The Long Handle

Have you seen the cricket in 3D? Oh, you must try it. 3D is marvellous, it is the future, you get, like, these dark glasses and when you put them on you can watch in 3D. Yes, I know, three dimensions! It’s the way of the future, 3D. Did you know that Sky are pioneering 3D? Didn’t I tell you? Yes, 3D. Cricket matches in 3D. Incredible, isn’t it. Sky are doing it. Yes, that’s right, 3D coverage of cricket. Only on Sky. It’s really wonderful, this 3D. 3D, 3D, 3D, 3D, 3D.

Once upon a time there was a poor king called Giles, whose kingdom was terrorised by 18 squabbling barons. The barons could never agree on anything, except that they should all have lots of money, which they spent on hiring African mercenaries and building enormous brightly coloured palaces that everybody hated. But King Giles could not get rid of the barons because they were so powerful.

And no matter what King Giles did, his people were never happy. He made money fall from the Sky but people complained that the barons grabbed it all and there was none left for them. For the prestige of his kingdom, he bought himself a splendid new suit made from invisible Texan cloth, but when he paraded it on television, everyone laughed at how naked he appeared.

One night, as he was just about to fall asleep under his Stanford Super Series Commemorative duvet, his fairy godmother appeared. She told him not to be alarmed and to look out of the window. With a wave of her magic wand, a quiet little shire hen that had been pecking away in the castle courtyard was instantly transformed into a plump goose wearing a Kolkata Knight Riders baseball cap.

For the weary cricket watcher, intervals are a godsend and, being a helpful kind of company, Sky likes to give the viewer a little push snoozewards. When David Gower mumbles the words, ‘special feature’ the eyelids of the nation start to weigh heavily and Wednesday’s mid game siesta featured another visit to Dullsville; this time courtesy of an interview between Nasser Hussain and Andy Flower. The sun was out, the men were old chums; it was cosier than a glass of warm milk before bed.

But this time I was not reaching for my pillow and Chennai Super Kings slumber mask. I was agog, or at least, reasonably awake, because I hoped this would be the moment when I got the answer to one of the most pressing cricket questions of the day. As the Essex twosome droned on about self-belief incubation, skill sets, range-hitting and suchlike, I was hanging on their every word. “Ask the question, ask the question!” I kept shouting at the television. But Nasser did not oblige and so I turn to you, the Cricinfo readers, in search of enlightenment.

Why exactly do the England players sport fluorescent underarms? I won’t accept that these gaudy green ovals have appeared merely at the whim of a fashion designer. Mr Flower looks to me the sort of chap who is a stickler; the cast of man who takes care over arranging his sock drawer; the breed of coach who leaves no stone unmolested in the unending search for the burrowing beetles of excellence. The England players are green under there for a reason. But what is it? I can think of only two possibilities.

1. During the course of a game, a chap can forget himself, run around a little too much and completely overlook the fact that he is perspiring. What if he has to meet the Queen in the lunch interval? That is where the patches come in. Made from perspiration-sensitive material, they turn green on contact with sweat: the sweatier the player, the more vivid the green. Team-mates, noticing this chameleon like colour change, can have a quiet word and the player concerned can slip away to the dressing room for a deodorant break. And if you are using the emergency tactic of applying it without removing your shirt, the day-glow colour helps you to hit the right areas.

I’m Andrew Hughes. My pen weighs 40 grams, my favourite aural experience is the sound of a cork popping from the neck of a bottle, and my toughest opponent is the stray cat who keeps digging up my azaleas. Next week I’m hoping to be miked up as I sit at my desk so the editor of Cricinfo can fire interesting questions at me for the benefit of readers. (“The opening paragraph went well, but there’s a long way to go and I need to keep hitting my grammatical straps” etc. etc.)

Yes, yes, yes, you’re probably thinking, that’s all very well, but what do I care? Quite so. A pot pourri of personal trivia does not add greatly to the reading experience. But for reasons that are not immediately apparent, someone in an editorial position of a certain satellite-television company feels that it is paramount that those viewers following the Friends Provident T20 are kept up to date in the crucial matters of willow poundage and the musical inclinations of county cricketers.

