Different Strokes
Punter's Paradise
I’ve got nothing against sports betting per se
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
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Can it really be true? Two record-breaking run chases in the same week, in venues and on pitches that could not be more different to each other. The MA Chidambaram Stadium and the WACA have little in common apart from this magnificent week of Test cricket.
Both games had incredible swings of fortune. Betting agencies around the world must have been tearing their hair out, trying to frame markets that kept swinging from one extreme to another. In Perth, South Africa went from being rank outsiders before the start to a brief stint as favourites in the first few overs of the match to level pegging before Mitchell Johnson’s devastating burst. After that, their share price plummeted again until it started looking a bit healthier when they bowled well in the second innings. Brad Haddin’s innings effectively blew the price out again to unbackable odds, Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla briefly brought South African money back into the reckoning until two late wickets on the fourth evening restored Australian supremacy. The rest is now amazing history!
How do I know all this? Well, apart from being a keen punter myself, I was constantly kept abreast of the betting fluctuations with the Channel 9 commentary team’s regular advertorials for an Internet betting agency. To legitimise it even more, we were reminded, nay comforted, by the reassurance that this mob were official partners of Cricket Australia. Oh, that’s a relief!.
Full postCricket at its best
This game was due to be remembered as the one which defied the terrorists, but that will now be but background colour adding extra lustre to the tapestry which should be woven in commemoration of one of Test cricket’s greatest epics
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
This was the stuff of which dreams are made. If it had been made up, it would have seemed unbelievably mawkish. As reality, it was intoxicating.
While England were still debating whether to come back to India, Andrew Strauss was the one who said that they had to make every effort to come back because they owed it to the game of cricket. Whatever debt he was referring to, it was paid back with massive interest in Chennai.
Instead of cricket doing duty in the war on terror, terror was unceremoniously dismissed as cricket pursued its own sense of history. All the horror in Mumbai achieved was to make it that much more exquisite that in this match it would be Mumbaikar Sachin Tendulkar who hit the boundary to simultaneously post his own century and top off the fourth-highest run chase in Test history, thus wiping away the pain of January 1999 when at the same ground he scored 136 in what many think of as his greatest innings but India fell so agonisingly short. This game was due to be remembered as the one which defied the terrorists, but that will now be but background colour adding extra lustre to the tapestry which should be woven in commemoration of one of Test cricket’s greatest epics.
Full postDefending The Wall
As soon as a player loses the ability to win a Test match I suspect the modern game will spit him out
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
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I write this piece on the morning of the last day of an absorbing Test in Chennai. Rahul Dravid, the focus of this essay, is not out overnight and possibly facing the last great challenge in an admirable career. The scene is set for a Dravid epic – obdurate, unflinching and the perfect time to live up to his nickname of The Wall.
I have to wonder though if the modern game will allow someone like Dravid the opportunity to defend his way back into form. With high scoring rates and an expectation that batsmen will always play shots, Dravid may not have the arsenal to be able to fight back with a big score at this late stage of his career. His game is largely built around a rock solid defensive technique and the ability to concentrate for long periods of time, wearing down opposition bowlers. He may not have the luxury of time to resurrect his career unless the selectors can see beyond the strokemakers and recognise an old fashioned jewel in the new Indian crown.
When Dravid really shone in the 2003/04 series in Australia, he did that by being much more aggressive than the Aussies expected him to be. All of a sudden, the longer he remained at the crease, not only was he occupying time but the scoreboard was scooting along too. With Sehwag, Tendulkar and Laxman at the other end, Dravid’s batting was now a real threat because the bowlers could not block up one end by bowling short of a length to him.
Full postBunnies of steel
In the modern game, where coaches are looking for those ‘one percenters’ in every aspect of the game, it’s hard to believe that both coach and cricketer can’t find the time to work on their batting to find at least another 10%
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
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In recent times, as cricket has now become a full-time job for most professional cricketers, it beggars belief that some cricketers still cannot improve their batting skills to the extent that they can at least have a basic defensive technique. For the less defensive types like Stuart Clark or Zaheer Khan, at least find a few lusty attacking shots that can be honed to some level of competency.
