My Funeral, Your Ashes
Into the mystic
Swing
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Swing. No word in cricket tantalises like it.
Wrist, finger, arm, chest and ball positioning might make a cricket ball swing through the air. Then again, they might not. The grass’s greenness, ball’s redness, seam’s brittleness, leather’s absorptiveness, air’s moistness and the day’s cloudiness can help a bit. Or a lot. Or zilch.
Swing is where cricket leaves physics behind and goes into the mystic. You can also block, whack, catch, throw and spin a cricket ball. But the fundamentals of these can be roughly passed on, from parent to child, whether in a minute or a month or seven years. Fifteen days was how long Mitchell Johnson spent in the practice nets of Adelaide and Perth rehearsing the one thing for which there are certain fundamentals but no guarantees. Swing.
Full postThe Smith experiment
One high-wired June afternoon in 1986, Kapil Dev clubbed a six into the grandstand to win a Test match at Lord’s and Mike Gatting was minutes later being steered into the tiny physiotherapist’s room
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
One high-wired June afternoon in 1986, Kapil Dev clubbed a six into the grandstand to win a Test match at Lord’s and Mike Gatting was minutes later being steered into the tiny physiotherapist’s room. There, the chairman of selectors offered him David Gower’s job, the fifth England captaincy handover in six years, and a moment the Guardian’s Matthew Engel was soon inking into the annals of English cricket cock-upery. “There comes a time,” wrote Engel, “when the judges ought to be judged, but that never seems to happen.”
It is nearly 2011. Still we are waiting for the time to happen. For anyone sitting down and selecting any cricket XI, the fundamentals are fourfold: you pick your six best batsmen, three fast bowlers, a spinner and a wicketkeeper. In Australia this week the selectors accomplished one out of four. They picked – and times being what they are, let’s be grateful for small mercies – a wicketkeeper.
Four hot afternoons lie ahead, time aplenty for the folly of five fast bowlers and no spinner to gradually dawn on slow-cooked brains. Overlooking the inherent usefulness of choosing your six finest available batsmen hit home somewhat earlier – at 11.42am, with the big old WACA scoreboard saying 4 for 36, when quick-stepping out to rescue Australia came a lad in short sleeves, busy-looking, his friendly eyes peeping out from behind the helmet grille, a face so little that the black protective cap on his too-big chinstrap covered not just the point of his chin but the entire jawline. From cheek to cheek. No identikit-style Test cricketer this one, you thought. And then Australia’s new number six took guard. A single tap-tap on the popping crease and he yanked up his slender arms, bat dangling high in the direction of second slip’s throat.
Full postA time for sparrow’s feet
People say baggy green caps are never given away lightly
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
People say baggy green caps are never given away lightly. It’s a myth. Budding baggy green wearers, you hear it said, must first conjure a rainbow of runs or a thunderclap of wickets. That’s bollocks. Mark Cameron, Phil Hughes, Mitchell Starc, Usman Khawaja and Steve O’Keefe have not done enough to be considered compelling baggy green candidates. So goes the logic. The logic is bollocks built on a myth and it is holding Australia’s cricket back.
What makes a young cricketer compelling is not what a scorebook tells you but what the eyes see. One canny Australian selector, John Benaud, once described another, Lawrie Sawle, like so: “The skin at the edges of his eyes and mouth is sparrow-footed, creased in the squint of assessment, concentration…” Andrew Hilditch, David Boon and Jamie Cox crouched behind the netting at Australian team practice, that ain’t.
In Mark Cameron the eyes see a right-armer, lively pace, whose close-in angle and sideways movement gives batsmen’s techniques a tense, prolonged going-over. Phil Hughes is a left-hander whose technique has more holes than a colander but is underpinned by a kitchen sink – a kitchen sink that he throws at anything wide of off stump. Survive till the drinks break and he’s 65 not out. Cricketers like these two make good teams great. Somehow an ordinary Australian team aspiring merely to be half decent cannot find a place for them.
Full postWaltzing, not wilting
In 1973 – a year when the Ashes were technically in England’s possession, but not for long – Mary Gates migrated to Australia with her husband and four children
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
In 1973 – a year when the Ashes were technically in England’s possession, but not for long – Mary Gates migrated to Australia with her husband and four children. Their luggage could have filled the entire back of a ute. But that didn’t bother the friendly customs officer. “Welcome to Australia,” he said, and through they went, into the Sydney Airport arrivals hall, where the handsome new prime minister Gough Whitlam stood beaming, a crowd was singing “Waltzing Matilda”, and the sequel to The Adventures of Bazza McKenzie was being shot. “What a welcome,” thought Mary. “What a country.”
