The Long Handle
A bloody Baz and a menacing MacGill
The highlights of the Big Bash League opener
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Thursday, 15th December
Ouch! I’ve never faced Steyn and Philander on a green wicket but I imagine it’s not the most congenial way to spend a Thursday afternoon. After an hour or two of watching hard leathery ball smack repeatedly into Sri Lankan rib cage I was starting to wince, and I’m 3000 miles away. I expect tomorrow I’ll wake up covered in sympathy bruises with an overactive duck reflex.
Still, I do think it’s time for Sri Lankan cricket to have a rethink. In this day and age, you simply can’t expect unpaid amateurs to hold their own against professionals.
Friday, 16th December
I haven’t yet been able to find a place to watch the Big Bash League so I don’t know what the opening ceremony was like. I’m guessing cheerleaders, fireworks, enormous papier mâché Richie Benaud heads parading around the outfield on stilts, a hologram of Donald Bradman giving the whole thing his blessing and James Sutherland wearing an Australian flag skydiving onto the pitch from a Martian spacecraft.
Full postCooking calamities of cricketers
They might be tigers on the field but not with frying pans
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Saturday, 10th December
Today we had a poignant reminder of the franchise that touched all our hearts with their cheerful clothes, crazy boardroom antics and unlikely defeats. The Kochi Calamities are holding a fire sale. Shrewd bidders can grab themselves a bargain at the auction and here are just some of the items available at a knockdown price:
1. Thirty-seven polyester orange and purple shirts, with matching trousers, baseball caps and man-bag accessories. Some tear stains. Ideal for children’s entertainers, holiday camp attendants or circus performers.
2. Two thousand copies of the Kochi theme song, “If Any One Can, Kochi Can”, autographed by Ramesh Powar’s cousin.
Full postThe struggle of the committed cricket fan
So many games, so little time
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Wednesday, 7th December
The modern cricketer may think he has it hard, but he only has to stay awake for one game at a time. The cricket watcher, on the other hand, lives in a state of paranoia; unable to fully appreciate the contest they are watching for fear that they may be missing Sehwag doing something marvellous on the other channel.
Though I hate to say it, I do sometimes wonder whether there isn’t a little bit too much cricket. At the moment, I feel like a diligent guard dog who has, by rapidly turning his head this way and that, managed to keep three cats under surveillance, only to see a fourth moggy emerging from the rhododendron bushes.
For it seems that Sri Lanka are about to tour South Africa, leaving just Zimbabwe and England as the only Test nations currently without a date. The only way for the hard-pressed cricket fan to keep up with all this is to hire a personal assistant. Alec Stewart would be ideal, I reckon.
Full postWe don’t need no stinkin’ rotation
And the joyous spinfest that was the third Bangladesh-Pakistan ODI
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Monday, 5th December
Rotation is, on the whole, a good thing. Without it, merry-go-rounds would be a good deal less merry; our cities would be congested with commuters on horseback*, and we would probably never have heard of Shane Warne.
But for the professional sportsman, rotation has a sinister side. It’s okay when it’s happening to someone else. Michael Hussey, for example, is quite relaxed about the prospect of bowler rotation. Batsman rotation, on the other hand, is quite possibly the end of civilisation as we know it, and The Huss is having none of it.
"From a batting point of view, if you're playing well you want to keep batting, and if things aren't going right, you want to keep playing so you can get that big score.”
Full postThe Sri Lankans' payment protest
The unpaid players haven't had sit-ins or walkouts
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Wednesday, 30th November
As Sri Lankan cricket’s temporary cash-flow crisis enters its 214th day, there’s good news for Tillakaratne, Kumar and friends, who have taken to living under the covers at the Premadasa Stadium, eating grass cuttings and burning Mahela’s spare bats to keep warm. The politicians are on the case.
“The sports ministry is making arrangements to resolve this issue,” said a man in a suit. “The players will be paid very soon. They need not worry.”
I suspect that if I hadn’t been paid since April, I would long ago have abandoned worry, worked my way steadily through perturbation, consternation, despair and hysteria and would by now be angrier than Jade Dernbach when he discovered that Craig Kieswetter had stolen the last wildebeest sausage at England’s annual braai.
