The Long Handle
Angry Dan’s furniture rampage
What’s a poor batsman to do when he gets out
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Life can be frustrating. The printer jams halfway through printing that amusing photo of your employer’s head superimposed onto Saddam Hussein. You queue for the coffee machine, put your Styrofoam cup under the nozzle, press play, and instead of a stream of espresso, you get a face full of coffee-scented steam and a beeping noise. You arrive home to find your recorder has not recorded Cricket’s Greatest Moustaches as you asked it to and has instead gone with the catch-up edition of Jersey Shore.
But do you set about the gummed-up printer with your umbrella? Do you pick up the coffee machine and hurl it into the chilled drinks section whilst giving out a blood-curdling, caffeine-deprived roar? Do you pour petrol into the workings of your digital recording device and then stand with a lighted match over the poor thing, cackling maniacally?
No you don’t. At least, not more than once.
Full postIs this the preservation of Test cricket?
Aside from growing their hair and absent-mindedly walking into lampposts, philosophers spend their time wrestling, on our behalf, with the Big Questions
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Aside from growing their hair and absent-mindedly walking into lampposts, philosophers spend their time wrestling, on our behalf, with the Big Questions. What is existence? What is the nature of truth? What's love got to do with it? How does Donald Trump get his hair to do that?
So here's another one for our chin-stroking friends to wrap their syllogisms around whilst sipping Lady Grey in the refectory of the Faculty of Important Thinking. If a Test match is played but nobody sees it, has it really happened?
At a time when Test cricket is going the way of other quaint 19th-century pastimes like duck-dangling, unicorn-prodding and cockerel-mockery, those who find themselves temporarily at the controls of the Test Match Spaceship seem bent on steering it into the black hole where all irrelevant pastimes go to die.
Full postA rich tapesty of bovine excrement
We all enjoyed reading Australia's top secret scrapbook of the self-evident, but as we work our way through Dermot Reeve's Psychological Warfare For Beginners , this week we've reached chapter two
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
We all enjoyed reading Australia's top secret scrapbook of the self-evident, but as we work our way through Dermot Reeve's Psychological Warfare For Beginners, this week we've reached chapter two, entitled, "My Other Ball's A Teesra..."
Ravichandran Ashwin is threatening England with a new delivery, in the same way that you might taunt a frightened chicken with a packet of sage and onion stuffing. And why not. If you were about to enjoy a whole series worth of bowling at a succession of jittery-looking Englishman-shaped jellies, wouldn't you want to have a little fun with them first?
For Ashwin knows that he casteth his magic beans of fear on a particularly fertile psychological vegetable patch. Just as thespians are not supposed to mention the Scottish play, so the words "slow" and "bowler" have been banned from English net sessions. When England's reserve buttock masseur turned up to the team Halloween party wearing a Saeed Ajmal mask, he was sent home for making Ian Bell cry.
Full postThe dummy dossier
South Africans may find the Australians not bowling short or being particularly mean, after all
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
If history teaches us one thing, it's that human beings just can't be trusted. A civil servant leaves James Bond's Health and Safety Risk Assessment on the 5:47 to Waterloo. With the goal at his mercy, the Bolivian superstar you backed to score the winner trips over his bootlaces and dislocates his pony tail. You warn your co-pilot that on no account should he press that red button, but as soon as you leave the cockpit, you know what will happen.
So we shouldn't be surprised that so many top-secret cricket dossiers end up in the newspapers. Australia's latest is called "Beating South Africa For Dummies" (subtitled: "Or At Least Not Losing Too Badly To South Africa. For Dummies.")
It includes some helpful identification photographs for the younger Australian bowlers who might not recognise Graeme Smith, AB De Villiers or Jacques Kallis, although the South African batting averages are not mentioned, since that might discourage them.
Full postThe joys of monsoon cricket
Why stop playing when the heavens open up?
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
I've never lived in a country where rain has its own corner of the calendar. In England it's spread haphazardly across our four traditional seasons: Icy, Drizzly, Wet, and Wetter. Still, I think the critics of the Sri Lankan board are being unfair. Where else could they shove the New Zealand tour? It's like trying to arrange the chairs in a dining room with a leaky ceiling; someone has to sit under the damp patch.
There is a heroic quality to this perseverance in the face of impossible meteorological odds. Ploughing on with the tour regardless says something about the undaunted human spirit. It reminds us of Captain Ahab's dogged insanity; of Scott at the South Pole; of the stoicism of those people who can endure a whole episode of The X Factor without Valium.
As I've been sitting at my computer, reading ESPNcricinfo's unrivalled rain commentary, occasionally hitting "refresh" and wondering what I'm doing with my life, I've been thinking about cricket's relationship with the weather gods. Maybe we should be looking at this the John Buchanan way. Maybe we should be trying a little grey-sky thinking. Are we absolutely sure that we couldn't play in the rain?
Full postYou gotta feel sorry for cricketers
When they aren't getting dumped by T20 franchises, they must endure jargon-filled scolding from their other employers
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
You may think the IPL is the chilled glass of Bollinger in the exclusive bar at the pinnacle of Mount Entertainment; the epitome of cricket loveliness; an extravaganza of celebrity-waving, million-dollar slog-sweeps and enormous foam fingers.
