The Long Handle

People often say that Wisden lands on their doormat with a thud, which immediately causes you to wonder about the size of their letterbox. Wisden wouldn't land on my doormat with a thud; it would be left outside to go soggy in the rain, with a note from the postman explaining that he could hardly be expected to push a yellow brick through such a meagre aperture, and anyway, why don't you just get the scores from the internet?

My postman would be missing the point. You could get the scores from the internet, but there is something cosy about having them all piled up in your lap in very small print. And it is all about the small print. There are boring, pointless bits in Wisden, but then you could say the same about Christmas, and my year wouldn't quite be the same without that, either.

So even though I have to wait until the price drops before being able to afford one, which means I may be somewhat behind the times - yesterday, for example, I was worried to read John Woodcock's notes about the deadly threat of West Indian fast bowlers - like most cricket fans, I have a yellow-themed shelf in my living room, bent slightly in the middle, which I optimistically describe to guests as an investment.

Generally I regard numbers with suspicion. It started at school. I was comfortable with them for a while, but at some point in my teenage years, I noticed that they were no longer content with being added up, subtracted and so on. They wanted to try new things. Square roots, primes, quadratic equations, squiggly Greek symbols. Suddenly numbers weren't my friends, they mocked me.

So aside from having on occasion to try to remember that 11/4 is smaller than 12/5, I've kept my distance. Occasionally, though, you come across numbers worth celebrating. Like these:

1 1 0 0 0 2 +3.158 100/12.2 99/20.2

Like Luke Skywalker wandering into the Mos Eisley cantina, when I joined Twitter recently I found it a little bewildering. There are some angry, angry people on there, even in the section where the cricket tragics gather - near the toilets, not too far from the band. I've grabbed myself a corner seat, kept my head down and observed the rum goings-on, keeping an eye on the chap with the oversized rabbit teeth who has obviously taken a dislike to me.

As a fairly lazy kind of individual, I don't tweet very often. It's so hard to know what isn't tweetworthy and what definitely isn't. But the industriousness of other twitterers is eye-opening. Lalit Modi has a strike rate of tweets per minute that even outdoes the official ball-by-ball IPL feed. His Lalitness clicks on the little blue button so often that I'm struggling to keep up with what he's saying, or at least, I would be if I was reading them.

I've also had a ringside seat at a mass squabble that is becoming a springtime tradition. Yes, once again its hurricane season in the cricket tea cup as two communities count down with barely suppressed excitement to completely different events. One has asked Santa for a copy of Old Bore's County Preview Almanack. The other is hoping for a Kolkata tea cosy. Come the big day, nerves get frayed. Hair is pulled. Cyberspace is thick with sarcasm and league envy.

There has been a distinct lack of bat-and-ball action in recent days and this rare gap in the cricket fixture continuum has been hard going. Whilst I've enjoyed reading about Kolpackshire's prospects in the Empty Seats Siesta Bring Your Own Thermos Championship, and about how Bankruptchester will cope now that they have sold their wicketkeeper to finance a hospitality oblong at deep backward square leg, it was with some relief on Monday that I turned over the picture of a semi-nude Michael Atherton in my Glamorous Cricketers Of The Nineties calendar to unveil Graeme Hick sprawled across the bonnet of a Ford Mondeo, signifying that April is upon us. And April, as we all know, is IPL time.

This annual shebang has grown from its modest begins as a gargantuan circus of hype to its current status as Supreme Intergalactic Orgy of Expensive Cricket, and the list of those who are not to be admitted under any circumstances has also grown. This year it consists of:

Lalit Modi
Little Lalit, sinister pet pterodactyl and part-time minion
Pakistanis
Sri Lankans

Ah, springtime. Birds are twittering. Trees are blossoming. Hayfever-ridden children are wiping their noses on the sleeves of their school sweaters. And the first crop of articles complaining about county cricket's lack of attention is in full bloom.

Every year about this time, we witness the same colourful pageantry. A cry goes up from the depths of the shires, and cricket journalists harken, like old huntsmen hearing the blast of the beagling horn. They close Angry Birds IPL, put aside their expenses claims, and immediately set to work bashing out 1000 words on "Why Oh Why Oh Why Doesn't County Cricket Get More Coverage?" or "Why Oh Why Oh Why Do People Keep Knocking County Cricket?"

English hacks seem ever vigilant against the deadly threat posed by county-cricket haters, like militia volunteers in the backwoods of Wyoming permanently poised to defend the Republic against the return of King George III and his evil Redcoats.

