Where in the World?

From the time Wasim Jaffer re-announced himself in international cricket with 81 and 100 against England at Nagpur in early 2006 I felt that he had something. Sure, I'd seen him in England in 2002 and he played a few classy strokes then, but there was little in the way of substance and he failed to convince me that he'd ever do much outside India.

Now, though, with good runs in England, South Africa and the West Indies behind him, he's an entirely different proposition, and today's masterwork was the apogee of his career.

He retains the habit of getting out when apparently well set, with the result that his average, climbing into the forties in his current innings, remains a little on the low side for a player of his talent, but all the other ingredients of a high quality Test player are there. His undefeated 192 today was adorned in particular by his uniquely sweet cover driving off front and back foot and a succession of wristy flicks through the leg side, chiefly off Kaneria, which were suffused with rare timing and elegance. All in all, an innings for which 'good' is a wholly inadequate description, and I couldn't get a nagging question out of my mind afterwards.

Where else in the world today can you see batting as good as that?

Genius at the End of the Day

The retired Lehmann, one of the greatest batting geniuses I ever saw, chats with Jenny Thompson here.

Bopara and Shah

I haven't been posting much recently, for which apologies. Something to do with spending time rearranging my house, standing on a freezing touchline watching thirty public schoolboys attempt - and largely fail - to play rugby and toasting the past cricket season over several pints of Otter and some food with some mates from my club.

During the past few days, when I've been in, I've had the first India-Pakistan Test on, but never managed to watch much of it, which meant that I was left with a pretty sketchy idea of what went on. It was good to see Munaf back, even if he didn't pull up any trees, and there was penetration with ball and bat from Kumble, Laxman, Ganguly and Jaffer. India looked worthy winners of a tight contest, which augurs well for the rest of the rubber.

England, meanwhile, continue an uneasy build-up to their first Test in Sri Lanka, with the most interesting sub-plot for me being the contest between Owais Shah and Ravi Bopara for the final batting place. While seeing the merits of both, I always felt that Bopara was likely to nudge in front because of his youth and ability to bowl (if not his 'bowling ability'). Having scored 47 to Shah's 26 today and taken two wickets with the new ball after Harmison and Anderson went lame, you have to feel that the deal is all but done, however high Moores' regard for Shah.

Ravi seems sure to be there, but who (apart from Hoggard and Broad, the most nailed-on debutant for years) will do the rest of the bowling?

Atapattu

And then there's Atapattu. As I said last week, I'd have loved to have seen him have another tilt at England but, having signed his own death warrant with his comments about the Sri Lankan selectors, he's nailed it to the wall by announcing his retirement, going out with a typically well-constructed 80 at Bellerive.

His career's many stages are summarised here.

Questions, Questions

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

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

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

You Must Be Kidding

One of the other blogs which I always enjoy reading is Patrick Kidd's Line and Length. Patrick has the great advantage of being paid to write about sport for The Times and so is literally paid to blog, unlike most of the rest of us who do it because we have opinions and like writing (not that Patrick doesn't have opinions or like writing, I'm sure).

Mind you, being paid doesn't mean you're immune from the perils of mad people visiting your site. For some time now, a certain 'Mr.A.Nel' has been leaving 'interesting' comments in response to entries such as this.

Now I've got no idea whether Andre Nel is really leaving comments on Patrick's blog (do you, Patrick?) but, if he is, he seems to be at least as unhinged as he always appears on the pitch. And that, my friends, is quite worrying.

Decent bowler, though (I have to put that in in case he comes after me as well, but I do actually rate him).

A Load of Balls

It seems as though every branch of the media in Britain has latched on to the story that MCC are going to trial the use of a pink cricket ball next season with a view to finding a one-day ball which doesn't deteriorate as rapidly as 'conventional' white ones do. The full story wasn't, of course, explained when the story was first covered on the radio yesterday morning, and it sounded initially as though red balls were going to be replaced by pink ones. Which, in turn, made me wonder whether it was April 1st, realise it wasn't and then forget all about what seemed a deeply implausible story until I heard John Stephenson discussing it on the radio some hours later.

