Gravitas

It already feels late to be writing about Graeme Smith. Most of what needed to be said - and this, in truth, wasn't a player to inspire great literature - has been said. Best and most comprehensively of all by Jarrod Kimber here.

Time is short, and so one memory from the mind's eye will suffice.

It is a sunlit Lord's evening, 3rd August 2003. South Africa are about to defeat England. Graeme Smith, 22 years old and South Africa's captain, stands with his hands on the shoulders of Makhaya Ntini. Ntini has taken nine wickets in the game; he will take ten. Smith himself has scored 259.

Smith fixes Ntini with an unwavering gaze and speaks quietly, assuring him, reassuring him, that victory is about to be theirs. Its significance could go unstated, but Smith recognizes the importance of the moment and seizes it.

It is a gesture which speaks of gravitas and maturity.

This is a man destined to captain his country for a very long time.

Cricket in Winter

English winters come in varying forms. There is difference - some are cold, this one has been wet, wetter than anyone alive has ever seen or experienced - and there is also similarity, uniformity. There are always long months of predominantly grey skies and early darkness. This is normal.

For anyone who loves cricket, and, for reasons of time, or money, or both, cannot travel to those parts of the globe where cricket takes place throughout the English winter, the months between October and April are strange ones. Cricket goes on; indeed, if you have access to Cricinfo and Twitter, and, most important of all, Sky Sports, cricket is everywhere.

But it is not cricket as it really is. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn on your television and see cricket; one day it is Perth, the next it is Sydney, then it is Wellington, Dubai, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Antigua. But as much as you can see the skies, and marvel at the depth of their blueness, rare in Britain even in summer, or almost convince yourself that you can feel the heat or the humidity by thinking back to a time and place when you were there - or somewhere similar - you cannot really feel the rhythm of the game. It is refracted and distended through the lens of the TV camera, while the commentators' perceptions - skewed by experience and biased by nationality and personal taste - can influence the way in which you see things. Moreover, you can never feel the wind on your face, or properly hear the shouts of the fielders, or the crowd. If you tire of watching from behind the bowler's arm, you cannot watch from midwicket, or low down at long-on, or chatting at square-leg. You have not travelled to the ground, or arrived there; you will not have the experience of packing your bag and leaving at close of play. Unless you have an unusually barren life, perhaps one where you have no work to do and little need to eat or sleep or leave your house, it is rarely possible to watch entire sessions of cricket in the way you would do if you were there. Thus, some of the light and shade of batsmen's innings - fluctuations of tempo and mood - and bowlers' spells - changes of pace, of flight, of spin, of field, are lost. If a bowler's field is altered it may be mentioned by the commentators, or the moved fielder may be shown, but the way in which that changes the impression and the purpose of the field as a whole can be obscured.

What a winter of televised cricket can do is reduce the game, with all its grandness and glory, to a series of distilled impressions, presented to you by the director and his cameramen and mediated by the commentators' personal tastes and opinions. It is a very different way of experiencing the game, but it is by no means an entirely bad thing.

Advances in technology increasingly mean that a television viewer has a closer view of the action than someone at the ground will ever have. Seam position, rotations of the ball as it spins, the way in which batsmen's eyes instinctively close upon impact as they play a hook or pull off their nose, or the way the blade of the bat wobbles on impact with the ball, are all evident to the television viewer in ways they will never be to someone watching from the boundary. And in the Test match arena, as in anything long, and stirring, where emotion and feeling play their part, you can draw many conclusions from being able to see the whites of the players' eyes or the precise way they use their bodies.

Over recent English winter weeks it has been possible to experience the impression of surprise and incidental pride on BJ Watling's face as he hears the announcement that he has broken a world partnership record, and to see him shake hands with Brendon McCullum as the crowd on one of the Basin Reserve's banks rises to acclaim them. Or it has been possible to look in detail at the way in which, as his form slowly returned at St.George's Park, Hashim Amla's bat emerged from its distinctive backlift with all its straightness and ethereal timing, relying on the nuances of wrist and hand positioning for its power and direction. As Australia slid to defeat in the same game, it was possible to see the way in which reverse swing took hold of the ball in the split second between it leaving Dale Steyn's hand and destroying the stumps of Brad Haddin. Or, also from Wellington, it has been possible to enjoy the beautiful, persuasive neatness of Ajinkya Rahane, or Brendon McCullum's return to the changing rooms, 302 to his name and a small, vulnerable, but immensely proud cricket nation saluting him. Week in, week out (it seems), there is the compactness, power and technical efficiency of the man who currently looks like the best opening batsmen on the planet, David Warner. And there is Kohli. There is always Kohli.

Cricket viewed through the prism of television is different. In many ways it is a more limited, less rounded, less involving experience. In others it is richer and more concentrated, while also more artificial.

Now it is March in England, things begin to change. It still rains, but the days are longer, and, when the sun is out, there is a meagre warmth in the air and the quality of the light is indefinably distinctive.

Soon, as surely as the world turns, it will again be time in England for the real thing.

The Forces of Conservatism

Once upon a time, Viv Richards made 322 in a day for Somerset against Warwickshire at Taunton. One of the Warwickshire side who had the misfortune (or, looked at another way, the good fortune) to have to field to it was Robin Dyer, a young opening batsman and the son of a cricket bookseller from Yorkshire who used to advertise in The Cricketer and Wisden Cricket Monthly. Perhaps he still does.

Since then I've spent many days on the County Ground at Taunton. Twenty years after Richards, I even saw another Somerset player called Graeme Smith make 300 in a day there. Stuart Broad, a nineteen year-old bowler then, remembers that as well.

But when Richards made his runs I was the one who was nineteen, and I lived far from Taunton. I was obsessed with cricket, and I knew that things like that didn't happen very often. I read all the reports, collected all the cuttings. This was the era of Richards.

I haven't got it to hand so I can't recall it word for word, but Robin Dyer said something resonant that day. It went along the lines that here he was, struggling to establish himself and make a living from a difficult game, when he witnessed an innings that was so far beyond anything that he would ever be capable of - or perhaps anything that he imagined anyone would be capable of - that he began to question what he was doing. By most people's standards, Robin Dyer, with his two thousand plus first-class runs and three centuries, could bat. But the following year, 1986, he retired. It may have been illusory or simply wrong, but at the time there was a sense that Viv Richards had made him give up the game.

At times I feel like Dyer did when I read the writings of Jon Hotten, The Old Batsman. Last week, in the most lyrical and apposite of the many pieces written about the fall of Kevin Pietersen, he wrote:

But KP was English, or at least he was playing for England, and the English psyche, deeply conservative, deeply repressed, is a challenging place for the non-conformist. It was doomed from the start and I knew it. In a way, it's amazing that he lasted as long as he did.

Here Jon is, of course, right. There was always a good chance that Pietersen, with his naked ambition, his outspokenness, his tattoos and his unveiled genius, would end up a victim of the innate forces of conservatism which are as strong in English cricket now - in the age of prescriptive coaching, rigid gameplans and ubiquitous nutritional advice - as they ever were. In his time they also laid waste to David Gower, who didn't have the tattoos or the outspokenness, only the genius.

A more wide-ranging discussion of the qualities which made Pietersen the nearest thing to Viv Richards that England have ever had will have to wait for another day, but at the end of the Perth Test, I wrote that England's tour was starting to develop a fin de siécle quality, and, of all those involved with the England shambles, the futures of Flower, Pietersen and Swann were all shrouded in uncertainty.

Eight weeks on, with Flower, Pietersen and Swann all gone, and only one of them truly the master of his own destiny, the sense of an era ending is stronger still. And, while Flower and even, perhaps, one day, Swann, will be replaced, Pietersen never really will be.

It is a horribly trite cliché, but, for all kinds of reasons beyond the cricketing, it will be a very long time before we see Pietersen's like again in an England shirt.

Coming Home

It is still early in the year in southern England. For those of us who have been here all winter it does not seem cold. But still the rain lashes down. Everything looks dirty. The entire country feels as though it is drowning.

Alastair Cook notices this. He feels the chill and does his England blazer up. Alice, his wife, has brought him a heavy overcoat from home; he puts it on and turns the collar up. As the beads of water drip down the car window, the realisation sets in that he is home. For months, those killing, unforgettable months he has spent on the other side of the world at the focus of what is perhaps the most savage and pitiful defeat English cricket has ever known, the weather has made little impression on his consciousness. It has been hot, of course it has been so hot, but he has been there before and he is famous for never breaking sweat. The only thing disorientating or unusual has been the intensity and clarity of the sunshine, and the burning dryness of the air. All this is gone, now.

As the car leaves Heathrow Airport behind, images of defeat cluster his mind. It is a chilling montage of lost tosses, dropped catches, poorly executed strokes and the harsh, unforgiving glare of the camera eye. Unwanted post-defeat interviews in soiled kit, with thousands of Australians leering and jeering and laughing. Mark Nicholas, a preening martinet in a tailored suit, firing the questions with a forced mixture of levity and accusation. Why? Why? Why? Airless press conferences with all the Aussies there, Conn and his mates, with their crude and tedious jibes, laughing behind their notepads as they mock the fact that England's only truly successful player was born in New Zealand.

