Jon Hotten
England do it pragmatically
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a deep statistical conviction behind their current method
Jon Hotten
18-Jun-2013
I can still see it now in my mind's eye, me and my dad looking down from our seats at the top of the Compton Stand. The Prudential World Cup final, England versus West Indies, 23 June 1979. The sun is out after a muggy morning. West Indies have made 286 for 9 from their 60 overs, a score always remembered for Viv Richards' 138 not out, an innings concluded by a six into the Tavern from the final delivery, the new King walking outside his off stump to flick Mike Hendrick's full toss deep into the crowd. Curiously, it hadn't been the best knock of the day. That had been Collis King's 86 from 66 deliveries, a game-changer that seemed to remind Viv and the rest of the West Indies side that they were cricket's dominant force.
Now Brearley and Boycott were batting against Roberts, Holding, Croft and Garner, and something strange was happening. It was not so much Geoffrey, who could, and usually did, bat as uncompromisingly as they bowled, but Brearley, who was stroking a high-class attack across the ground on a sunlit afternoon.
In 1979, 286 felt unattainably distant; the equivalent today of perhaps 340 from 50 overs. The final was only the 74th ODI ever played, and the game was quite different then. The ball was red, the cricketers wore whites. Sixty overs per side carried the appropriate payload of frivolity while allowing the players to perform "properly" in a way they couldn't do, for example, in the Sunday League, when innings flashed past in 40 overs and bowlers were required to limit their run-up to eight yards. There was no 30-yard circle: all nine men could field on the boundary if they wanted, and no one had ever heard of a Powerplay.
Full postPick 'em early?
Prodigies, like Yorkshire have nurtured, emerge with the expectation of something big. But really all they offer then is promise, which can be fulfilled or lost
Jon Hotten
12-Jun-2013
It was a day for history at North Marine Road. Yorkshire, like the venerable Almanack, are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year. Sunday was also 50 years removed from the first of Geoffrey Boycott's 151 centuries in a Roses game at Bramall Lane, an occasion marked with the presentation of a framed scorecard. And then there was Matthew Fisher, all of 15 years and 212 days old, the youngest player to appear in a competitive county game since Charles Young, who turned out for Hampshire against Kent in 1867, aged 15 years and 131 days.
There is an inevitable melancholy about this great wash of time, refracted through the boys at either end of it. Young, a left-hand allrounder who was born in India, played 38 games across the next 18 years before slipping away into history. No one knows when or where he died, or the circumstances surrounding his end. He was here and then he was gone. We're left with his wickets and his runs and his odd little record, which may stand forever. Fisher is from an entirely different world and a more focused and intense game, yet prodigies always carry with them a chance of unfulfilment that can be unsettling.
Fifteen, you think, that's just too early, isn't it, however good you may be. For a start, it is such a brief span. Boycott had been retired for 11 years by the time Fisher was born, and no doubt Geoffrey could (and perhaps has) told the young man how fleeting those years can feel.
Full postIs cricket losing its sense of judgement?
Fans or experts' comments dismissing a player on the basis of a few low scores are in stark contrast to the game's natural rhythm
Jon Hotten
27-May-2013
Some years ago, Danny Baker began a radio phone-in about football called 606, named after the time that it came on the air. The idea was that fans would call in on their way back from matches and chew the cud about the state of the game, not necessarily the one they'd just seen but football in general. It arrived at the height of fanzine culture, and for a while it reflected the great human zoo that was the football-going public of Britain. Baker steered it like the skipper of a ramshackle ship; he had no idea where it was going, and nor did anyone else. It was about the journey, not the destination.
The show is still on but Baker left years ago. It's lowest common denominator broadcasting now, hooting ex-pros arguing with blustering punters over the minutia of who did what to whom. Opinion is god, and woe betide anyone who doesn't have one. There is no longer a language with which to discuss the game. In its place is simple polarity. The manager who was unbelievable last week is sackable this, and so on. The only point of interest is whether this language reflects football's biddable short term-ism or drives it. The nice thing about listening to 606 is the knowledge that cricket is nothing like that.
The game, especially the first-class and Test game, has a rhythm as deep and consistent as a heartbeat, and it's a rhythm that was essentially set at its creation. It can be accelerated by sprinting through short forms, but over the longer distances it will always return to something resembling the original. A single day or an individual match can suggest a line of thought, but rarely can it offer a concrete conclusion until it is the culmination of ongoing events.
Full postThe divine madness of Kevin Pietersen
Players who compel you to watch them and be engaged in the game, when absent, stir a yearning in the spectator that has nothing to do with team loyalty
Jon Hotten
22-May-2013
There is a certain uncomfortable clamminess in contemplating the England batting order without Kevin Pietersen in it. Is that it? you find yourself asking, this collective of relentless technical proficiency, with its whiff of executed skills and coaching pathways? Cook, Compton, Trott, Bell, Root, Bairstow… they're all very good and everything, but you know, is that really it?
