The Long Handle
Cracking cricket's morality code
His minders may frown at his decision to have a drink before a game, but do fans care if Jesse Ryder's hydration levels were down a notch as long as he can still do magic with a bat?
Andrew Hughes
22-Feb-2014
For the religious believer, morality is a simple business. It's all there in black and white, there's a rule for every situation, and if you're stuck, a man in a robe will happily explain for you what God meant.
For the rest of us, it's a stickier business. We have to work out for ourselves what is naughty, what might be naughty in certain circumstances and what is not naughty as long as you take precautions, and then we have to negotiate with other people.
This can lead to multiple moralities. The moral code of traffic wardens, for instance, appears to demand of its adherents a dogged commitment to spreading misery and perturbation amongst the car-driving populace. Politicians too have a distinctive moral code, one that allows them the freedom to practice the ancient art of truth-massage, and to exercise their traditional skills of ethical flexibility and intellectual suppleness.
Full postThe joy of Johnson
How one fast bowler gatecrashed several batting tea parties
Andrew Hughes
19-Feb-2014
Cricket could be described as a collection of people standing around in a field performing elaborate athletic rituals while they wait for something to happen.
This is not a criticism. The standing-around aspect of cricket raises it above most other sports. Football, for example, also consists of people in a field waiting for something to happen, but in football, the people spend all their time running hither and thither in a breathless and frequently undignified pursuit of events. An hour or so of watching people haring about recklessly can drive you to distraction, as anyone who has shared a house with more than one young child can confirm.
Rugby too involves a certain amount of standing, with marginally less running than football, but features considerably more heaving, grunting, punching and bleeding, none of which is conducive to a pleasing viewing experience. The only other sport that comes close to cricket is baseball, but the positive impression created by the lack of meaningful action is spoilt by the players' unhygienic expectorative tendencies.
Full postThe alternative IPL auction
How Hyderabad and Kolkata wrestled for Ishant, and other delights from a parallel universe
Andrew Hughes
15-Feb-2014
ESPNcricinfo's coverage of the IPL's annual money-throwing contest has been unimpeachably good, but still, despite the penetrating analysis and comprehensive fact-trawling, something has been missing. Journalists are very good at telling you what happened, but hopeless when it comes to telling you what didn't happen, what might have happened in a parallel universe, or what they dreamt about as they dozed off waiting for someone to buy Ian Bell.
So to make up the fictional deficit, here is the essential guide to the key imaginary events at this year's money jamboree:
Mallya's Millions
With enormous piles of cash in their pockets and only two days to get rid of it, the franchisees embarked on an overspend orgy, flinging money at anything that looked like it might be able to slog a few over midwicket or throw down a couple of overs of tidy legspin.
Full postWith enormous piles of cash in their pockets and only two days to get rid of it, the franchisees embarked on an overspend orgy, flinging money at anything that looked like it might be able to slog a few over midwicket or throw down a couple of overs of tidy legspin.
Cricket's great board game
It's called IPLopoly. And it's televised
Andrew Hughes
12-Feb-2014
There is nothing like a board game to bring people together. In our family, Monopoly was the pastime of choice. I remember one particular game during the Christmas holidays. It started in cordial fashion, just after lunch, with a little light conversation, a jovial choosing of pieces and a few rounds of innocent dice-rolling, property-acquiring fun.
By mid-afternoon, things were getting a little fraught as my brother had turned Fenchurch Street Station into a casino-leisure-hotel-complex and was charging ten times the market rate if you landed on it; my mother and father were involved in a messy legal dispute over the naming rights to Marylebone, and I had resigned as owner of the Water Works.
By the evening, I was in jail, having fallen foul of the complex rules regarding franchise ownership, my father had gone bankrupt and been expelled from the game for defaulting on a bank guarantee, my mother had been suspended because of irregularities concerning alleged bribes connected with the purchase of Pentonville Road, and my brother had appointed himself head of a Monopoly enquiry to investigate in-game wrongdoing.
Full postThe more things change...
...the more the ECB reminds you of the days when the sun never set on the MCC
Andrew Hughes
08-Feb-2014
As the chaps at the ECB flap about like a flock of well-fed puffins whose cosy perch on the cliff face has been disturbed by the arrival of a puffin-eating cliff-climbing Antarctic snow kangaroo, we should remember that English cricket is usually like this.
The ECB masquerades as a thrusting, dynamic executive that has swept away the embarrassing relics of a time when the sun never set on the MCC. All those public-school educated men in red-and-yellow ties have been elbowed off the stage, to be replaced by slightly less well-educated men in designer ties.
Yet as the saying goes, you can take English cricket out of the MCC, but you can't take the MCC out of English cricket. In fact there's something reassuringly 20th century about recent goings-on: bizarre autocratic decisions, thinly disguised personal vendettas, a patrician's refusal to communicate, and a certain unmistakable whiff of panic, as unsettling as a hint of brandy on the breath of the relative who was supposed to be driving you home.