Nothing has prepared him for this. Not the gilded childhood, singing in the St.Paul's choir, nor those adolescent summers piling up runs on the school ground at Bedford as public schoolboys in museum piece caps bend to his will. Not the previous winter's glory in India, defying tiredness, searing heat and the weight of the past. There have been times these past few years when it has seemed as though Cook may be superhuman. We now know that he is not.

He was almost dropped by England once. But then came the Oval century against Pakistan, and the rest is history. 100 consecutive Tests and counting. Today, with jet lag setting in and defeat on his mind, he feels every one of those games in his legs and in his mind. The comforts of home cannot come soon enough.

The key turns in the lock. The house is warm. The bags are left in the hallway. Now, at last, a time to shed the layers of formal clothing crumpled by hours of international travel. A time to reflect on what has happened to him, and to the team which he has captained.

As the days turn into nights and back to days again, with Cook barely recognizing their passing, the recollections have an unwelcome tendency to come thick and fast, a bit like the Australian attack on one of its many good days. Cook relishes the opportunity to get away from everything - from holding a bat, from thinking constantly about bowling changes and field placings, from people, with microphones, or with beers in their hands, asking him 'why? - and he enjoys the serenity and security of being in his own space. He watches television, he reads a little, he talks to Alice, he sorts through the mountain of tedious paperwork which has arrived while he has been away. He spends some time outside, with the farm animals which have failed to register his departure, his absence or his return. This is how he likes it. He has been noticed far too much over recent months, usually for the wrong reasons.

But, as the activity lulls, the memories and anxieties return. In an instant he is back at the Adelaide Oval, late in the day, his mind and body scrambled by the relentless heat and noise, by the batting of Clarke and Haddin and Harris, and by his team's threadbare bowling. He is facing Mitchell Johnson, who is bowling to him as quickly as anyone has ever done. He sees the ball, but in an instant it is through him as his reactions, slowed by tiredness and stress, fail to cope. He hears his wicket break, and then, a heartbeat later, he hears the roar of the Australian crowd. In a sense this is flattering, as it signifies how highly his wicket is prized, but he knows that. He has no need for flattery. He needs runs.

Another time he is back in Perth. The heat has not receded and his team, theoretically, are chasing 504 to win. This time it is the hulking frame of Ryan Harris which confronts him. He sees the ball better this time as it doesn't quite have the pace of Johnson's delivery, but it swings in slightly through the air before cutting away off the pitch and hitting the top of his off stump. He knows he couldn't have done anything more to counter it - few left-handed batsmen alive could have done - but it cuts to the quick even more as it is the first ball of the innings and he knows that in all probability the Ashes are about to be surrendered.

These are extracts; he also recalls dropped catches, poor strokes, captaincy decisions. While his confidence - the sort of confidence which derives from a life of almost unbroken success - has been affected, when it comes to his batting failures he knows very well that he can bat. He always could, and the numbers are in the book. Form is temporary, class is permanent, all that. But captaincy is different. He hasn't done very much of it, and it shows, both on the field and off. He knows that what he has said about wanting to continue in the job, at least in Test cricket, is genuine and heartfelt. He wants the chance to show that he is capable of improvement. He wants the chance to help bring his England side back from its darkest hour. He feels, with Andy Flower, a man he likes and admires, still in charge, that better times lie ahead. Come the early summer in England, the pitches will be green, Jimmy and Broady will be fresh, perhaps Finny will be back, Stokes will be there. He knows how Sri Lankan and Indian batsmen play the seaming and swinging ball in English conditions. In his mind, for all its concerns, there is hope for the future.

A few days in, Cook is lazing around the house when the doorbell rings. Alice is nearer so she goes to the door. There is a brief, and, to Cook, inaudible, exchange of pleasantries. Then she calls to her husband:

“Alastair, Andy Flower is here to see you”.

After the Hard Yards

It has become a commonplace these past few weeks - not that it did England any good at all - that Australia aren't a great side. This is true; they aren't. Leaving aside the unpleasant reality of where that leaves the England side that they've just eviscerated, the current Australian team contains one great batsman, Michael Clarke (who also happens to be an excellent captain), and three men, Harris, Johnson and Haddin, who have given convincing short-term impersonations of era-defining influence. In the case of Harris and Haddin, age and fitness are against them, but, after their deeds of recent weeks, they will one day retire happy in the knowledge that they decisively defined the course of a series which, for all its deeply unsatisfying one-sidedness, has added an indelible chapter to the annals of Ashes history.

Another player who, for all his vast corpus of first-class runs, will look back on this as the time of his cricketing life, is Chris Rogers. Rogers, with his pinched, serious expression, his slight stature, his understated body language and his clunky, workmanlike left-hander's game, is nobody's idea of a hero, and, as a batsman, he is easy to underestimate. In the early part of this series, Geoff Boycott, who has made a career out of being unpleasantly disrespectful to people who deserve better, repeatedly described him as a limited (and, by implication and tone, very ordinary) player who would be lucky to last the series. The thought that he was merely continuing to grow into a role which he would have felt until earlier this year had passed him by for good, clearly didn't occur, although, to give him his due, by the time of Rogers' polished centuries at Melbourne and Sydney, even Boycott appeared to have developed an awareness that he could play a bit.

As a professional opening batsman who spent the best years of his career in the twin shadows of Hayden and Langer, Rogers has done the hard yards on both sides of the globe. In England, from the slow club tracks of Devon and Shropshire to the bleak, unconsidered county arenas of the east Midlands, and, more recently, to the broad and beautiful acres of Lord's; in Australia, from the hardness and pace of the WACA to the intimidating vastness of the MCG. There is little he hasn't seen or done, and, now in the autumn of his career, he has played a vital role in his team's regaining of an Ashes urn he would never have expected to be given the chance to compete for.

Parallels can be drawn and similarities observed between Rogers and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. Both are studiedly unflamboyant, often ugly, but with a suppressed class which can be hard to recognize and define. But there the similarities end: Chanderpaul made his Test debut at 19 and has spent most of his career in a poor side trying to stem the tide of defeat; Rogers made only one Test appearance before the age of 35, but, at 36, has played in a side which has won every game of a five Test series and humiliated its oldest foe.

England's players, brought low by a perfect storm of complacency, hubris, staleness, poor selection and Australian verve and excellence, will take time to recover from this. Chris Rogers will finally feel that he belongs, really belongs, at the game's top table.

For varying reasons, this has been a time which neither of them will ever forget.

Kallis

As some people may have seen, Cricinfo were good enough to publish some thoughts of mine about Jacques Kallis. They can be found here.

The piece was edited. They may well have done me a favour by removing some additional guff about my Dad and his trips to South Africa, but it was interesting to find that a reference I'd made to the 'mysteriousness and corruption' of Hansie Cronje had also been removed. I'm not in a position to make a judgement about why that was done, but I can't see that a reference to Cronje having been corrupt is controversial in any way. He admitted as much himself.

Anyway, the unexpurgated version is below:

Newlands, early January, sun shining out of an azure sky, is a cricket ground for the dreams. People have photographed it, people have written about it, people have loved it. In the isolation years those of us growing up in the old Test countries would read about it, imagine it. The oaks, Table Mountain, endless sunshine. Players - some forgotten, some never known - playing out their days in the Currie Cup. Pollock, Procter, Richards, Barlow, van der Bijl, Fotheringham, McKenzie, Hobson, Kirsten. Hard cricket, sure, but an ever-present sense of unfulfilment. A kind of slow death. Memories of the world at their feet, Lawry's Australia humiliated, and then nothing.

Early January, 1996. I am there. This is what I thought about when my Dad came back from his business trips to South Africa with the newspapers and the magazines. This is what I thought about that time we went with him to the heart of the Apartheid Republic (Hell, I regret it 35 years on, but I was young and it meant time off school) and we went to Cape Town but didn't get further than Green Point athletics stadium.

But I'm not enjoying it. Really I am not enjoying it. The early year sky is unnaturally blue, which, for someone brought up in northern Europe, is slightly spooky, and it is hot. God, it is hot. And I am ill. Stomach trouble, brought from the UK, sunburn from Port Elizabeth and a streaming cold, caught on the Western Cape.

Just get through the match. It will not take long, as England will lose inside three days. Years later, if people mention Dave Richardson or Paul Adams (fortunately they rarely do) it makes me shudder. Memories of that time and place do the same to Ray Illingworth, to Devon Malcolm, to others. England, wasted in Australia, have it bad now, but that was a grim time.

It is still the first day but the scalding, relentless sun is too much. Shelter is found under the chalets. The embryonic Barmy Army on the grass in front, England battling away, trying to defy the weather and the odds.

