A lot to play for

For England, there is a lot to play for at Edgbaston on Saturday, as they usher the weekend in with a handy lead of 214 runs with four wickets in hand.

All is forgotten as Paul Collingwood cements (why does that verb seem most appropriate for the man?) his place in the test team again with a handy hundred. (He got there with a six, didn’t he? Well, well, what’s the world coming to? Now they’ll expect Michael Vaughan to score runs as well, those unreasonable media men.) The captain of the one-day team not finding a place in the test team? That’s a sure way to get the selectors into recalling Graeme Hick.

Ryan Sidebottom gets a chance to do another Bob Willis (as a colleague said, it’s more than the bobbing hair, right?) as he steams in to bowl with a not-so-heavy target to back him. That may put paid to the hopes of Darren Pattinson’s comeback, but who cares for Aussies in England any way?

Andrew Flintoff completes a dream return to the test fold. Was he match fit? Did Michael Vaughan over-bowl him in the first innings? Is he good enough to bat at No. 6? All such questions will be forgotten. Until the big man injures himself again. (Can anyone please lead me to an online video clipping of his two overs to Jacques Kallis in the first innings?)

Andrew Strauss will get one more opportunity to prove that he is worthy of the sparkling whites after back-to-back twin failures following a relatively massive 44 in the first test. With Michael Vaughan preferring to give the opposition two quick wickets at the top of the order, the selectors will find it tough to look beyond a reluctant Marcus Trescothick (remember the man?) to partner Alastair Cook. And if Marcus jumps the ship again… well, let the selectors do their job, I’m not paid to do so.

Ian Bell’s not doing too badly, notwithstanding the twin failures in the second test (and that horror of a shot today), but all it takes is one more loss for the wise men to start looking at Ramps and other assorted veterans for the middle order.

Finally for the skipper. Notwithstanding my cruel jibes at him earlier in this piece, Michael Vaughan redeemed himself somewhat by making a whole fistful of runs today (it constitutes 42.5 percentage of his aggregate for the series so far). But no, Vaughan’s not there in the team to make those runs – that’s for Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar to take care of. A win this weekend and Vaughan will be English captain for life, even after he retires. He will also be unquestionably named the best English captain of all time. Mike Brearley, who’s that? And all those whispers about knighthood will be happily amplified.

There is a lot to play for tomorrow.

The outcast league

A Cricinfo piece titled ‘BCCI bars its players from counties with ICL staff’ reveals that the BCCI has decided that Indian cricketers cannot sign up for English counties that have ICL players in their midst. The honourable secretary of the BCCI Mr. Niranjan Shah said, ‘We don’t want our players in teams that have other players playing in unauthorised tournaments.’ Considering 15 out of the 18 English counties have ICL players in their midst, this sage decision of the BCCI all but rules out Indians from playing in the English county.

So the ICL has officially been declared an outcast, so if they go one way, the rest of Indian cricket cannot take that route. So you play for the ICL, then travel to England and play for Notts, then VVS Laxman can’t sign up for Notts. You go to Aberdeen for a vacation, and Rahul Dravid can’t vacation in Scotland for the rest of his life. You book in to a British Airways flight to go to England to watch the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and you’ve denied Sachin Tendulkar the opportunity to meet Lewis Hamilton.

However, there is some silver lining faintly visible in the grim horizon. The BCCI does not have a problem if ‘non-ICL’ players from English county teams take part in the IPL. Someone please explain that to me.

I wonder whether it is possible to ban the BCCI and the IPL.

My Favourite World un-XI

Time Cricket correspondents Mike Atherton, Chris Martin Jenkins, Alan Lee and John Woodcock discuss their favourite world XI (clearly for the real version of the game, considering the presence of a certain Sunil Gavaskar in the team) from the players they have seen in action (link courtesy: Rambling About). Random people expectedly followed suit with their own sides in the comments. Dileep Premachandran added another team to the kitty in The Doosra.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing is there, so let me flip the criterion around. Who are the eleven players I have watched / followed who I wouldn’t want to see on the cricket field? Accomplished performers all with impressive records, but so unwatchable they make the weather channel seem like AXN on steroids and Cher come across as the epitome of sartorial elegance.
My first choice as opener would be the current Indian coach, Gary Kirsten. Hugely effective yes, but would you pay a penny to watch him in action? Ferreting away his runs, nudging the odd boundary, he even makes that king of strokes, the left-hander’s cover drive, look like a bumpy car ride on a pothole-ridden road.

