The Surfer
No right answer for England
ESPNcricinfo staff
25-Feb-2013
In his post on the Wisden Cricketer blog, Lawrence Booth says the decisions and statements made by the England team in the past few days will provoke different reactions from the media. Here's one of the three examples he provides:
Event 2: Andrew Flintoff sings the praises of team unity
Playing for the biggest stakes of his life
The Daily Telegraph sits down with Imran Khan, the Pakistan legend, and gets him discussing Jemima, fatherhood and the war on terror
Jamie Alter
25-Feb-2013
The Daily Telegraph sits down with Imran Khan, the Pakistan legend, and gets him discussing Jemima, fatherhood and the war on terror. Despite his playboy reputation, The cricketer-turned-politician claims he was shy and introspective as a cricketer, with a small circle of friends and little appetite for socialising in pubs after the game.
Full postBeautiful to watch, frustrating to captain
Chris Lewis, the former England allrounder, has been accused of attempting to smuggle cocaine with an estimated street value of £200,000 into the United Kingdom
Jamie Alter
25-Feb-2013
Chris Lewis, the former England allrounder, has been accused of attempting to smuggle cocaine with an estimated street value of £200,000 into the United Kingdom. Mike Atherton, in the Times, says Lewis was the supreme athlete who underachieved; the intelligent man who more than once punctured a hole in his career through sheer stupidity; the warm, friendly face who was also a committed loner, for whom controversy was never far away.
In the Daily Telegraph, Derek Pringle recalls touring with Lewis.
Talented, narcissistic (he once posed naked in a magazine), frustrating, though never anything but unfailingly polite, Lewie, as he was then known, had the anti-social habit of ordering just about everything on the room-service menu, tasting a mouthful of each, and then leaving it to smell out the room. He also owned a hairdryer that gave off electric shocks, but he didn't tell me that until after it had made me and my hair stand to attention one day.
In the Independent, Stephen Brenkley offers another view.
Full postTest cricket in need of global solution
Jamie Alter
25-Feb-2013
Christopher Martin-Jenkins, in the Times, says it is good that England are in India because it shows that normal life can proceed even after the horrors in Mumbai. On a more mundane cricketing level, it is good also because India’s recent Test success must be helping to put the Twenty20 bubble into perspective.
All this ought to get everyone talking about Test cricket, which is what anyone who understands the game wants. That is not to denigrate the new spectators who have been attracted to the more superficial excitements of the aggressively marketed Twenty20 version.
But exciting, competitive Test cricket ought to teach them that the two-innings game is subtler, tougher, more profound, interesting and satisfying. The trouble is that Test cricket, or rather the administrators who have let it drift on too aimlessly in too much profusuion for too long, have pushed their luck too far.
Full postAre Australia's players over-worked and under-paid?
Player workload is becoming a big issue in Australia and the Daily Telegraph’s Iain Payten uses Ricky Ponting as a case study.
Peter English
25-Feb-2013
Player workload is becoming a big issue in Australia and the Daily Telegraph’s Iain Payten uses Ricky Ponting as a case study.
If Ponting glances at his calendar today, he'll struggle to find a spare weekend for a barbecue. For about a year. A backlog of postponed tours and tournaments will see Australia's cricket team embark on arguably their busiest year on record in 2009. Ponting's Test, one-day and Twenty20 sides will play up to 140 days of cricket across six countries and be on the road for a whopping 318 days in a gruelling itinerary ...
Players are currently negotiating with Cricket Australia to cut back off-field commitments for more free time. On the face of it - in 2009 at least - the players have a decent argument. An average worker works about 230 days a year, with weekends, annual leave and public holidays off.
Full postWarne reviews his own musical
ESPNcricinfo staff
25-Feb-2013
He was angry when he first heard of the launch of a musical based on his life, but Shane Warne finally decided to see the show, a decision which made him "more edgy, even, than facing Pakistani quickie Shoaib Akhtar on a green, seaming deck". He passes his verdict in the Herald Sun.
I reach the interval and think this is pretty good - and fair - but I'm getting nervous because the so-called "scandals" are about to happen. Buckle up the seatbelt, I think to myself, and count to 10.
Thai pads and more
Puttivat 'Parn' Poshyanonda, 54, is a legend in Thai cricket
Judhajit
25-Feb-2013
Puttivat 'Parn' Poshyanonda, 54, is a legend in Thai cricket. The first cricketer of Thai descent to play cricket in Bangkok, he created the Thai Cricket Club in 1983 to represent the cricket of Thais, while also playing football and rugby for Thailand. In an interview on the Asian Cricket Council website he goes down memory lane and speaks of his big plans for Thai cricket.
I was keeping wicket and didn’t sight the ball out of the trees and was hit in the face. I’d come up from Bangkok that morning and I hadn’t packed a toothbrush, so had asked my wife at the start of the match to kindly go and get one for later. When she came back, waving the toothbrush, it was too late.
Iain's latest post
It's tough going for Iain O'Brien, both with his blog and after the trying series in Australia, but scoring 36 in partnership of 80 while playing 'Club Cricket' should do wonders for him, ahead of the first Test against West Indies in Dunedin on
Judhajit
25-Feb-2013
It's tough going for Iain O'Brien, both with his blog and after the trying series in Australia, but scoring 36 in partnership of 80 while playing 'Club Cricket' should do wonders for him, ahead of the first Test against West Indies in Dunedin on Thursday. Read more.
Full postMcKenzie calm after obsessive compulsive storm
Alex Brown, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald , reports on how Neil McKenzie overcame some strange habits to become one of South Africa’s best batsmen.
Peter English
25-Feb-2013
Alex Brown, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, reports on how Neil McKenzie overcame some strange habits to become one of South Africa’s best batsmen.
McKenzie's international career seemed to have terminated in 2004 when, after 41 moderate Tests in the Proteas' middle order, he was cut adrift by national selectors. By then, the Johannesburg native was in the grips of what he believes was obsessive compulsive disorder, and enslaved to a series of bizarre superstitions - including the taping of his bat to the ceiling before each innings and insisting every toilet seat in the dressing room was down when he went to bat.
McKenzie now concedes his complex set of rituals overwhelmed him, and might have cost him his career. But after four years of toil and self-discovery in South Africa's domestic cricket, the then 32-year-old was handed a lifeline in January when called in to replace Herschelle Gibbs.
The allrounder Jacques Kallis is a player Australians don’t generally warm to. In the Herald Sun Jon Anderson looks at some of the reasons why.
Full postSelector adds to Casson conundrum
What happened to Beau Casson
Peter English
25-Feb-2013
What happened to Beau Casson? It’s one of the big questions of the Australian summer after Casson, the left-arm wrist spinner, careered from first-choice slow bowler to forgotten man in a couple of months. Daniel Brettig talks to Andrew Hilditch, the chairman of selectors, about it for AAP.
Far from knowing that Casson was confused, Hilditch believes the left-arm spinner "knows exactly where he stands". "When anybody goes back to Shield cricket, they've got to perform, they've got to be at their best and they've got to be knocking on the door," Hilditch said.