Rouse has grounds for enjoying feast (3 July 1999)

3 July 1999

Rouse has grounds for enjoying feast

Simon Hughes

Batsmen are the darlings of committees, seam bowlers are cricket's labourers. Steve Rouse has rewritten that old adage at Edgbaston. In the past two days 31 wickets have fallen for 462, 20 caught behind the wicket, not forgetting about 239 streaky edges and swishes at thin air. Channel 4's snickometer was in danger of overheating.

Two opening batsmen in the match have managed one run between them in four innings occupying a mere 10 balls. They came brandishing a slim branch of willow. They needed the whole trunk.

In a clammy atmosphere, the ball swung so prodigiously the speed gun could not keep track of it, and bounced extravagantly. Some of the replays were better watched from behind the sofa. The pitch, not the one originally planned for this match, started tacky and a lush green outfield maintained a shine on the ball like patent leather. You could have got wickets with an orange. Well what else would you expect from a groundsman - Rouse - who ploughed nobly into the wind on featherbeds here for Warwickshire throughout the Seventies.

The quickies resembled pigs with their snouts in the trough. These were the conditions of their dreams. They were assisted by batsmen whose feet remained stuck in treacle yet who seemed magnetically attracted to anything wide. Not one of either side's top six managed 30. Rouse himself commented at tea that perhaps some players could have got a shade further forward in defence but there was a twinkle in his eye.

In fact the most effective batsmen were tail-enders content to sniff or biff. Having smelled the leather a couple of times as good-length deliveries grazed his nose, Andrew Caddick adopted a forthright approach and struck England's first boundaries for two hours. Alex Tudor followed suit. They more than doubled the score and, having put on 70, would have found it hard to resist returning to the dressing room to say: "What were you lot doing out there? I was playing it with a stick of rhubarb." The uncomplicated hitting of Simon Doull sent the same message to the New Zealand team.

This has been a dramatic return for Caddick, a man so mistrusted by the previous regime. Rightly entrusted with the new ball in the first innings, he took a while to find his ample feet but, once he did, he was irresistible, with eight for 89 in the match and a doughty innings that became England's highest score.

For a man who tended, on England tours of the distant past, to look up the New Zealand score before anything else, it is reassuring that he has reserved his best England performance for his old compatriots. Chris Cairns kept him out of New Zealand junior sides when he was a teenager. He certainly had a point to prove.

Rouse was obliged to change the original Test pitch because fielders accidentally damaged it during the World Cup semi-final two weeks ago. Test wickets are usually tended and manicured for three months. This one had two weeks. Amid the heavy rain of this week, Rouse did the best he could, but felt it needed another four days of preparation. Caddick must have felt he had died and gone to heaven.

Alec Stewart, meanwhile, will think he is in one of those torture chambers where the fruit on the tree shrivels up as soon as he touches it. The deposed captain has had a wretched week, culminating in two ducks and two costly dropped catches here, on a ground where, two years ago, he was a hero after hitting the winning runs against Australia. But gaffers don't become duffers overnight and he will serve England well again.

England's chances now rest on doggedness, self-belief and luck. They have the men to make 204 to win and they have the time. Oh ye citizens have faith. And admire the England players' shrewdness. Having had their pay rise requests recently rebuffed by the England and Wales Cricket Board, they have taken craftier measures: cram the work into less hours.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph