Different Strokes
Wake up call for West Indies
It was a mighty effort of collective will for West Indies to hold firm and win the series
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
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West Indies have won their first series against serious opposition for five years. For anyone who wishes West Indies cricket well, celebrations are in order. Let’s all have a rum punch or two and dance for joy.
And then let’s wake up and assess what has really been achieved.
Some people were offended that in my last piece I said that England had been slightly the better side, as if winning a series automatically confers superiority, but England themselves are no strangers to winning series against better teams. With a little luck and a lot of grit, England beat a massively superior South Africa in 1998, won in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2000-01 and beat Australia in 2005, but only in the last case was anyone deceived that the better side had won.
Full postBCCI: Board of Control for Cricket Intimidation
The old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune has never been more apt than in cricket at present – and the piper is playing a sitar
Paul Ford
25-Feb-2013
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Niranjan Shah was embarrassing on TV3 on Friday night, saying that the BCCI had made a request to the NZC board to ban anyone connected to "an unauthorised tournament cannot take part with our own people". He then went on to say that we "don't want to interfere." No, of course not Mr Shah. But, in the interests of consistency shouldn't we be banishing everyone who partakes in unofficial cricket tournaments? That would rule out commentators Stephen Fleming and Simon Doull (beach cricket) plus all those Black Caps who have played in teams (or competitions) that have been "polluted" with ICL players. It's a nonsensical approach.
Apart from having an ICL bloke having his say about India and Indian cricketers, another crucial issue appears to be the presence of BCCI favourite Ravi Shastri, who does a cracking job in the TV box and doubles as a member of the IPL's governing council alongside heavyweights such as Lalit Modi and Sunil Gavaskar. A Ravi-Macca combination is unpalatable for the BCCI who would probably rather see McMillan in stocks outside the ground.
We shouldn't be at all surprised. There is now a veritable catalogue of intimidatory tactics and unsavoury "anti-ICL" incidents that have had an impact on the New Zealand cricketing milieu:
Full postUnderdog day afternoons
Pitches which so effectively extract the teeth of bowling attacks that batsmen are only in danger of being gummed to death make Test cricket a test only of endurance
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
There is obviously an element of sour grapes to English criticism of the pitches in the Caribbean. Appalling batting in one session back in Jamaica has cost England an entire series, so carping about the conditions seems like bad-tempered refusal to acknowledge how poor England are or the advances made by West Indies, but really, this has not been a series which has been worth the watching.
All that has been revealed by the Tests in Antigua, Barbados and Trinidad is that neither West Indies nor England possess a spin bowler of the quality of Shane Warne or Muttiah Muralitharan, nor do either team have a pace bowler of the calibre of Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall or Wasim Akram. This, however, is not news and two tense final hours were not really compensation for the rest of the fifteen days in which they were embedded.
Pitches which so effectively extract the teeth of bowling attacks that batsmen are only in danger of being gummed to death make Test cricket a test only of endurance. If it makes little difference who is bowling, we are denied the varying conflicts which make the sport exciting.
Still, from an English point of view, it cannot hurt for the batsmen to remember what it is like to score hundreds and run up big totals.
Full postGet Lefty - 2
Just about every country, with the exception of India (Sehwag) and Sri Lanka (Atapattu) show us that left-handers do indeed average more than right-handers in the last 10 years or so
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
My recent post on left-hand opening batsmen received plenty of intelligent feedback. Someone posed the question about whether left or right-hand openers were statistically more successful and it got me thinking.
Before I embarked on a long and painful date with Statsguru, my initial gut instinct was that the lefthanders would have better numbers. Let’s see what the results show.
I picked recent opening batsmen from each country (excluding Bangladesh and Zimbabwe) and the minimum qualification was approximately 10 Tests. The selection of these batsmen relied upon my imperfect memory so please forgive me for any significant errors. I’ve stuck to just Test matches because I don’t have the resources to trawl through ODI history too.
