The Long Handle

Some have suggested that the Tri-Nations Tournament in Bangladesh is a less-than-gripping addition to the cricket calendar. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Triangular Extravaganza in Mirpur is an avant-garde celebration of the essential absurdity of human endeavour as seen through the medium of cricket.

Just as the abstractionists once stripped the figurative arts down to bare lines, so the Bangladesh Cricket Board has daringly done away with all that is superfluous in our sport. By insisting on playing the second half of every match in a paddy field, the 50-over game has been reduced to its essence: the toss.

So let’s have no more negative talk about this immensely significant, if ever so slightly damp, competition. I have enjoyed every minute of the Isosceles Cup and I have already planned my schedule for the final on Wednesday:

It is said that if you open any book by Cardus to any page, you will find what it is that you are looking for. By whom is it said? Well, by me, just now. Such is the genius of the great man’s writing, you may not even known what it is you are looking for until you find it. This morning, for example, I picked up my battered copy of The Summer Game, allowed the pages to fall open and came across the following:

“No lover of the game has a ghost of a reason for protesting against true and natural obstinacy at cricket.”

Quite right, Neville, straight out of the middle. As everyone knows, not losing is the essence of cricket. And the key to not losing is sheer, unvarnished, pig-headedness. Duncan Fletcher talks a lot about coming to the party. But he’s only telling us half the story. Cricket isn’t about coming to the party, it’s about refusing to leave the party, even when the other guests have gone home, there is nothing left to drink and the police are hammering on the door.

I have nothing against word processors. Nor do I bear any ill will towards retired cricketers. However, the conjunction of the two is usually, in my experience, something to be avoided. Scientists may believe that an infinite number of former batsmen bashing away at an infinite number of laptops may eventually produce the collected works of Cardus, but I count myself amongst the sceptics.

Reviews, reviews, reviews. You can’t escape the inevitable end-of-year review. And this being the conclusion of a decade, there is 10 times as much reviewing to be done. Personally, I’d prefer my round-up of things-we-already-know-about to be sprinkled with a little mischief. Why not slip a few falsehoods into the end-of-year-raking-over-of-long-cold-news events and see if anyone notices? Much more fun.

For instance, you could set a princess-and-a-pea test for the statistically retentive by changing Brad Hodge’s final Test average from 55.88 to 55.89 and waiting to see if anyone notices. That should separate the true geeks from the wannabees. You could claim that it was widely understood that a bug in the ICC ranking system was to blame for South Africa’s temporary accession to the No. 1 spot, or that Australia in fact retained the Ashes after the Oval Test match was abandoned due to termite infestation.

Or maybe not. At any rate, there will no tired old reviews here. We do things differently at the Long Handle. No, instead I will be offering something groundbreaking and entirely unexpected. Not a REview, but a PREview. Genius, isn’t it? Instead of looking back with a wearisome sigh, I shall be gazing into the mists of the unknown with a keen eye and a stout heart.

	The name is Ton. Ath.Er.Ton © Cricinfo Ltd

Heroes. Everyone has heroes, don’t they? Along with the fictional XI, naming your cricket hero is a staple of cricket chat. For some it is Ian Botham, for others Dennis Lillee, Sachin Tendulkar, or possibly even Gareth Batty (though this might qualify as a fetish rather than hero worship). Small boys crowd the boundary boards in the hope that one of the Morkels will scribble an illegible something on their mini-bat, and grown men go into bookshops and emerge with Alastair Cook’s autobiography (presumably in a plain brown envelope).

But not me. I am ethically opposed to the idea of hero worship in cricket. For a start, the art of manipulating a small leathery object, whilst capable of great heights of refinement, weighs in pretty low on the bravery scale. Keith Miller’s famous quote involving Messerschmitts and arses is always worth an airing. If Miller was to be considered a hero, it should be for the things he did whilst perched in a cockpit, not his feats with a bat in the middle of a green field on a pleasant summer’s evening.

