The Long Handle

Wednesday, 18th May Australia are expanding their Twenty20 tournament. They have ticked all the right boxes. No evidence that Australians want more Twenty20. Check. Watered down imitation of the IPL. Check. Silly team names. Check. But wait, isn’t there a danger that they have missed the boat on all this? Aren’t new Twenty20 leagues so 2008? Head zombie Mike McKenna doesn’t think so.

“There are a lot of people still feeling the game out, what’s the right way to play it, where to play games, what’s the right number of teams.”

A sentence like that really deserves a closer reading.

Sunday, 15th May Former player Akram Raza has been arrested, allegedly for trying to place a bet. If it’s true, then well done the Pakistani police. I only wish the British constabulary offered a similar service. How useful it would be if, as you approached the counter, clutching a hastily scrawled slip, you felt a heavy hand on your shoulder and heard a voice deep with authority and wisdom:

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, is it sir.”

Quite right, constable, don’t know what I was thinking. Worcestershire to win the County Championship? Forgive me, I’ve not been well lately.

Tuesday, May 10th The plot has thickened in Rajasthan. Someone or something, though more likely someone, told the chaps in electric blue that they had to play on pitch A and not pitch B. Just a few short hours later, they lost to Chennai. Coincidence? Probably. Chennai are better. But Warney reckons strange things are afoot. The BCCI say no team can choose which pitch to play on. Who’s telling the truth? Who knows? Who cares?

Let’s be honest, the great Jaipur pitch switch is a bit disappointing; the Delhi Daredevils of conspiracy theories. But it is a cunning way of explaining a Rajasthan thrashing. Warne is the cat burglar of excuses, pretending to be at a society party, whilst all the time Twittering his way over silent rooftops, slipping quietly through a window and leaving a card marked “The Blame” on the Jaipur groundsman’s pillow.

Wednesday, May 11th Mr Ijaz Butt has spoken. In an interview with the Complacent Administration Monthly he announced that he had succeeded in eradicating “Player Power” - an undesirable state of affairs in which players have too much influence in Pakistan cricket, and has instituted “Butt Power” - an altogether more satisfactory arrangement in which a benevolent, grey-haired leader rules over the sport forever.

Saturday, 7th May Shahid Afridi is a little boy, albeit a boy with a handsome beard and a mild case of media Tourette’s, but a boy nonetheless. He fidgets, he shouts, he claps, he swings wildly, he poses, he gabbles incessantly to his bowlers whether they like it or not. Life is a birthday party and he wants to open all his presents at once. Sometimes he gets a little over-tired, turns into Shahid Huffridi and stomps off in a sulk.

Naturally he wants to be in charge of picking the team. I’m sure he’d quite like to drive the bus too, and given half a chance, he’d take the kit home to wash, although he’d probably overdo the detergent, flood the kitchen, dismantle the washing machine, storm out of the house, come back half an hour later and try to eat one of the pipes before fixing everything with one hand whilst trying to break the world yo-yo record with the other.

Sadly it seems that Shahid is outliving his welcome in some quarters, which is a shame, so perhaps he should do the sensible thing and let Waqar have his say selection-wise. Besides, given some of the peculiar selections that Pakistan have come up with in recent months, you’d have thought a degree of plausible deniability would be useful to a captain. Don’t blame me, it was Waqar who picked the team…

Tuesday, May 3rd The word ashes has many meanings. It’s the plural of a well-known species of tree belonging to the genus Fraxinus. It’s the correct phonetical transcription of the sound the Queen makes when she sneezes. But to Graeme Swann, it’s the name of the greatest sporting event on the planet. Don’t believe me? Here’s what he said in today’s Independent:

“The Ashes is the greatest sporting event on the planet.”

Told you. Graeme’s a likeable chap so let’s give him a chance. Is there any way in which this statement could be correct? Is there another dimension in which this might be true? Can it really be the case that an event watched by a small minority of people in two of the world’s 193 sovereign countries is the greatest on the planet? No, almost certainly not, and no.

Saturday, 30th April So it turns out that the West Indies selectors can, after all, just about find room for Ramnaresh Sarwan in their exciting new team of all the talents. And who knows, if the young fella applies himself, he might one day be a regular, like those stalwarts, Marlon “Misadventure” Samuels and Devon “Disappointing” Smith.

Ramnaresh’s return from the naughty step does not, though, imply that his fellow troublemaker Shivnarine Chanderpaul will be forgiven. He is currently engaged in a duel by letter with Ernest Hilaire, and though the details of the spat are too wearisome to go into, it is vaguely charming in this electronic age to see two men slugging it out the old-fashioned way: via the postal service.

Sunday, 1st May Indian pitch in “spin-friendly” shock! Yes it’s true. The wicket in Jaipur was so constituted that it enabled spin bowlers to cause the ball to deviate sideways more easily than might otherwise have been the case. Scandalous. Mumbai have complained, or not, depending on your point of view, and Shane Warne has hit back at the unwarranted slur/non-existent accusation.