Like cheerleaders, blimps and the employment of Danny Morrison, it is not immediately clear what all of this adds to the cricket watcher’s experience. The dutiful reporting in pounds and ounces of the size of every batsman’s weapon merely reminds us that these things are indeed heavy - not as heavy as a small dog, perhaps, but weightier than a bag of sugar. As everyone knows, it’s not the size of your bat that matters, it’s what you do with it.

Fifty-over cricket is dead; I think we can all agree on that. It’s so last century; it’s a form of public spectacle as passé as karaoke and bear-baiting.

If I were paid by the word I would write Ryan ten Doeschate as often as possible. Sadly, I am not and so I will refer to him as RTD. Before Wednesday’s televised Twenty20 game, RTD said that whilst he was flattered that some were talking up his chances of playing for England, he felt he was South African. There then ensued a debate between Charles Colville and Robert Croft that was a pleasant conversational excursion through the thorny maze of cricket nationality. It went a little like this.

Colville: But he’s been playing for Holland

My dictionary defines a dynamo as “a machine for generating electric currents by means of the relative movement of conductors and magnets”. Extremely useful, I’m sure, but at first glance, such a device would appear to have little to do with the game of cricket. Nevertheless, I have no truck with those who suggest that the cricketers of Durham are saddled with this moniker as the consequence of a random alliterative brainstorming session in a conference room somewhere in Chester-le-Street.

Anyway, on Monday the Dingos were up against the Leicestershire Foxes, so named not because they employ only the most attractive cricketers (consider if you will, Mr Hoggard, Mr Nixon and Mr Henderson) nor because they display a particularly vulpine craftiness (they don’t) but because that particular mammal was at one time more persecuted by men on horses in the fair county of Leicestershire than in any other part of this green and pleasant land. Probably.

For this game the Dodgems were able to call upon one Paul Collingwood, back from his burnout sabbatical, having given his mind the month off. Another ideal location for mental rehabilitation is of course the Sky commentary box, and there another of the Dodos, Graham Onions, was also giving his cranial machine a well-earned break.

The rainy season is an important part of the ecological cycle, bringing many benefits to the various ecosystems of the Caribbean. It does, however, have certain regrettable aspects, specifically that, in my experience, it is impossible to have a rainy season without a certain degree of precipitation. I suspect that it was the high volume of rain that falls during this time of year that led to it being called the rainy season in the first place.

You and I might think that such a season might not be the best time to stage an outdoor sport. But that is why we are not employed in an official capacity on one of the many cricket boards around the world. It turns out, you see, that a rainy season is precisely the best time to hold a Test series, just as Monday night is ideal for a major international one-day final and nine months is the appropriate length of time that should elapse between one World Cup and its successor.

Watching a Test series during the rainy season does, though, require a certain degree of optimism. The man-in-a-suit in the Sky studio was suitably ebullient; Colin Croft waxed lyrical on the subject of drainage systems and Robin Jackman at the Queen’s Park Oval brushed over damp patches and discounted gloomy clouds. But umpires are made of sterner stuff and upon consulting the lugubrious Steve Davis, it appeared that the men in white coats had followed the umpire’s first instincts on such occasions and yielded to the temptation of an early lunch.

So not a Bang, then but a whimper. At times during the England versus Bangladesh double-header (two matches, while it may paper over a crack in the Future Tours Programme, does not a series make) the viewers felt they were watching something rather beautiful in the making, that the glorious day on which the Bangladeshis would silence those dreary naysayers and silence them good and proper was imminent.

But it wasn’t to be. Now I long ago mislaid my patriotism, so am probably not best placed to hold forth on this subject, but like Kieron Pollard with his one big shot, I will plough on regardless. I think there is a frontier in the mind, a wall of the imagination. On this side are those of an English persuasion who had a sneaky desire to see the Tigers win and for whom an England win would be a ho-hum affair. Let’s call them the civilised folk.

I’m not too sure what happens on the other side of the wall; I’ve not been over there for some time, but from what I can make out it involves the vigorous waving of flags, the frequent application of water-based paints to one’s face (and frankly with my complexion, the last thing I need is extra whitening) and the replacement of each of cricket’s delicious complexities with a crude weighing up of whether England are winning (which is good) or losing (which is bad).