Personally I dislike pink, but if the results of the experiments prove positive, why not?

Playing the Joker

Leaving aside what's been happening on the field, I'm enjoying the saga of Marvan Atapattu's none-too-subtle dig at the Sri Lankan selectors, whom he described as 'muppets headed by a joker'.

I'm not aware of all the history involved, although you can't help feeling that if Atapattu wants to extend his lengthy and recently resurrected Test career even further he's picked a strange way of going about it.

And I'd be very disappointed if he doesn't line up against England. For a very long time now he's been one of the most deliciously orthodox, quietly stylish and under-rated batsmen in world cricket, and anyone who can forge a career such as his after scoring just one run in his first six innings in Test cricket must have something going for him.

Going On Abroad

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

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

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

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

Wondering What It's Like

I don't usually write about rugby here - it's a cricket blog, after all - but I spend a lot of my time during the English winter watching the game, and occasionally you come across something which you not only enjoy, but which makes you think a bit more about the wider resonances and parallels of what you've seen.

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Joe Roff, 86 Australian caps and two World Cup finals behind him, play for Oxford University against the second team of my local club, the Exeter Chiefs. Unsurprisingly he excelled, while at the same time gliding through the game with the type of effortless poise and command that not only signifies a gifted sportsman but also one playing in a game far below the level to which he's accustomed.

It's hard to come across such experiences in cricket. No international in my experience has retired at 29 and gone back to university as Roff has, so you can only think of the times you managed to see one of the game's more gifted batsmen ply their trade against an attack that simply couldn't touch them. My most penetrating memories revolve around Lara at Trent Bridge in 1995, and, more vividly, a fifty by Darren Lehmann at Taunton when he looked as if he could have humiliated the Somerset bowlers while batting with a stump and only got himself out when it all became a little too easy.

At the end of the first half there was the type of exchange between players which is commonplace at any level of the game - a bit of grappling, a few random and harmless punches, a release for surplus aggression. Roff stood well away from it and trotted off, smiling to himself. He'd seen it all before. He'd been to places his compatriots and opponents could only dream of going, where the stakes are overwhelmingly high and the blows really hurt.

Those of us who spend our time on the sidelines, or vainly trying to emulate the actions and experiences of our heroes, can never really go there either. The best we can do is to see those places through their eyes and wonder at what it might be like.

Worse for Wear

There's a lot of talk in the media about Duncan Fletcher's memoirs, in which he tells some pretty shocking home truths about Andrew Flintoff's conduct as England captain in Australia last winter, including the revelation that he had to abandon a practice session after Flintoff turned up 'worse for wear', as the old cliche goes, after a heavy night on the lash.

I haven't read any of it so it's hard to comment in specific terms, but, in hindsight, it does look as though the decision to make Flintoff captain for the tour was mistaken. Andrew Strauss would have done a more astute job on the field and would have behaved himself a bit better off it.

A year on and they're not just out of contention for the role of skipper. They're both out of the team. Flintoff because of his continuing and increasingly concerning battle for fitness, Strauss because of the decline in form which he's suffered over the past eighteen months.

A penny for either of their thoughts today.

Hard Done By

Someone who does have the right to feel hard done by, though, is Chris Tremlett. Dodgy fitness record, yes, lucky to be selected ahead of Stuart Broad for the Lord's Test against India, yes, but someone who then went on to bowl pretty well in the three Tests he played. I suppose if the tour was to a more seamer-friendly environment he'd have made it, and Broad is certainly the better long-term prospect, but I wouldn't mind betting that he's feeling a bit hacked off at the moment.

And am I the only person wondering whether England really need two wicket-keepers for a tour like that?

Time to Move On

It's that time of the English autumn when there's nothing much going on in this country (apart from the announcement of the odd touring side) and little enough elsewhere in the cricket world (apart from what seem like endless ODIs on the sub-continent). This being the case, the past week seemed like a good time to let things slide a bit on the blog and see what else life has to offer; last weekend I took myself off to Derby to visit my parents and managed to get out into the Derbyshire Dales, where the weather was gorgeous and the scenery equally beautiful.