Full postOld Australian dogs, assorted mongrels and lesser-spotted biffers
Hello and welcome to the animal farm that is our glorious game
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Saturday, 26th November
Graeme Swann would like to scrap 50-over cricket and keep the other two formats. I have every sympathy. It reminds me of my French GCSE. I was a natural when it came to listening to the stuff and could read the lingo as easily as if I’d been raised in a fishing trawler off the coast of Marseilles. But ask me to speak it and the Hughes brain clammed up. I got my accents horribly muddled and my uncooperative vocal chords did unforgivable things to entirely innocent French vowels.
But there it was. Despite my protests, the headmaster insisted that the French oral exam was an essential part of the course and that he wasn’t about to remove it from the syllabus just because I wasn’t very good at it. C’est la vie, I suppose.
Monday, 28th November
One of the many benefits of following this great game of ours is that you are always learning new things about cultures other than your own. For example, until today, had anyone pressed me on my knowledge of New Zealand slang, I would have had nothing to offer but an embarrassed cough and an apologetic shrug.
Full postA mathematical question on Twitter
And a prize to be won if you can answer a simple question about names
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Wednesday, 23rd November
As three-cap wonders go, Hugh Morris was one of the best. It wasn’t his fault that his parents had the lack of foresight to bring him into the world in 1963, thus ensuring that his peak years as a cricketer would coincide with a period in English cricket when a new Test batsman had a career expectancy of two and a half weeks.
Anyway, in his current role as Head of Miscellaneous Cricket-Related Stuff at the ECB, he’s been keeping his finger on the technological pulse and wrestling with the ethical dilemmas inherent in allowing contracted cricketers access to social media. So Hugh, what’s the official ECB position on Twitter?
“It’s like giving a machine gun to a monkey.”
Full postHurry up, please, Sachin
Can we get that irritating number out of the way?
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Saturday, 19th November
Do you believe in fairy stories? Me too, even though over the years I’ve been badly let down by the likes of Santa Claus, the Loch Ness Monster and those leprechauns that my friend said would definitely appear at the bottom of the garden if I sat under the magical oak tree for long enough. After three hours sitting in the wet grass, I learned an important childhood lesson: never put your trust in imaginary little people.
But there’s still one story I believe in, though like many, my faith is being tested. All summer I sat staring at the television, waiting in vain for it to happen. I’m referring of course to Sachin’s hundred. According to the man himself, it’s “just a number”. Well, yes it is, Sachin, but that’s like an astronaut saying Mars is just a planet. And as you know full well, cricket is a number freak’s paradise. In fact, numbers are cricket.
Consider the jellyfish: a beautiful, delicate, ethereal underwater presence. But take it out of the sea and all you’ve got is a pile of squelchy stuff. So it is with cricket. When it goes the way of the dinosaurs, what will be left of it? A few glorious paragraphs from Cardus, the odd faded photograph of Doug Bollinger, and great piles of fossilised numbers. Numbers are cricket’s skeleton, its structure, its substance.
Full postA Swannopoly
The world's favourite offspinner is everywhere you go
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Tuesday, 15th November
I came across Paul Collingwood in the supermarket today. He was in the tinned comestibles aisle, struggling to reach the baked beans, so I picked up a can from my basket, shouted his name and flung it in his direction, expecting him to execute one of his trademark salmon-like leaps. Instead, it caught him flush on the crest of his Sunderland baseball cap and sent him flying backwards, demolishing a display of cut-price DVDs and a cardboard cut-out of Graeme Swann.
“Bad luck, you almost had it,” I lied, as I helped the dazed allrounder to his feet.
“Can you believe this rubbish?” he asked, brandishing one of the much discounted DVDs (was £9.99, now available at £2.50, three for £5.00).
Full postA suggested austerity programme for England
Too much cricket is killing cricket
Andrew Hughes
25-Feb-2013
Friday, 11th November
Andy Flower says that cricket boards are piling up fixtures with the same alacrity with which Samit Patel used to fill his plate at Nottinghamshire’s end of season charity buffet (“All you can eat for a fiver, bring your own plate and indigestion pills”) and that this global scheduling gluttony is all about the money.
So why this fixture frenzy? Where does all that money go? Well, some of it is invested in vital tools for hard-pressed cricket administrators: velvet sleeping masks, embroidered executive aromatherapy hand towels, and posterior-pressure-relieving cushions for those long afternoons in the boardroom.
But to take just one cricket board at random, an awful lot of the ECB’s money is shovelled in the direction of Team England: to keep Kevin Pietersen stocked up with silly sunglasses, to fund James Anderson’s twice-yearly cosmetic frown surgery and, without wishing to be indelicate, to retain the services of a certain Mr Andrew Flower.
Full post