What a bloody country indeed, eleven Englishmen might have been thinking to themselves this morning, for the 16,897th time in 128 years of Ashes rivalry. Graeme Swann was pitching the ball into some loose, black and perfectly round sods of dirt. This was producing substantial spin. It wasn’t gentle, parabolic spin. It was rapid spin, the kind that makes a batsman’s movements jerky and is hard to see off.
Yet see it off, somehow, is what Australia’s openers did. Simon Katich bunted various balls through short leg’s hands, wide of the man at short extra cover, and into the spot where a fourth slip should have been. Shane Watson popped one over silly point’s head and another out of short leg’s reach. All this happened in a handful of minutes. Australia, needing to bat six sessions for a draw, were one session down and no damage done.
Full postThe travails of Xavier Doherty
The cap did not fit
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
The cap did not fit. Away went the drinks cart and off came Xavier Doherty’s baggy green headgear. That’s when you saw it: an angry-looking red stripe, slightly curved, imprinted across Doherty’s forehead and just above the eye-line.
An hour’s play was up. It was time – the worst of times – for Doherty to have a bowl. England were three down and as good as a thousand in front. Batsman Kevin Pietersen had taken to tiptoeing low across his crease then leaping bolt upright, pummelling ball after ball into the midwicket fence. This was off a fast bowler, Peter Siddle, who had a trio of men guarding that fence. What chance the spinner Doherty – especially on this, his last chance?
With bucking arms and his tongue peeping out he bustled in. Three dot balls: a long hop and two fuller ones. Keeper Brad Haddin let out an encouraging growl. “Good start, Doh.”
Full postThe Lost Art of Intercepting
Give me a time machine and a choice – one match, one moment, one ball – and I’d say take me to Old Trafford, mid-afternoon, on the 26th day of July in 1902
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Give me a time machine and a choice – one match, one moment, one ball – and I’d say take me to Old Trafford, mid-afternoon, on the 26th day of July in 1902. Eight runs to win, two wickets in hand, and England’s Dick Lilley hit Hugh Trumble high and to leg. Stationed on the boundary rope, Clem Hill sighted it early. No hope of a catch. But perhaps he could save a four or six? So he ran and kept running, 25 yards, until without breaking stride he sort of half dived, half flew, two legs horizontal behind him and one hand outstretched in front. Over to Clem: “Nobody was more astonished than I … The ball had stuck. I could hardly realise I had made the catch. I was the proudest man on the ground.”
Whether cricketers bat and bowl better than they used to is a matter of constant conjecture. But fielding, it is reckoned, that is definitely superior. You hear this said with some certainty. Yet out of all cricket’s elements, here we have least cause for certainty. There are no averages to guide us, no meaningful statistics to look up. Noughts by batsmen and 0-for-100s by bowlers live on naked and forever in old Bill Frindall scorebooks. Fieldsmen’s dropped catches are no sooner spilt than forgotten.
All we have to go on is what our eyes see: men helter-skeltering after balls that in days of yore might have excited a polite waddle. Yet our eyes tell us conflicting things, too. Today, for instance, they saw Xavier Doherty tackle a straightforward run-out opportunity with the sangfroid of a child drunk on Fanta playing pin the tail on the donkey. Ten minutes later the ball floated towards Mike Hussey in the gully.
Full postTyson, Hadlee, Holding … Jimmy?
Jimmy Anderson’s second delivery to Michael Clarke today swung 11 centimetres, the mere width of a golf hole
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Jimmy Anderson’s second delivery to Michael Clarke today swung 11 centimetres, the mere width of a golf hole. Two centimetres more and the ball would have missed the bat’s edge. Four centimetres fewer and it would have kissed the bat’s middle. But it didn’t, and it wouldn’t, and for Clarke what happened next did not bear thinking about. He got a snick to second slip.
Centimetres and if-onlys – that’s cricket. No one so far has satisfactorily explained how Anderson could bowl so thrillingly in Brisbane yet be so feebly rewarded. His old coach Duncan Fletcher took a stab in his Guardian column, calling it a “big mystery” that makes “you wonder”. “I have seen this before as a coach,” Fletcher went on wise-soundingly … And then changed the subject. We should have expected nothing much more. It is why ex-coach Fletcher’s now writing, not doing. Besides, some things are beyond explaining.
Today Anderson’s one ball at Ricky Ponting basically bounced and straightened. It was the perfect hello to an old dog who has picked up many new tricks over the years but found one bad habit impossible to shed: his anxious, jabbing beginnings. This ball from Anderson was not full or short. Ponting could comfortably stride neither forward nor back. The result was a sort of no-man’s-land hover – and Ponting’s fourth golden duck, three of them caught behind the wicket, in the space of 24 months.
