Jonathan Wilson
The power of booing
It has value when used against players who have transgressed - particularly if they have somehow offended the spirit of the game
Jonathan Wilson
01-Sep-2014
When the German football team arrived at the Estadio Mineirao in Belo Horizonte for their World Cup semi-final against Brazil this summer, they were jeered. Even in the stadium, as the big screens showed several, serious tracksuited young men getting off a coach, there was a rumble of unanimous booing. When they trotted out onto the pitch to warm up, there was more booing. It was that attitude that made many journalists secretly hope Germany would beat Brazil, as of course they did, by the improbable scoreline of 7-1.
I'm not against booing. In fact, I think booing is an essential part of sport. But booing must be respected. Boos can't be wasted or the practice abused. Boos express displeasure or distaste; they're a way for a crowd, for the public, to make its opinion clear. (Although that modern vogue for chanting "Rooooot!" in approval at Joe Root, following the similar "Luuuuuke!" for Luke Donald in golf, and "Poom" and "Kanu" for Mart Poom and Kanu in football has made the sound slightly more ambiguous than it once was. The golfer Boo Weekley, of course, makes things even more complicated, but the forenames of American golfers are far too contentious a subject to get into here.)
Let's think about what that booing of the Germany team meant. The Brazilian crowd booed them getting off the bus. So, logically, that meant they disapproved of them arriving. But if they hadn't arrived, there wouldn't have been a game; those fans would have paid significant sums of money for tickets for a match that didn't happen.
Full postHow much practice is enough practice?
Deciding how much time to set aside to unwind is a dilemma in any profession. In sport, it's all down to the player, not the coach
Jonathan Wilson
18-Aug-2014
When Rafa Benitez was the manager of Liverpool, he had a chart on his wall that showed how many minutes each player had played. He was obsessive about it, substituting key players even in tight games to ensure they didn't suffer burnout. Last week, the Irish journalist Ken Early suggested that one of the reasons the Uruguay striker Luis Suarez had been injured so rarely in his career was that he kept getting bans that allowed him to rest. Ensuring players arrive at matches not merely fit but fresh has become a central preoccupation of modern sport, and one that will become an increasing issue for cricket next year as England face up to a schedule of 17 Tests in about 10 months.
But it's not just about physical strain. That, up to a point, can be measured. Far harder to determine is mental strain: even without getting to a point where players are placed under such stress that they become ill. Some people need absolute focus; some thrive with a more relaxed approach, as this piece by Ed Smith makes clear.
Gary Player's line, "The harder I practise, the luckier I get" may have become a cliché, but it simply isn't true - or rather isn't simply true. When Graham Gooch and David Gower clashed over the appropriate amount of net practice in the early '90s, I was on Gooch's side, but now I'm not so sure.
Full postThe fear of the ringer
How a team can collapse in the face of some ordinary bowling if they believe they are batting against a pro
Jonathan Wilson
03-Aug-2014
Cricket, probably more than any other sport, encourages the ringer. Everybody who has ever played at any kind of amateur level knows that Sunday morning feeling, either calling round mates and mates of mates to see if anybody fancies making up the numbers, or getting an unexpected phone call from somebody you last saw in a bar at university ten years earlier seeing if you fancy a game.
It happens in other sports as well, of course, but cricket, as an individual sport dressed in a team game's clothing, seems more
conducive to the ringer. A footballer or a hockey player suddenly introduced to an unfamiliar team will stand out a mile, the holistic nature of those sports meaning he won't be making a run he needs to, or he'll be providing cover where none is needed. In cricket, though, you pick up the ball and bowl, or pick up the bat and bat, and - apart from knowing the idiosyncrasies of how other batsmen run or the vagaries of who fields best where, essentially you can just get on with it.
Even better, because of the self-regulatory element of cricket, the way a batsman can retire, or a bowler can be taken off if he's bowling so well he threatens to unbalance the game, it doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far better than everybody else. It doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far worse: even good players score ducks, so the weak link doesn't stand out as he would in another sport.
