The Long Handle

You could have egg on your face in no time

12-Jul-2014

After the sinking of HMS Flower, lost somewhere between Brisbane and Adelaide, English cricket journalists struggled to stay afloat among the wreckage, clutching at whatever intellectual driftwood they could lay their hands on. Some of them grabbed at the idea that it was all Kevin's fault. Others hung onto makeshift theories assembled out of passing debris: burnout, Graham Gooch's negative vibes, El Nino.

But all of them shared a common bond, forged in shared adversity. They had seen things. Terrible things. Nothing would be the same again. And they were resolute that when they made land again, they would tell the whole story.

Something was rotten in the state of English cricket and they were going to lay it bare. They were agreed that thrashing India on the damp green pitches of Blighty this summer would not make things all right. That would be like papering over the cracks, like throwing a cosy old rug over an unsightly stain on a sofa, like growing a beard to cover a facial blemish, like wearing a hat to hide a bald spot, like… well you get the idea.

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Beware Shakib

If your children don't go to sleep, he will get them

Andrew Hughes

09-Jul-2014

The crash of 2008 was the biggest bank-related catastrophe this planet has faced since the last one. The aftershocks of this man-made disaster are still being felt (although not by the men who made it.) The global economy is more sluggish than an elderly slug just after a heavy lunch and it may be years before we are able to refer to the profession of banking without attaching a ripe expletive.

So it is heartening to report that one sector of the global economy is doing well. The Bangladeshi Hyperbole industry is flourishing, thanks to the efforts of men like BCB President Nazmul Hassan who has this week shown himself to be a master of the hyperbolic arts.

We all know what happens when cricketers are naughty. There's a spot of post-match detention, a splutter of tabloid outrage, a bland statement from the board reminding players not to make fun of the umpire's moustache/smuggle endangered tree frogs onto the field of play/declare war during the lunch interval. The guilty man issues a mea culpa on Twitter and we all get on with our lives.

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The Sharapova lesson

Cricket is a minor league sport and apparently content to remain so

Andrew Hughes

05-Jul-2014

Every now and then you come across an example of such startling human ignorance that you have to sit down, wipe your face with a handkerchief, and pour yourself a stiff drink. Brace yourselves readers, for this is one of those moments

Maria Sharapova has never heard of Sachin Tendulkar.

Who exactly is Maria Sharapova, you might ask, petulantly, but you're only pretending. You know who Maria Sharapova is. Yet of the world's greatest living batsman, the man who built monumental peaks of batting stats and then built some more on top of those, one of only two living cricketers entitled to use the world "Master" in his nickname; of him, Maria is entirely, blissfully ignorant. It is enough to make you weep.

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Lessons from ancient Pompeii

And why we need to give the pink ball a chance

Andrew Hughes

02-Jul-2014

As any unlicensed spectrumologist will tell you, the colour of an object can tell you a lot about its personality. For instance, red objects are usually dynamic, extroverted and, if you rub them up and down on your trousers first, able to swing round corners.

Sadly, Cricket Australia didn't think to bring in consultants from the colour industry before they made their decision to try pink cricket balls in day-night Sheffield Shield games. The result has been chaos and a big thumbs-down from the hard-working Aussie cricketer who knows what he likes (and it isn't pink leather).

A mass survey of the bat-and-ball fraternity revealed this week that they have taken to the pink cricket ball in the way that a Yorkshireman might react if you told him he was getting an oven-braised flank of ox with sautéed-onion jus and sculpted batter on a bed of steamed root vegetables, instead of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, for his Sunday lunch.

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How well do you know current cricket?

Are you abreast of developments in cricket? Take the Long Handle test

Andrew Hughes

28-Jun-2014

As we all know, cricket never sleeps, and even when it looks as though it's dozing, it is merely resting its eyes. To keep abreast of unfolding cricket happenings is a constant struggle, so to help you out, here's the Long Handle test, a chance to impress yourself with how clever you are or to wallow in your contemptible cricket ignorance. (Answers at the bottom of the page. No cheating. No biting. No referrals to the third umpire.)

1. Who was controversially appointed head of the ICC this week?

a) Luis Suarez
b) Osama Bin Laden (deceased)
c) Spongebob Squarepants
d) Mr Srinivasan

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How do you solve a problem like Alastair Cook?

