The Long Handle

Sunday, 1st July I hope he doesn’t take it the wrong way, but there is something of the stone age about Mitchell Johnson. His run-up reminds me of a caveman in vigorous pursuit of a woolly mammoth, charging across the savannah to fling a small leather ball with all his might in the vague direction of his quarry before the long trudge back to explain to the Johnson tribe that it’s roots and berries for dinner again.

In a world of laser-guided, hi-tech bowling weapons, Johnson is the 16th century blunderbuss, elaborately decorated and liable to go off in any direction. He is the ultimate luxury bowler, as extravagantly useless as a chocolate coffee maker and as profligate as an investment banker after his second bottle of Bollinger. Once again he’s been bailed out by Cricket Australia, but the public’s patience is wearing thin and the Serious Bowling Fraud Office may soon be in touch.

So why am I a fan? Well, imagine finding six unmarked envelopes pop through your letter box. You open the first five and they’re all bills. Then you find that the sixth one contains a $50 dollar note, a hand-written apology from the chairman of the gas company and an uplifting poem. That’s how it is when you watch Mitch. There’s roughly an 83% chance that what transpires upon his releasing the ball will be face-palm worthy. But occasionally, just occasionally, he produces a snorter.

Sharad Pawar’s travelling International Cricket Circus is always a popular attraction and this week it has pitched up in Kuala Lumpur. As ever, there are plenty of clowns to keep people entertained, as well as the main show in the Big Top, featuring master of ceremonies Dave Richardson trying to persuade his well fed co-star, the Ferocious Srinivasan, to swallow the DRS system whole.

And if that’s not exciting enough, over in the Tent of Procrastination spectators have been invited to marvel at the daring high-wire concept of day-night cricket. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s well worth a look. You’ll gasp in astonishment as one administrator after another comes within a bullet point of taking the plunge before leaping to safety at the last minute

The idea of playing Test cricket in the evening has been under active investigation by the ICC’s Long Grass Committee since the day after Hitler invaded Russia, but there have been one or two problems to iron out along the way. For instance, the issue of whether it should be called Dusk Cricket or Twilight Cricket took up most of the 1990s and the last decade saw a fierce debate over whether the specially coated pink cricket ball could properly be described as fuchsia, since in a certain light it was more of a bashful cerise.

Saturday, June 23rd There are some things in life that are hard to explain. Take the Big Bang, for instance. I’m a fairly liberal sort of chap, so I’m quite prepared to imagine an incredibly dense ball of matter. In face, I like to think of it as a sort of tiny, interdimensional Edam cheese which then explodes, sending bits of rind and slightly rubbery dairy goodness in all directions. But try explaining this to an eight-year-old on the way home from school and you are likely to be met with a stony glare and a distinctly sceptical tone.

Of course, in the case of the Big Bang, you can settle matters by appealing to the authority of scientists whose books you haven’t read, the internet, or, if all else fails, parental infallibility. (“Because I say so” is a remarkably effective phrase and I sometimes wonder whether umpires would have it easier on the field if they tried it from time to time. And they could follow it up with “Have you washed your hands?” before the players go off for lunch).

But how do you explain the English cricketer’s fascination with ballroom dancing? Today we learnt that Michael Vaughan is to enter Strictly Come Dancing. He is not the first to feel the lure of the dance. In 1932, the BBC had to cut footage of Douglas Jardine and Harold Larwood having a quick waltz on the boat to Australia from their newsreel footage, and when Colin Cowdrey arrived at the wicket in Adelaide in 1975, he was reported to have asked Jeff Thomson whether he might have the next dance. The offer was declined.

Wednesday, June 20th Once upon a time there was a boy with beautiful hair who was very popular in his village. Despite his somewhat disappointing career batting average, everybody loved him. But the boy had a troublesome habit: he liked to play practical jokes.

His favourite joke was to call all of the villagers to the square and announce that he would no longer be watching the sheep because he just wasn’t enjoying it any more, he wasn’t getting enough support from the other shepherds or he wanted to try his hand at being a cattle herder instead.

The villagers would shrug and say how much they would miss his exuberant sheep-watching style and the way that he would sometimes entertain the flocks by clapping loudly or pretending to eat a cricket ball. But just as they were starting to talk about his replacement, the boy with the lovely hair would call them back to the square and announce that he wasn’t retiring after all and that it had all been a joke.

Saturday, June 16th Do the Inuit whine about the snow? Are the Tuareg forever complaining about how sandy the Sahara gets? You’d think that the English would have resigned themselves to moisture, but no, every year we sit in caravans, half-empty sports stadiums and country parks, shivering and dripping, moaning to one another bitterly as though the utter sogginess of June was a total surprise.

There is something particularly demoralising about the dampness of the English summer. It even got to famous philosopher and anal retentive Aristotle, not a man who bored easily, as those who have tackled his endless works will attest. His unfinished volume, The Aquatics, begun during a two-week holiday in Celtic Britain, grinds to a halt in the middle of the second chapter:

“There are seven kinds of rain. First, there is drizzle. Then, there is mizzle, which is akin to drizzle, but of a finer quality. The third kind of precipitation is that known locally as cats and dogs, but neither cats nor dogs are involved. Then there are showers and by Zeus this place is depressing! What time is the trireme home?”

