Jon Hotten
Why are England forever in transition?
Let's just admit it, the word is now just a euphemism, used to explain the standing of a team that was never very good at ODI cricket
Jon Hotten
06-Nov-2014
The ICC has announced its ODI Team of the Year. There are no England players in it, for obvious reasons. And we all know the main one - England are a team "in transition". In fact, the England ODI team has been in transition since 1992, before the notion of being "in transition" had even been thought of.
Since then, five World cup tournaments have passed, along with numerous Champions Trophy competitions and countless tri-series and bi-series, one-offs, warm-ups, warm-downs, mini-tours, and other apparently vital engagements, and England have transitioned their way through all of them, without notable success. Even when - by statistical anomaly, flukes of the calendar and lots of home games - they briefly became the No. 1 ODI team in the world (yeah, right) they were still in transition.
And as the next World Cup approaches, England are in their traditional pre-tournament holding pattern of not really knowing what their best team is, or how it should play, or even who should be captain. If the standard model holds, they'll be thrashed a few times on the forthcoming tour to Sri Lanka, while the warm-up tri-series against Australia and India will be best viewed from behind the sofa. There will be the panicky last-minute squad selection, the banana-skin group match against an Associate nation (where some bum-fluffed trainee bank clerk or 17-stone policeman will have taken time out from the day job to launch England's storied attack for an 80-ball century), then a grim elimination, a resignation or two and the announcement: "We're back in transition, building for the next World Cup…"
Full postCricket's humanity resists specialisation
While major sports across the world are driving their competitors towards homogenous physical ideals, cricket seems to celebrate diversity
Jon Hotten
30-Oct-2014
In 1996 I went to a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. During the slow days before the fight, a slender, almost ethereal figure floated around Don King's press area at the back of the MGM Grand Casino. His legs were thin, his hands fine-boned, his face nobly etched but pinched by the years. This was Floyd Patterson, who in 1956 had become the youngest heavyweight champion of the world, a record he had held until Tyson superseded it three decades later. It seemed inconceivable: Floyd was shorter and slighter than me. Mike Tyson was shorter than me too, around Floyd's height but twice as wide, twice as heavily muscled.
Tyson lost that fight to Holyfield, who was built more like a gymnast than a heavyweight boxer, and who had actually fought most of his career at cruiserweight. Today their successors as champions dwarf them. Tyson and Holyfield were both about 6ft and fought at around 210lbs. The current holder is Wladimir Klitschko, who is 6ft 5in and outweighs both by 40lbs.
I thought of Floyd this week while I was reading David Epstein's wonderful book The Sports Gene, which explores the roles that genetics and practice play in the lives of elite athletes.
Full postCricket: complex, unknowable cricket
We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket, utterly brilliant in its design, is not
Jon Hotten
21-Oct-2014
This is Martin Amis, writing about chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps nowhere in human activity, is the gap between the trier and the expert so astronomical."
Is he right? In the field of human activity, at least, I can think of another arena in which the knowledge gap between amateur and pro is vast - that of theoretical physics. The latest man to try and bridge it is the particle physicist and former keyboard player with D:Ream (best-known hit - "Things Can Only Get Better"), Dr Brian Cox.
He has a new TV series called The Human Universe, and he kicked it off with an interesting analogy for beginning to understand exactly what theoretical physicists are on about.
Full postThe work that is county cricket
Players toil all season, but fans don't really get a sense of the scale of effort involved
Jon Hotten
30-Sep-2014
An English first-class season that began on March 29 wound its way to an end last week, its champion county decided long ago, its issues of promotion and relegation running into the final hour. Like almost every part of professional cricket, it runs on a calendar established more than a century ago, when the world existed on different lines and the notion of a spectator event that took place while its potential customers were permanently engaged elsewhere was not so strange.
It may have continued in its twilight state as a grand folly ad infinitum but for the rise of social media, which has given county cricket a new constituency. It is followed and loved by fans who would be there if they could; instead they can live with it in real time through the live blogs (hastily collapsing that browser as the boss walks past). The BBC offers some terrific radio coverage on local digital and internet stations. Sky showed a couple of decisive games. Through these channels, the county season shimmers as a background glow in thousands of lives.
Through it all, county cricket's titans fight on, knowing that their deeds are glimpsed rather than savoured. It hit home when I went down to the Ageas Bowl to watch Hampshire play Kent in their penultimate championship fixture, and I realised again how rich the game's detail is, and how much of it we miss out on.
Full postWhat will cricket be like 50 or 100 years from now?
It's a daunting thought because it feels like the game has already completed its evolution, leaving little wriggle room
Jon Hotten
10-Sep-2014
How knowable is cricket's future? Could it be predicted, if you picked up on the clues and you knew where to look - or perhaps more importantly, how to look?
It's easy to presume that we're at some kind of peak moment, a point where the game has almost completed its evolution and there's not a lot of wriggle room left. The players are stronger, fitter, more powerful, nurtured by sports science rather than raw steak and physical labour. The cricket bat as an object has maxed out, and the laws governing its dimensions and materials prevent it changing in any significant fashion. Test matches exist in their eternal way as games of exquisite and sometimes excruciating drama, and yet more prone to positive results than ever. T20 is the ultimate concentration of form, a starburst of action that has yielded techniques that had no need of existence even two decades ago.
Earlier in the summer, at a pop-up bookstall in the hushed grounds of Winchester Cathedral, I found a copy of The Happy Cricketer by A Country Vicar, published by Frederick Muller Ltd, in 1946. "The draughtsman of cricket literature" promised the blurb, so I bought it. The book's previous owner had stuck a small newspaper clipping to the title page, a picture of the Rev RL Hodgson, and then noted underneath in a wobbly hand, "Vicar of South Baddesley 1917-1946".