Just give him four years at the helm and be done with it

Andrew Hughes

25-Jun-2014

If you read English newspapers you might have formed the impression that handsome batting superhero Alastair Cook is a bit of a disappointment as a leader of men. Headlines such as "Calamity Cook" (Times), "Captain Comedy" (Essex Bugle) and "Cook's Concatenation of Cricket Clangers Causes Cereal Crop Catastrophe" (Farmer's Weekly) suggest that his captaincy skills are not particularly highly rated in his home country.

It isn't just the experts in the press box who feel qualified to point out his failings. Waitresses at the ECB canteen snigger that he leaves the salt too square and fails to move the vinegar in short despite that fact that Ian Bell always has vinegar on his chips. His neighbours shake their heads at the predictable straight lines of his vegetable patch, an orthodox arrangement that the modern slug has no trouble penetrating.

Even the England team coach driver regularly takes to Twitter to criticise Cook's choice of driving music, although with hindsight, his decision to go with Radiohead's "No Suprises" as his rousing pre-Gabba anthem was rather ill-judged.

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Your choice between premium cricket and bargain cricket

Give fixers and those who are ambivalent to it a whole new sport to muck up

Andrew Hughes

21-Jun-2014

Although most humans are perfectly decent people, there exists among us, a shadowy, untrustworthy, degenerate group of desperadoes, living on the margins of respectable society, beyond the pale of civilisation. I am talking, of course, about people who don't like cricket. How do they stumble from one day to the next? How do they survive?

Nevertheless, they are with us. And if you have non-cricket loving friends, you will usually find that whenever our sport has one of its less than excellent moments and finds itself spread all over the front pages, these types will ask you, usually with a grin, what gives.

Naturally, at the mention of match-fixing, one of your other friends will remind you that it isn't actually match-fixing, before smiling the smug self-satisfied smile of the superior intellect. This is the same kind of person who ruined the Millennium celebrations by repeatedly pointing out that it was taking place a year too early.

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Let's hear it for the glorious five-day draw

It helps save the format from extinction

Andrew Hughes

18-Jun-2014

I think we're all agreed that Test cricket is on the way out. It twitches occasionally, but this is no more than the last spasm of a fly that has banged its head on the cold uncaring window of commercial fate one hundred times in a row and is now expiring on the same dusty window ledge where all dodgy insect-sport metaphors go to die. Test cricket is a goner, and will soon be as extinct as the pterodactyl, monetarism, and the penny-farthing.

Or is it? Fear not, cricket fans, because although the ICC is showing the same urgency in saving Test cricket that the Emperor Nero did upon hearing that there was a conflagration in the Roman precincts, the thrilling inconclusiveness of Monday's play at Lord's showed why the format must endure, and how we can help to save it.

Conventional attempts to save Test cricket have depended on making it more like other sports: gladiator contests where one side is crushed and the other triumphant. A modern audience doesn't insist on literal blood and gore, but they do like to savour the sight of players enduring the agony of defeat, or worse still, the agony of fearing defeat.

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The utterly expected tale of the Kiwi Calypso

The only thing to raise an eyebrow at in the Sabina Park Test was Chris Gayle's vow of abstinence

Andrew Hughes

14-Jun-2014

Children are generally quite gullible. I was a child so I know. When I was young, I was happy to believe in all kinds of nonsense: tooth fairies, vampires, shape-shifting alien monsters, flying robots, talking cars, supply-side economics.

But if you'd told me that in my lifetime a touring New Zealand team would crush West Indies by 186 runs at Sabina Park, in Kingston, in Jamaica, I'd have given you a suspicious, narrow-eyed look, before backing away slowly and running off to find a policeman. Either that or I'd think you were a traveller from the seventh dimension and ask you for Darth Vader's autograph.

No film studio on the planet would have touched the script for Kiwi Calypso: an uplifting tale of how a plucky nation famous for flightless birds, wind, and unnecessarily confrontational rugby dances, overcame the odds to beat the greatest cricket team ever assembled in their own backyard. An audience can suspend disbelief in the case of bike-riding aliens, self-driving cars and flying men in blue tights, but New Zealand beating West Indies in Jamaica? Come on buddy, no one's buying that.

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England's latest New Era

And it's probably "improved" as well

Andrew Hughes