Jacques Kallis, twenty years old, comes on to bowl. It is the first time I have taken any notice of him. He made his debut at Durban two weeks before but the game was ruined by rain and he barely got off the mark. People are talking about him, but only as a batsman. I have no idea that he can bowl.

Kallis here is slimmer than the barrel-chested figure of his later years, and he has all his own hair. He bowls four economical overs, high side of medium pace, robust, muscular action, bounce. It sticks in the mind.

From that day on, Kallis is around. For the first year or two he struggles, then the century comes at Melbourne. The rest is history.

For a long time people underestimate him. With his subdued personality he can seem a little too mechanical and unemotional. People do not warm to him. His batting (people say) lacks a signature, lacks defining elegance, lacks really big scores. Kallis (people say) is too one-paced, Kallis is not alive to the situation. Kallis is this; Kallis is that. All the while, though, Kallis is making runs. There is a bloodless technical perfection to his batting in the way there always was with Martin Crowe, but this does not mean that he is unworthy of greatness. Gradually he builds his reputation like an innings, brick by brick.

He is also - although sometimes with reluctance - taking wickets. There is always bounce, sometimes there is genuine pace. When conditions help and the muse is with him, as at Headingley in 2003, there is movement and what old English pros call 'a heavy ball'.

When he is not making runs or taking wickets, he stands at slip and catches everything.

For those that remember Sobers, Kallis has one particular fault. He is not and will never be Sobers. This is of course true in all ways but it doesn't matter. Every generation is territorial about its heroes, but comparison of players from different eras is ultimately meaningless and demeans those who try to score points through it. I can feel old around cricket these days, but I hardly saw Sobers. Through a young child's eyes in 1973 and then a cover drive from the Gods in a charity game at The Oval nine years later. I am happy to accept that Sobers was better, but he was a different player in a different time. Gideon Haigh said this week that Sobers was 'a cavalier among roundheads', while Kallis was 'a roundhead among cavaliers', and, while this is open to discussion, there is plenty enough truth there. Statistics are of little relevance in such an argument, but if you want to go there, well, Kallis' immense figures stand proudly against those of anyone else who has ever played the game.

When I was in South Africa in late 1995 and early 1996, the country was changing rapidly, both on the cricket field and far away from it. As the post-isolation era developed at Newlands, and Kingsmead and at the Wanderers, Kallis was at its heart. Young, and not as visibly or as showily as Rhodes, or with the pace and vitality of Donald, or the mysteriousness and corruption of Cronje, but he was there. Lately, in the era of Steyn and de Villiers, and of Smith, and of Philander, he is still there. Like Tendulkar he has outlived one epoch and seen his side into another. It somehow seems appropriate that they should retire within a few weeks of each other.

In this there is a sense of the passing of cricket history. This is an old, old game, and these are two of the best players it has ever produced. But it should not necessarily be a source of sadness. In the age of T20 the fabric and context of the game is shifting like sand, but it will still produce players to rank with any that have gone before. From Kallis's final game there is Steyn, there is de Villiers, and there could in the future be Pujara and Kohli.

Few, though, will ever be better than Jacques Kallis.

The Non-Conformist

When I hinted last week that I thought that at least one of Graeme Swann, Kevin Pietersen and Andy Flower would soon take the decision to move on from Test cricket, I wasn't expecting something to happen so soon. Indeed, I wasn't necessarily expecting Swann to be dropped for the Melbourne Test, even though it seemed like the right thing to do. With the replacement of Prior apparently inevitable, I was doubtful that the England management would want to make too many changes at once, even if their team was looking more and more like a busted flush by the day. In the event, Swann took the decision out of the hands of Flower and his cohorts, and this was far from surprising. Swann has always had a welcome tendency to say and do what he wants, rather than what's expected of him.

Beyond the more obvious things that Graeme Swann gave England in his late-flowering career - beyond his crafty, aggressive bowling, his reliable slip catching and his punchy, vivacious batting - he stood as living proof that it was possible for a contemporary player to cut through the vacuity and bullshit of the modern player-media relationship. Swann, who'd really done his time on the county circuit and consequently stood slightly apart from much of the regimented behaviour and thinking of the modern international player, tended to tell it as he saw it, which was refreshing in itself. At times, as in the past few days, it would lead to more questions than answers, but it was always good to feel that you were getting the genuine opinions of someone who came across as having a wider world-view than most of his colleagues.

In the short term, arguments will continue about whether it was right for Swann to retire in the middle of the series or not - I tend towards the latter view - but, given Swann's personality it wasn't surprising. In a similar situation, Alastair Cook or Ian Bell, conformists to the last (and none the worse as men for that) would have been in for the long haul. Swann, though, is cut from different cloth.

And England will miss him more than they know.

Out of Control

The few unexpectedly short weeks that it has taken to decide the fate of the Ashes have begun to assume a strange, slightly otherworldly quality. In a sense they have been like a return to the time, not so very long ago, when Australian dominance over England in Test cricket was taken as the natural order of things. The echoes of 2006-7, the series by which all other English thrashings are measured, are starting to feel disconcertingly loud.

But things are different now. Prior to 2005, English cricket followers under the age of thirty barely knew what it was to beat Australia. Now they know what it is to dominate, even to humiliate them. Just a few short months ago England completed a third consecutive series win against Australia, by a margin of 3-0. For all its relative closeness and the unrepresentative nature of the ultimate scoreline, it was seen as normal, understandable and predictable for England to beat Australia. This has lent the events of recent weeks a fin de siécle quality, and they're no less painful for that.

Over international cricket's long history there have been few times when England have led the world. In 2011, after they had won the last Ashes series in Australia 3-1, with three victories by an innings, and beaten an insipid Indian side 4-0 at home, many people fondly believed that such a time had come to stay.

Such hopes were illusory and built on sand. England were, for a relatively short time, an efficiently run, technically excellent team, relying heavily on a range of very good, if not great - with the possible exception of Pietersen - players who were in the form of their lives, and assisted by the fact that Australia in the late Ponting era were a team in transition and turmoil, while India in England in 2011, as so many overmatched Indian teams before them, resembled fish out of water once they left the security of home behind.

With the benefit of hindsight it's clear the gradual decline which has culminated in the apocalyptic shambles of the last few weeks began in the UAE in early 2012, when England's vain pretensions to greatness were laid bare by a rootless but highly talented Pakistan side. The against-the-odds series win in India last winter covered some cracks and said more about India than it did about England, while it was clear from what happened last summer that England would need to raise their level of consistency substantially if they were to counter a Lehmann-inspired Australia benefiting from the additional advantage of playing at home.

In case anyone has forgotten - and they are excused for doing so - Mitchell Johnson didn't play in the Ashes series in England. The ODIs which followed, though, were a different story.

Jonathan Trott remembers those. In the second match at Old Trafford, with England chasing 316 to win, Johnson, after having Carberry caught at backward point by Clarke, removes Trott with a short ball of high pace and spitting, lethal venom. Trott tries his best to remove his bat from the ball's vertiginous line, but he succeeds only in edging it to Wade. It is the first ball he has received, and, before he leaves the crease he looks briefly back down the pitch and his eyes narrow with confusion and retrospective concern. He has been confronted with something he cannot control and it has defeated him. Old certainties are starting to slip away.

From that moment on it was obvious to many - just so long as Johnson maintained his form - that retaining the Ashes in Australia would be very difficult for England to do. Even without Johnson there would be the muscularly authoritative and highly skilled, Ryan Harris, the redoubtably persistent Peter Siddle and the newly-trusted Nathan Lyon. Then there would be Clarke - there is always Clarke - and there would be Warner and there would be Haddin, overshadowing Prior with gloves and bat and driving ever more nails into his once-valid claim to be the world's leading wicket-keeper/batsman. God knows, there would even be Steve Smith, still looking far from a Test number five but benefiting from the reflected glow which playing in a winning side bestows, and displaying a nice line in punchy resilience.

England knew this - or at least if they didn't they weren't paying attention properly - but they have failed to confront or challenge it. They have been outplayed and shamed by a team which, for all its resurgent virtues, is still punctuated with clear weaknesses. No definitive answers exist, but tiredness in the face of an unrelenting, sapping, devaluing schedule, and good old-fashioned poor selection have both played their part, while there is also the sense that during England's glory years (if that's what they were), more than one member of the side came to think of themselves as a little better than they were, and, as decline has set in, they have been powerless to do anything to respond to something they have been unable to control.

Control has been the byword of Flower's England, as represented by conservative fields, predictable selection, turgid over-rates and over-prescriptive catering arrangements. All this is fine, just as long as the opposition don't have the temerity to start fighting fire with fire in the sledging arena while simultaneously out-bowling, out-batting and out-fielding you. Then it can all become too much very quickly. And it has.

While the series and the Ashes are gone, it would be too convenient to pretend that the opportunities for short-term redemption at Melbourne and Sydney can be discounted. Those who have been following England since the days when this type of performance was the norm rather than the exception will recall Barbados, 1994. And the release which comes with clinching a series can do strange things to victorious teams.