Full postWhen the weak can resist the strong
Cricket and football give lesser teams and players a chance to hold out and sometimes even show up stronger opposition
Jonathan Wilson
14-Jul-2014
I woke up on Saturday morning fully expecting England to be well on the way to losing the first Test. There was something disconcerting about finding out Jimmy Anderson was not only still there but had scored a half-century. My first reaction, I confess, was irritation: all these years of watching him bat, all the years of arguing that he should be scoring more runs, that he was a No. 11 in name only, and vindication came when I was on the other side of the world, in a time zone four hours behind, covering the football World Cup, with no way of watching him.
I had a shower and he was still in. I had breakfast and he was still in. I wrote a lengthy piece about German youth development and he was still in. I decided to follow online after lunch to see if he could get his ton and, of course, he was out immediately. Still, the resistance of No. 11 batsmen in this game seemed relevant to a discussion I'd had with a US journalist earlier in this World Cup.
He suggested that basketball was better than football because the better team always won. I suggested that made it an inherently flawed sport: one of the things I love about football is that a lesser team can, through diligent defending and organisation, hold out against a superior team and perhaps even nick a winner on the break.
Full postCricket as a metaphor for life
Perhaps in no other game does the adage of playing the hand you're dealt apply as much as it does in cricket
Jonathan Wilson
30-Jun-2014
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself about 20 yards from a major news story - a story, in fact, I ended up writing about for the next day's Guardian - as around 100 Chilean fans without tickets for their side's World Cup match against Spain smashed a door at the front of the press centre at the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro and charged through, trying to gain access to the stands. I probably shouldn't admit this, but I missed it. A hundred people in bright red shirts were clattering about, being chased by cameramen, photographers, journalists with phones and, eventually, security, and I was caught up in the developing drama of the third day of what would, the following day, become Durham's victory over Lancashire in a county championship match.
"It should be their first victory of the season," I enthused to Miguel, the journalist with whom I'm sharing a flat for the duration of the tournament. He's half-Irish, half-Spanish (the liver of the Irish, the wristwatch of the Spanish, if we're dealing in cheap stereotypes) and has no interest in cricket. "Shit season, then?" he grunted.
And that's where we came upon one of those moments of cultural misunderstanding that make cricket such an idiosyncratic sport. Because Durham's season up until then, featuring one defeat and six draws had been, well, what? Not great but not all that bad either.
Full postWhy stadiums need a sense of place
In football, increasingly, it's hard to tell which city you're watching a game in. Cricket venues still maintain a sense of where they belong
Jonathan Wilson
16-Jun-2014
There are many bad things about the new football stadium in Sao Paulo where the opening game of the World Cup was staged on Thursday (starting with its existence, given it was created for political reasons, when there were at least two existing stadiums in the city that with a lick of paint and minimal upgrading could have done the job perfectly well), but there is one thing that it gets emphatically right, and that is the fact that there are gaps in the corners.
There is a one-tier bowl, plus permanent second tiers down the long sides of the ground, with temporary stands at the two ends. In the corners are the big screens and television boxes, but they are low, so you can see through, and what that means is that you get a sense of where you are. After hours cooped up in the air-conditioned tent of the media, there's something refreshing about being able to see downtown Sao Paulo, shady hills in the background, a reminder that there is a world beyond the World Cup. When Brazil scored, you could see fireworks bursting in the evening sky.
This, of course, is an area in which cricket has a huge advantage over football. Because the stands tend to be lower, there is a constant sense of life going on outside, from Lumley Castle at Chester-le-Street to Table Mountain at Newlands, to Henry Blofeld's beloved buses passing Archbishop Tennyson's School outside The Oval.
Full postSo how was your cricket weekend?
Did it involve getting locked in a coffee-shop toilet, getting off the bus in the wrong place, and discovering the Bopara pose?
Jonathan Wilson
02-Jun-2014
"Bounce is uneven," said the outgoing batsman. "Get forward and play straight."
"Nothing cross-batted," said the non-striker.
I'd watched wickets fall at a steady rate as batsmen were undone by a two-paced pitch on which some balls held up. It was clearly slow and a bit claggy. The first ball was a yorker on leg stump that I dug out without too much difficulty. Two balls of the over to come. Just block, I told myself. The batsman at the other end was on 30-odd and nicely set. Feed him the strike. The second ball was short and on my legs. "Smack it!" screamed a silly but persuasive voice at the back of my head. "The field's in; just get it over the infield and you're fine." So I leaned back and heaved into the leg side, was through the shot several minutes too early and spooned a dolly to midwicket. My scores this year, including the Sri Lanka tour, now read 0, 0, 3, 0. And it wasn't even a good 3.