A few things got through, though, including the fact that Andrew Strauss had been left out of the England Test team to tour Sri Lanka, but Mark Ramprakash hadn't, as was widely predicted, been recalled.

Strauss had appeared to be living on borrowed time for a bit too long. In fact he's never appeared quite the same since his old mate Marcus left the stage. A batsman trying to operate outside his comfort zone and play too many shots, but also a player ground down by the way in which the world's best bowlers had homed in on and exposed his weaknesses. In the age of trial by DVD it's like that, and, when the England selectors are looking for a way to get a couple of extra batsmen into the team, you're going to be in trouble if you've got no major runs behind you for more than a year.

As an admirer of both Shah and Bopara I'm happy with the decision; Strauss, even at 30, is easily young enough and good enough to come again.

Nobody admires Ramprakash more than me but a recall at 38 for someone with a proven record of total mediocrity in Test cricket? No thanks. He's better now than he ever was, they say. Well, maybe. But he was pretty damn good as a Middlesex player in 1995 and he couldn't score a run for England then, so why should it be any different now? No, Shah or Bopara could score just as many runs in Sri Lanka as Ramprakash might, and it will be far more significant for England's future if they do.

Ramprakash is perhaps the greatest 'might have been' in post-war English cricket, but, sadly, that's where he's destined to stay. Time to move on.

Inzamam Retires

While I've been working too much and watching rugby just enough, Australia have completed a comfortable ODI series win over India, England's series in Sri Lanka has meandered to an end with Paul Collingwood's men showing good signs for the future, and a surprisingly efficient South Africa have conquered their least favourite conditions to outlast Pakistan in the first Test series of the English winter.

From Pakistan, though, came the most significant story of the week; the retirement of Inzamam. This was a player who probably never quite received the recognition in England that he deserved, possibly on account of the fact that he didn't play county cricket until his 38th year, but this was, unquestionably, a great player. Pakistan's greatest batsman? I, remembering 1987 at The Oval and a host of other wizardry, am a Miandad man, but I really appreciated Inzy, with his century at Lord's in 1996 and his final appearance there in 2006 bookending his career for me.

As always, Osman Samiuddin covers his passing with depth and elegance here.

Upward Curve

Another thing I seem to have done quite a bit of since I started the blog is writing about England one-day victories. The CB Series, the home ODIs with India, and now an away win in Sri Lanka; if you ignore the World Cup and the Twenty20 you could convince yourself that England are quite a good one-day side.

They're not that yet, but, under Moores and Collingwood, they are improving and you get the feeling that, this time, the upward curve might just be maintained.

No More Weak Puns

Having expended several thousand words in the early days of this blog in the summer of 2006 on the whys and wherefores of the Darrell Hair saga, I deliberately decided not to comment on his tribunal until after it had concluded. Now it has - and, from a distance, it seemed to be a strange, anti-climactic and amusing affair - I still don't have a lot to add to what I said last year.

As one of the minority of people outside Australia who always had, at the very least, a lot of sympathy for Hair, I can only reiterate that it seems to me very silly that an official of the quality of Hair cannot get a game while the other Australian DH, Daryl Harper, a nice bloke but an utterly mediocre umpire, remains on the ICC's Elite Panel. However, despite what Malcolm Speed said, it's very hard to see Hair appearing in many more Tests. None of the Asian countries will touch him with a bargepole and he can't officiate when Australia are involved which just leaves games between England, South Africa, New Zealand and West Indies, and there aren't that many of those.

So, I might not be writing about Darrell very much more, which, if nothing else, means that I won't be needing to rack my brain for shallow puns based on his surname.

I won't miss that, and nor, I suspect, will anyone else.

After Fletcher

It was both pleasing and interesting to see Ryan Sidebottom and Graeme Swann playing their parts in England's latest victory over Sri Lanka. Both are players who played a single game for England - Sidebottom a Test, Swann a one-day international - in the early years of Duncan Fletcher's stewardship of the England side. Neither impressed, both were forgotten. Swann said recently that he never spoke to Fletcher again after his tour to South Africa, but, in 2007, both have come back to the side to show how much they've developed in the intervening years and, perhaps, how much England were missing for all that time.