On Tuesday morning, I woke to find that England had not lost. I wasn't surprised. English people prefer having their backs to the wall. For one thing, having your back to the wall means that when it comes time for a cigarette break, you can lean on the wall, whereas your opponent, not having access to a wall, has to sit down on the wet grass. It also gives you the chance to earn a kind of victory, without the tedious business of having to win anything.

I was vexed to have missed this year's exciting Test match, but pleased that England had made a stand against the win-at-all-costs mentality of modern sport. I was brought up to believe that it was the taking part that counts. Or the way you play the game. Or something along those lines, anyway. By doggedly refusing to permit a positive result, Prior and chums have registered their protest, and reminded us all that winning isn't everything.

But as I rummaged through the post-match rubble, I was alarmed to find that two mouldy, decomposing ideas had clambered out of their holes and were shambling around cyberspace. Even now the Twittersphere is echoing to their mournful sound. So before this gets out of hand, let's take a metaphorical shovel to these zombie clichés.

I imagine that going to a pre-match press conference must be like visiting a distant relative you don't really get on with: there's a lot of uncomfortable shuffling, sporadic polite coughing, and interminable small-talk, punctuated by tumbleweed silences.

Journalists pretend to be interested in the carefully vetted opinions of young men in tracksuits, whilst cricketers half-heartedly feign an interest in explaining how they'd very much like to win the imminent fixture.

So reading second-hand accounts of such events has never struck me as a particularly worthwhile way to spend three minutes; time that might better be spent boiling an egg, half emptying the dishwasher or learning to count to ten in Albanian.

The Ashes is to cricket what a black hole is to a neighbouring solar system. The Ashes exerts a dangerous influence on the cricket media, pulling everything else on the cricket calendar over the event horizon and into oblivion. Such is the gravitational pull of The Ashes, it has sucked me into writing the words The Ashes four times already, even though when I sat down at my desk, I didn't want to write about The Ashes at all.

Then again, it is possible to emerge unscathed from The Ashes, so if you don't like that intergalactic analogy, try this. The Ashes looms in our scanners like the Death Star. At first glance, The Ashes appears to be a small, distant, urn-shaped moon. As it gets closer, you realise it is in fact an enormous cricket superstructure designed to obliterate anything that gets in its way with its irresistible, hype-powered, patriotic drivel ray.*

Two black holes in the vicinity would be bad news. Two Death Stars is almost as bad, and this time, no implausible plot twist or shoddy exhaust-port engineering is going to save us.**

When will cricketers learn? Running about during a game is dangerous enough, but exerting yourself physically before the thing has even started is just asking for trouble. The proper preparation for Test cricket, as we all know, is a pot of Darjeeling, a slice of fruit cake and a satisfying pre-prandial puff on a pipefull of Old Peculiar.

Matthew Wade does at least deserve some credit for eschewing the clichéd methods of rendering yourself useless, such as dislocating your big toe playing keepy-uppy or rupturing yourself in a game of Ligament Rugby. Instead, he's gone for the trendier self-immobilising option and sprained himself while shooting some hoops.

Unfortunately, thanks to Homeworkgate, the Australian squad was already several clowns short of a circus and Wade's basketball boo-boo has further reduced their numbers, rendering roving pin-sticker Rod Marsh redundant. What does a selector do when there's no one to select? He's spent the last few days wandering around forlornly, looking for something upon which to exercise his powers of selection. He's already rearranged the sun loungers in the roof garden of the Titanic Hotel, and at the time of writing is trying to decide whether to open with the pakoras or the kebabs.

Being an international cricketer sounds like fun. Stretching your calves on first-class flights, tweeting about some tatty vehicle you're being paid to like, launching into the occasional burst of activity on a field, offering a few platitudes for the cameras, then being driven back to a five-star hotel for the serious business of ordering exotic snacks from room service and beating your personal best on Celebrity Mole Catcher 2013.

It's a small comfort to us, as we haul our sorry carcasses across town in flu-ridden buses and queue with the other early-morning zombies in franchised coffee-themed-grit retailers, that somewhere on the planet a troupe of young men are enjoying the good life, that the spirit of CB Fry lives on, and that at least one collection of humans is not condemned to the hell of commuting, offices, and pretending that they care about this month's sales figures.

But the truth is that cricketers are prisoners. Not only do they have to spend their time being shouted at by fitness instructors, prodded by doctors and having a team of nutritionists standing over them with clipboards while they eat, if they attempt to sneak out for a quick drink, they are likely to be bundled into a van by the fun police and sent for re-education at Alec Stewart's Clean-Living, Responsibility and Well-Being Camp.