I also concede that some of these batsmen did not spend their entire careers as openers so their final averages may not tell the full story about exactly how many runs they scored at the top of the order. Nonetheless, I’m sure it will give us some answers to the question.
Full postIs it okay to be rusty?
The question is: why were they rusty and is that acceptable in modern sport
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
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The question is: why were they rusty and is that acceptable in modern sport? They are professional athletes and this is their chosen, highly-paid profession. It is their professional responsibility to turn up to work ready to perform at their best (barring illness, injury or bad luck).
Imagine if a surgeon was operating on you and said "well, I've been on sabbatical for a few weeks so I'm feeling a bit rusty. Haven't really kept up with the latest surgical techniques. Hope you don't mind".
Or a pilot announcing on the intercom "Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts as we approach the runway. I've been using the autopilot for a few months now so haven't really practised my own landings and am feeling a bit rusty so please forgive me if we don't quite make this landing".
Full postGet Lefty
I’m no closer to answering the original question about why it is that there seems to be more left-hand openers at the highest level of the game but there’s no doubt that they are over represented
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
What is it about Australia's love affair with left-hand opening batsmen? Phillip Hughes is about to join that list in Johannesburg tomorrow. It makes me wonder if there is some sort of natural advantage in being a left-hander against the new ball. The proportion of left-handers who open the batting seems to be much higher than the total numbers of batsmen who make up the rest of the batting order. Is this some sort of Darwinian ‘natural selection’ at work, where left-handed opening batsmen seem to have evolved to have an advantage over right-handers?
Australia have a particularly rich heritage when it comes to left-handers at the top of the order. In recent times, I can think of Hayden, Langer, Jaques, Rogers, Katich, Gilchrist, Shaun Marsh and Warner. Going back a few years, we had Wessels, Wood, Wayne Phillips (the keeper), Mark Taylor and Elliott. I can only think of Slater, Geoff Marsh, Boon and Mark Waugh (in ODIs) who were regular right-hand openers. Just about every first-class team in Australia is top-heavy with lefties. Can it be pure coincidence or is there a theory worth exploring?
Full postWhy NZ won't do India any favours
Gagging for the cricket to begin so we can all stop banging on about paymasters, financial windfalls, and record revenues
Paul Ford
25-Feb-2013
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1. The primary motivation in December 2002 was not to stitch India up. No, no, no: it wasn’t about you, it was about us. NZ was aiming to stitch up whoever happened to have the misfortune to touch down in the Land of the Long White Cloud that sorry, soggy summer. The New Zealand team was blessed with one of our best ever fast bowlers at that time, Shane Bond. It wasn't an anti-Indian move as much as it was an attempt to deploy the one genuine match-winning weapon in our arsenal. Rest assured, if we had been playing England, Zimbabwe or Nepal, the pitches in would have been exactly the same.
2. Mark Richardson points the finger at the green tops and New Zealand's moves to make the most of favourable conditions - but humbly leaves out the fact that he averaged 48 in the two-Test series. That was a full 15 runs more than The Wall and almost double that of Tendulkar: India's two best batsmen in the series.
3. I dearly hope Rigor is wrong when he says the Indian batsmen can "rest easy this time round...because New Zealanders and New Zealand cricket understand who pays the wages nowadays". That should never come into it, and I don't think it will. Most New Zealanders couldn’t give a rat’s posterior about where the “financial power” of world cricket resides. The most important difference between 2002 and now is that we do not have a world-class fast bowler to prepare pitches for, thanks to the boning of Bond via administrative interference and a plethora of cock-ups.
Full postAnother win for Test cricket
West Indies on song bring joy, the pure joy of exulting in excellence, the feeling that nothing can be so much fun as being good at cricket, and that is a joy we need in these otherwise depressing days
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
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It’s not that Twenty20 isn’t very good, just that it gets rather samey. Our local kebab shop does some wonderful variations on grilled lamb and chicken but man cannot live by shish alone – there is also a time and place for lobster thermidor, sweet and sour pork or macaroni cheese.