But, whatever happens, the events of the past few weeks have ushered in a period of soul-searching which will cast the longest of shadows over the rest of this English winter. For the England players who have failed most strongly to live up to their reputations, and for each member of their coaching team, it is a time for unsparing self-examination. For certain players, chiefly the oldest, Swann and Pietersen, it will be harder than for most. This will also be true of Andy Flower. The suspicion is that at least one, probably Flower, will fall by the wayside.

In the short term others may go too, but the feeling persists that for the likes of Cook, Prior, Broad and possibly Anderson, while form is temporary, class is permanent. Their reputations have been damaged for good, but they, and England, with an infusion of new blood, will be back.

The illusion of world domination, though, has gone. And it will take a long time to return.

Stokes

It's too early to take any real credit - and I'm hardly the only person who's ever indicated that they thought Ben Stokes might turn out to be a handy player - but, in May 2012, after watching him make a muscular half-century at Taunton which, in an indefinable way, hinted at greater things to come, I wrote this.

And, after seeing him hit a six at Taunton last season that went as high and as far as virtually any shot I've ever seen (although the straight boundaries at Taunton are short, it would have been a big six on any ground in the world), I was even more convinced that here was one to follow.

Of course, succeeding in Test cricket takes a lot more than the hitting of big sixes, but Ben Stokes showed today that, for all the myriad uncertainties and problems which currently confront England, he is, very definitely, one for their future.

Past Tense

With the dust settling on Jonathan Trott's return home, and with the precise reasons for it still unclear, thoughts turn to what he has left behind.

If it is to be the end of his England career - and no-one yet has any firm idea about that, including, I'm sure, Trott himself - he leaves behind him a legacy of apparently emotionless intensity, of striving purposefulness and of calmness under fire which has served England well through both difficult and glorious times. With all this said, though, the feeling persists, as I touched upon back in June here, that Trott has never, will never, quite be admired in the way many of his colleagues in the current England team are, let alone the way in which many England players of the past (think Tom Graveney, to take just one example) have been truly and unconditionally loved.

The recent turn of events has shown that Trott - scowling, balding, crease-occupying, Jonathan Trott - is as vulnerable as the rest of us (and we warm to him just a little more for that), but the fact remains that for most of his four years in the England side, regardless of the runs he made, he was just a little too much of an outsider for people's comfort. His lack of visible emotion, his occasional (exaggerated by his critics) reluctance to adjust his approach to the perceived needs of the situation and the obvious otherness of his accent all contributed to this in a way that similar traits haven't for other players. Trott is no more or less South African (or English) than his erstwhile colleague Kevin Pietersen, but for all his perceived arrogance, Pietersen's relative extroversion, and the dazzlingly innovative genius of his batting, have brought him closer to the hearts of England fans than anything Jonathan Trott ever did.

This, of course, is unfair; many of the things which Jonathan Trott did for England were exceptional. Of course you had the century on debut, of course you had the doubles at Lord's and Cardiff, of course you had the runs which nailed the Australian coffin shut during England's last tour there, but most of all you had the innings during which he, in partnership with Stuart Broad, took a Test away from Pakistan on the day spot fixing came to Lord's. Regardless of where his front foot was landing, Mohammad Amir was making it talk that morning, and Trott's judgement and resolution, coupled with his finely tuned awareness of when and how to start to take the game to, and then away, from the opposition, marked him down as someone who could be a player for the ages. It may not be widely recalled as such yet (perhaps, in the future, it will), but that was a truly great innings.

As to what else Trott has left behind, he has left an England team which, for all its planning, its attention to detail and its past successes, stands close to the precipice. Established players' form continues to falter, others, perhaps, are fading in age's spotlight. Trott has no obvious replacement in the team, chiefly because, although we are told his illness is nothing new, nobody thought to bring a player who could act, without hesitation, as a direct substitute for him. This week, in Adelaide, the wheels can either be bolted firmly back on to the wagon, or. conceivably, they may start to come off.

For England the pressure this week will be as intense as the South Australian heat. For Trott, the chill greyness of a Birmingham winter will be a strange but necessary kind of release from the stresses of his former existence.

It is to be hoped that he will return to England colours in the future. In the meantime he may be missed more in his absence than he was ever valued.

Riding for a Fall

In cricket, as in life, times change. Teams, empires, rise and fall.

In early February 2009, England were bowled out for 51 by the West Indies at Sabina Park, Jamaica, to lose by an innings and 23 runs.

I wrote about it here.

Strauss was new as captain, Flower as coach. It was a time of flux and unease. Despite evisceration in Australia in 2006-7, the 2005 Ashes triumph was still relatively fresh in the memory. England followers had received a taste of the promised land, quickly followed by a dose of hard reality.

Then came retrenchment, rebuilding, discovery, hope and triumph.

For a time in 2011, it was possible to believe that here was a team for the ages. As an apogee, 7th January 2011, at the Sydney Cricket Ground, has it. A cathedral of Antipodean cricket is packed to the rafters with singing English fans and fellow travellers as Australia, a weak shadow of the team which had bestrode and defined an era, slides to their third innings defeat in four matches. Later in the year, India are humiliated at home.

There is a sense, though it is illusory and in some quarters self-congratulatory, that cricket has come home. England, for so long whipping boys, are now on top of the world. They have batsmen who can accumulate as few in the modern world can - Cook, Trott - they have technicians of style and brilliance - Bell - and they have an artist of unadulterated and unconventional genius in Kevin Pietersen. They also have a wicket-keeper batsman who can bend any attack in the world to his will, skilled, aggressive, penetrative seamers and an exceptional spinner. They have all bases covered. This is a team which can lose a Test match in the arid heart of India and come back to win the series. This is a team which can win an Ashes series 3-0 when playing far from its best. There is a feeling among some that this is a team that can do anything.

They are manifestly wrong. That way hubris lies.

On the eve of their next Test series, the airwaves in Britain are full of former players predicting an easy series victory for England. Despite the persuasive evidence of the danger he poses (his potent bowling in the one-day international series in England just two months ago has been instantly forgotten), fans who should know better (and now they do, boy they really do) are dismissing Mitchell Johnson as though he, a man with more than 200 Test wickets, cannot bowl. The team's support staff are issuing prescriptive and precious demands about how and when their players should be fed. In some senses this is a cricket culture, if not a team, that is riding for a fall.

On the first day in Brisbane it carries on. Michael Clarke, unquestionably a great batsman, pops one to short leg off Broad and people are questioning his future. It is implied that Broad can get him out as and when he wishes. Two days later, the same people are uncomfortably aware that he cannot.

Late on the game's third day, Jonathan Trott, for so long a byword for imperturbability and remorseless consistency, plays a short innings of such panicky impermanence that his dismissal to a truly dreadful stroke comes as an inevitable but merciful release.

At the same time, both on the pitch and in the Gabba's stands, there is ample evidence of Australia's renewed aggression and self-belief. They have taken it from England for too long and now it is payback time. This is a cricket country to its soul.

For Flower's England, painfully reacquainted with the feeling that accompanies crushing defeat, the next few weeks will be the hardest many of their players have ever had to face.

At the Crossroads

It's often said that a player's career is 'at the crossroads'.

It's one of those aphorisms, - clichés in fact - which should only be used with extreme care. To use it more freely is to dissipate both its meaning and its significance.

It was never used very often about Ian Bell.

Ian Bell, from his Warwickshire childhood, was always a prodigy. At sixteen he was described by the New Zealand Under-19 coach, Dayle Hadlee, as the best player of his age he'd ever seen (this was well into the era of Tendulkar, but presumably Hadlee never saw the young Sachin live), and his ascent to the England team in which he made his debut with a cultured 70 against the West Indies at The Oval in August 2004, was completed with as much ease as one of his innings. It was difficult to shake the feeling that here was someone very special, but the way in which a few of his predecessor prodigies in the England side - John Crawley, Mark Ramprakash - had found the step to Test cricket a trial in both mental and physical terms, encouraged caution. Anyone who thought otherwise was riding for a fall.

In Bell's case the fall came the following year, during the greatest Test series of them all. Bell, 23 now, was tormented by Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. He wasn't the first, and he wouldn't be the last, but his experience raised questions which had never arisen before.

In the years that followed, as England's off-field management went through its own period of transition - from Fletcher to Moores and eventually on to Andy Flower - Bell established himself in the side to an extent, but often failed to convince. He couldn't make runs under real pressure, they said. He only made centuries when another player had done so in the same innings. He wasn't a three, nor a four, people said, even though he made his fair share of runs in both positions. Was he a six? Or a five? After a run of relative failures while batting at three in 2008 and early 2009, he was dropped during England's last, unsuccessful, West Indies tour, before returning during the Ashes summer.

Thus began the second coming of Ian Bell.

