Different Strokes

By and large Asian cricketers are not too fond of working on their fitness - and it shows

25-Feb-2013

So I was watching the All Blacks play the Wallabies the other day. Given that this is the world’s premier cricket website, it might be necessary to reveal that those are the rugby union teams of New Zealand and Australia. It wasn’t so much watching them “play” each other as much as batter, maul, punch, thump, and make the best possible attempt to destroy, each other. For the uninitiated, international rugby is a hybrid of professional wrestling (minus the scripts) and American football. To say that it is brutal would be an understatement. Yet here are these 30-odd professional athletes, playing week in week out, with little or no drop in intensity and even less regard for their bodies, representing their countries, provinces and franchises.

It has always surprised me that there are not as many injuries in rugby as you might expect; which speaks volumes for the amazing adaptability and strength of the human body. I have never ceased to be amazed at the limits to which the body can be pushed, without irreparable damage being caused. Remarkable.

Which brings us to cricket, a game played by elite professional athletes, who make a pretty damn decent living, especially in the subcontinent. Given the general per capita incomes in, say, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan, cricketers are well paid in comparison. Especially given the lack of any sort of rival sport played at the same level. So one could be forgiven for assuming that their commitment to cricket should possibly be all-encompassing. In a day and age where the average white-collar worker spends a minimum of eight hours behind a desk, cricketers ought to, we assume, spend a similar amount of the day on matters associated to cricket.

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The era of great bowlers is not over

For my birthday, my mother sent me a copy of “Not In My Day, Sir”, a collection of letters on cricket published in Britain's most traditional newspaper, the Daily Telegraph

Mike Holmans

25-Feb-2013

Dale Steyn leads a clutch of current bowlers seeking greatness © Associated Press

For my birthday, my mother sent me a copy of “Not In My Day, Sir”, a collection of letters on cricket published in Britain's most traditional newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. The book amply bears out the implication of the title, that there is nothing so constant in cricket as the complaints of the middle-aged and elderly that the sport is going to the dogs because it was so much better when they were younger.

Being middle-aged myself, I adhere to this to some extent: I don't care what you say or what statistics you produce about any other player, I'm not going to change my opinion that IVA Richards is the greatest batsman I've seen. And I very much suspect that when I'm an old man I will annoy young whippersnappers now being born by droning on about none of the future's current leg-spinners being a patch on Shane Warne.

But only to that extent.

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A thank you letter

Dear Mr Strauss and Mr Dhoni,

Mike Holmans

25-Feb-2013

Dear Mr Strauss and Mr Dhoni,

Thank you for my birthday present of an excellent Test match at Lord's. It was very kind of you to give me such a lavish gift, which I was able to share with my good friend Bharat, a gentleman originally from Hyderabad who now runs a research lab in Pennsylvania and has said that he will be in the Warner Stand for England-India Tests at Lord's until either one of us is too decrepit to manage it. Even though he didn't care for the result as much as I did, he too says that it was a very enjoyable match.

I particularly appreciated your arranging that two of my favourite batsmen should score centuries.

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The Hayden way

Matthew Hayden has come out of retirement to sign up with Brisbane Heat in the Big Bash League

Michael Jeh

25-Feb-2013

Matthew Hayden has come out of retirement to sign up with Brisbane Heat in the Big Bash League. My first reaction was ...’gosh, not sure how to react!’ The Hayden Way (as his company is called) is a brand that clearly trades on his reputation for being tough and uncompromising, winning at all costs. Wonder how history and hindsight will judge this reincarnation?

I've known Matt since we were both young men, both of us trying to break into First Grade cricket in Brisbane. I was a couple of years senior to him and had already played for the first team when he burst on to the scene and "announced himself". And I mean, announced himself. Whereas my goals, in keeping with my talent, were fairly modest, Matt suffered from no such inferiority complex. Blessed with enormous self-confidence, a powerful physique and a work ethic to match, I watched this young pup write his own autobiography in his mind and then fulfill it. It was quite a bizarre way to live the dream - he wrote the script, convinced himself that it was his destiny and, despite many who doubted him, went on to live the dream.

Early doors, I must confess that I feared for this perceived arrogance. As the runs piled up, after he predicted they would, that fear grew into a kind of morbid admiration. I realised soon enough that his self-belief wasn't so much arrogance as utter confidence in himself. I shared too many dressing rooms with him early in his career to put it down to a fluke. The guy was just on a different planet when it came to making bold statements about scoring big runs and then backing it up in totally emphatic fashion. When he returned to the dressing room to our congratulations, his reaction suggested there was no relief or sense of vindication in his own mind. It was more like a sense of "well, what did you expect? I told you I'd get some today. What's so surprising about that"?

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Mission accomplished for Cook

Mission accomplished, and then some

Mike Holmans

25-Feb-2013

Mission accomplished, and then some. Rarely has a newly-appointed England captain achieved so much in his first series in charge. Not only did the team beat the World Cup runners-up 3-2, but he was the outstanding player from either side and shattered the preconceptions with which he had been saddled. Quite something for someone people had been queueing up to denounce as an impostor.

Very few people outside the inner circles of the England management or, presumably, Alastair Cook's family and friends had been enthusiastic about his appointment.

