Rob's Lobs
Taking The Lord’s name in vain
As things stand, the best, purest, most destructive striker of a cricket ball this country has produced since Ian Botham will never be permitted a proper run on a stage worthy of his talents.
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
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Sachin Tendulkar may be a demigod in India, but not everyone is in awe of his aura or susceptible to his charms. Try as he might, he could not persuade Alistair Brown to join the Indian Premier League. And thereby hangs a somewhat tragic tale. Out of respect to those who died in Bhopal, Auschwitz and Galle, I would normally resist the word “tragedy” in relating any story that does not involve a fatality, but Brown’s tale seems in keeping with the Shakespearian sense of the word.
In Tuesday’s edition of the Times, “The Lord”, as Brown of Surrey has long been belovedly known at The Oval, revealed that he had not only rejected Tendulkar’s entreaties on behalf of Mumbai Indians, but also those of his erstwhile county colleague, Harbhajan Singh, who phoned him shortly before pre-season training began, urging him to reconsider. After all, a three-and-a-half-year deal was on the table. “They were talking telephone numbers,” divulged a still-disbelieving Brown, whose appetite for chewing up and spitting out bowlers in double-quick time is matched only by his modesty. The main reason, he insisted, was a sense of loyalty.
“I’ve been at The Oval for 20 years and they’ve been the best 20 years of my life,” he told reporter Patrick Kidd. “The club have been incredibly good to me and, having signed a one-year contract, I didn’t feel it was quite right to turn round and say: ‘Let’s tear that up and do something different. I want to go out to India because there’s a lot of money up for grabs.’” Cynics may be disarmed to know that after the Wisden Cricketer ran a piece about Brown by Hugh Massingberd in its “My Favourite Cricketer” section last year, the subject rang the magazine asking for the author’s phone number. To convey his thanks, embarrassment and heartfelt appreciation.
Full postThe new Murali?
To steal shamelessly from Jon Landau, the man entrusted with selling a scraggy wannabe Bob Dylan by the name of Bruce Springsteen to the planet in 1975, I have just seen the future of spin bowling – and his name is Ajantha Mendis.
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
To steal shamelessly from Jon Landau, the man entrusted with selling a scraggy wannabe Bob Dylan by the name of Bruce Springsteen to the planet in 1975, I have just seen the future of spin bowling – and his name is Ajantha Mendis.
Until now, given the recent stumbles of Danish Kaneria and the apparent failure of several young Australian twirlers to live up to their billing, detecting the seeds of a new generation of spinners worthy of following the holy trinity of Warne, Murali and Kumble has been a troubling and deflating quest. Whisper it softly, but on the evidence of his international debut in Port-of-Spain today, however chastening his team’s astonishing defeat may have been, this wide-eyed 23-year-old member of the Sri Lankan army could well emerge as the leader of the new pack.
Friends in Colombo had warned me that something special was on the horizon, trumpeting Mendis as the owner of the freakiest fingers since Jack Iverson. They weren’t exaggerating by much. Googlies, leggies, offies and flippers all eased effortlessly from that precociously adaptable right hand, facilitated by three distinct modes of release – barely discernible to the devoted couch potato and leaving the batsmen groping and clueless.
Full postThe greatest insignificant innings
Sehwag’s own improbable accomplishment richly deserves to be remembered for years, even decades, to come, as one of the most memorable and invigorating individual efforts in the annals of any team sport
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Yes, it induced awe, albeit not exactly shock. After all, Virender Sehwag’s stupendous one-man-band of a show in Chennai was hardly the first time he has cocked a snook at contemporary wisdom. Given that his last 10 Test centuries have all exceeded 150, nobody, not even Adam Gilchrist, has so consistently belied the theory that aggression militates against substance. How can you play the way he does, with such scant regard for protocol or respect for the tried and trusted means of acquisition, and rack up such immense scores? Luck, certainly, had nothing whatever to do with it.
In joining Don Bradman and Brian Lara as international cricket’s only double triple-centurions – and, even more remarkably, becoming the only opener to repeat such a feat – Sehwag, having spent a year on the sidelines, his career in the longer format apparently done and dusted, has completed one of the most gobsmacking comebacks in Test history. But let’s not get carried away. Please.
Full postThe best pound-for-pound captain
It is one of professional boxing’s few saving graces that commentators still attempt to identify the world’s best “pound-for-pound” pugilist, for all that proving as much is impossible
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
As I write, Stephen Fleming requires 54 runs in New Zealand’s second innings in Napier to finish his Test career with an average of 40. Much as this shamefully unreconstructed Pom wants to see England win the series, I’d willingly trade that for a spot of statistical justice.
On the face of it, New Zealand’s highest runscorer in Tests is out of his depth. With nine centuries to date, he stands six behind Alec Stewart as the maker of the fewest hundreds by any amasser of 7000-plus runs. He is also the only member of that 32-strong elite bar Mike Atherton (37.69) to average under 40. Ultimately, though, whether he gathers those 54 runs should have no effect on how posterity treats him.
Full postOf sacred cows
Bar Bradman, Allen and Warner, Gubby and Plum, have long been the most sacred of cricket’s ancient cows
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
If those in charge of Thomas Lord’s patch are truly serious about leaving the MCC’s crustily imperialist image behind once and for all – and the admirable new chief executive Keith Bradshaw certainly appears to be hellbent on being just that - now is the time for some prolonged navel-examination and truth-facing.
So, let’s start with the proposed redevelopment of Lord’s, under which the Allen, Warner, Compton, Edrich and Tavern stands are all to be razed and rebuilt. Not all of the new constructions should retain those names. If that sounds sacrilegeous, so be it.