Full postThe Shoaib Malik Semi-Final
In which our hero performs feats of athleticism while checking his email
Andrew Hughes
05-Feb-2014
To be honest, I'd forgotten about the Big Bash League. You know how short the attention span of the average T20 fan is. We're like goldfish. We're attracted to the flashing stumps, the fireworks, the colourful clothes and the shouting, but as soon as the music stops, we completely forget why we were watching, who we are, where we live and what we were talking about at the start of the sentence.
Still, a week is too long to wait for the knockout stage. For a month or so, the thing rattled along at a game a day, then it ground to halt. Returning to it now feels like a contractual obligation, not a climax; a completion of formalities, like asking the birthday girl to blow out some candles eight days after her party.
Tuesday's game will forever be known as the Shoaib Malik Semi-Final. At least it will in my house. It was with some surprise that I first noticed Shoaib in the Hobart team earlier this year. "What's Shoaib Malik doing playing for Hobart?" I asked the pigeon perched on my window sill. The pigeon didn't know. I'm not sure that Shoaib knew. The Hobart selectors certainly didn't, and the poor chap has been moved here and there in the batting line-up like a piece of furniture that doesn't quite fit with the décor.
Full postBullying for dummies
It's particularly hard to stand up against bullies when all your friends desert you. But that doesn't mean you should stop trying
Andrew Hughes
01-Feb-2014
It isn't easy being a bully. People think it's just a matter of looking tough or finding imaginative ways to hurt people before stealing their lollipop, but there's a lot more to it. For a start, a lot of a bully's time is taken up with PR. A bully's reputation should precede him; otherwise he has to establish his credentials every time he meets a new kid, which can be very time-consuming, not to say wearing on the knuckles.
In fact, the very best bullies are so skilled at the PR side of things, they can convince you that not only is it inevitable that you will be bullied by them, but that being bullied by them is perfectly fair and reasonable, if only you'd stop to think about it.
I can still remember our old school bully Barry's reasoning on the matter. His argument was that since his father was an investment banker, our lunch money was the product of a vibrant economy that Barry's father had helped to create, so for Barry to confiscate our lunch money was just a more equitable way of distributing the nation's wealth, and if we had a problem with that, we could take it up with his big fat fist.
Full postEngland's dirty laundry
And the larger problem of what happens when cricketers open their mouths
Andrew Hughes
29-Jan-2014
From an early age we are exposed to proverbs. These are usually imparted by elderly relatives in lieu of them having any original wisdom of their own to pass on; packaged bite-sized pieces of philosophy, dusty cultural heirlooms that are presented to us with great solemnity, whether we want them or not.
"Less haste, more speed" is one I heard a lot when I was young. I was most likely to hear it on a Monday morning, particularly one of those Monday mornings when I was forced to brush my teeth, put on my trousers and wolf down a piece of toast all at the same time, because I was ten minutes late for something or other.
In such circumstances, this hoary piece of folk advice is entirely useless. When you're badly behind schedule, you need to take a few risks and cut a few corners to make up time. Being hasty may leave you with toothpaste up your nose and your trousers on back to front, but it's your only chance of catching that bus.
Full postAustralia's alert anti-foreigner squads
There comes a time when even the most tolerant country has to draw the line
Andrew Hughes
25-Jan-2014
As we all know, Australia is a hospitable sort of place. Throughout history, the land of the big red rock has welcomed immigrants, whether they were 18th-century explorers, Victorian toddlers sentenced to 30 years hard labour for stealing a boiled egg, or refugees from Pakistan who can bowl a reasonably accurate legbreak.
But there comes a time when even the most tolerant country has to draw the line, and that time has come. Australia may look enormous on your map, but most of it is an inhospitable howling wilderness of dust, crocodiles and bad soap operas. Most Australians are crammed together along the coast, and with many of the nation's sheds, hotels and portable toilets already occupied by terrifying arachnids, there simply isn't any room for newcomers.
So why not crack down on the spiders? The vast majority of them are born and bred Australians, with as much right to remain as any other eight-legged, multiple-eyed, venomous-fanged citizen. They also perform a crucial role in the Antipodean ecosystem, keeping Australia's streets clear by eating all the stray cats and dogs.
Full postAll hail cricket's bright future
There are advantages to the proposed restructuring of the ICC (and we're not talking only about savings on furniture)
Andrew Hughes
22-Jan-2014
As any general will tell you, staging a coup is a tricky business. It's one of the five most stressful things a human being can do, along with moving house, getting a divorce, planning a dinner party for people you don't really like but who, for some reason or other, you have no choice but to try to impress, and supporting Worcestershire.
First, there's the invites to consider. You've got to invite enough people to make it a proper coup - there's nothing worse than turning up in your tank to find it's just you, your cousin, and your old friend from school who was between jobs. Then there's the logistics of the thing: who has to be where at what time, whose job is it to blow up the airfield, who's on assassination duty, who's bringing the snacks and so on.
So no one undertakes a coup lightly, even an administrative coup, like the one underway at the ICC. As we speak, BCCI tanks are parked on the finely manicured lawns of ICC HQ, a crack commando unit of ECB bureaucrats has infiltrated the building and is planting booby traps in David Richardson's spreadsheets, and James Sutherland's grandmother has embroidered a new post-coup ICC flag, featuring three lions squabbling with a kangaroo inside a giant blue circle.
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