Jon Hotten
Let's embrace all of cricket's ages
Peter Willey and George Sharp's dispute with the ECB highlights how we tend to look at what people can't do after a certain age rather than what they can do better
Jon Hotten
17-Feb-2015
One of the best opening spells I faced last season came from a 56-year-old seamer who bowled 14 overs off the reel, a spell that featured only one really loose ball. As he came in from his favourite end on a wicket that he had been playing on for decades, age had given him almost as much as it had taken away. The pace of his youth might have gone, but there were compensations in the way that he presented the seam on the perfect length for the pitch; how he created pressure from repetition and endurance. His run-up was easy, his action grooved. It all just worked.
Two years before, I encountered an even more remarkable player. He was a man of considerable achievement in his professional life as a documentary-maker, and after a lifetime of cricket was still playing at the age of 72. On a dank day of low cloud and grey light he bowled unchanged for ten overs, no longer quick but still with a quick bowler's mind and attitude - he scowled at anyone trying to hoick him and kept the field in line with a gimlet eye. His approach to the wicket beat with a rhythm carved out over season upon season, through overs in their thousands. He finished with a couple of wickets for not that many.
There are many moments of transition in a cricketing life, but I think the most significant is the move from being one of the younger players in a team to one of the older ones. Things about the game that once seemed important aren't so much any more, and others take on a new significance. Sometimes it's just enough to be out there.
Full postI saw Richards in his prime
Watching Garner, Richards and King punish England left a young fan awestruck at Lord's
Jon Hotten
04-Feb-2015
Ooh, the '70s. Hipsters, groovers, scenesters, bubble-permed rock gods in big-ass flares, auteur movies, blissed-out, bedenimed surfer boys and sun-kissed girls on roller skates…
Yeah, well, sort of…
In the haze of memory, the world's cheesiest decade has synthesised into something superfreaky and glowing with nostalgia - Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice is perhaps the apogee of this reinvention of its wigged-out wildness, and like most cultural reinterpretations it's probably half-accurate.
Full postWhen will we see the first truly freelance cricketer?
Will the likes of Pietersen become guns for hire in the full sense of the term, offering a complete package of services to the highest bidder?
Jon Hotten
28-Jan-2015
Grand Slam tennis champ Andy Murray had what was generally accepted as a bad year last year, undergoing surgery on his back, losing his coach, Ivan Lendl, and then restructuring his "backroom team", apparently after they found it hard to accept Lendl's replacement, Amelie Mauresmo. Murray's assistant coach and his fitness coach took their leave.
Considering that Murray travels the world with his girlfriend and sometimes his mother, also a distinguished coach, his career has the dimensions of a mini-business - lucrative, sure, yet dedicated to the kind of fine margins that separate the very best players from the pack. Murray has won more than $34m in prize money, so his investment in micro-management is worthwhile.
It's a situation that occurs regularly in golf too. At the time of Justin Rose's US Open win two years ago, he credited his caddy, his swing coach, his manager, his psychologist and his wife as vital members of his entourage. Rose has won more than $41m in his career to date.
Full postThe importance of cricket punditry
It may have started out as a bit of televisual fluff but it now is crucial in shaping perceptions of the sport
Jon Hotten
12-Jan-2015
A decade ago, the late Jonathan Rendall wrote a characteristically brilliant piece on the art and development of football punditry. You may think it strange that it's not a subject that has been revisited often since, because television punditry is really football's major voice (and of most sports).
The somewhat dubious "stars" of Rendall's story were Alan Brazil, then as now the mercurial host of Talksport radio's breakfast show, Tony Cascarino, who was trying to climb the greasy pole of punditry and remains an occasional face on television and radio, and Cascarino's friend Andy Townsend, an early adopter of new technology in his "tactics truck", who will soon be leaving a long-standing role at ITV.
Back in 2004, the pundit's qualification for the role was a solid career in the pro game - enough at least for the public to recognise the name. The job was designed to be non-taxing. It entailed either the snap analysis of a slow-motion replay during co-commentary, or sitting in a chair for a superficial scan of the major talking points for a few minutes after a game. Seniority on the pitch manifested itself as seniority in the pundits' chair - men like Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson were deferred to, however glib and dismissive their comments.
Full postIt's all in the arm angle
Baseball teaches us that deliveries that make the batsman rethink premeditated responses will succeed more often than not
Jon Hotten
07-Jan-2015
Imagine the scene: David Warner and Chris Gayle are invited to face up to the world's fastest female bowler. Their challenge is to do what they have done to many of the great male bowlers and hit the ball over the boundary. They not only fail to do so, they miss every ball in the over. Waiting in the pavilion, Kevin Pietersen refuses to come in rather than be embarrassed out in the middle.
As David Epstein describes in his wonderful book The Sports Gene, something roughly equivalent to the above did take place in baseball, and it may contain some valuable information for the development of bowlers.
Back in 2004, some of America's top MLB sluggers were invited to the annual Pepsi All-Star Softball game in California to face the fastest softball pitcher in the world, Team USA's Jennie Finch (a few months later, Finch would win an Olympic gold medal at the Athens games).
Full postWhat cricket can take from darts
It's simple, it's TV-friendly and it has a promoter who can tailor the product for its audience
Jon Hotten
24-Dec-2014
Alastair Cook made a return to top-level sport on Monday evening, facing up to Jimmy Anderson in an exhibition leg at the World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace. He won too, hitting a 140 and then taking out double 11 for the victory, proving at least that he still has the big match temperament - the Ally Pally stage and its baying crowd has turned many a hot-shot darter to jelly.