And it isn’t just that professional cricket involves no extremes of danger. This question of heroes goes right to the heart of why we watch cricket and why I have never bought an autobiography. A hero is someone you admire, indeed revere, as a person. When watching cricket, it is not Alastair Cook the man I am interested in. I care not where he went to school, what his first pet was called or whether he prefers low-fat margarine to butter. Without wishing to be rude, I don’t care what he thinks.

I am only interested in him in so far (and for as long) as he bats. On the field, he is playing the role of Alastair Cook, performing in a long tradition of public theatre. How he uses his bat, how he stands at the crease, how he runs, all these things taken together form the Alastair Cook of the mind’s eye. VVS Laxman may have some interesting things to say on global warming, but to be honest, I’m only really interested in his wrists and their neurological wiring. To say VVS Laxman is my hero would be a little like saying Hamlet is my hero.

I love the ICC Code of Conduct. I read it all the time. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. Drama, pathos, tragedy, even a little romance. Oh and an awful lot of “Thou Shalt Nots”. Really, if Moses had had to bring this little lot down from the mountain, it would have taken a fortnight. I particularly like the rules on showing dissent at an umpire’s decision, which, as far as I remember, forbid a batsman from lingering overlong at the crease, raising either eyebrow quizzically (both eyebrows is a Level 2 Breach) or making sarcastic quips over the salad bowl at the post-match buffet.

Now, to be honest, I do enjoy watching the occasional dust-up on a cricket field. It brings out the Roman emperor in me, watching these gladiators tear into one another. Admittedly, I’m not sure that Nero would have been satisfied with a little bat-waving or the kind of handbag scuffles that we witnessed in Perth, but as Harbhajan is behaving himself these days, it’s the best we can do. But after a bit of an on-field set-to, there is nothing I like more than the serving up of a big steaming plate full of justice. And thanks to the ICC, there is a punishment to fit every crime.

Yes, when it comes to codes, I’ll pick the ICC version over Dan Brown’s any day. But, Haroon, I feel you can do more, much more. Television viewers may be considered the lowest of the low, even more unworthy than the plebs who pay good money to sit on uncomfortable seats amongst the drunks, but we pay our satellite subscriptions and we are entitled to at least a modicum of consideration. Hearing Shane Watson scream like a four-year-old who’s just beaten his older brother at Buckaroo is mildly troubling, but it pales into insignificance when set against the aural torture that the sofa-dweller must endure from the commentary booth.

UDRS! It sounds like the cry of a Bulgarian shot-putter as he lets fly. Or perhaps the first word that David Boon uttered as he disembarked at Heathrow airport in 1989.

In fact, this collection of letters stands for Umpire Demoralising Review System, an entirely new method of making cricket more complicated that is completely unrelated to the previous Player Review System, which everyone hated. You can tell it’s different because it has a completely different name, apart from the last bit.

Lots of intelligent and learned cricket folk are asking questions about UDRS. Questions such as: How does it work? Come again? Run that by me one more time? No, still not got it, could you write it down? But the only question I want to ask is: does it enhance the sofa-dweller’s viewing pleasure? Sadly, I have to say that the answer is no.

So India are numero uno. Congrats to MS Dhoni and chums. A high five with a big foam hand to them. But large wet raspberries to the BBCI. Like a bank in possession of a painting that has has just gone up in value, the Board for Choking Cricket Indefinitely seems determined to lock its world-beating Test team away in their vault for the foreseeable. It’s not fair. We want to see ‘em. Please Mr Manohar, if we promise to write you some more cheques, will you let Sachin come out to play?

But no. As far as the BCCI goes, FTP stands for Failure To Play. Still, the fact that they can postpone a Test series with South Africa reminds us of the flexible nature of international cricket. Touring teams no longer take three weeks to arrive, having picked up a touch of scurvy and having played an awful lot of shuffleboard on the way. Test series can be scrubbed out or pencilled in overnight, entire tournaments are transplanted at a moment’s notice. And this got me thinking.

The time has come to scratch the ICC Test ranking system. It is nothing more than a fiendish attempt by statisticians to take over the game (and from there, perhaps the world). And we need not fall back on the opinions of studio-hopping, microphone-bothering former pros or the weight of internet forum anger to determine which is the best team in the world. Instead, we should take a lesson from the boxing world.