In 2011, when consistent, implacable, high quality runs at home against Sri Lanka and India quickly followed performances of equal skill and assurance in Australia, it finally looked as though Ian Bell was becoming the player he had always threatened to be. There has always been an innate diffidence about his body language which has sometimes given an illusory impression of his character but there was now a welcome touch of arrogance; a sense that he was starting to realize how good he was, and how good he could be.

After that, though, his performances began to slip again, to the point where, as Australia arrived in England last summer, people were again starting to question him. These queries were triumphantly dispelled by Bell's three Ashes hundreds at Trent Bridge, Lord's and Chester-Le-Street, heady combinations of fine defensive technique, grace under pressure and as wide a range of textbook strokes as has been seen from an English batsman since the post-war heyday of May and Cowdrey.

Now, on the eve of his sixth Ashes series, it can be argued that Bell's career once more stands at a crossroads. His performances in 2013 have firmly established him as one of the finest English batsmen of the modern era, even though he lacks the defining charisma and daring of Kevin Pietersen or the insatiable run-hunger of Alastair Cook.

This, though, is a batsman with the physical and technical resources to be truly great; in the era of power bats, diminished bowlers and slumbering pitches, he should be averaging in excess of 50. His current mark of 46, coloured by too many early dismissals, fails to do him justice.

Over the next seven weeks, from Brisbane to Sydney, Bell has a golden opportunity to take another series of steps towards being the player he always promised to be.

As always, if he gets through the early overs, he, along with the series, will be desperately worth watching.

Confronting the Future

What is there to say about Sachin Tendulkar that hasn't been said already?

Nothing.

So, what to do as his career slips into the past? Say something that everyone else has said in a million different ways on countless occasions - Tendulkar is the greatest batsman of all time (not for me), Tendulkar is God (well, not if you're really paying attention), Tendulkar has profoundly affected my life (Oh no. Cricket itself has, but Tendulkar is not the game.) - or try to say something different?

The latter is much the most attractive option, but it isn't easy to do.

It feels like a strange and slightly dirty thing to admit to at a time when expressions of unconditional admiration are the norm, but I've always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with Sachin Tendulkar. The first time I ever heard his name was in 1988 when Bill Frindall brought Test Match Special listeners the news of his unbroken partnership of 664 with Vinod Kambli in the Harris Shield. There was interest in this, even a fair bit of astonishment, but it didn't stick in the mind. The easy tendency was to ascribe it to the old Indian tradition of dead pitches and mountainous scores and move on. I didn't necessarily think I'd ever hear much about either of them again.

Then came the Test debut, news fragments filtering through from Pakistan in the days before Cricinfo, even before the Web itself, when following Test matches outside England in which England weren't playing was a difficult and random business. I can't remember whether I knew about Tendulkar's early tussles with Imran and the rest until my copy of Wisden Cricket Monthly arrived weeks later, but it's possible that I didn't. There was a lot happening - I was a London student, the Berlin Wall was coming down and England weren't going to the West Indies until the new year - and the fact that a sixteen year-old had made his debut for India didn't stand out. These things happened from time to time.

Then England, 1990. Tendulkar was here, this we knew, but how much significance his appearance held was yet to be established. Once more, fragments of memory paint the picture. In this case a breathless radio report of him lifting Ian Bishop over the row of trees east of the square at Derby as he strode to a match-winning hundred. I knew those trees, I knew Ian Bishop and I knew that what he was doing was extraordinary. He had to be seen.

Later in the month he was, up on tiptoe to lacerate Chris Lewis through the covers as India chased a forbidding England total down in a Trent Bridge one-dayer, then, for the first time live, looking like a little boy lost in the field as Gooch and Lamb stacked up the runs on the first day at Lord's. Runs didn't come then, and in Lord's Tests they never would, but the Old Trafford hundred did, on a day when I was travelling from London to Newcastle and back for a job interview. With Italia 90 a few short weeks in the past, the north-east zeitgeist was dominated by talk of Paul Gascoigne, and, once again, Tendulkar slipped into the background. In the short term there were more important things to do; in the long term, it was obvious, there would be many other opportunities to witness his virtuosity.

For years these came and went. Usually via television, but at others from the power of the printed word and the observations of those who had shared grounds with him. In 1996 I saw him bat live for the first time, on the day when Dravid and Ganguly began to redefine Indian batsmanship for the new millennium. Tendulkar went early. In 2002, in 2007 and in 2011 it was the same: Lord's would never bend to his will as so many other grounds did.

In 2002 I finally saw him make a century. 113 against Sri Lanka under lights at Bristol. It was magnificent, of course, but it was also somehow bloodless. Its ease was its weakness. As with so many things that rely on the distillation of feeling, definitions are hard to shape, but at the heart of the reason why, in the age of Tendulkar and Lara, I was always a Lara man, was that Lara's genius was more flamboyant, more visible, more immediately evident. With Tendulkar the difficult could look just too easy. It could look like perfection beyond emulation. With Lara you could feel as though you could at least try to do what he did, although you would obviously fail. It was genius with vulnerability.

However, Tendulkar had his moments.

Of all the thousands of recordings of Tendulkar's batting which can be found on YouTube, my favourite is the one which currently lies at the top of the list of results if you type 'Sachin Tendulkar Brett Lee' into the search box.

It is a film of the last five balls of an over bowled to Tendulkar by Brett Lee early in India's reply to an Australian total of 159 in a one-day international at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 10th February 2008. The target is comparatively modest but Sehwag has just been dismissed, and Lee is bowling like the wind.

The second ball of Lee's second over is full, a little too full, on off-stump. Tendulkar stands tall - or as tall as he, always a small man, is able to - and drives it through the off-side with more than a hint of excess force. His bat cuts slightly across the ball - as Slater says, it's 'a little bit slicey' - but it runs to the boundary for four and he is away. This, though, gives Lee hope, as there was a small hint of falseness about the stroke and its relative lack of timing. As he retreats to his mark, Lee smiles ruefully. There is nothing for it but to run in again and give it even more.

The next ball is even quicker and once again it pitches around off-stump, with a little too much length for the bowler's comfort. That said, if the batsman is anyone other than one of the very best, it is possible that the ball's naked pace will be enough to deny the attacking shot its timing and fluency. It is instructive that here Tendulkar doesn't worry too much about getting his feet in the right place - the speed of the ball makes that harder even for him - but he doesn't need to, as he sees the ball early, assesses that it can be hit for four and simply throws his hands through it. Of course - and in this context here is the real expression of his genius - the timing is utterly perfect. The ball connects briefly, oh so briefly, with the middle of Tendulkar's bat and rockets back past Lee faster than it arrived. By the time Lee has completed his follow-through the ball is twenty or thirty yards behind him, heading for the rope. Ponting and Hayden, impassive and hard to impress or intimidate, stand up straight in the slips as the ball slides away. They have seen everything the game has to offer, but it is obvious from their expressions that they are concerned. They have seen Tendulkar take games away from them before.

The third ball is quicker still, but shorter and straighter. By most standards it is a good comeback. Tendulkar, with an ease which again belies the pace with which the ball is arriving in his half, defends on the back foot. The message sent to Lee is one of unassuming defiance. It says to him that even his best, his fastest, is not enough to trouble Tendulkar when he is in this mood.

Lee relishes the challenge, though, and he comes again. His pace is down a little here but it is of no consequence. The fourth ball is much straighter, and for a brief instant Lee must hope that he will force Tendulkar into defence again. Unfortunately for him the ball is too full. In fact, this time, it is a half-volley on middle and leg. While, once more, the pace might be too much for a lesser player, it is nothing to Tendulkar. The bat face is presented full, the right hand comes in and the wrists stiffen on impact to send the ball back straight but slightly to the leg side of the bowler's stumps. As someone once said, it is four 'from the moment it left the bat'.

Lee looks chastened now. The final ball of the over is slightly shorter and keeps a little low off the pitch. Even Tendulkar cannot hit this for four, and he bends at the knees and defends it out short on the leg side. He nods his head in a brief, unfeigned gesture of resignation, but he knows, and Lee knows, who has the upper hand.

Tendulkar is eventually dismissed for 44, but India win with comfort.

This is a vignette from the life and times of Tendulkar. There are many, many others, some captured on film and able to preserve the illusion of his immortality for ever, others simply lodged in the memories of millions. It offers a brief glimpse of the way in which he could play when mood and moment took him; as his fellow Mumbaikar Sanjay Manjrekar has recently written, in his youth, away from the intense pressure and responsibility of the international game, Tendulkar could score as freely, as quickly and as potently as anyone ever has. No target was ever safe.

This has been a player for all seasons and all ages.

Leaving aside the versatility of his skills, Tendulkar has been vitally important as a physical and psychological standard bearer for a developing country. Born just a quarter-century after independence, Tendulkar's life in cricket has coincided with a period during which his nation has changed in myriad ways. Like Bradman in post-federation Australia, he has represented his country to the world as its people have wanted it to be seen: brilliantly talented and endlessly resourceful, while retaining an essential modesty and dignity given to few.