In darts' brave new TV era, each player must have a nickname, a nom de guerre, and they are in general futuristic and self-aggrandising: you may encounter The Machine, The Power, Mighty Mike, Jackpot, The Wizard and so on. There is the occasional throwback to the darting glory days of the 1970s and '80s - one particularly large competitor is known simply as "The Pie Man"; and there's the odd baffling pun, too - John Part, a Canadian, is "Darth Maple".
Thus Cook emerged with the legend "Bed and Breakfast" emblazoned on the back of his darts shirt (presumably a nod to the halcyon times when he batted all day), while his opponent was saddled with the somewhat ambiguous Jimmy "The Swinger" Anderson (let's hope it was a reference to his bowling).
Full postAll Sehwag's children
Batsmen like David Warner will lead the game into the next generation. One man heralded the trend
Jon Hotten
14-Dec-2014
David Warner's first-innings hundred in Adelaide was fraught with meaning. One of those meanings has, quite rightly, been less reflected upon than those surrounding the passing of Phillip Hughes, but it nonetheless carries great force.
Warner is at the top of his game now. He has made 11 Test centuries, six of them in the past 12 months (and there will be more to come). He walked out in Adelaide afloat on adrenaline and emotion and began pumping the ball through the field and to the boundary, scoring 30-odd before his opening partner, Chris Rogers, had got to 5.
Cut back five years. Warner has just debuted as a T20 international for Australia without having made a single appearance in first-class cricket. The idea that he may one day play Test match cricket provokes not just laughter but horror. A few days later, Warner runs into India's opening batsman Virender Sehwag.
Full postThe joy of the excuse
They help you forget the fact that you're not a very good player
Jon Hotten
02-Dec-2014
The Spurs forward Emmanuel Adebayor has come out with a remarkable excuse for his lack of goals this season - his mother is a witch and has put a curse on him. Cue a string of jokes about how she's obviously done it several times during his career, how she has now extended it to Roberto Soldado etc etc. But it's easy to imagine how it has gone down amongst the Tottenham hierarchy, who pay Adebayor many thousands of pounds per week.
Sport in general, and certainly professional cricket, is officially a no-excuse culture. Google "cricket excuses" and you'll find a long series of results, mostly involving England, along the lines of "Cook: No excuses for failure against spin/pace/Mitchell Johnson/the Netherlands" and so on. The professional game is a pragmatic place in which everything is explainable and everyone is accountable - at least in public. There's no room for excuses, and due to their usually high level of competence, a pro needs them less. Indeed, without excuses to get in the way, genuine bad luck is often more visible. A good player in a bad trot can have respite without the need to cook up unlikely reasons for it.
The amateur game is different. In the amateur game, the excuse is not only king, it is almost essential to survival. A professional must face up to his faults, undergo a period of introspection and then remedy them. An amateur can simply blame the wind, the sun, last night's hangover, the sad lack of DRS at the local park, and a hundred other things. The amateur's excuse is actually designed to prevent that unnecessary self-reflection that makes you realise you're not actually any good at cricket. Especially if you can convince yourself - and even better, your team-mates - that your excuse is actually true.
Full postEngland's problem with attacking batsmanship
It has taken the country ages to get over its obsession with defensive batting and appreciate that the ball is there to be smashed
Jon Hotten
26-Nov-2014
Great hilarity greeted the start of England's first innings of their Sri Lanka tour, as Alastair Cook duly played out a maiden over before Moeen Ali hit his first six deliveries for four.
"There it is in a nutshell" was the unavoidable thought: the future confronting the past in an uncertain present. What is it about us English and our suspicion of change? It sent me back to Robert Winder's wonderful and rightly garlanded survey of Wisden, The Little Wonder. In it there is a lovely chapter on how the Almanack reacted to the emergence of the game's great force, William Gilbert Grace, and the unprecedented scale and speed of his scoring. Did they like it? No they did not.
When Grace took 121 off Notts while playing for MCC in 1869, the Wisden editors recorded it briefly before hailing the more modest knock of Richard Daft: "Tuesday was Daft's day," they wrote. "For cool, scientific, cautious and successful defence, the innings was a marvel." And when WG belted 172 of Gloucestershire's total of 276, this time against MCC, they noted sniffily that he had almost been caught with his score on 21, before reflecting at great length on Gordon's score of 53, "an innings of careful, good defence, clean, hard cutting and excellent cricket".
Full postEngland need to wake up to ODI reality
If England are to keep abreast of more explosive sides like India, they need a radical change in approach, as Eoin Morgan recently stated
Jon Hotten
18-Nov-2014
No sportsman tells himself he will be all right more often than a boxer. Partly because they do what they do alone, and partly because there is such devastating harm at hand, they construct citadels of self-belief that seem, from the outside, more impenetrable than the bodies that will eventually and inevitably betray them.
There was an example of it on Saturday night, when Ireland's veteran Matthew Macklin was badly knocked out in the tenth round of a world title elimination bout by the Argentinian middleweight Jorge Sebastian Heiland. Macklin, bearded, beaten, and exhausted by this battle and all of the others that had come before it, confronted every fighter's nightmare: a younger, fresher man who he could not stop, could not hold off. He had fallen in his own corner, his head lying queasily over the top rope, his seconds jumping in immediately.
Afterwards, Macklin gave a ringside interview where he said: "I could have carried on, but the ref decided it was over…"
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