Leaving the intervening South African adventure to one side, there have been enough signs in the home series with India and this one that England, under Peter Moores, are at least putting themselves in a position from which they can improve the most dismal ODI record of the major nations. It seems highly likely that Sidebottom and Swann will be part of that, and Stuart Broad, of the neophyte's freshness and the veteran's mentality, is certain to do so.

Indeed, with Broad, whose straight bat and cool temperament should ensure he'll make plenty of runs at international level to go with the wickets which are a given, it's simply a matter of when he gets into the Test side. Once he's there he'll be there for ever (or it'll sure seem like it).

Further Exposure

ODIs, World Cups and international Twenty20 competitions may come and go with his participation questioned or absent, but, as soon as the ball's red, the kit's white and the game lasts a maximum of five days, Jacques Kallis clicks into gear. His twin centuries in South Africa's first Test win in Karachi took him to 26 in Test cricket, and, whatever the desultory nature of his strike-rate (around 43, Cricinfo tells me), his average and the sheer technical impregnability of his batting mark him down as one of the finest batsmen in the world today. I can understand the questions (and the fact that his highest Test score remains below 200 tells part of the story), but, for sheer weight of runs, where would South Africa be without him?

I've waxed lyrical about Kallis before, but I've had fewer opportunities to write about successful England one-day sides. Yesterday's victory in the second ODI at Dambulla was hugely impressive, even if it may have been predicated on some Sri Lankan complacency. But then, if you'd played England goodness knows how many times in limited-over cricket in the last twenty years or so and steamrollered them repeatedly, you'd probably be complacent too.

Ryan Sidebottom fired in his customary new-ball spell from left-arm over and Graeme Swann showed the type of technical ability, competitiveness and temperamental solidity which completely justified his selection (and raised questions about his extended absence under Fletcher) and should see him back on the island for the Tests before Christmas, while Owais Shah continued to cement his grip on the tricky number six position. When Shah was growing up in the Middlesex side his chief problem appeared, as with many young players, to be knowing which of his many shots to play and when to play them. Almost 29, he seems to have all that taped now, and, while his right-hand dominant technique will never be a thing of beauty, his deep well of innate talent should ensure that he stays around the side for a while. Tests are a different matter, but he sure ain't doing his chances of further exposure any harm.

It's a Dirty Job...

So, just a few weeks after seeing off India at home, England are back to square one (did they ever leave it?). And a frustrated and annoyed Andrew Miller is shooting from the hip.

For what it's worth I agree with a lot of what you say, Andrew, but I'll be happy to get paid to travel to Sri Lanka and watch England lose if you don't want to do it.

Staying the Same, Changing

With the 2007 English season finally out of the way and the first World Twenty20 also put to bed, the mind turns to everything else that's going on in the perpetually revolving, often crazily over-burdened, cricket world.

Australia in India, South Africa in Pakistan, England in Sri Lanka. There is, as always, a lot happening, but the more things change the more they remain the same. As I write Jacques Kallis is unbeaten on 118 at the end of the first day in Karachi and Mahela Jayawardena has top-scored for Sri Lanka against England in Dambulla.

Elsewhere, though, things have moved on. It was announced at the end of last week that Allan Donald would not be taking up a full-time appointment as England's bowling coach and would instead be joining his old team-mate Ashley Giles back in the brave new world of Edgbaston. This is a pity, as Donald clearly had a beneficial effect on the performances of England's wayward seamers last summer and it remains to be seen whether or not Ottis Gibson, for all his magnificence in Durham colours, can do the same.

In India, meanwhile, the national 'A' team and their South African counterparts finally managed to get on the pitch for their first (or third) ODI in Rajkot. India gained a narrow victory, largely thanks to Subramaniam Badrinath, the Tamil Nadu player who's been hovering around the side for the last couple of years or so and who's built up a nice portfolio of decent performances. I noticed last week that he's been given a 'Grade D' contract by the BCCI; it'll be interesting to see if he can kick on, as India, whatever their recent achievements in the longest and shortest forms of the international game, will soon be needing some high-quality reinforcements.

The same might be said of England's batting once this afternoon is out...