Rob's Lobs
To walk or not to walk
One member of the Walking Lobby expressed the view that the pursuit of money – in individual and collective terms - lies at the heart of the dishonesty that underpins the philosophy of the Non-Walkers
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Thank-you, MS Dhoni, from the bottom of my heart. Had you not claimed that “catch” off Kevin Pietersen at Lord’s today, the Walking Lobby might have continued imagining it had half a leg to stand on.
The Walking Lobby never goes away. Every so often, it dons a suit and tie and bursts into the room, jabbing the air with a big fat cigar (Cuban preferably), wailing about declining ethical standards and professional liars, urging batsmen to get the game’s values back to where they once belonged. And, just as often, some slapping-down is necessary.
Full postThe ballad of Murali and Barry
Racism and jealousy: does it really matter which comes first
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Greatness comes in many shapes and hues. Rarely is it indisputable. A Londoner may deify Winston Churchill while a Dresden resident regards him as the devil incarnate. One of sport’s most alluring qualities is that, by dint of its statistical foundations, we can all, theoretically, agree about the magnitude of a performer’s achievements. Yet still we quibble.
Last Friday evening, I was at the Ford Sport and Social Club in Newbury Park, east London, primarily to see Nasser Hussain conduct a coaching session for the Sky Sports cameras with the girls and boys of Three Caps CC, recipients of this season’s Adopt-a-Club scheme run by The Wisden Cricketer. A splendid time was had by all, yet still a sour taste lingered.
Falling into conversation with the magazine’s deputy editor, Ed Craig, and a representative of the Essex County Board, we pondered whether Muttiah Muralitharan should be classified as a finger-spinner or a wrist-spinner. There was a decent case for either, we agreed. I mentioned that I had just written a piece for a Test programme putting him, for the sake of argument, into the former category, though I was not convinced. Cue an all-too familiar line from the Essex man, one I had fondly if naively hoped I would never hear again: “Of course, you should hear the pros talk about his chucking. They changed the law for his benefit, didn’t they?”
Full postWhen averages strike out
Strike rates tell us how often a bowler achieves his aim; averages tell us the price he has to pay for every success
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
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“If he’d played in a sandpit, he’d have got wickets.” Thus proclaimed Jimmy Adams during a documentary on Malcolm Marshall screened by Sky Sports on Saturday. It was an occasion for awe: Sir Garry and Sir Viv, Mikey, Curtly, Desi and Lance all queued up to pay homage to the man all agreed was the brainiest fast bowler they’d ever known, the finest bowler ever to pull on the maroon cap. Sir Ian chimed in too. It was also a tale of shock – that shockingly premature death from cancer. You could see the lump in Viv’s throat, the tears in Curtly’s eyes.
Marshall was a walking mockery of virtually every rule in the textbook. Here was a fast bowler of 5ft 10in with an open-chested action who nevertheless contrived to swing the ball both ways and bowl bouncers at nerve-shredding pace. Name another world-beating sportsman who has defied orthodoxy so conspicuously.
Which is why, if nobody ever strutted a cricket field quite like Sir Viv, no one swaggered across one quite like Marshall. Not for him the celebratory whoop or the finger-pointing send-off; all you saw, virtually without exception, was the smile of a man reasonably satisfied by the inevitable outcome of sound strategy and bottomless self-belief.
Full postThe beauty of ugly
Chanderpaul seems oblivious to it all, disdainful of such niceties, and, crucially, wholly un-self-conscious
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Ain’t no bout a doubt it, as those fabled funksters Graham Central Station so eloquently put it. On today’s evidence at Edgbaston, Shivnarine Chanderpaul is the closest the art of batsmanship has yet come to a perfect Jekyll-and-Hyde fusion.
In Tests he is as patient as an extremely laid-back saint. In ODIs he is a creative, flamboyant, Vegas-type hustler, always seeking the angles nobody else has thought to cover. Here, surely, is living, breathing proof that mastering the two formats should always be within the compass of those prepared to learn and adapt.
Full postOf necessary evils
All today’s antics achieved, for this less than dispassionate observer, was to underline why this town ain’t big enough for two necessary evils.
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Don’t always believe what it says on the tin. Halfway through James Anderson’s double-wicket maiden at Lord’s today, I was busy reconstituting my iPod when I noticed that those clever clogs at iTunes categorise the musical genre occupied by Man, my favourite Welsh band, as “Latin”. Which is a bit like classifying The Beatles as hip-hop. Or the best ODIs as runfests, as the ICC would like us to believe.
Seldom has it been such a delight to concoct a sentence containing the words “double”, “wicket” and “maiden”. The sight of an absorbing if decidedly unelectrifying match revolving around the efforts of Anderson, Fidel Edwards and Stuart Broad, three young quicks no less, was a blessed one for jaded palates. After a fortnight of non-stop Twenty20 (a form wherein Dmitri Mascarenhas’s career haul of four maidens in more than four seasons apparently leads all-comers), it was something of a relief to get back to the comparative sobriety and even-handedness of the 50-over version, albeit only something. After all, the outcome was set in stone less than halfway through the West Indies’ innings.
To Sky’s estimable David Lloyd, the commentator who to these ears best treads that fine line straddling authority, fairness, irreverence and levity, England’s innings was “tedious”. This may have been the understandable response of a sensibility bruised by successive evenings of breathless audience-rousing (“Please take it seriously, just not too seriously”), but it might also testify to a deeper truth. Given that man can no more subsist on a strict Twenty20 diet than on a lobster-and-champagne regime, do we really need TWO slower versions when the original remains much the most satisfying. Put it another way: was the planet really that much worse off when technical hitches halted ball-by-ball broadcasts of this afternoon’s “events” in Belfast?
