Jon Hotten
Warne's still scrapping
He has never believed that a cause is lost, and he brings something of the same fervour to his commentary and writing
Jon Hotten
27-Aug-2013
Only time could rob Shane Keith Warne of his genius with a cricket ball in hand, and not even time can quell his desire to compete. He remains Australia's arch-provocateur.
As Gideon Haigh has illuminated, Warne shimmers through Australian cricket and Australian culture. His hold on batsmen was both physical and psychological. He was the player of games, one of those people who somehow understood which buttons to push and when. To encounter him on the pitch was to engage with not just a bowler but a persona.
The bowler has gone but the persona lives. Through his column for the Telegraph newspaper and his perch in the Sky Sports commentary box, he has engaged with England from as close as he can get.
Full postLosing Phil Hughes
He was a magical player when he made his Test debut, but the establishment's orthodoxy, confusion and fear have reduced him to a shadow of his old self
Jon Hotten
21-Aug-2013
At the start of the 2009 season, on a rare foray into actual cricket journalism, I went to Middlesex's pre-season press conference at Lord's. It was packed with chattering hacks, enticed not by the opening of the county championship but the presence of Andrew Strauss, giving his first interviews of an Ashes season, and the introduction of Angus Fraser's latest signing, a kid from a banana farm in New South Wales, who, in between inking his contract and arriving in a chilled and grey England, had made a sensational entry into Test cricket in South Africa. He had shrugged off a four-ball duck in his debut innings to make scores of 75, 115 and 160 in his next three, and had dismantled a bowling attack that consisted of Steyn, Ntini, Morkel and Kallis in their own backyard with a series of unconventional and thrilling assaults.
It was no surprise. His life had been filled with such success: he scored 141 not out on his grade debut in Sydney, made 51 and 137 for New South Wales seconds to ensure a first-class debut where he'd got 51, and then scored a match-winning hundred in his first Pura Cup final. He was on the endless upward curve of the great player.
Phil Hughes came into the room. He was tiny, with one of those faces that might have been staring at you in sepia from a bygone age. His eyes were sharp and bright. He had presence, X-factor, star quality. It was like looking at a young racehorse.
Full postUp close to greatness
A new series of lunch-time shows on Sky takes us into the minds and methods of the legends of the game
Jon Hotten
13-Aug-2013
In the Great DRS Hoo-Haa Of 2013, it's not often mentioned that the system has its origins as entertainment for television viewers. It was devised by broadcasters, not the ICC, and it is involved in the game itself because it created an anomaly: the people sitting at home knew more about what was happening than the players and umpires.
Television is the great driver of the game in this new century, central to its formatting and scheduling and financing: it is the force that shapes cricket.
It also has its own internal demands. It needs to keep innovating. The more hours it broadcasts, the fresher it must seem because it is a force that eats itself. In the UK, where the broadcast rights holder is Rupert Murdoch's football-obsessed, deep-pocketed Sky, the strategy has been to employ a stream of garlanded ex-pros - there is a shimmering yellow-brick path from the embers of retirement to the Sky studio lights. Almost everyone in the Test match "comm box" is a former England captain or an international star. Shane Warne and Andrew Strauss have been the latest to join.
For a while this simply created a homogeny of voice, an excuse to peddle cliché and banter. Now, though, there is a new generation of ex-player, one who has played a game that is deeply analysed, who has thought nothing of walking from the pitch to watch a playback of their innings or spell, who has spent many hours with statisticians and coaches, looking for the incremental advantages that emerge from previously hidden patterns.
Full postWhat we talk about when we talk about KP
Not just England's best player, Pietersen is also their most interesting. In the age of pro-speak, he is a gift to any writer
Jon Hotten
05-Aug-2013
Kevin Pietersen's legendary dressing-room reintegration may be complete (and you can add "reintegration" to the flamingo and the switch hit as part of his legacy to the game's lingua franca) but his reintegration with the British press remains as distant as ever. Theirs is a relationship of weary rancour: they are a long-divorced couple still taking potshots, still bitter over which one got to keep the Coldplay CDs.