The deep pleasure in batting lies in its idiosyncrasy. It can be as individual as a fingerprint. Boycott was the supreme technician, yet the joy of repetition was just one half of watching him play. His obsessive immersion in his task, the amount of meaning that it carried for him and the almost comical value he placed upon his wicket could become mesmerising. Sometimes he would bat with Gower, whose apparent ambivalence to all of the aesthetic beauty he was creating etched even more deeply the differences between two members of the same side. Lara sometimes entered a place where few batsmen have gone, a fabled Valhalla where boundary followed boundary for hour upon hour, day upon day, a feverish dream of extended mastery. There was Viv Richards, a cruel emperor satisfied with nothing less than the subjugation of his enemy, and Adam Gilchrist, the best friend you never had, playing a World Cup final like it was a Sunday afternoon in the park. And then Sehwag and his stunning distillation of a complex skill to an equation that read "see ball, hit ball".
Amla, Inzi, Yousuf, AB, Gayle… there are many more, and nothing links them save for one thing. They had and have "it", whatever you want to call it, a watchability best defined by the feeling left behind when they got out: an emptiness that rose above team loyalty and extended into a love for what the game could be. Simply put, they invested the spectator in their immediate destiny; they encouraged a sense of the possible.
Full postThe legend of Cardus lives on
Neville Cardus' writing is alive, full of daring and almost novelistic observation. Cricket writing owes him a debt of gratitude
Jon Hotten
13-May-2013
Sometimes the past can come back with an unexpected force. Here is the last paragraph of Neville Cardus' essay on Don Bradman, published in 1930, shortly after the Don's 334 against England in Leeds. It was Bradman's seventh Test match yet he was already exhibiting a level of mastery not seen before, and one that seemed to threaten the random nature of the game.
"It is a hard world to please," Cardus wrote. "Perhaps by making a duck some day, Bradman will oblige those of his critics who believe that there should always be some strangeness, something unexpected, mingled with art and beauty."
Bradman did oblige, of course, with the most famous duck in cricket history almost two decades later. A year after Bradman's last Test innings came the first edition of Cardus On Cricket, which is republished by Souvenir Press this month. The legend of Bradman and the legend of Cardus endure.
Full postThe day I became a semi-international
Playing against the Japan national side in London on a cold April day is a story bound to be told several times over
Jon Hotten
06-May-2013
They say that international cricket is no place for the fortysomething player, but then Sachin's taking no notice of that. Forty is the new 30, anyway. So what about the semi-international game?
Having been ignored by the England selectors for my entire career despite repeatedly stressing my availability, I've played for the last season for the Authors XI, a team that once featured Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse but fell into inactivity until its revival in 2012 by its current captain, Charlie Campbell, and novelist Nicholas Hogg. Results are best described as patchy, so the news that Hogg had somehow arranged a fixture against Japan, the 37th-ranked team in the ICC international list, was met with equal amounts of incredulity, excitement and fear.
The venue was Chiswick House; it was the first match that Japan would play on a tour to mark the 150th anniversary of cricket in their country. While the Authors arrived in Chiswick via the usual combination of scrounged lifts, delayed trains and traffic jams, Japan came on a coach. They looked chillingly young, and they immediately embarked on proper fielding drills with those flexible plastic stumps and tiny traffic cones, apparently oblivious to the lumps and bumps of the early-season outfield.
Full postWe'll miss Mitch
Risky or not, Johnson is thrilling in his unpredictability. More's the pity we won't see him this Ashes
Jon Hotten
29-Apr-2013
I'll miss Mitchell Johnson on Australia's Ashes tour, and not for the obvious reason. It's easy to buy into the caricature of him as Barmy Army fall guy, the symbol of a new and flaky Australia. Yet a closer reading reveals a far rarer creature, one that we see little of in the game: the genuinely erratic international cricketer.
To try to define it more accurately, the gap between Johnson's peak performances and his quotidian ones is far greater than for most international players, who have usually made it through the sheer consistency of their game.
England had a long flirtation with their own Mitch-alike in Steve Harmison, a bowler capable of taking 7 for 12 or delivering one to second slip. Careers like Johnson's or Harmison's can go into a long, slow tailspin, the memories of their most devastating moments exerting a powerful grip on the collective imagination and a yearning for them to be repeated. They are our old boxers, flat-nosed and battered but always just one punch away from redemption.