Full postThe tragedy of fixing
Incidents that in a drama you'd reject as absurd you relish in sport because you know they actually happened. Until you stop believing that they actually happened
Jonathan Wilson
20-May-2014
A little while ago, I had rather too much to drink with a former Test cricketer. We had both watched a Premier League football match that had finished in a draw after both teams scored in the last ten minutes.
He admitted he was no great expert in football, but was adamant the game must have been fixed. It was clear, he said, that it had been decided the game had to be a draw and so when one team scored, it had then to concede. I was sceptical. The equaliser had come from a moment of brilliant individual skill, the sort of thing that can't just be produced to order. But the former Test player was certain: things like that, he said, don't just happen.
I'd had a similar conversation about a decade earlier in Romania. I had been sitting in a newspaper office in Bucharest, watching the Premier League scores come in with a group of journalists who were avidly checking their fixed odds coupons. Chelsea scored two late goals to turn a 2-1 deficit against Fulham into a 3-2 win. There was general laughter: fix, they all agreed. I should stress, there is absolutely no evidence that game was fixed, nothing beyond the weary cynicism of a group of men who had seen too much to accept the unexpected.
Full postNo cricket on Saturday?
A day off and no good cricket to go to - how's that possible with the jam-packed calendars of today?
Jonathan Wilson
03-May-2014
On Saturday, I was considering a day off - my first, as you ask, since March 1, and probably my last until July 15. A friend is going away for six weeks on Monday and we had a wedding reception to go to in the evening, so it seemed like, having helped her move out of her flat, it might be a nice idea to get out the picnic hamper, pack it with cheeses and a couple of bottles of decent wine, and head off for a day at The Oval. Or Lord's. Or Hove. Or Canterbury. Or Leicester. Or Chelmsford. Anywhere within an hour and half or so of London: we weren't fussy.
The nature of modern cricket being that everybody's playing all the time for different teams in different competitions in a structure so complex that nobody can hold the schedule in their heads for more than a couple weeks in advance, the specific game we'd watch wasn't much of a concern. That's not why I watch cricket anyway (of course I was delighted Durham won the Championship last year, but I didn't rock back and forth in a chair reminding myself to breathe as I do on the odd occasions Sunderland threaten to do something not rubbish). Of course there'd be a game: this is modern cricket - it's omnipresent.
Eventually I looked up which game we could go to. And it turned out the closest first-class or List A match was in Delhi, which, with the best will in the world, isn't within 90 minutes of my flat. At first, I thought this was an awful stroke of bad luck. Then I checked the schedule for the rest of the season. Northants v Yorkshire on May 31 is the first Saturday Championship game this season. Middlesex have one day of Saturday cricket scheduled at Lord's all summer: a T20 double-header on May 17 - which clashes with the FA Cup final, so not great news for those using the Jubilee line to get to Lord's or Wembley. Surrey start a Championship game against Hampshire on Saturday, June 28, but that's it for Saturday Championship cricket in London. Not only would there be no boozy, cheesy, crickety day off, but there was very little chance there could have been. That might not make Giles Clarke single-handedly responsible for me working 135 days straight, but it does feel like it.
Full postThe Argentine connection
Football may be the dominant sport in Argentina today but it wasn't the first sport the British took there
Jonathan Wilson
21-Apr-2014
I'm in Buenos Aires at the moment, researching a history of Argentinian football. Football, of course, is the dominant sport here, the league still attracting the seventh-highest average attendances in the world, despite the poor standard of play and dilapidated stadiums. At least two television channels are devoted to endless discussions of the game, while the logos and colours of the big clubs dot the city.
Football was introduced by the British towards the end of the 19th century, by sailors having kickabouts on the dockside, if you want to believe the romantic version; by teachers pursuing the ideals of muscular Christianity that prevailed in English schools at the time, if you want the truth. The seeds, once planted, soon sprouted. Yet football wasn't the first sport the British brought to Argentina: that was cricket.
Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff was one of those mid-Victorian men who would do anything so long as it was dangerous. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1849. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar on completing his Master's degree three years later, but he never practised as a barrister: he was far too busy doing exciting things.
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