for Strauss's England, there will be many more.

Punch Drunk

The Sydney Test will end later today. England will win.

But at least the game will be allowed to reach its natural conclusion.

If this was a boxing match they would have stopped it by now.

Vying for Superiority

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

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

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

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

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

Clutching at Straws

One of the central thrusts of the media coverage of the Ashes series is the way in which Australia, with all their obvious problems, are seen as the 'new England'. In other words they resemble the England team of the mid-1990s, with a glaring void in ability, leadership and selection. Whenever a straw comes along, however flimsy, it is clutched for dear life.

This was exemplified today by the response to Usman Khawaja's undeniably promising maiden innings in Test cricket. Such seems to be the shock at seeing Australia's Test number three perform with a modicum of composure and class that even writers as good as Christian Ryan are treating him like some sort of messiah. If ever there's an example of how far Australia have fallen and how poorly Ponting was playing, this is it.

With the game in Australia apparently going to hell in a handcart as a result of the rising tide of obesity, the nation's kids' obsession with computer games and the popularity and financial muscle of Australian Rules Football, it's seemingly the sole responsibility of a 24 year-old Muslim to single-handedly rescue his adopted nation from the wolves.

Get real. He's made 37 runs in his Test career.

Ring Out The Old

Best wishes for 2011 to all my regular readers and anyone else who's dropping by.

Having enjoyed The Old Batsman's take on the year's best innings, I've been mulling over what I've seen.

The innings I can't get out of my head is Jonathan Trott's 184 in the final Test against Pakistan, which I watched from the Warner Stand. Deliberate no-balls or not, he came in on as difficult a batting morning as you'll ever see at Lord's with more than a few people still wondering if he was the best England could do at number three. Hours later he left the field with Stuart Broad to a standing ovation. Just before he went up the pavilion steps he raised his bat and looked back towards the Grandstand with a broad smile on his face. He belonged.

This is what I wrote at the time.

The End of the Beginning

While England's success in Australia hasn't been especially surprising, the same can't be said of the way in which it has been achieved. Leaving aside Perth as an exception which proves the rule (that England are the better team), Adelaide and Melbourne have seen England dismantle and humiliate Australia in ways that would have been completely implausible just a few short years ago.

They have been assisted by Australia's timidity and confusion, both on the field and in the selection rooms, where there are deluded people who think that Steve Smith is a Test match number six batsman, or that Ryan Harris is a number eight, or that Xavier Doherty and Michael Beer are better cricketers than Nathan Hauritz. This was a team which used to set the standards for the whole world. At times these past few weeks they have been a shambles.

And, as Andrew Strauss made certain to acknowledge in his post-victory interviews, much of England's achievement can be attributed to that satisfyingly familiar cliche, the 'team effort', to which everybody contributed. This is broadly true, but some players contributed more than others.

Paul Collingwood has many virtues, but these cannot obscure the fact that he is the only one of England's specialist batsmen who has failed even to make a single half-century, and much of the time he has batted with the elegance and sure footedness of an inebriated man trying to walk across an ice rink. Not that you ever went to him for elegance - just resolution, unquenchable spirit and the best damn catching ever seen in an England shirt - but this must have been one of the last great days he will ever know in England whites.

Today has been a clammy, foggy day in the English Midlands and Stuart Broad's thoughts will, of course, have strayed far from his
Nottingham home. Unlike Collingwood, though, he will have further opportunities to be part of triumphs such as this, for the England team forged by Strauss and Flower will have many more days like these before they're done.

Two contrasting players. One old, one young. One in Australia, one at home. One at the beginning of the end, the other at the end of the beginning.

Now that the MCG cheers have faded, a penny for their thoughts tonight.

Confronting Mortality

There are aspects of all our lives which we know we're good at. And there are things we think we're good at, but which, in fact, we can't do as well as we think we can. And, eventually, our capabilities are changed and diminished by the vagaries of time, age and misfortune.

Ricky Ponting knows he's a great batsman and has probably always fancied himself as a pretty good captain too. He would be unlikely to admit that it was his good fortune to find himself in charge of a team which, at its best, could make anyone associated with it look good. The innate psyche of a great sportsman will always be reluctant to admit to inadequacies and failures. You don't spend 152 Test matches breaking the best bowlers of your generation by having a clear sense of your own weaknesses.

Eventually, though, everyone has to confront their mortality. In Ponting's case, the runs have dried up, his team is a pale shadow of what it was and a permanent reputation as the man who lost three Ashes series is staring him in the face.

Bearing all that in mind, as well as the fact that he's got a long list of previous convictions, it's no wonder he gave Aleem Dar an extended piece of his mind earlier today. This is not to excuse it. He got off lightly, but this was a man simply raging against a dying of the light over which he has little control.

When Ponting turned his attention to Pietersen, the batsman's face signified a mixture of astonishment and humour, but no real concern. He knows that he will still be playing Test cricket long after Ponting has gone.

Ricky Ponting's Barmy Army

These are confusing, possibly distressing, times for the Australian cricket follower. If you are one you would have to be in your early thirties, at the very least, to have any conscious memory of a time when your national side was as poor as it is now, and, even if you're older and were around in the days of Murray Bennett and Andrew Hilditch (I wonder what happened to him?), there's a good chance that you've forgotten what it's like to see your side repeatedly humiliated at home by superior opponents. The fact that the team raised your hopes by beating the very same opponents with ease in the previous match probably just serves to increase the feeling of disorientation.

And it's no better for the players. The last time this sort of thing was going on Punter was playing for Mowbray under-10s and Steve Smith and Philip Hughes hadn't even made their debuts in the human race.

So what, as a spectator, when your flagging, toothless team needs your support more than ever, do you do?

Well, if the first day at the MCG is anything to go by, you decide before tea that you can't take any more and you simply walk out of the ground.

Real Test Match Batting

In a week when England bit the Perth dust again, the one and only Sachin reached a milestone which once would never have seemed possible and another all-time great, Jacques Kallis, reached his first double-century in Test cricket, it could have been difficult to decide what to write about.

But to me the biggest story in the cricket world these past few weeks has been the form of Mike Hussey. A man who had been virtually written off as an international batsman but who has kept his team in the series with as measured a display of batting technique as you could ever hope to see.

Technical rigour, patience and stamina are unfashionable virtues these days. Relentless innovation and the hitting of boundaries can often seem to be all that matters as the more impulsive charms of the shortened forms of the game engage the senses of its newer acolytes more rapidly than Test cricket can. But this, from Hussey, has been real Test match batting: the advance selection of an appropriate gameplan, the persistence to see it through to its conclusion, and the shotmaking skill to bend England's often naive bowlers to his will.

At 35 Hussey is no tyro. But, while he is only a few months younger than Ponting, he belongs to a different generation of Australian cricketer. The generation who could never break into the Test side during the glory years and who instead were forced to earn their living abroad. While Hussey's basic skills were forged on the quick tracks of Western Australia they were polished on the English county circuit; at Wantage Road in Northampton, in the shadow of the Jessop Stand at Bristol, and at the Riverside. Holding poor sides together and piling up huge scores.

Hussey's batting over the past few weeks has been that of a man reluctant to give up something which he had to wait a long time to achieve. England have yet to discover an effective way of attacking him, but, with the series in the balance and Melbourne almost upon us, they need to do so soon.

Because, given the chance, he will bat, and bat, and bat.