Full postThe parts of cricket that language forgot
There are feelings and situations in cricket that all of us are familiar with but can't describe succinctly
Jon Hotten
26-Aug-2014
Laurie Evans enjoyed his T20 Blast Finals day at Edgbaston last Saturday, hammering an ultimately decisive 30-ball 53 in the final and holding on to a couple of skiers as Lancashire gave chase to Warwickshire's 181.
Yet there was a moment when he experienced one of the universal lows of cricket, a dropped chance on the boundary as team-mates and spectators looked on in hope and expectation. He'd grassed Karl Brown, the ball bursting through his raised hands and striking the peak of his cap before trickling away behind him, and he'd spun around in a psychic state that cricketers of all levels know and understand, having put down a catch but still having to go and field the ball.
It lasts only for a few seconds, but it is one of the worst emotions in the game, a liminal time during which you are required to complete a task that you have already failed at. All that lie ahead are moments of despair and regret that will last as long as the reprieved batsman remains at the crease.
Full postThe complex art of picking openers
An opening pair requires good form and a happy blend of personalities to succeed. Perhaps Cook needs a new partner in the Strauss mould
Jon Hotten
13-Aug-2014
This is a series where both sides have played well, just not at the same time. It has been defined by the egregiously uneven nature of the contest: England were bad at Lord's, India even worse in Southampton and Manchester.
Symptomatic of these struggles is this run of figures: 33, 9, 49, 11, 22, 40, 12, 55, 17, 22, 26, 8, 21, 26. It is the chronological list of opening partnerships by England and India so far, and there's trouble at the top. There has been one stand of more than 50 - between Alastair Cook and Sam Robson in Southampton. which means that no innings from either side has begun from a position of strength. Between them, the five men to have opened this summer have batted 28 times for a return of one century and five fifties. Seventeen of those innings have resulted in scores of 25 or less.
Although two players, M Vijay and Cook, are averaging more than 40, only Vijay can really claim to have succeeded: his is the one century, and he has a 95 and one other half-century too. Cook made 165 runs at the Ageas Bowl and 54 from the other three matches. Shikhar Dhawan has flickered like a faulty bulb, his light extinguished each time it appeared to be coming on, while Robson has become so tightened by tension and fear that he can barely bat in any meaningful sense. The dimensions of his world have shrunk to mere survival. Poor old Gautam Gambhir pulled the really short straw - having had no cricket at all, he caught Stuart Broad and James Anderson at their very best in helpful conditions.
Full postDoes Anderson need a verbal crutch?
It seems odd that a man who can make the ball talk like he does needs to resort to verbal aggression
Jon Hotten
06-Aug-2014
I have often thought of Jimmy Anderson and Ian Bell as shadow images, the batting and bowling equivalents of one another. Their skills are exquisite, refined, an aesthetic delight, yet they can be delicate too: both have endured long losing streaks.
Most of all they had similarly troubled starts in the England side. Bell came up against the 2005 Australians where he was christened "Sherminator" by Shane Warne and was briefly overwhelmed by more skilful opponents. Anderson faced an opponent who proved more insidious: the coaches and bio-mechanists who had him bowling at cones and trying to change his action.
Both appear quiet, somewhat diffident characters who went through periods of self-examination and apparently came up with much the same answer: to impose themselves better on the opposition.
Full postCook's Brearley lesson
Mike Brearley managed to remain an outstanding captain despite his consistent failures with the bat. Is there a lesson in there for England's current skipper?
Jon Hotten
30-Jul-2014
Mike Brearley once gave a lovely description of the feeling of being out of form: "We try to focus on all sorts of things that should be unconscious," he said. "Like the centipede, who, trying to think about each leg before it moves, ends up on its back in a ditch."
Alastair Cook's first-innings 95 at the Ageas Bowl has probably rehabilitated his self-image enough for him to enjoy Brearley's analogy. It is, after all, impeccably sourced. Cook may be 28 innings from his last Test match century, but he has 25 in the bank, which is 25 more than England's shrewdest, most erudite and flat-out most lovable captain ever scored.
In a life of outstanding and understated achievement, batting for England was the one arena in which Brearley encountered monotonous failure: 33 matches, 66 innings, 1442 runs at an average of 22.88, nine fifties, and a strike rate of 29.79. In almost half of those innings he was out for less than 20; he never made back-to-back half-centuries. To paraphrase the old song, if it wasn't for bad form, he'd have had no form at all.
Full postA strange, brutal magic
As Ishant Sharma showed at Lord's, short-pitched bowling can open old wounds and create sudden uncertainty
Jon Hotten
23-Jul-2014
In the middle of Bankstown Oval lies a red pool. David Colley, the incoming batsman, sees it on his slow walk out. Greg Bush's blood. Sort of "squeezey" looking, like squirted sauce. Sick feeling in the stomach. Red blood on white creaseline. Try not to step in it. Colley gave Bush a lift to the ground that morning. Try not to get your friend's blood on you. Blood on the creaseline, behind it, in front of it. Red splash in the line of all three stumps. Got to know where middle stump is. Colley asks the umpire for middle and marks the spot with his boot. Red on white boot.
That is Christian Ryan writing about the fastest spell Jeff Thomson ever bowled, during a grade match between Bankstown and Mosman in Sydney in 1973, four years before the invention of the helmet.
Trott's battle with Johnson, and with himself, was briefly resumed, with England's number three the loser again. No sooner had Clarke posted his legside sentries than Trott, off balance and on edge, shovelled a nondescript delivery down long leg's throat. It was baffling - not least to Trott himself, who departed holding the bat by the blade, as though this was the way it now felt in his hands.
