Jon Hotten
What being thrashed does
It can be a lightning-rod moment, a realisation that the world is a lot bigger and badder than you might have realised
Jon Hotten
21-Jan-2014
The newspaper clipping is yellowing now and stuck in an old scrapbook somewhere, but the scorecard it contains still tells its story: a long-gone summer's evening and an Under-13s 20-over match, us batting first and scoring 80-odd (not bad back then, in the days when only kids' teams played 20-over cricket), our opponents Frensham CC batting next and all out for 7. The things I recall most clearly are the warm weather - never a guarantee in dear old England - and the fact that four of the seven runs were leg-byes, flicking off a pad and running past our keeper.
Many moons have waxed and waned since then, but you never forget a thrashing, whichever side of it you're on. I thought of it again this week when news arrived of an extraordinary game in New Zealand, in which former first-class cricketer and CEO of the Hawkes Bay Cricket Association, 42-year-old Craig Findlay, made 307 from 115 deliveries, leading his side to a total of 578 for 6 in just 45 overs.
His opening partnership with Bronson Meehan was worth 336 before Meehan departed third ball of the 24th over, and Findlay went after 33 overs with the score at 471 for 1. With a dispirited St John's College XI dismissed for 177, a glorious win came by 401 runs.
Full postStokes is the future, the rest is dark
There has been no shortage of punditry and vitriol directed at Andy Flower and Co in the wake of the Ashes loss. They have their work cut out for them
Jon Hotten
08-Jan-2014
"I wouldn't walk around the corner to see United."
George Best said that, when his former club had a new manager who was struggling in his job. Best also recommended replacing that manager with Terry Venables. The manager was Alex Ferguson, who didn't win a trophy with Manchester United until his fourth year in charge, and then went on to win a few more - 39 in total.
Best's criticism did not exist in isolation, and it's not quoted here to diminish him (I interviewed him once, in a pub in London; it was funny and sad) but rather to highlight the unknowability of sport. After all, it's why we like it, isn't it? Because we don't know what's going to happen. And if one of the greatest footballers of all time cannot recognise one of the greatest managers, then who can really know anything?
Full postDRS in the parallel universe
Whether it's used in a series or not, the review system has had an irrevocable effect on Test cricket
Jon Hotten
01-Jan-2014
The theory of multiple universes was developed by an academic physicist called Hugh Everett. He was proposing an answer to the famous paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, a thought experiment in which the animal is both alive and dead until observed in one state or the other.
Everett's idea was that every outcome of any event happened somewhere - in the case of the cat, it lived in one universe and died in another. All possible alternative histories and futures were real. It was a mind-bending thought, but then the sub-atomic world operates on such scales. Everett's idea was dismissed at first, and wasn't accepted as a mainstream interpretation in its field until after his death in 1982. Like most theories in physics, its nature is essentially ungraspable by the layman - certainly by me - but superficially it chimes with one of the sports fan's favourite question, the "what-if". And after all, the DRS has produced a moment when a batsman can be both in and out to exactly the same ball.
There came a point during the fourth Test in Melbourne, as Monty Panesar bowled to Brad Haddin with Australia at 149 for 6 in reply to England's 255, when Monty had what looked like a stone-dead LBW shout upheld. Haddin reviewed, as the match situation demanded he must, and the decision was overturned by less than the width of a cricket ball.
Full postIn praise of voices of experience
Men like Geoffrey Boycott and Ted Dexter, who are still keen to be part of the cricket debate, part of the life of the game, are always worth listening to
Jon Hotten
25-Dec-2013
My favourite Geoffrey Boycott story was told to Leo McKinstry for his book Boycs by David Lloyd. Apparently Boycott has a habit of dispensing with any kind of introduction when on the phone, surmising, no doubt correctly, that his is not a voice it's possible to mistake.
"Hello," said Bumble, answering an evening call.
"You and me, playing golf, tomorrow morning, 9.30."
Full postWhy England need Eoin Morgan
Like Australia's Steven Smith, Morgan is unorthodox and audacious, and doesn't conform to England's straight-like thinking
Jon Hotten
21-Dec-2013
This is a tale of two Test match middle-order men. One has batted 30 times for his country, averaging 35.22, with two hundreds and five fifties. The other has marked his guard 24 times, averaging 30.43 with two hundreds and three fifties. As closer comparison, when the first of the two went out to bat for his 24th time, he took guard averaging 29, and not having made a hundred at all.
That innings came at The Oval, and it became Steven Smith's maiden century. It was a madcap knock from an offbeat player, brutal in parts, almost always deeply unorthodox. Smith, it seemed, was one of those batsmen, the sort who coaches and commentators are convinced they can work out, and yet whose flaws are somehow aesthetic rather than self-destructive ones.
He followed it up with a far better century in Perth when a series was on the line. Smith had found his place in an Australian top order like no other, an order that in turn reflects the game's new order. He joins David Warner, George Bailey and Shane Watson as men whose style and substance has been fashioned by the white ball. Of Australia's first six, only Clarke and the old-timer Rogers echo the less fluid boundaries of an older time.