They do very little else with their lives apart from practicing cricket. The bowlers do increasingly less bowling at training these days, wrapped in cotton wool and constantly having massages, ice baths and visualisation sessions. With an army of support staff around them who need to justify their jobs within the team structure, surely it is not asking too much to spend a few hours each week improving their batting skills.
Glenn McGrath proved that if you are serious enough about it, you can transform yourself from an absolute bunny to someone capable of scoring a Test fifty. Jason Gillespie went even further, starting off with a completely dead bat technique and eventually expanding his repertoire to score a Test double-hundred. Mind you, he never played another Test again so that’ll teach him to score runs instead of taking wickets. Daniel Vettori is in a similar category.
Full postFocus Anderson
If England are to do well, there will need to be big contributions from several players
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
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The England player I shall be keeping the closest eye on in this two-parter (you can’t call two matches a “series” with a straight face) is Jimmy Anderson, who could show that he is at last coming into his own.
His performances in the ODIs may make this seem far-fetched, but he has always been fairly poor in limited-overs cricket whereas his Test performances this year have been in a different league to those which went before.
How poor an ODI bowler he is was not apparent until he was partnered by someone who isn’t. In the 20 ODIs in which they opened England’s bowling this year, both Anderson and Stuart Broad conceded 747 runs. The difference is that Anderson took 10 wickets and went for 5.66 an over while Broad took 31 and went for 4.78.
Full postUnsafe is the new safe
What 9/11 did to us all was make it clear that nowhere can be completely safe
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
In a city which endured 25 years of an IRA bombing campaign as well as the bus bombs of 7/7, I know what it is to live with the shadow of terrorism over one’s home town.
We carried on playing cricket even in London despite explosions, and India is a vast country compared to ours. A bomb in London is an unlikely pretext for calling off an event in Rome, though Rome is nearer London than Chennai to Mumbai. On the other hand, none of our atrocities were on the scale of the Mumbai massacre, nor were they targeted at a specific group of foreign visitors.
Whether the Indian authorities, let alone the British Foreign Office or the ECB’s security advisor, would consider the India v England cricket matches to be safe to continue with, I could not know from thousands of miles away. I somewhat envy those who were able to sound off on air and in print with the certainty so many arguing both for staying at home and flying back to India displayed, but I did not feel able to post. It’s a relief that a revised series is going ahead: it’s what I had hoped for, but galumphing on people’s sensibilities by saying so without any worthwhile understanding of the circumstances just seemed tasteless or downright rude.
It’s hard to remember in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity, but a billion Indians and the entire English cricket touring party survived the Mumbai massacre completely unharmed. While one square mile was the scene of death and destruction, nothing out of the ordinary happened in over three million other square miles in the country.
Full postKeeping score
Why isn't there a ranking/rating for wicketkeepers from the ICC
Paul Ford
25-Feb-2013
I cannot bring myself to discuss the pain and suffering induced by Australia (and New South Wales too) after their dismantling of the Black Caps over the past month. So, in order to divert attention, I’ll focus on a completely unrelated debate.
Why isn't there a ranking/rating for wicketkeepers from the ICC? They've got plenty of other areas covered, including the all-rounders, date-specific ratings, best-ever ratings and for the truly obsessed, even women's ODI rankings.
But poor old wicketkeepers (and pub debaters like me) are left to wonder who is the best, and how they rank against their fellow glovemen. In New Zealand, here at Beige Brigade HQ we enjoy winding-up the South Africans by claiming that our own Baz "The Pirate" McCullum is the best wicketkeeper in the world. In India, the wicketkeeping skills of MSD appear to be overshadowed by at least three other areas of significant impact: captaincy, captivating batting, and the cult of celebrity.
In Australia, the best in the world is always the current Australian wicketkeeper - or that is what Ian Healy will be droning on about in the Channel Nine commentary box anyway. Healy was arguably the best wicketkeeper of all-time so his views are highly relevant, but his sycophantic commentary and cycloptic view of Brad Haddin during the recent Test series Down Under against New Zealand was vomit-inducing.