And then there is the sheer duration of his career. As Ed Smith wrote this week, a measure which goes beyond mere chronology is the fact that when he began playing international cricket, the West Indies, the insipid wreck of a team against which he finished his career, were indisputably the best side in the world. In the time he has been playing, Australia have gone from being an average side to one of the greatest in the game's history and back again.

The maintenance both of form and focus over such a long period - under the greatest scrutiny any cricketer has ever had to endure - requires a man of rare ability and character. It has become commonplace to say that he has gone on too long and this is true, but, when playing cricket is all you have known, all you have excelled at and all you can imagine, it must be fearsomely difficult to confront the future.

Over his time in the limelight, his country has changed, the game has changed, and so has his team. This, in the artistic hands of Dhoni and Kohli and Pujara and Rohit, is destined to continue.

We have changed too. A whole generation and more of the game's followers throughout the world barely knows what it is like to see an Indian Test team take the field without Sachin Tendulkar.

Cricket reveres its history like no other game, and we have been living through history. In these days of easily lost perspective it is possible to sleepwalk into the feeling that cricket ends here. Of course, it does not. Long before Tendulkar there was the game, and the game will survive him long into the future.

We are all about to find out what the future tastes like.

Falling through the Cracks

In the spring of this year I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Wisden dinner, an event which takes place annually at Lord's to mark the publication of the little yellow book. On this occasion the event was lent greater weight by the fact that it was the 150th edition.

Awards were made, speeches were delivered, toasts were drunk, backs, both metaphorically and literally, were slapped. Some fairly insubstantial food was consumed, along with a lot of complimentary wine.

After the formalities were over, people stood around in the Long Room as the tables were cleared. It was getting late, but few felt like leaving. Among those people was Nick Compton, the only one of the year's Five Cricketers who was there to receive his prize. He had been presented with a leather-bound Wisden by Andy Flower and had given a warm and elegant speech, full of feeling, in which he recalled his first visit to England, being taken to a match somewhere by his legendary Grandfather and meeting Peter Parfitt (at this, all eyes turned to the self-same Peter Parfitt, who was, like everyone else, imbibing freely).

Lots of things felt right.

With rare and unusual confidence, which can be safely ascribed to the receipt of a small amount of adulation and the consumption of a large amount of alcohol, I approached Compton and introduced myself as someone who had been known to watch him from the hill at Taunton. He responded with a direct gaze and a firm handshake. We didn't chat for long, but we did so for long enough to allow me to congratulate him on his recent centuries in New Zealand, especially the one in Dunedin, made under heavy pressure. He smiled an unassuming smile and said something like 'you just have to do what you have to do'. It was the tough, experienced professional sportsman's classic response to what the rest of us, who have never been there, perceive as intolerable stress, under which we could never perform (ignoring the fact that most of us couldn't make a century against Test class bowling even if we were under no pressure at all. We're not good enough.).

For Compton, with his Wisden award and his beautiful girlfriend and his place at the head of England's order apparently assured, all seemed well with the world. Headingley, with all its travails and protracted failures, still lay ahead.

I know this means little - I suspect he's the same with everyone - but at Lord's that night I watched Flower, his expression oozing control and gravity and seriousness, shake Compton's hand as Compton went to leave, and everything about Flower's demeanour suggested a lack of ease, of warmth, of friendliness, of approval. 'Don't get too comfortable' is what his eyes said.

He had a point. Six months on, with England about to begin another tour, Compton is nowhere to be seen. Flower is there, of course, as is Joe Root, and Michael Carberry. Compton is elsewhere, almost certain never to be seen in England colours again. The decision to replace him with Joe Root before the Ashes series in England was a defensible, perhaps logical, one, but for all that the selection of Carberry - with his background of struggle, his illness, his brilliant flair, his ethnicity - is a welcome and touching one, the feeling is that Compton, with his calm orthodoxy and his two Test hundreds, would have been at least as good a choice as reserve opener for this toughest of tours.

As to why Compton is no longer there, there have been mutterings: Compton 'offers little in the dressing room' (whatever that means); he doesn't like working with England's batting coach, Graham Gooch; he scores too slowly. All these can be questioned, argued with, but they add up to the same thing: Compton's face doesn't fit.

The England team has come a very long way from the days when players were regularly brought into the side, given little opportunity to succeed and then dropped and forgotten within one or two matches. This doesn't happen anymore. Compton played in nine Tests, and no-one will ever be able to take away the memories of the two occasions - in successive innings - on which he passed three figures.

But still, on occasion, players fall through the cracks.

Unlikely Looking Lad

For all the usual reasons - too much going in the day job, and in life itself - I didn't manage to mark the retirement of Stephen Harmison when it happened. But this is no bad thing. Sometimes it is a good idea to let the sound, the fury and the dust settle.

And sometimes, pace Sachin Tendulkar, it can be worth waiting until the player actually retires.

After surviving the initial barrage from Betts, I could see from the corner of my eye a tall, lanky lad with an innocent, baby face and long hair swinging his arms, jogging on the spot and jumping up and down like a monkey in the zoo. Obviously warming up to bowl the next over, I thought nothing of it until I glanced at Boony who was still grinning like a circus clown. As he walked past me at the end of the over, he winked at me as if to remind me of his early promise, or threat.

I wasn't to be disappointed. Unleashed was Stephen Harmison, a six-foot-three, nineteen-year-old from Northumberland in the north-east of England. Luckily, I was standing at the non-striker's end when this unlikely looking lad ambled in, jumped high at the crease and, from over seven feet in the air, delivered a bouncer which thudded into the gloves of his keeper. To everyone's surprise, except Boony's, the ball hit the gloves before any of us could blink. Boony's grin glistened as my eyes widened at the prospect of battling this youngster, whose baby face had quickly turned into that of a fierce-eyed monster. His first ball wasn't a fluke, as the next six overs produced some of the fastest bowling I have faced in a long time. This boy was quick, and I mean really quick. Like a West Indian fast bowler, he bounces in, hits the crease hard and hits the pitch harder.

Justin Langer 'From Outback to Outfield', 1999.

Steve Harmison could always bowl fast. He may not have known how, or why, but he knew that he could. Bowling for Durham at Justin Langer's Middlesex side at Lord's in June 1998, he liked the way he could make good players feel a sense of discomfort, liked the way he could make the ball bounce steeply, liked the way the ball took the edge of the bat before nestling in Martin Speight's gloves. This was an uncomplicated time. Just get it down there and see where it takes you.

Where it took him was the England team.

All teams have their eras. Times that, when those who followed them get older and move on, they view with fondness and the warm, embracing glow of nostalgia. For all their more prosaic and predictable recent successes, for England the days between their arrival in the West Indies in early 2004 and the death of the dream at Sydney in early 2007 were that time.

And from that time the mind's eye's memory scroll reveals many things. England in the field, with Vaughan, sunhatted and animated, cajoling and controlling with an indefinable and irreplaceable air of authority. Flintoff, muscular and unsophisticated, pounding in, shaking the ground and the batsman's hands with his leaden weight of delivery. Trescothick, restrained, often seemingly inert at slip, catching everything. And Harmison, windmilling in, knees and elbows pumping, sweat dripping, a Bob Willis for the Internet age.

Fletcher on the balcony, seeing everything, revealing nothing.

The apogee of this period - perhaps of modern Test cricket - was the Ashes series of 2005. As time has passed, the series and its quality has been praised and revisited so many times that it has entered the realms of cliché. This was England's time. Cricket's time.

It wasn't really Harmison's. With the recent departures from the first-class game of Matthew Hoggard and Simon Jones there has been much justifiable praise for the four-man seam attack which brought the Ashes back from seemingly permanent exile. Harmison's figures of 17 wickets at 32 both encapsulate the nature of his career of peaks and troughs and reflect the fact that, in the summer when Flintoff and Jones were kings, Harmison played a more fractured part. But this was his way, and, at the times in that year when he got it right, he really got it right.

10.30 on the first morning of the series, Thursday 21st July 2005. I am sitting in a packed Warner Stand as Harmison, with the Lord's pavilion behind him, begins his run. The sense is of gathering power and speed, like a fully-laden jet airliner devouring a runway. Unlike Brett Lee, who will do the same later in the day, there is little sense of athleticism or beauty, but there is rhythm and there is high, high pace.

Langer, seven long years on from his first enervating encounter with Harmison, takes one on the elbow, second ball. Later in the morning Ponting too is marked on the cheek. Blood is spilt. Years later, everyone remembers these things.

But for Harmison there are also wickets. Five in just 68 deliveries as Australia, for so long seemingly impregnable, succumb for 190 by mid-afternoon. In this Harmison's importance to his team is confirmed. When the muse is with him he can provide pace, he can provide bounce and he can provide match-defining advantage. He has done this against the West Indies, sure, but he has now done it to Australia, who, even as the cracks begin to show, are a much tougher proposition. England end up losing the match, but there are hints that they can compete. The standard has been set.