Vying to join Kirsten at the top are a couple of Englishmen – that old stonewaller Chris Tavaré and the relative dasher, Graeme Fowler. With a relatively higher strike rate (38.87 versus 30.60), Fowler gave us more of an opportunity to turn our head the other way, so he gets the nod.

Though he bats quite often at no. 4, my choice for the no. 3 slot is arguably one of the finest all-rounders in the world (statistically at any rate), with almost 10,000 runs and more than 200 wickets. But when it comes to effectiveness as an anti-insomnia pill, Jacques Kallis is my no. 1 choice.

At no. 4 is another world beater, Javed Miandad. No, I am not a crazed Indian seething with anger at that six, but every one of Miandad’s 8832 test runs was like a penny stolen from that poor beggar at the street corner. And his immunity against lbws at home doesn’t make him too popular with me either.

Speaking of lbws and pads, the name of Jimmy Adams surely has to feature in such an august list. Watching him in that ‘Padams’ series against India in the mid-1990s was just one degree better than solitary confinement. And that’s a generous comparison. Shivnarine Chanderpaul came close here, but Adams sneaked in because of his equally inelegant bowling and (occasional) wicket-keeping. We’ll excuse his great fielding at forward short-leg.

He is the architect of Sri Lanka’s rise in the cricketing world, he probably saved the career of Muthiah Muralitharan, he’s anna to every one in Sri Lankan cricket, but remember Arjuna Ranatunga with his pads on? An ugly nudge to third man and a leisurely walk to the other end, a brutal cut that the point fielder lets go more out of disgust at the patent inelegance of the stroke than anything else. If stomach inside counted, Ranatunga would have perhaps been run out less than the eight times he has been in his test career. Anna is also my captain.

The wicket-keeper’s slot was a tough battle, what with the impressive credentials of Bruce French, Ridley Jacobs, Salim Yousuf and Adam Parore, among others. But Nayan Mongia gets my nod just because he was a better wicket-keeper, and his batting was as ugly and unwatchable as the others on the list. Ridley ran Mongia really close. May be my anxiety to get an Indian into the team surfaced here.

Leading the new ball attack will be Javagal Srinath. Probably one of the most under-rated performers in Indian cricket, Srinath’s hangdog expression and apologetic demeanour made him the perfect anti-fast bowler. And he’s the only batsman I’ve seen who plays a front-foot heave of the back foot. Remember that last delivery of the World Cup game against Australia in 1992?

Joining Srinath at the top of the attack could be any of a clutch of medium pace and swing bowlers from England – I don’t want to choose one and upset a whole lot of others, so let me just pump for that unlucky Aussie, Michael Kasprowicz. Being a contemporary of Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee meant that Kaspa was restricted to just 38 tests over a ten-year career. But for the sheer ordinariness of his action and his role as a workhorse, he deserves to be unwatched.

The first spinner in my team has to be Muthiah Muralitharan. Congenital defect or not, I am just not convinced by his action and so I can’t relish the prospect of watching him on the field.

I prefer to go in with two spinners because there aren’t too many fast bowlers who are particularly unwatchable (and there is Kallis in the team as well, isn’t there). And the spinning partner for Murali has to be Ashley Giles. Ever seen him bowl? His inelegant batting is a useful bonus as well.

The coach of my team is Aunshuman Gaekwad, who gave me the pleasure of switching my television off when he made a brief comeback (albeit in one-day cricket) against the West Indies in 1987 – he even scored at a much faster rate than Krishnamachari Srikkanth in his last game.

How will my team fare against the world-beating sides of Athers & Co.? Well, we can only speculate, because who’ll want to watch them play?