Full postEngland's batting disorder
If Pietersen does come in at three, as happened at Cuttack, they then start weeping and wailing that Owais Shah should have come in at three because he is the man in form
Mike Holmans
25-Feb-2013
My campaign to get Kevin Pietersen to open the batting has gained another welcome recruit in the person of the proprietor of the Confectionery Stall. His support is most welcome as recent events have demonstrated how essential it is.
For a start, we have to preserve what little is left of the sanity of the TV commentators. If the first wicket falls and Pietersen does not come out to bat, they immediately start weeping and wailing that Pietersen has to bat at three because you need your best batsman coming in early. If he does come in at three, as happened at Cuttack, they then start weeping and wailing that Owais Shah should have come in at three because he is the man in form. Round and round they spin, and nervous breakdowns beckon.
If KP continues to refuse to open, the only way of settling Botham’s tiny mind is for Pietersen and Shah to come out together at three.
As tactics go, this is not a promising one. I was at a Sunday game in the 1980s when a Middlesex wicket fell. As was usual, a barrel with the word “Gatting” on its back rolled down the pavilion steps and out to the wicket, but the innings which followed was most uncharacteristic. There was poking and prodding, but no short-arm jabs for four as was customary.
Full postWhat's a good pitch?
A few ignorant callers to a radio program that I host referred to the so-called ‘doctored’ pitches in India as an excuse why the Australians surrendered the Border-Gavaskar Trophy
Michael Jeh
25-Feb-2013
Today, I received my regular M.C.C Newsletter from Lord’s which talked about some of the issues that were canvassed by the M.C.C World Cricket Committee Meeting in October. It talked about the decline of spin bowling and the need to get away from the philosophy that “if the first ball seams, it’s a good wicket; if the first ball spins, it is a bad wicket”.
At the Gabba last week, we saw a fairly mediocre New Zealand batting line up clinically dismantled by a four-pronged Aussie seam attack. Given the wild storms that hit Brisbane in the days leading up to the game, it was no surprise really to see a pitch that was even more conducive to fast bowling than is normally the case. This is usually a surface that favours the quickies anyway – the ground staff worked miracles to prepare a playing surface of this quality.
Initially, when Australia was bowled out cheaply in the first innings, there was the usual debate about whether the pitch was too helpful to the seam bowlers. Sensible commentators simply accepted that this was part of the challenge of playing in Australian conditions and no more excuses were made for a fairly poor batting display by most of the batsmen apart from Michael Clarke and Simon Katich. Daniel Vettori was magnanimous in defeat, conceding that his batsmen did not have the skills or experience to cope with these very-Australian conditions. No apologies, no excuses.
A few ignorant callers to a radio program that I host referred to the so-called ‘doctored’ pitches in India as an excuse why the Australians surrendered the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. I'm afraid I failed to grasp their logic.
Full postWhite Out Wipe Out
I think some of the post-slogan reaction has been a little over the top
Paul Ford
25-Feb-2013
The greatest controversy in Kiwi cricket this week is not whether Andy Moles is the right man for the NZ coaching job, the pros and cons of Brendon McCullum batting (and under-performing) at No. 5, nor is it our team’s ability to play two good days of Test cricket but not four, nor is it which seamer to bench for Adelaide.
Nope, none of the above. In fact it’s a marketing idea, now canned, which would have seen Dunedin embracing the slogan “It’s All White Here” for the upcoming New Zealand vs West Indies Test match (December 11-15). The idea was nothing to do with the Ku Klux Klan or Romper Stomper but a cricket take on a popular approach to marketing rugby here in New Zealand. Under the “Black Out” fans are encouraged to wear black if they are going along to support the All Blacks.
For the Dunedin cricket Test, the idea was a to inspire a “White Out” with everyone donning their finest lab coats, sheep suits, Playboy bunny costumes, bridal gowns, Elvis flares, stormtrooper kits, nurses’ uniforms and cream tuxedos. Harmless – and despite the axing of the official campaign, students all over the South Island should plough on regardless and embrace the idea.
By virtue of the deranged decision-making by the local government bureaucrats involved, it ironically threatened to become a sliver of accidental genius and one of the most successful marketing campaigns for Test cricket in recent years. Never before has the marketing of one match attracted so much attention outside the province of Otago.
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