Sixteen days on and it is late on an Edgbaston Saturday. England have stood toe-to-toe with Australia but there is a sense that the match is entering a crucial phase as Warne, with naked aggression and self-belief, and Clarke, with astute accumulation, chip away at a difficult target. 175 for 7 chasing 282 for a 2-0 lead in the series which will probably prove decisive.

Clarke is still young here, with his future of back trouble, back-biting and batting greatness lying ahead. He has watched from the non-striker's end as Martyn, Katich, Gilchrist and Gillespie have fallen, but he has played with patience and skill. He has started to feel a little more comfortable at the crease and he, we, have a sense that the bowlers are starting to tire as the close approaches. Harmison, bowling the day's final over, musters a renewed effort. The knees are still high, the sweat drips from his pores in the steamy sunlight of the Birmingham evening, and the arm comes over high for the fifth time in the over, with one no-ball called. Harmison has been bowling at or around 90 miles per hour but this time he decides to throttle back and bowl the most perfectly-timed slower ball any England fast bowler has ever delivered. Clarke, in and set, is nearly up to the challenge. Normally a batsman plays early at a slower ball but Clarke sees it for what it is. However, recognition is one thing, combatting it very much another. Clarke knows what is coming but his timing is shot to pieces and he plays too late. Unfortunately for him the ball is straight and his middle stump is gone. The ground erupts, as does the England team and millions watching at home. Tomorrow, somehow, they will win.

This was the most brilliant thing that Steve Harmison ever did in an England shirt. The years afterwards always carried a sense of unfulfilment, with performances like the destruction of Pakistan at Old Trafford in 2006 immediately followed by a caning at the hands of the self-same batsmen at Leeds, and the individual and collective humiliations which the Australian summer of 2006-7 brought. But for all his inconsistencies and his ingenuousness, on those days when everything clicked - as much in his mind as in his body, Steve Harmison could bowl, really bowl.

The last memory anyone has of him in his national colours sees him hurtling in from the pavilion end at The Oval, Australia sliding to defeat, and a hat-trick beckoning.

The hat-trick doesn't come but a few balls later, the Ashes are won back again.

Harmison, at thirty, is finished with Test cricket.

Change of Tone

More observant readers may have noticed that the photograph which appears at the head of this page is new. After a few years of Tendulkar and Warne I felt it was time for a bit more colour, a change of tone.

It was taken at the County Ground in Exeter during the Minor Counties Championship match between Devon and Cornwall in June of this year. The batsman is David Lye, a man of Devon who, once upon a time, played for England's under-15 side with Graeme Swann.

He never made a career out of the game. At one time Middlesex were interested but an untimely injury put paid to that. He's well past thirty now, and these days you can see him on summer Saturdays around the Devon seaside grounds, accumulating with punchiness and a touch of class which is easy to recognize but hard to define.

There are all kinds of levels of cricket. In the realm of Tendulkar and Warne, David Lye is of no consequence. But if he played in one of the village matches which I've been known to play he would be the lord of all he surveyed.

I look forward to seeing him play for a few more years.

A Day at the Cricket: The Oval, Monday 12th September 2005

The final day of the Oval Test match between England and Australia in 2005 has, in the years since, achieved semi-mythical status as the most memorable day of the most memorable Test series most of us have ever had the pleasure of watching. I was at The Oval on that day, having paid just £10 for the privilege. On the eighth anniversary of that day someone reminded me that those eight years had gone by, and it prompted me to pour out some of the random memories which have occupied a small corner of my mind's eye ever since. As a day at the cricket, it had its moments.

A short, fitful, uneasy sleep. Up before 1.

Wash, shave, dress. Get the bag together. Don’t forget the ticket. The £10 ticket. Bought in the spring and now as prized as gold dust. You could sell it for a hundred times as much but you never would. Taxi into town. On the coach to London by 2. More semi-sleep. M5, M4, along the Embankment and into Victoria. London is dry, cloudy, humid.

There is tension in the air. In London, even at 6.15 in the morning, there always is. The tension of the incipient working week, of course, but something else. The tension of expectation. Of anticipation. The Ashes will end today.

Side street café breakfast. Over Vauxhall Bridge. Down to The Oval. People are everywhere. Touts and their would-be clients. How much?

God, this is different. Perhaps this is what 1953 was like.

Into the ground and take your seat. Block 18, Row 24, Seat 568. Right at the back in front of the gasholders.

The players net, do their fielding drills. The noise rises as the ground fills. After the players have left, some broadcasters walk across the pitch from the old pavilion to the new OCS Stand, where their commentary boxes are located. They are cheered.

In a sense this is surprising but then again not. This is the mood of the day. And they are Tony Greig, Geoff Boycott and Ian Botham. Richie Benaud, of course, is less conspicuous. But this is his day. He will be cheered by the whole ground later.

10.25. Bowden and Koertzen. Australian fielders, led by Ponting. Chewing gum, meaning business. Then Trescothick and Vaughan. Hopes of a nation and all that.

Warne on straight away. This is chaos. Second ball, full-toss, Vaughan, always elegant and alive to the chance, hits it straight for four. The ground erupts.

McGrath at the other end. A maiden to open. Soon Lee is on too. Erratic, but high pace. Boundaries come at both ends.

Two overs only to Lee then Warne is back. He will bowl long today.

McGrath gets Vaughan and then Bell, first ball. This will be mighty tough. Now Pietersen is there. No hat-trick, just.

Trescothick holds out against Warne but it is hard, so hard. Later Haigh describes him as being ‘like a London bobby trying to quell a riot’. The description fits like a glove.

Pietersen settles in. We know that he is good but how good? Today will tell. He is dropped. Warne off McGrath. Next over Warne is hit for six. Salt in the wound.

Then Trescothick goes. To Warne, of course, lbw.

Now Flintoff is there. The summer’s hero of heroes. But this is not his time. You feel he cannot last and he doesn’t. Warne gets him and England are on the brink.

Time for consolidation. Collingwood gets his head down. Sniffs the ball as he was taught to do on the capricious tracks of the north-east, far from here in place and time.

Lee bowls a bouncer. 93.7 mph. Pietersen, desperately hurried, arches his back and jumps to evade it. Shit. The mind scrolls back to the West Indies, years before. Hearts beat faster.

Lunch. It is needed.

Early afternoon. Sun. KP opens out. Really opens out. Lee is hit for six, then six, four, four. The boundary boards in front of us take a battering, as does Tait. He tries to save the runs but is left on his knees, head down, gazing into the dirt like a boxer taking a count.

Collingwood is still there. Virtually scoreless but no matter. Pietersen will provide the runs.

Then Collingwood goes to Warne and Jones to Tait. Trouble.

England must bat the day to secure the urn, but the doubts are strong now. Someone has to stay with Pietersen. Giles?

The afternoon wears on. Warm for September and racked with anxiety. Giles and Pietersen bat. And bat. The overs tick down. Safety draws closer. Pietersen’s ton is passed and the possibility of relaxation starts to present itself. But not now. They must bat some more, and they do.

It goes on. Giles ungainly but full of guts and common sense, Pietersen turning the screw with flamboyance. The overs tick down and things start to look good. Then very good. Giles is hitting fours now. The Ashes are coming back.

With the pressure released, it feels like time to go to the bar. But it has been drunk dry. Three bottles of Red Stripe is all they have. Take them, drink them.

Back to the stand. Now people are happy. Langer fields on the rope, further down. He smiles through gritted teeth as the songs and jeers crank up and the Spanish flags are waved. This feels special. Like a time you will remember well enough to write about, years later.

Pietersen goes, but his job is done now. As is Benaud’s. It is announced and the ground rises.

Giles and Hoggard stick around for a bit. After Giles finally goes for a quietly epic 59, England subside, but no matter. It is done.

Australia bat, but time and light are against them. They cannot win. The Ashes are England’s again.

Presentation. Fireworks. Lap of honour.

Darkness falls.

Back to Victoria in a muck sweat. On to the coach. Exeter in the early hours. Taxi home. The driver forgets to engage the meter, but you pay up anyway.

Bed for a few hours then up for the open-top bus and Trafalgar Square.

Cricket in England has never been like this. You wonder if it ever will be again.

Eight years on, you’re still wondering.

No Show Pony

Leaving aside the white noise of hype and counter-hype which now accompanies every series during which the Ashes are at stake, the oldest international contest in Test cricket draws much of its enduring strength from its rich seam of events and memories.

If you can name it it has happened during an Ashes series: crushing wins and humiliating defeats, teams devising innovative strategies to hinder and humiliate their opponents, spectators assaulting players, teams losing after enforcing the follow-on, governments expressing their disapproval. In Ashes series, things happen.

In this, though, the 2013 series was an outlier. Contested by one side which was better than its opponents but which often failed to function as it knew it could, and another which tried valiantly - and occasionally succeeded - to overcome its inadequacies, it had its moments but, after a magnificent opening contest, it didn’t captivate in the way of most of its recent predecessors.

