The Surfer

Perhaps he wanted to succeed too much and therein lay his failure. He was a perfectionist who was hard on himself and hard on others and more empathetic souls would have got the best out of him. Between the start and end of his international career of 11 years, England played 120 Test matches and it could be argued that he should have played in 100 of them.

This week, West Indies and New Zealand played two T20s at the CBRP Stadium in Lauderhill, Florida, USA, where the boundaries were about 65 metres on all sides. West Indies struck 12 sixes in the first match and 13 in the second. Even checked drives cleared the ropes easily. There was a time when sixes were a rare treat batsmen helped themselves to after getting their eye in. Now, they go for it from the first ball. The dessert is now the main course.

While Kevin Pietersen tweets about what a good time he’s having now that he doesn’t have to play 50-over cricket, England are turning a format they have traditionally regarded as a chore into something more akin to a pleasure. Really, you couldn’t make it up.

If England win the last three ODIs against Australia – entirely conceivable given their comfortable victories in the first two matches, even though the weather could play a part – they will become the first team in history to top the ICC rankings in three formats of the game. They hold the Ashes and the World Twenty20. England Women hold the World Cup and are playing cricket from the future. Is this really happening?

What I mainly learned, though, was that, contrary to my hopes, one cannot grasp the rules of cricket through osmosis. No, nor through flinty if squinty-eyed observation neither. So instead of talking knowledgably about wickets and stats, as I fully imagined myself doing by the fourth hour, the whole experience was somewhat akin to the (one) time I went to an opera: beautiful, to watch, rather elegant, to observe but utterly, utterly incomprehensible to me.

Okay, so the cricket committee is a recommendatory body with little or no powers. Yes, it can suggest changes and it is up to the chief executives committee and the board to approve.

But it begs the point why in the first place changes to the one-day format come up for discussion at the cricket committee, when the stated objective of the ICC is that the 2011 World Cup showed how strong the format is?

What seems like transparent and firm action against erring players does on closer examination seem like a potential cover-up. The strategy adopted seems to be to sacrifice the indefensible transgressions of minor players with spectacular flamboyance, club together a variety of offences under the label of spot-fixing so as to escape closer scrutiny, transfer the responsibility for any irregularity squarely on the players rather than the teams, and give a clear signal to everyone else in the system that talking about any wrong-doing will attract the strictest punishment.

He got the least sympathy out of the three and was never as popular a figure before; in fact, he was quite the polariser of opinion. But he has as much a right to continue trying to clear his name – even though he has been found guilty in two different courts – as we do of not being convinced by his protestations.

One day though, once he has fought all his battles and drained out all of his defiance, he will need something else to move on, finding some peace within perhaps.

But what of 2012 so far? How long we will remember the wettest start to the season since records began? There have been the sodden, one-sided series against the West Indies, won by an efficient England side whether the ball was red or white. Tony Greig gave a lecture; Kevin Pietersen retired from one-day cricket. Stay awake at the back.

Around the counties it feels like a battle for survival against the distractions: the Euros, though England's performances there were seldom more uplifting than a damp draw at Grace Road, and those Olympics just around the corner. But mostly it has been a battle against the weather. County chief executives look in anguish at the skies like grumpy old farmers.

On one level, cricket is a grand, winding narrative that runs languidly enough for the souls of players to be bared, but making so many startling turns that nothing can ever be taken for granted. On another, it is a game of moments, each invested with match-altering potential. The central action, the delivery of the ball by the bowler and the batsman’s response to it, lasts only a second or two, and for the batsman every ball is a matter of life and death. Because the game goes to the edge hundreds of times a day, the anticipation, between balls, between overs, between sessions and between days, creates a unique pleasure.

For the popularity of Twenty20 is an admission that cricket is too dull for the next generations. You cannot argue with the commercial logic – any more than you can argue against shutting music stores and bookshops. Lord’s was at least a third full for an unimportant match and it may be that this helps subsidise the less profitable games – the ones so poorly attended that they stop play and wait for you if you need the toilet.

But the question for me is whether these efforts to make cricket more digestible for bite-size attention spans might actually undercut the sport; whether rather than building an audience for the future, it is, in fact, ensuring there isn’t one. Someone once wrote of a long-dead cricketer that “small boys rushed to the pavilion gate, women put down their knitting and strong men emerged from the bar when Joe Hardstaff came out to bat”. Could Twenty20 ever inspire such emotion?