Full postDouble the fun
If the almighty US cultural dollar is valued as much as it seems to be, they could always go the whole hog and trim XIs to Xs and have nine alternate innings per side a la baseball, each expiring with the fall of a wicket
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
After a few days of purported “cricket” squelched by what is reportedly the wettest British June on record, with its deeply unsatisfying array of fast-forwarded Twelve12, Ten10 and even Five5 farces, how heartening to see one reader, Michael Fernando, chiming with my fervent belief that the game’s latest golden goose needs surgery of the back-to-basics variety.
Ten years ago next month, on July 21, 1997, 5,343 spectators at Old Trafford witnessed the future of abridged cricket. In the first floodlit 11-a-side county match, a strictly experimental affair, Lancashire and Yorkshire decided to split their 50-over affair into quarters – alternate chunks of 25 overs – so that both teams would bat in daylight as well as under lights.
Full postWhy Twenty20 vision is impaired
Much as I’d love to see such games played over two innings per side – cricket without second chances is like a BLT sandwich without the B - I have few quibbles with the philosophy or the format
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
He is not a chap whose boots I would normally be prepared to lick, but I must express my gratitude to Lord MacLaurin for advancing the cause of 20-over cricket a decade ago. The hoots of derision with which the idea was initially greeted are not remembered now. And much as I’d love to see such games played over two innings per side – cricket without second chances is like a BLT sandwich without the B - I have few quibbles with the philosophy or the format. Unless, that is, it results in the sort of farce a friend of mine endured yesterday.
He went to Canterbury to see Kent entertain Essex with some friends. They were a little late, arriving in the middle of the fifth over, saw four balls bowled and then watched it tip down, driving the players off for about two hours. The match eventually resumed at 5.30, with a good two and a half hours of pristine daylight to go – oodles of time to complete the remaining 35 overs. Or so you would have thought. Instead, Kent had to stick on what they had and the visitors were left score 50 in five overs under the dear old Duckworth-Lewis.
Full postSaluting the equivocal Englishmen
One is generally regarded as a byword for nerdiness and prima donnaesque truculence, the other as the flat-track bully who couldn’t stop Australians kicking sand in his face, the underachievers’ underachiever
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
Caddick and Hick. Sounds like a shady law firm. If talent was the only passport required for entry into sport’s promised land, their Test curriculum vitaes would be festooned with 400 wickets and 10,000 runs, and a century of caps apiece.
As it is, notwithstanding the fact that Andrew Caddick and Graeme Hick are the leading active first-class performers in their respective disciplines, one is generally regarded as a byword for nerdiness and prima donnaesque truculence, the other as the flat-track bully who couldn’t stop Australians kicking sand in his face, the underachievers’ underachiever. Flags of convenience never were entirely convenient.
Full postThe man who should have been king
Adam Hollioake led a star-deprived, profoundly maverick but one-for-all XI to victory in the 1997-98 Champions Trophy, the only one-day pot England have won in a tournament featuring more than three sides
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
This has already been quite a year for comebacks involving my favourite entertainers, what with The Police, Steely Dan and Squeeze all accepting sizeable sums to return to concert stages. I sincerely doubt he is in it for the money – he appears to be doing fairly nicely thank-you in the property game in his native Perth – but another is scheduled to return to the boards on Friday when Adam Hollioake makes his debut for Essex in the Twenty20 Cup. An ex-Surrey captain turning out for that Chelmsford lot? It’ll take some getting used to.
The upshot of a spot of beach cricket with Graham Gooch on the Gold Coast in January, Hollioake’s return to arms prompts the odd wild imagining. Since he was arguably the first player to master the super-abbreviated game – Surrey’s first defeat came in their 14th match, the 2004 final, and he was the leading wicket-taker in each of the first two seasons – might it be that Gooch was acting under ECB instructions? Even in semi-retirement, Hollioake is still the best man to captain England in the inaugural Twenty20 World Cup.
At Surrey, he succeeded where Stuart Surridge’s successors had repeatedly and miserably stumbled, presiding over a gift-laden dressing room yet subsuming egos to the point where trophies flowed whatever the format. Strong-minded yet flexible, tactically sharp and a decent psychologist, it was entirely typical that the one time I know I offended him was with praise and admiration.
Full postFrom Stan to Ollie
The first time I saw him bat for England, I saw Stan Laurel in him, the same rebellious tufts of hair, the same vaguely bemused expression, the same understated command of his craft
Rob Steen
25-Feb-2013
And so, in the wake of one of the more bloodlessly humdrum Test series of recent times, to the burning question. No, not "Can Caribbean batting possibly plumb lower depths?", nor "Will Steve Harmison ever dismiss a good Test batsman again by judgement rather than luck?", nor even "Does Shivnarine Chanderpaul put glue on his soles before taking guard?" or Is "Ryan Sidebottom auditioning for the male lead in Nell Gwynne - The Movie"? but "Has Michael Vaughan succeeded Steve Waugh and Brian Lara as cricket's least self-effacing man?"
Even in his leaving of the one-day captaincy (voluntary or otherwise), England's not-always-enlightened despot of a captain sounded like a self-seeking grouse, insisting that having different skippers never leads to success. Displaying an encouraging disregard for mindless deference, Paul Collingwood, rightly and properly deemed his likeliest successor, was quick to cite Australia - presumably referring to the Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh axis - as counter-evidence.
In some respects Vaughan should be arrogant, albeit inwardly rather than outwardly. All cricket captains must have a streak of intellectual - or at least social - superiority. How else to persuade men of often greater stature that they should defer to you? Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton, his immediate long-term predecessors, both thought they knew better than anyone else, as their vibrant on-air debates bear out. The difference is that they had a touch of grace. They also knew when to go.
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