Tuesday, 26th April Today Alastair Cook called our attention to the plight of dozens of downtrodden cricket professionals, some of them earning as little as £100,000 per annum, who are forced to fly first-class, to train to a peak of fitness at someone else’s expense and to spend days at a time in five-star hotels. Comrade Cook complained that the modern cricketer doesn’t have enough say and implied that something ought to be done about it, whilst playing John Lennon’s “Power To The People” through his iPod speakers.

As a mood of militancy swept the golf courses, top-quality gymnasia and exclusive nightclubs of the nation, there were rumours that the England team might be about to go on strike. But after urgent talks, the Association of Stodgy Top-Order Grinders, the Federation of Flashy Cameo-Makers and the Union of Bowlers and Twitterers all agreed to cancel the planned industrial action on the grounds that actually they were rather well-paid, had lots of time off and really had very little to complain about.

Thursday 28th April The news that bookmakers have been arrested and some may have confessed to making death threats against Zulqarnain Haider has not gone down well at the PCB. Officials are being instructed to exercise extreme caution in opening newspapers, and in the event of being exposed to suggestions that the match-fixing problem is widespread, have been taught advanced emergency techniques, such as carefully inserting one finger into each ear and making, “la la la la la” noises.

Saturday, 23rd April So what is burnout, exactly? Is it that feeling you get some mornings, you know, when you’re dog tired, you lack any motivation, you can’t face another day working with the same old people and you wonder if you’ll ever get a break.? Is that burnout? No, of course it isn’t silly. And why? Because you aren’t a professional cricketer, that’s why, so get out of bed and get to work, you idle layabout!

Proper burnout is what happens to the top sportsman when he decides he wants some time off, perhaps because his golf handicap is slipping or he really wants to get started on that house extension. Or sometimes because his contract is up. And burnout is such a powerful phenomenon that it can even be cited before it’s happened. For example, we read today that Andy Flower might be at risk of burnout in the future and so will need a really good deal from the ECB. Unless, of course, he gets the India job.

I suppose fast bowlers like Lasith Malinga might be entitled to complain about burnout, or more accurately, the gradual disintegration of their more important limbs. If Larwood, Hall, Lillee or Lindwall had been forced to tear in, jam their foot into the dirt and twist sideways at speed in three different formats all year round, they’d be retiring from Test cricket in no time. But how exactly do coaches burn out? Laptop strain? Press conference fatigue? Selection anxiety?

Tuesday, April 19th With the imminent abdication of Andrew Strauss from the one-day international throne, we are entering King Lear territory. Strauss is the ageing monarch. Alastair Cook is Cordelia. And Stuart Broad and KP are the ugly sisters, entirely unsuited to the position, but nevertheless jostling their way to the front of the media’s attention. Perhaps Strauss might stick to the script and divide the captaincy between them?

Last week, Bambi let it be known that yes, he’d quite like to do the job some day, but personally, he thought Straussy should go on for ever and ever. KP wasn’t quite so subtle today and inevitably found time to mention what happened the last time he was in charge. He said that it was water under the bridge, though this particular stretch of water has been recycled a number of times and is starting to look a bit murky.

But though the entertainment value of another KP captaincy stint should not be underestimated, I’m not sure that what England need to lead their rebuilding is a man who looks good in sunglasses. He should probably stick to what he’s best at: hitting huge sixes, communicating complicated emotional states in 140 characters or less and finding imaginative ways to lose his wicket to part-time left-arm spinners.

Saturday, 16th April The WIPA are not happy and have filed a notice of dispute against the WICB, only the third since breakfast. This time they are properly riled up. They think the selection of the West Indies team was influenced by issues other than “performance, potential, playing conditions and preparedness” though they don’t elaborate. Perhaps they had run out of p words. Not that it matters: for all the difference it will make, they might just as well have cited pumpkins, pineapples, prestidigitation and parachutes.

The decision to ditch our old friends, Cool Chris, Shiv the Crab, and Hamstring Ramnaresh was many things. It was baffling, bizarre, and more than a little bonkers. But that’s how they roll at the WICB. They get to pick the team and that’s that. The WIPA say the selection process was not fair or transparent. In the long history of our game, has there ever been a fair and transparent selection process? It’s always smoky rooms, old men in suits, names in a hat and “My nephew is quite a player you know.” Fair and transparent selection policies? Whatever next? Accountability? Integrity?

Sunday, 17th April Zulquarnain Haider is to return to Pakistan, having grown bored of waiting for his asylum application to be processed. Chalk another one up to the Home Office. Their next step would have been to claim that they had never received it in the first place, find it, lose it, find it then lose it again and it would eventually turn up next August in a small filing cabinet somewhere in the Outer Hebrides.