Some were openly hostile and pointed to his career ODI strike-rate as proof that he was not and could not be an effective opening batsman in limited-over cricket. Following the disappointing World Cup campaign, the last thing that the ODI squad needed was a lame duck captain who had clearly only been given the job so that he could gain some captaincy experience before taking the reins of the Test side. I had considerable sympathy with that view, but was prepared to wait and see.

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A Test XI with potential or proven ability?

Throughout his career, Simon Katich was a relatively low-key character

Michael Jeh

25-Feb-2013

Throughout his career, Simon Katich was a relatively low-key character. In an era where he shared the stage with players like Matthew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, Michael Clarke and Andrew Symonds, Katich's role was always underplayed. He flew under the radar at times, churning out runs in his second coming with serene monotony, rarely drawing much attention to himself. It is ironic then that his axing from the Australian squad has attracted more public interest than many of his fine knocks. Even in his disappointment, he may yet see the bitter humour in that.

Unfairly perhaps, Katich will be remembered as a bit of a grafter, a reliable and hardy competitor, very much in the mould of the old-fashioned Australian opener of yesteryear. That image probably sells him short. His scoring-rate may have paled in comparison to Hayden (whose wouldn't?) but he ticked along at a deceptive pace. He may have lacked the power game of his genre, but the shuffle across to off stump and supple wrists meant he rarely got tied down, strong through third man and efficient behind square on the leg side. From the outside looking in, he appeared relatively unselfish, happy to sit in the slipstream of the flashier characters in his team, preferring the shadows while the big boys hogged the headlines.

Typical of his brand though, it appears that even in 'death' (in a cricketing sense), his passing will morph into a debate that renders him an innocent bystander. Like in many of his big opening partnerships with Shane Watson and Hayden, Katich is almost forgotten in the post-mortem. This time too, this issue has become more of a forum to discuss Andrew Hilditch's (and to a lesser extent Greg Chappell's) performance as chief selector. Katich, the original victim has almost become the forgotten road-kill in the bigger debate around Hilditch's future. "What about me?" poor old Kato must cry. “Forget Hilditch's career – I'm the one without a contract!”

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Hail Mahela

The best sort of cricket match to watch is one which your team wins and your favourite player on the other side gets a hundred or a five-for

Mike Holmans

25-Feb-2013

The best sort of cricket match to watch is one which your team wins and your favourite player on the other side gets a hundred or a five-for. I am therefore hoping that Lord's will bring another England win and another century for Mahela Jayawardene.

I can't say that I noticed him on his first visit to England in 1998. Sri Lanka only played the one Test, in which Muttiah Muralitharan and Sanath Jayasuriya were so dazzling that a 21-year-old with no record who scored very few passed under the radar.

But when England went to Sri Lanka a couple of years later, it was very different. In the first Test at Galle Jayawardene came in at 5 to join Marvan Atapattu, who was on his way to a double hundred, following the dismissal of Aravinda de Silva for a typically stylish hundred of his own. In such a healthy position, he obviously had a bit of licence to play his shots, which he proceeded to do – and I was captivated.

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An extraordinary Cardiff ending

Before play started on the fifth day at Cardiff, I was thinking what a prosaic Test match it had been

Mike Holmans

25-Feb-2013

Before play started on the fifth day at Cardiff, I was thinking what a prosaic Test match it had been. Until Ian Bell arrived at the crease, we had seen a great deal of very worthy batting from Tharanga Paranavitana, Prasanna Jaywardene and the seemingly unstoppable Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott, but there had been little to dispel the rainy gloom and lift the spirit.

Bell's 98* on day 4 was a welcome introduction of poetry. Its colour and adventure had the same effect on me as those daffodils when Wordsworth came across them on his walk. Since nothing was likely to happen on the fifth afternoon, I thought it only right and proper that he be given the chance to finish off the hundred before a declaration.

Bell clearly deserved the cachet of a Test century, and it would have stored up untold resentment if Andrew Strauss had denied him the few balls he needed for it. The England squad are genuine fans of each other and would all have wanted him to get it.

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Pakistani men can't bat

How long can you last in international cricket without being able to bat

Saad Shafqat

25-Feb-2013

How long can you last in international cricket without being able to bat? This sounds like one of those impossibly existential how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin type of questions. In this case, however, we have an answer. Evidence suggests you can last a pretty long time in world cricket without being able to bat. Potentially many decades, as Pakistan's example shows.

Okay, I'm being harsh. It isn't that Pakistani men can't bat at all; every now and then you'll see a fifty or two, and once in a generation someone will come along who could be selected as a batsman in a more successful international side. But no one would call Pakistan a nation of batsmen. And based on current form, Pakistani batting is certainly at the bottom of the heap. Over the last two years, even Bangladesh have scored more Test runs per wicket than Pakistan.

Fans lament the decline of batting in a country that once produced the likes of Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad. But objective assessment suggests this complaint is based on a fallacious premise. Zaheer, for example, was a run-machine no doubt, but only when the stars were aligned, which wasn't all that often and certainly seldom when most needed. And while Miandad was unquestionably a batting genius, he remained overshadowed by greater Indian, West Indian, and Australian contemporaries – as it happened with Pakistan's other authentic batting hero, Inzamam-ul-Haq, a decade later.

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Steven Finn - new and improved

Mike Holmans

25-Feb-2013