But it has an unpleasant underbelly. No, I don't mean Dermot Reeve. Every November, when the franchises think no one is looking, they launch a secret cull. Dozens of cricketers are cut loose. Some of them find out by text. Others are not so fortunate.
"I didn't even get a chance to warn my wife," said one Australian who nearly played in a Test match. "She came down to breakfast one morning, tears streaming down her face. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "Is it true that the Cutack Colonoscopies don't want you to carry the isotonic drinks out for them at the strategy break anymore? Oh darling, what will we tell the children?"
Full postBack to the five-day stuff. Yawn
T20 can be a pain but at least it's over quickly
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
The autumn cricket schedule is packed tighter than Rush Limbaugh and Chris Christie in phone booth. It seems like every day there's another pair of polyester-clad captains shuffling out to the middle to throw a bit of currency into the air. And yet, I can't remember the last time I watched a Test match. That's either because there hasn't been one for a while, or because the last time I watched a Test match, I wasn't entirely conscious.
It's not that shorter games of cricket are always edge-of-the sofa affairs. Sunday's Champions League slog-off was the most one-sided public encounter since I challenged Keira Knightley to an arm-wrestling contest*. But even when T20 games are one-sided, they are at least over quickly, like having a loose tooth pulled, whereas a dull Test match can be like week-long root canal surgery with only David Gower's voice for anaesthetic.
The big day was a bust mainly because the Lions of the Highveld could not get over their child-like fascination with hitting the ball straight up in the air. Neil McKenzie fell that way, as did Quinton De Kock, who henceforth shall be known as Half-Kock. He flailed one down to third man and strolled off to the sound of "Let Me Entertain You", apparently oblivious to the irony.
Full postWhy the ECB was nice to Kevin
They had to pick a squad for India, innit?
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
For many months, the England team picked itself. So straightforward was the selectors’ job that the ECB even produced a “Ditto Selection” app for David Graveney’s mobile, which at the press of a button, automatically cut and pasted the same team from the last Test and emailed it to cricket journalists. He didn’t even have to leave the golf course.
But this summer everything changed. Defeat was in the air. Defeat and the polyphonic ring tone of a traitor’s Blackberry. In the ECB’s crack Selection Unit, all leave was cancelled. Worried-looking men loosened their ties and paced anxiously up and down in dingy offices, pretending to smoke. September’s pre-India selection meeting was a desperate affair. After seven hours of stilted silence, during which the only sounds were the nervous shuffling of blank pieces of paper and the plaintive chirping of crickets, the selectoral elite of the English game came up with a batting order that read as follows:
“Cook, er, Trott, some chap or other, oh we forgot about Bell, who does that leave? Someone, someone else, Prior.”
Full postWristspin? Whatever abomination next?
In the land of the pucca, there's only one acceptable method of imparting spin on a cricket ball
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
We British love a crisis. From time to time, particularly if there's not much on television, we like to work ourselves up into a proper panic about something or other. It need not be anything dramatic. Civilisation is such a delicate creature that almost anything could be the cause of its demise: the price of fish, the preponderance of badgers in the countryside, the circumference of Victoria Beckham's waist.
And then we usually forget all about it the following week, when a politician is caught trying to sell his donkey without paying donkey duty, or a new series of Britain's Got Lots Of Singers Who For Some Reason All Sound Like Michael Jackson is launched.
Cricket is not immune to this kind of thing. At one time or another green pitches, wide seams, one-day cricket, three-day cricket, four-day cricket, television, money, bad language, Ray Illingworth, and stubble have all been the panic de jour. Now, in the aftermath of the World Twenty20, we are in the midst of another. "Why oh why are our spinners so boring?" goes the plaintive cry, "Everyone else's are so much more exciting and mysterious and foreign!"
Full postWhat dish does the Champions League resemble?
Something that doesn't satiate you
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Before we start, I feel I should offer a warning, particularly to those of you who haven't had your lunch yet. When I sat down to write this I hadn't had my lunch yet either, which is why, as I tried to sum up where the Champions League fits amongst the many tempting dishes on the crowded table at the cricket lover's banquet, things took a gastronomic turn. So if you skipped breakfast or you're trying not to think of that piece of cheesecake in the fridge, please feel free to go straight to the third paragraph where there are no food metaphors whatsoever, although there is a bit of IPL satire. If you haven't had your lunch yet and you're sensitive to IPL satire, perhaps you should start at the fourth paragraph. Or maybe the fifth.
Anyway, on with the overly-contrived analogy. I think we'd all agree that Test cricket is a steaming bowl of goulash. It's stodgy, it looks unappetising and it takes forever to prepare, but it's a proper plateful and it fills you up. The IPL is a double Big Whopper with fries. And the Champions League is a stir-fry. You take a mess of ingredients from different continents, throw them all together and see what happens. It looks interesting, but it doesn't really taste of anything and half an hour after it's finished, you're still hungry.*
Although champions feature prominently in the title, there are a suspicious number of non-champions hanging about and a few champions who weren't even allowed to take their coats off before they had to leave. This is because the structure of the Champions (and Friends) League is designed to keep the number of non-IPL teams who make the semi-finals down to a manageable number for the sake of Indian television (zero, for example).
Full post