Full postThe philosopher captain
If captaincy was not regarded as an art before Brearley, it was after he had gone. His tenure may have been brief, but his impact endures still
Jon Hotten
23-Apr-2013
Mike Brearley turns 71 this week, an age that barely seems possible for English cricket's benign eminence grise; where do the years go? But then he was 34 when he first played for England in 1976, 39 when he assumed the captaincy a second time for the immortal Headingley Test match of 1981, and his career to that point felt like one from another age. From 1961 until 1968, from undergraduate to postgraduate, he played for Cambridge University while acquiring a first in Classics and a 2:1 in Moral Sciences, as well as turning out for Middlesex and touring a couple of times with MCC. He managed to slip in a couple of years of lecturing in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and then became captain of Middlesex in 1971, leading them to four County Championship titles. On his retirement in 1983 he took to psychotherapy and a life that has kept him on the edges of the game.
A rare presence on television and with no more than an occasional byline in the papers, Brearley has done his ageing elsewhere. He remains trapped in the mind's eye as his younger self, crouching at first slip with his hands cupped in front of him, his Leviathan Botham to his right at second, and that other grey-haired sprite Bob Taylor to his left in the gloves.
Brearley was a terrific slip catcher, a legacy of his early days as a wicketkeeper, and from there he could watch his bowlers. His batting was a different matter, and there was something moving about watching him open for England because he was almost always outgunned. A Test average of 22 told no lies, and his periodic half-centuries were islands of respite as he fought against the tide.
Full postOf unwritten laws and moral compasses
Cricket's relationship with its rules is a constantly evolving flirtation, unlike in golf, say, where things are more cut and dried
Jon Hotten
17-Apr-2013
In the first round of the 1925 US Open at the Worcester Country Club, Bobby Jones, then the best golfer in the world, was preparing to play his third shot from the rough around the 11th green when he inadvertently brushed the grass close to his ball and caused it to move. Only Jones was aware that it had happened but he immediately called a penalty on himself, added a shot to his final score and went on to lose the tournament in a playoff. When he was congratulated on his sportsmanship, Jones replied, "You might as well praise me for not robbing a bank."
For Bobby Jones, the rules were there for a reason, and they were implacable and unambiguous. He became the golfer upon whom the Masters tournament was founded. Glorious Augusta this year found itself embroiled in chaos of its own making: the 14-year-old Chinese wunderkind Tianlang Guan was docked a shot for slow play, a penalty that was last imposed almost 20 years ago, and the Tiger was lopped two, but not disqualified, for dropping his ball in the wrong place following an outrageous piece of ill fortune on the 15th green.
What was interesting was how the rulings exposed the powerful internal culture of the sport. Golf is policed not just by the officials, the other players and TV viewers watching at home (one of whom, it emerged, had phoned Augusta and dobbed Woods in), but by the competitor's own moral compass. And on the latter, everyone has an opinion.
Full postGayle forces the pace of change
Clad in his space-garb, his gold pads and his gridiron helmet, shoulders rippling under his muscle shirt, Chris Gayle is an implacable object, driving cricket forwards, challenging the world to produce another batsman that plays like him
Jon Hotten
08-Apr-2013
Chris Gayle has presented an almost completely realised vision of the future of Twenty20 batsmanship. On Sunday he offered another shimmering insight into what is to come during the Super Over finish between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Hyderabad Sunrisers. Chasing 20 and facing a flat-out, pumped-up Dale Steyn, Gayle was required to hit the last two balls of the game for six. He dispatched the first before knocking the second disconsolately to long-off, foxed by Steyn's shorter length. The point was not that Gayle had failed, but rather that no one would have been surprised if he had succeeded. At the crease, he trails a new sense of the possible behind him. If not Twenty20's Bradman, then he is its WG, its Ranji. In its infant years, he is a conceptual force.
One in every nine deliveries that Gayle has faced in T20 cricket has been hit for six, and it is a ratio that is rising towards one in eight. Around that glowing headline stat, he has constructed a method of batting which has produced an unmatched consistency through its counter-intuitive lack of risk. With it, he is separating himself from the rest.
By the blunt tool of average, his mark of 44.51 is way beyond those who can reproduce his strike rate of 154.72, while those who can come within range of that average cannot approach his speed: Kieron Pollard strikes at 160.33, but averages 29; Virender Sehwag 156.24 but averages 27, David Warner at 142.59 but averages 31. Sachin Tendulkar averages 35.69 but strikes at 121; Shaun Marsh 42.24 but strikes at 131.46, Kevin Pietersen 34.41 but strikes at 137.10. Or consider this: Gayle has ten T20 centuries, which is more than Tendulkar, AB de Villiers, Pietersen, Sehwag, Jacques Kallis, Virat Kohli, Shane Watson and Warner combined.
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