As always, though, players stood out. Apart from the muscular, highly skilled Ryan Harris, Australia’s successes are harder to define, but one of them was unquestionably Christopher John Llewellyn Rogers, a veteran left-hander from Perth who, for most of his recent adult life, must have felt that his chance to shine at the very highest level had gone for good, swept away in the blizzard of rare talent which kept his nation at the very summit of the world game for more than a decade. He was far from alone in this: batsmen of true quality, such as Matthew Elliott, Brad Hodge, Stuart Law and Martin Love only received brief tastes of life in the Baggy Green. Some were called back, but unlike Rogers, none stayed. In the short term at least, Rogers will.

For years and years, in his native Australia and in England, Chris Rogers has been around, making runs. Unobtrusive, often aesthetically jarring, but remorselessly reliable, he holds the attention for the way he doesn’t quite fit with the stereotypical mind’s-eye images of modern Australian batting. This is no Matthew Hayden, all bulging chest and biceps, repelling the opposition with raw power and naked self-belief, or David Warner, flamboyantly precise in his aggression, or Shane Watson, stubbornly reckless with both strokes and reviews. This is a man who puts the highest of high prices on his wicket and recognizes the value of the controlled push through the on-side, elbows kept close to the body, or the nudge behind square on the off-side. If the bowler fails to find the right line and length he will drive or cut with precision timing, his balance steady and his head still. He is a small, slight man, but his strokes lack nothing in power.

Rogers was never a prodigy and his thirty-sixth birthday looms. Although in recent English seasons he’s usually been found in the home dressing room at Lord’s wearing the Middlesex seaxes, he’s more familiar with the sparsely populated surroundings of Derby or Wantage Road than the world’s Test grounds. A show pony he is not.

In Australia's age of decline, the Ashes series of 2013 has given Rogers the chance, in his own understated way, to show the world what he can do.

Age and circumstances dictate that it will not last long, but it is no more than he deserves.

Little Boy Lost

The opportunity to play professional sport is granted to few.

This is the deal: You can carry on doing into adulthood something you've loved since you were old enough to walk and you will get paid for it. Unlike your friends you will not need to concern yourself with which university to go to, or how much money you will end up owing a student loan company, or how you will find a job with your meagre handful of qualifications.

That can wait.

If you can play cricket really well, while your friends are shuffling to their offices, shops and factories through the greasy English winter streets, barely awake in the half-light, you will be abroad. You will be travelling and playing your sport among the shimmering sunlit cities of Australia or the majestic beauty of New Zealand, or amid the palm fronds and azure seas of Sri Lanka or the West Indian islands.

And you will receive adulation for doing it. People will love and admire and applaud you for what you can do, even if, to you, it is nothing exceptional or unusual. It is simply what you do best.

Playing professional sport at the top is as good as life can get.

Nothing in life is perfect, though. Even this wonderful existence has its downsides. The fact that millions of people watch you doing your job can be one of these. If you have a bad day everyone knows about it. People you don't know, have never met, with whom you have little in common, will tell you what they think of you. At the worst, people's perceptions of you can be coloured for as long as you live.

Matthew Syed's thought-provoking book Bounce contains, among many other things, a chapter which examines some of the worst examples of choking under pressure that sport has seen, and explores the reasons why they happened: they include Greg Norman at Augusta, 1996, and Jana Novotna at Wimbledon, 1993. There are others. Until a couple of days ago, one example from the recent history of English cricket stood out: Scott Boswell's over soon after the start of the 2001 Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy final.

Then came Simon Kerrigan.

It's hard to imagine that Kerrigan had any idea until shortly before the match started that he would be playing in the most important match of his life, in front of the largest crowd of his career, with a group of people who, with just a few exceptions, he knew only from television. In this he was an innocent throwback to the age when underprepared, uneasy, inadequate, debutants were ten-a-penny in England teams.

His early overs were shocking, partly because of their sheer technical incompetence but also because everything you'd read and heard from those who'd seen him, and, more importantly, played with him, was that he was a confident, tough, aware, bowler.

But apparent confidence can be skin deep. Sudden fame and the eyes of millions can do strange things to people. From the time he began to turn his arm over Simon Kerrigan will always have been able to bowl well, and his first two overs in Test cricket were probably the worst he will ever have bowled. He will have wondered, silently, what was happening to him. He will have wanted to be elsewhere. Back playing with his mates, back playing for Lancashire, at Old Trafford or Aigburth, with the sun on his back and the ball coming out right without thought or effort.

Kerrigan had the demeanour of a little boy lost, and, until he gets the chance to redeem himself, this is the memory which too many people will retain. In England's age of tolerant, enlightened, consistent selection, there must be the hope that he will be persisted with, or at least, if he goes back to Lancashire and continues to take wickets, returned to. But such was the level of his stagefright, the concern is that even among the England management, his card will have been firmly marked.

If he gets another chance to bowl at Australia's batsmen in the next few days, the pressure will be even greater. He will know that a good many people, even if they are hoping otherwise, will be expecting him to fail. It will be up to him to confound their expectations, and, possibly, his own.

If he fails to do so - or if he doesn't get the chance - Simon Kerrigan could easily join the ranks of those England players - John Stephenson, and Joey Benjamin, and Allan Wells, among others, can tell the tale - who played their only game at The Oval and were never seen again.

Which would be very, very sad.

Stranger to Failure

For a fully paid-up cricket tragic, the Long Room at Lord's is a dreamlike place. It is also multi-faceted: part art gallery, part social centre, part grandstand, part green room to one of the greatest sporting theatres on earth. The right to enter it during a Test match - conferred after many years waiting for people to die and the procurement of a substantial sum of money - gives you the opportunity to study players with a proximity granted to few. At Twickenham, at Wembley or at Wimbledon it isn't possible to hang around the dressing rooms or follow the players' progress to the arena without being arrested. At Lord's, it is.

I once saw Darren Gough leave the field at the end of the last spell he would ever bowl in Test cricket. England's opponents South Africa had scored 682 for 6 declared, and Gough had bowled 28 wicketless overs for 127. His face was scarlet and he walked with an uneasy gait that spoke of mental and physical exhaustion. He appeared disillusioned, on the verge of tears. He wouldn't be walking that way again.

I've also seen many batsmen walk from the dressing rooms to the pitch's edge. Convention and the demands of their profession dictate that they wear a serious expression. The message they are conditioned to give off is that this, what they are doing, what they have wanted to do since they began to play the game, is work. They are not there to enjoy themselves. They are there to make runs. After they have done so, from the safety of the middle, where people they don't know cannot see the whites of their eyes or guess at their deepest emotions, they will allow themselves to show that they are enjoying what they are doing.

Last Saturday, with Joe Root, things were different. With Root they usually are.

As Root, who is 63 not out, returns to the field after lunch, he strides ahead of his older partner and fellow Yorkshireman, Tim Bresnan, and his soft manchild's eyes betray a brief hint of levity and recognition. Then, before he puts his helmet on, he breaks into a smile. It seems to me, standing right in his eyeline, that he may have realised that he is going out to bat for England against Australia at Lord's and that he is in a position to fulfil the childhood ambition both of himself and of virtually everyone who is watching him. He can make a century for England at Lord's and he is not daunted by the possibility of failure. Instead he is relishing the prospect of success. There is also the feeling that he is a little flattered and amused by the fact that a roomful of people he does not know, and who are far removed from him in age, background and experience, are applauding him, a lad from Sheffield who simply knows how to bat very, very well.

From the time he came into the England side at Nagpur at the end of last year, Root's performances in all three formats of the game - with their combination of poise, judgement, technical acuity and nerveless flair - have been those of a phenomenon. But he is, in some ways, an unlikely phenomenon.

To watch Root at the wicket is not to be awed by genius. His stance is a little ungainly, perhaps as a result of his relatively recent transformation from a slight lad to a tall young man, although he retains a freshness of face which can make him appear 17 instead of his chronological age, which is 22. He has no signature shot, although he is perhaps happiest working (and sometimes stroking) the ball through the off side off the back foot. When anyone overpitches he is quick to recognize the length and drive the ball, with an exaggerated crouch through the off side, or with fine timing straight or through the leg side. When the ball is dropped short he will pull, when the nature and circumstances of the game demand it he will improvize. He is a workmanlike, predominantly orthodox batsman in the classical Yorkshire idiom, where runs, not empty style, are all.

His batting carries echoes of Atherton, although, where Atherton was hunched, Root is upright, and where Atherton was careworn by the demands of captaincy and the stresses of playing in a consistently overmatched side, Root is carefree. His Long Room smile is far from unique.

For now Root is a stranger to failure. Watching him bat, or bowl his sharply ripped off-breaks, or skip around in the field, or simply take his place with unforced self-assurance among his seniors on the dressing room balcony, it is possible to see the years sliding away into the future. Where now he is 22, one day he will be 34. He will have known failure, and the smiles will be less common, but the powerful sense is that he will still be there and he will still love what he is doing.

Joe Root will be walking through the Long Room for many years to come.