What's curious is that the sniping at Pietersen usually comes when he has succeeded rather than failed. It is designed to fit a well-established narrative into which current events are squeezed. Thus one of headlines after his Saturday century read: "Kevin Pietersen falls just short of the epic hero he craves to be." Another on his press conference ran: "So what is up with Kevin Pietersen, England's sullen saviour?" On Sky's Cricket Writers on TV show he was raked over the coals for the crime of discussing his knee injury.
Just as the England team exists in its bubble, so the English press does too. And just as the team can become detached from public opinion, so can the media. What stood out most about Saturday was how radically the reality of Pietersen's hundred differed from the reported version.
Full postThe sportsman's cliff
What must it be like to face your mortality just when your peers in other fields are beginning to excel in their professions?
Jon Hotten
30-Jul-2013
I saw Jeff Thomson and Rodney Hogg open the bowling for Australia the other day. It happened at glorious Wormsley, the ground built by John Paul Getty and set deep on his estate in the rolling Chilterns outside Wycombe. It's a magical place, where a thatched pavilion overlooks a perfect oval, surrounded by steep and wooded hillsides from which giant red kites fly out and soar overhead. The game was an Ashes tussle of sorts: England legends versus Australian legends for the benefit of the PCA.
Australia were captained once more by Kim Hughes, still golden but no longer a boy, and if not as comfortably rotund as Merv Hughes, certainly giving the amply padded Hogg a run for his money. The years have also been kind to Greg Matthews, still jaunty and spiky and fun, albeit in a larger shirt size, and Tom Moody, guardsman- straight and as powerful as ever.
England, who seem set on gaining any advantage over the old enemy that they can these days, arrayed a far younger and more serious side, at least in terms of their batsmen. Opening up was Andrew Strauss, retired less than a year from Test match cricket, and at No. 3 came Mark Ramprakash, 100 first-class hundreds fresh from his blade and the singular look of the professional sportsman still in his eyes.
Full postNotes arising from Lord's
The shelf life of an opener, the curious anomalies in Hot Spot, and why we miss Kevin Pietersen
Jon Hotten
22-Jul-2013
It's hard to think of batsmen as different from each other as Graeme Smith and Joe Root, yet they do share something. Smith began opening the batting for South Africa in his third Test match, at the age of 21. Root has moved to the top of the order in his seventh game and is 22. Smith's career has, in part, been an epic of pressure and endurance. He seems to have been around forever, yet is still only 32 years old.
It's a position shared by Alastair Cook, who was also 22 when he began opening for England. He is only 28, has played 94 Tests and has already made more centuries for his country than anyone else. He is perhaps halfway down his road.
One of the few considerations England might not have made when moving Root up was about exactly how long they would be asking him to do the job for. If he retains his place in the side until he's 35, he will still be opening for England in 2026. If he is as cussed and in love with his profession as another son of the White Rose, Geoffrey Boycott, he'll be walking out to bat at the age of 41 in 2032. WG played for England for the last time at 50, which would mean Root would still be there in season 2051.
Full postIt's the humans, silly
The problem with the DRS lies not in the technology but in the way the system is used and administered
Jon Hotten
16-Jul-2013
It's been a bad week for the DRS, or so they say. It hasn't, of course, because DRS is a piece of technology, implacable and unyielding. Its week was neither good nor bad. What they mean is, it's been a bad week for those tasked with operating and interpreting the DRS - us fallible, biddable human beings. It's us who had the bad week, with our talent for tying ourselves in endless knots over something designed to streamline our lives.
There was a revealing radio interview with the former umpire John Holder following the Jonathan Trott lbw decision in England's second innings (and how long ago that one seems now - day three wasn't it?). Holder told his interviewer that he had seen the incident on the television highlights, and he didn't think Trott had hit the ball.