Full postClose, Chappell and acts of courage
Some small deeds in the game's vast history endure, when others that dwarf them by numbers fade from view
Jon Hotten
11-Dec-2013
Before the Adelaide Test began, I tweeted a link to this video of Brian Close facing Michael Holding at Old Trafford in 1976, with a line saying that England's batsmen should watch it before they walked back out into the Australian guns. I got a reply saying that, as Close had only made 20 and England lost by 425 runs, there were probably some more inspiring videos about.
As a statistical point it was inarguable, and it made me wonder why some small acts in the game's vast history endure, when others, which dwarf them by numbers, fade from view. The six innings that Close played in the scorching summer of '76, three Tests in which he made 166 runs at 33.20, not only confirmed his legend within the game but took him out into the wider public in a way that sustains him in the imagination. He even became the subject of a famous joke by Morecambe and Wise - "I always know it's summer when I hear the sound of leather on Brian Close."
That 20 at Old Trafford was Close's final Test innings, bookending a career that began at 18 and ended at 45. Only Wilfred Rhodes has had more time between his first Test and his last.
Full postThe importance of Bres
Workmanlike players like him can be pillars for teams, not to mention foils to a side's superstars
Jon Hotten
04-Dec-2013
Sometimes, nothing becomes a cricketer like his absence. England have brought Tim Bresnan back into the Ashes squad after a gentle work-out against the Queensland 2nd XI, his four wickets and a fifty burnished by the Southern sun and the warm memories of similar efforts for the Test team over the years.
It's not the low-grade runs and wickets of the last week that England are valuing so much as the presence in the national side of a particular cricketing archetype: the yeoman player. Unflashy, rarely the star but always chipping in and happy to be there. Every team should have one, and many great teams do.
Among the tweeted congrats to KP before his 100th Test in Brisbane was one from Paul Collingwood. In reply, Pietersen called Colly his favourite batting partner. They scored a lot of runs together - notably in Adelaide - and how England and KP miss him too, for Collingwood was the stoutest of yeoman players. What would Flower and Cook give to be able to ink his name on the team sheet at No. 6 without a second thought. It's not often remarked upon, because yeomen players rarely are, but he has been missed and never adequately replaced. Once more it took absence to emphasise the qualities he brought.
Full postThe quickest spell I ever faced
When up against really fast bowling, the unconscious functions required to see the ball and judge it are overwhelmed by the sheer speed of what is happening
Jon Hotten
26-Nov-2013
A while ago I talked to a former Test cricketer about the reality of facing genuinely quick bowling, of the sort delivered by Mitchell Johnson in Brisbane.
"I've seen blokes cry in the dressing room," he said. "They'll be shit scared."
To play it is to confront the limit of your ability, and yet it's one of the experiences that is not confined to the professional player. Any cricketer can find the point at which the bowling is discomfortingly fast. Whether it's 75mph or a nice round 100 is irrelevant, except in the degree of damage the ball might inflict if it hits you. What matters is that tipping point at which the unconscious functions required to see the ball and judge it, to pick line and length, are overwhelmed by the sheer speed of what is happening.
Full postKP: great player or player of great innings?
Pietersen has contributed to defining an extraordinary era in cricket. But the jury's still out on where he stands
Jon Hotten
21-Nov-2013
He is an extraordinary batsman for an extraordinary era. Kevin Pietersen's 100 Tests, and his international career, have spanned batsmanship's great advance, a perfect storm of hyper-tooled equipment, conducive pitches, frenzied switching between formats, elastic techniques, and the end of a generation of very great bowlers that has taken us to untravelled heights.
And not only has Pietersen spanned it, he has contributed to the reimagining of it: the switch hit and the flamingo have been his offerings to the language that describes the new game. He has played the defining innings of the greatest Ashes series of them all. He has won three urns, and England's first world title. With him, they have been the No. 1 ranked Test match side. He has scored more runs in England shirts than anyone else. He has been central to everything that has happened during these years, both good and bad; he is a lightning rod, a figurehead, a totem, there to be adored, loathed, disputed, argued over. He is England's avatar, onto which we project what we want to project.
Mark Nicholas wrote this week that he has the chance to be England's first truly great player since Ian Botham. Mike Atherton called him the best England player he has seen in the flesh. The name of the infamous fake "KP Genius" Twitter account reflected what many actually think - that he has that electric and uncertain presence that comes with the term. He has been my favourite batsman to watch over the decade.
Full postWhat football rights have to do with the future of cricket
BT has paid a stratospheric amount for the rights to the Champions League. Cricket will probably feel the knock-on effects in time
Jon Hotten
12-Nov-2013
No one remarked on the psychological oddity of Australia's captain "launching" his diary of a losing Ashes series as he prepares his men to play another one in nine days' time (it's hard to imagine him handing complimentary copies around the rooms - "All right lads, here's how we stuffed it up a couple of months ago…") but then we have become almost completely inured to the forces that commerce applies to sport.
News of a TV deal for rights to broadcast the UEFA Champions League in Britain may seem distant and unattached to world cricket, with its eyes on Mumbai and Brisbane, but its meaning should not go unacknowledged.
BT, the telecoms company, has paid almost £900m to take those rights from satellite subscription company BSkyB and free-to-air broadcaster ITV, from 2015. It's twice as much as BSkyB had paid for them, a sum described as "mad" and "an extraordinary level of inflation that has never been seen in any deal in the developed world".
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