Wednesday, June 13th Murali thinks the English Twenty20 competition is old-fashioned. I’m not quite sure he’s got the hang of England yet. Old-fashioned is what we do. If we wanted to organise our cricket properly it would be based on the cities, where the people live. But we don’t do organised. We prefer an organic approach, partly because it preserves the accumulated wisdom and heritage of our ancient isle, but mainly because it means we don’t have to do anything.

And his idea of merging counties is a lousy one. Combining Gloucestershire and Somerset? Into what? The Somershire Mutants? The Gloucesterset Freaks? Where would the YorkLancs monstrosity play their home games? I suppose joining Leicestershire and Northamptonshire would at least contain the tedium in one place and Middle Surrey has a nice ring to it, but Hampsex and Kentsex sound positively unpleasant.

Franchises aren’t going to work either. English people are generally well-disposed towards cricket. They are pleased in a vague sort of way that it’s there and come the soggy season they might even consider going to a Test match, until they see the prices. But that’s as far as it goes. I can’t see Katie Price or Anthony Hopkins stumping up £100 million for the privilege of owning the Birmingham Bores or the South London Gangsters.

Sunday 10th June The Third Foregone Conclusion Test Match has had something for everyone. Connoisseurs of the wet stuff have been thoroughly spoiled: thundery showers, light showers, heavy showers, drizzle, light drizzle, mizzle - I’ve ticked them all off in my Eye Spy Big Book of Summer Precipitation. And the time off has enabled the players to explore the cultural highlights of Birmingham, home to Europe’s largest collection of concrete.

With a long and sweary summer ahead of them, England understandably decided to rest their two main sledgers. Australia and South Africa will be on these shores soon enough and we’ll need our top puerile-abuse merchants to be ready for them, so at the time of writing, the foul-mouthed first-choice fast bowlers are resting their throats, taking regular doses of Dr Flower’s Patented Swearing Oil and watching a selection of Al Pacino movies.

The problem with this plan is that England are having to rely on their b-string of cursers in Birmingham. And if you thought the sight of Mr Anderson mumbling some incoherent drivel in the vague direction of a batsman was rather feeble, it’s as nothing compared to the sledging style of Mr Graham Onions, to be on the receiving end of which must feel like being harangued by an angry gerbil. A gerbil who hasn’t had time to shave, at that.

Thursday, 7th June How disappointing. I’d been looking forward to the forthcoming bout of extremely heavyweight boxing between two of New Zealand’s finest exponents of the verbal jab and the Twitter upper cut. But now it seems that the title fight between Jesse “Occasionally Suspended” Ryder and Craig “Retired” McMillan is off.

Like draping a dust sheet over a nude painting of WG Grace, the suggestion that this fight was for charity was just a polite veil over the unpleasantness. Jesse has been training in the pugilistic arts (swearing, gouging, gargling blood and biting) for several months, and Craig, whose only jousting opponent recently has been the English language, would probably have had his commentary face mangled.

What was the cause of this proposed bout of fisticuffs? Well, a little while back, Craig suggested that Jesse had slowed down a little when nearing his fifty in a Twenty20 game against South Africa. And as every ten-year-old will tell you, when someone casts aspersions in the media about a perceived compromise in your strike rate, there’s only one thing to do. Ask them if they want a fight.

Saturday, 2nd June So it’s farewell, then, to the bowling Powerplay. I’ll be honest, I never really got to grips with the concept. I just about had a handle on the fixed Powerplay and the floating batting Powerplay, but the floating bowling powerplay was a floating powerplay too far. And now that it’s going, there’s one less thing to have to sound convincing about should my daughter ever take an interest in the game.

The end of the unloveliest Powerplay was announced by the ICC cricket committee, and whilst I don’t know who’s on that committee, they all deserve an extra slice of fruit cake at their next meeting, or at least an additional plate of chocolate digestives and an increased dry-cleaning allowance. Their recommendations were rich with common sense, including the excellent idea of allowing two bouncers per over.

Since trying to inflict any sort of serious damage on the modern batsman is like trying to wound a medieval knight in full armour with a stale Chelsea bun, the only intimidatory weapon left to the fast bowler is the prospect of making him fall over and look silly, unless you count mouthing off like a 12-year-old who’s just lost a game of Super Mario IPL to his younger sister (yes, I mean you, Mr Anderson). So more bouncers, by all means.

Wednesday, 30th May Today saw the publication of yet another scientific paper tackling one of mankind’s most pressing issues: what makes a cricket ball swing. Now, I’ve got nothing against scientists, I have many friends who fiddle with test tubes and Bunsen burners for a living, although obviously I don’t invite them to my parties or socialise with them in public.

But, admirable though they are, our lab coat-wearing friends tend to develop some rather unhealthy character traits, perhaps due to spending too many summers in dusty laboratories dissecting rat intestines whilst everyone else is outside having fun. One of these is an laissez-faire approach to personal grooming. Another is obsessiveness.

For years now, the scientific community has appeared obsessed with proving that cricket folk are wrong about swing. Periodically one of their number deigns to release a rather sniffy paper explaining with patronising diagrams and condescending paragraphs that there is no reason why a ball should swing, swerve or bend as it travels and that it is all in our fevered, unscientific imaginations.