I watched it on the highlights too. Aside from what looked like a deviation from Trott's inside edge, Snicko (which legendarily takes so long to "build", it is not a part of the DRS, although given that the length of DRS pauses is now drawing out to biblical proportions, Snicko must be edging into the frame) suggested that the contact with Trott's bat was audible. That's something Holder presumably saw too, and yet he still felt Aleem Dar's initial decision was correct.
Full postThe Shane Watson gamble
His Test stats are a puny return for all of his brawn but Australia's new coach seems to have more faith in him than most
Jon Hotten
09-Jul-2013
It was hard not to smile at Darren Lehmann's exhortation to Australia's batsmen to score lots of hundreds, coming as it did just days after he elevated Shane Watson back to the top of the order.
If there's one thing that everyone knows about the square-shouldered enigma it's that he doesn't score them, not in Test matches anyway. In his 41 games he has two, which is the same number as Harbhajan Singh and Richard Hadlee, one less than Phil Hughes and David Warner. Put another way, it took his opposite number in this series, Alastair Cook, 12 innings to go past Watto's ton total. Since the second of Watson's centuries, in Mohali in October 2010, he has walked from the crease 39 times without reaching three figures. Cook, in his last 39 innings, has made six.
It is just a fraction of the Watto mystique. Debates about his game are in part debates about aesthetics. He has a dominant physicality and a classical technique heightened by the explosive power that is the motif of the modern era. His is an abundant talent and it is also an obvious one: anyone new to the game would quickly be able to pick him out as being good at it. He just looks like he can play.
Full postThe fielding dog and other tales
There is a deep quirkiness to some of the early reporting on cricket - and not just because the world was so different back then
Jon Hotten
02-Jul-2013
Was the first great fielder in cricket history a dog? Leafing through a wonderful book, Double Century - Cricket In The Times, offered an answer. The emergence of the Times from a paper called the Daily Universal Register coincided with the emergence of the game into wider society, and in 1785 the pair became fumblingly acquainted, neither conscious yet of the co-dependent affair between press and sport that would still be going strong 200 years later.
There is a deep quirkiness to some of this early reporting, and not just because the world was so different. The era was filled with odd games. On 21 May 1788 "a cricket match was played at Alfriston, Sussex, by four men whose ages added together amounted to 297 years" (the reporter is more enthralled by the vintage of the players than the game itself, which is largely unremarked upon). On 20 June 1793, also in Sussex, was a match played "by females, the married women against the maidens, which was won by the married women, who had 80 notches more than the nymphs" (early proof perhaps that there's no substitute for experience). And, rather sadly, on 22 October 1805, at Totteridge, a match between two young men named Greig and Corduroy reached such a pitch that Corduroy, in pursuit of 34 to win the game, had made seven when he "again hit the ball and ran, but on arriving at the wicket, expired".
One of the most extraordinary matches from these early years took place on 21 May 1827, on Harefield Common near Rickmansworth, where "for a considerable sum" two gentlemen of Middlesex took on Mr Francis Trumper, a farmer at Harefield, and his sheep dog in a two innings game.
Full postDhoni's feel for cricket
India's captain has an instinctive sense of the rhythm of the game; he hears its heartbeat acutely
Jon Hotten
25-Jun-2013
As the rain came down at Edgbaston, many blurry TV hours were filled with punditry, most of it lost on the airwaves to heaven. Somewhere along the way though, someone, and I don't recall who, said something like this: "At heart, MS Dhoni is a gambler… "
If that's so, he's the man you want to be standing next to at the roulette wheel; the chips are piling up, and there's nothing his India have not won.
But is he? As anyone closely affiliated with actual professional gambling (not spot-fixing or bookmaking, but making a living from betting legally) will tell you, done properly, it is for the most part a boring and pragmatic assessment of odds and value. There are very few coups de theatre to be had.
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