Full postMystery on Haddin's head
An hour wafted by on Monday before Xavier Doherty got a bowl – crazy, seeing as how one of the morning’s big intrigues promised to be the sight of Australia’s new spinner operating on a last-day pitch with cracks in it
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
An hour wafted by on Monday before Xavier Doherty got a bowl – crazy, seeing as how one of the morning’s big intrigues promised to be the sight of Australia’s new spinner operating on a last-day pitch with cracks in it. It took him a while but eventually he found one. This delivery landed outside off stump, bang in the middle of that crack, then swerved 90 centimetres to the left. Wicketkeeper Brad Haddin, failing to dangle a glove within 60 centimetres of it, scrunched up his nose in annoyance. Four byes was the wash-up. By the time poor Doherty was handing his cap to the umpire, itching to begin another over, something in the picture had changed.
It took a moment to dawn on you what it was: you couldn’t see the wicketkeeper’s face anymore. He had stuck a helmet over it. The helmet wasn’t there before. So why now? Something, you supposed, to do with the crack and those 90 centimetres. But that still didn’t tell you why. Something, presumably, to do with Haddin being scared of getting hit. Hit how? And by what?
By a wedge of wood in the eye from a flashing blade’s toe end? That didn’t seem much of a reason. Wicketkeepers can go a lifetime without that sort of ill luck befalling them. Maybe Haddin was afraid Doherty might dig into his trouser pocket and pluck out a leaping taipan, its beady eyes fixed on his windpipe. But Doherty is a slider, not a Shane Warne. Skid, not bounce, is his poison. The Gabba pitch – Warne’s traditional 22 yards of Queensland paradise – was Doherty’s idea of five days in Tennant Creek.
Full postChannelling Dennis
Could we have a little less politeness and a little more "stupid emotion" from Mitchell Johnson?
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Forty summers ago in Adelaide, a gusty wind flapping from the south, Dennis Lillee took the new ball for Australia. From that day on he never willingly let it go. Occasionally a captain tried prising the new ball off him. That made Dennis cross enough to bite the ears off a kitten. The first time it happened, in 1975–76, Dennis was doing his warm-ups when Greg Chappell tossed the ball to Gary Gilmour instead. This insult to his manliness brought out the little boy in Dennis. With a pout on his lips and lead in his shoes, he ambled in first change and served up half an hour’s crap on a platter – only to realise, after a word from his mate Bacchus Marsh, that in doing so he was proving the skipper right all along.
When it happened again eight summers later he took the opposite approach – and again proved his captain correct. Fine, huffed Dennis, if bloody Kim Hughes preferred Geoff Lawson, Rod Hogg and Carl Rackemann to him, then he, Dennis, would bowl so super-amazingly as to put a couple of extra z’s in amazing. The result, he confessed, was “the biggest load of rubbish ever seen at the Gabba… I bowled with stupid emotion instead of my head”.
Today at the Gabba it took about 10 minutes to suspect that England’s opening batsmen were not for unsticking. So we sat and waited for Mitchell Johnson to be given the ball. Johnson – in theory, and in talent – is Australia’s match-winner. So we sat. And we waited. Dennis, upon being denied the new cherry, was furious about not being warned in advance and even furiouser that, well, that it had happened at all. No noticeable fury simmered in Johnson during his long wait today. No fire came out of his left arm once the wait was over.
Full postThe hour that mattered
Had we been playing in a log-fenced park up the road, and not in a cauldron of concrete and plastic, the seagulls would have been spooked and the people pushing their prams around the oval mystified
Christian Ryan
25-Feb-2013
Had we been playing in a log-fenced park up the road, and not in a cauldron of concrete and plastic, the seagulls would have been spooked and the people pushing their prams around the oval mystified. It was that kind of morning in Brisbane. Three times in 15 minutes a beseeching yell cut the air. The people would have looked up from their prams, seen that no one in the middle had moved, and shuffled on their way again. What just happened?
It is one of Test cricket’s charms that when not much seems to be happening, that’s when the really big things are happening. An hour went by. Those three lbw shouts against Mike Hussey were the only moments of uproar. One was not out, another was out yet not out, and the other one was not out, then out, then not out again. Everything else seemed unspectacularly uncomplicated. There were not many runs. There were a great many instances of batsmen poking and missing. And the bowlers kept landing the ball on the same spot.
It was fine bowling – exquisite bowling, in Jimmy Anderson’s case. Had Australian Rules been the game, England might have gone three goals ahead. But Test cricket is not meant to be fair. Momentum does not always translate into one team is winning and the other team’s losing. You actually have to take a wicket. For an hour that wicket seemed imminent. And then it didn’t.
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