First, let’s dispose of the names that should survive. Few could argue with any legitimacy that the two newest stands, the Compton and Edrich, ought to. These two Middlesex mavericks did more than anyone, with the possible exception of Don Bradman, to recapture imaginations and reignite cricket as a spectator sport in England – and hence, arguably, the planet - after the second world war. A case could be made for a Brearley Stand, or even a Titmus Stand, in recognition of more recent county stalwarts, but not a terribly strong one.
Full postTrading places
Innumerable words, dispassionate and rabid alike, have been, and will continue to be, expended trying to get to the root of the collective hard-drive failure currently afflicting England’s premier national sporting teams (and yes, I am wilfully
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Timidity. Mental cowardice. Unconfidence. Complacency. Ineffable bloody uselessness. And much, much worse.
Innumerable words, dispassionate and rabid alike, have been, and will continue to be, expended trying to get to the root of the collective hard-drive failure currently afflicting England’s premier national sporting teams (and yes, I am willfully ignoring Fabio Capello’s collection of “Am I bovvered?” soccer entrepreneurs, whose lack of interest can easily be traced to the absence of a match fee). There is, however, another possible explanation for this conspicuous lack of competence on cricket and rugby fields alike: expectation.
Full postTest of will
With baseball belatedly joining in last year, cricket and American football remain the only major team sports without a world crown worthy of the name
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Hats off to dear old Malcolm Speed. The outgoing ICC CEO, who has little to gain and even less to lose, has performed a U-turn any self-respecting politician would be proud of.
Having stated, without the slightest hint of equivocation, that there was no earthly chance of a window being found in the Future Tours Programme to accommodate the IPL until the current TV agreements elapse, the global interest and player unrest fired by last month’s player auction prompted a remarkably swift backtrack. Well, maybe a teensy little spare pane could be found after all. What a pity that, unlike Tony Blair, Speed seems so unconcerned about his legacy. Had he been clever – and there’s still time to prove otherwise – he would be striving like buggery to find another window. For a proper World Test Championship.
With baseball belatedly joining in last year, cricket and American football remain the only major team sports without a world crown worthy of the name. The ICC tables redressed matters to an extent, but the scoring system is about as comprehensible as a Sanskrit to an Inuit, while the inaugural Champions v The Rest showpieces drew as rapturous a critical response as the collected recordings of Little Jimmy Osmond. No, if six weeks can really be found to accommodate a Twenty20 tourney, why on earth can a similar provision not be made for the game’s highest form?
Full postBig wedge, thin end
“There can be no normal sport in an abnormal society.” Thus was the stance of the South African Cricket Board during Apartheid
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
As for boycotts, Kevan Gosper, the International Olympic Committee vice-president and an Australian, said the following prior to the 2003 ICC World Cup: "In suggesting he would like to see an agreement between all the countries that we not play World Cup cricket in Zimbabwe, (Australia) Prime Minister John Howard is giving new life to the dreaded sporting boycott. To do this on the basis that the issue is one of principle is misguided. It can only damage our sporting reputation. Sport is all about providing opportunities for all, particularly for the younger generations. Boycotts have no part in this generation building.” By way of underlining the IOC’s tolerance, Tomas Amos Ganda Sithole, President of the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee, had just been named as the new director of the IOC’s International Cooperation and Development Department.
Gosper, who supported an Australian boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, should have known better than to perform such an obvious u-turn. But then what else can one expect of the IOC, which once led the way by banishing South Africa but whose showpiece became so prone to boycotts in the 1970s and 1980s that it now puts humanity a distant second behind money? Not that its counterparts in soccer or rugby union have any more to shout about.
Full postRevolution blues
If Packer can be regarded as a Marconi, Preity Zinta, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Bollywooders fronting those eight IPL consortia are equivalent to the backers of pirate radio
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Predictability thy name is cricket. The build-up to the Indian Premier League player auction has attained such heights of hype, humbug, hypocrisy and hysteria, especially from ex-players in rose-tinted glass pressboxes, a visitor from Mars, or even Manhattan, might reasonably imagine it to be an event of vast significance to Planet Earth. The truth is both far more humdrum and infinitely more interesting.
So, let’s get to what Frank Zappa called the crux of the biscuit. So a few tours and Tests might have to be rearranged to accommodate a couple of events, one of which is ICC-approved and the other surely destined to fail? How can anyone who cares about the game’s future not be delighted that the upshot, properly handled, might be millions of additional apostles and disciples? Similarly, how can one not be intrigued as to the size of the slice the ICC is presumably taking from the IPL pie?
Full postCool Ed Smith
Ed Smith’s newie, What Sport Tells Us About Life , is not just the best book by a Middlesex captain since Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy a couple of decades ago
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
A fairly frank confession coupled with a health warning. This blog thought long and hard about it, often agonisingly so, before it decided to celebrate the work of someone it regards as a mate. Which makes it a hazardous, even dangerous undertaking. On the basis that running the risk of being accused of nepotism or favouritism is marginally harder on the ego than acknowledging that a younger practitioner has just written you so far under the table you might as well take up speed-knitting, it hereby vows to carry on regardless.
In which case it may as well be blunt. Ed Smith’s newie, What Sport Tells Us About Life, is not just the best book by a Middlesex captain since Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy a couple of decades ago. In my not-obviously-humble opinion it is the best ever written by a professional cricketer. Given that the competition includes Jack Fingleton’s Cricket Crisis and Peter Roebuck’s It Never Rains as well as Brearley’s magnum opus, this is no meagre accolade.
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