And what you cannot get at your local Twenty20 outlet is cricket reduced to its primal essence, as occurs in a last hour when the batting side has no chance of winning and only a couple of wickets left. The outfield is empty and irrelevant, the only figures on the scoreboard which matter are the wickets and the overs remaining, and the only point of each ball is to see whether the batsman can prevent it hitting his stumps without giving a catch to one of the ravenous mob surrounding him.
The electricity in the crowd has the crackle of static, the batsmen’s fans squawking their approval as a ball is safely fended away and yelping their fear at misses or miscues while those supporting the fielders catch their breaths at each run-up and snort their disappointment at each survival. And at the end, whichever way it goes, there is overwhelming relief for those who succeeded and agonising disappointment for those who failed to reach their objective.
Full postShould Giles Clarke go?
It is easy after the fact to say that the ECB should have seen through statements about fantastic rates of return on investments as being impossible, but a year ago the press were still running gosh-wow stories about hedge fund managers who made
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
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They are probably making omelettes with the egg being scraped off the collective face of the ECB following the collapse of the Stanford venture. Whether it was a blunder of such incompetence that resignations would be appropriate, though, is quite another matter.
The main criticism appears to be that their inquiries into Stanford’s business were not adequate, because all they really sought to establish was whether Stanford would be able to cough up the cash that he was promising and did not seek to penetrate the convoluted structure of his financial vehicles in as much detail as the US SEC.
Arguably they should have delved a bit deeper than they did, but it grates more than somewhat having this criticism levelled by counties whose teams paraded round the cricket grounds of England in 2008 sporting the logos of financial institutions which are now largely owned by the government because the perpetrators of what amounts to institutionalised fraud are being propped up rather than prosecuted. What due diligence did those counties undertake before accepting the cash of bankers whose declared wealth was based on loans which would not be repaid, and why are they so different from Stanford whose declared wealth was based on deposits he allegedly did not make?
Full postThe New Australia
This is not a lament for the dead, nor is it a denial of the bleeding obvious
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
At the end of a long summer of international cricket that began in Bangalore and finished in Sydney, one could be forgiven for thinking that it’s all doom and gloom for the average Australian cricket fan. Beaten comfortably by a resurgent India, ambushed in their own backyard by the resilient South Africans and then mugged by the Kiwi’s, it hasn’t been the sort of summer that we’ve been used to since … well since ... the early days of Border’s captaincy in the 1980s.
Despite that, I get the feeling that this summer brought with it a genuine sense of enjoyment, perhaps brought upon by the realisation that each and every match was a genuine 50/50 contest. Speaking to members of my local cricket club, knowledgeable without necessarily being experts, patriotic without necessarily being one-eyed, disappointed at the losses without necessarily being distraught, it strikes me that many Aussies are philosophical about the see-sawing fortunes of the national team.
There is almost an inevitability about their acceptance of the current state of affairs, almost as if it is only fair that we too must now learn the art of occasionally losing games of cricket with equanimity and grace. No great gnashing of teeth or looking for excuses – most of the people I spoke to were prepared to accept that winning can no longer be taken for granted. What’s more, there was even a grudging acceptance that it might actually be the best thing for the game.
I must confess to being a tad surprised by this relatively sanguine attitude until I realised that even the cricketers themselves might have sensed, deep in their souls, that the great era of dominance was soon to be no more. Watching their on-field behaviour this summer, there was none of the snarling and boorishness that characterised previous teams. They played it hard, they played it fair and they accepted the triumphs and disappointments with good grace. The series in India was perhaps a bit testy (both teams were guilty at times) but both South Africa and New Zealand played the game in the sort of spirit that made it easy for all three teams to play uncompromising cricket without crossing that invisible line.
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