The next crisis in cricket

The cricket web sites are yet to latch on to it, but one of the news channels in India had this staggering revelation: Shahid Afridi has claimed that he has not performed well with the bat recently because someone has been using black magic and casting bad luck spells at him.

It is a real tragedy that the game should be denied its due by such travesties. The success of the game attracts too many envious elements – bodyline, Packer, ball tampering, match-fixing, Lalit Modi and now, black magic. We need to cleanse the game of these. Then, Shahid Afridi will be the Don Bradman he is in terms of potential. And Pakistan will be Australia. Oh well, does that suggest a conspiracy theory? No, I’m not saying anything.

The left-right divide

When Ian Botham played the shot, it looked ugly all right but it seemed to befit the man and his cheekiness. It appeared to contravene the spirit of the law, but in a harmless and endearing sense, not unlike a Javed Miandad stealing a single after giving the fielding team the impression that he considered the ball dead. So it became accepted as the Botham shot (though he did not quite invent the stroke) and gradually, other players, many less accomplished than Botham and some more, started attempting the stroke, with mixed results.

Mike Gatting’s famous dismissal in the finals of the 1987 World Cup was promising: will it mean the death of the shot? Unfortunately, but rightly so, the man got pilloried more than the stroke. The reverse sweep survived. Today when Rahul Dravid plays it, it's his statement that he can play unorthodox shots, and thus is not a misfit for Twenty20. When Matthew Hayden plays the left-hander’s version of it, it seemed to be one more manifestation of his ugly-but-hugely-effective run-gathering approach.

When Kevin Pietersen launched those two left-handed sixes off Scott Styris (one of them through long-off / long-on!) en route to a match-winning century against the New Zealanders earlier this week, I groaned. (I know he did it once before against Muthiah Muralitharan in a test match, but then once is an exception, twice is a trend.) Come on, this was not a gentle paddle to fine-leg / third-man for an ambled single; this was just playing the other way around. Instead of a light-hearted skirt around the spirit of the game, it was becoming another tool for batsmen to terrorise bowlers. Surely it was time for the administrators to step in and do something?

Step in they did, but do something they did not. They investigated and decided that the ‘switch hit’ (note the change in terminology: it’s no longer the reverse sweep; on such subtleties does the game change) is “exciting to the game of cricket” and therefore gave it an all-clear sign. Michael Holding, the patron-saint of bowlers, questioned the double standards at play here, arguing that when bowlers cannot change hands midway without intimating the umpires, why should batsmen be allowed to do so. The MCC response?

They [bowlers] do not provide a warning of the type of delivery that they will bowl (for example, an off-cutter or a slower ball). It therefore concludes that the batsman should have the opportunity – should they wish – of executing the ‘switch-hit’ stroke.

Sure they’re comparing different fruits here? The bowler’s craft involves mixing things up – slower ones, yorkers, bouncers, etc. – while bowling with one hand and the batsmen respond with their own execution strategies, in terms of what stroke to play – drive, cut, pull, hook, defence, leave, etc. – while also batting in one stance. That’s the comparison, and it ends there.

Now with the legitimisation of the ‘switch-hit’ (it still does not have enough legitimacy with me to escape the inverted commas), batsmen, the deprived souls that they are, get an advantage over the bowler. So if you can’t play leg-spin properly, all you need to do is change grips so the ball comes into you rather than turn away. Sure, such ambidexterity is not easy, but at least batsmen can practice the shot and the ‘gifted’ ones like KP may come off successful. But what about the bowlers? Bowling off one’s other hand is even more difficult, so even granting that for bowlers is not a reasonable levelling out.

The anti-bowlers’ campaign carries on mercilessly, as the MCC and the other bodies benignly preside over the gradual inevitable death of the game. To begin with, the death of the bowler. Why would any one want to be a bowler in a batsman’s game? It’s about as intelligent as launching a new brand of typewriters in the market today.

Forget test cricket versus Twenty20, let’s stoke the batsmen versus bowlers argument.

The future cricket 5 (More to toss)

Eight long years ago, a good professor called Warren Edwardes suggested that the toss, the traditional ritual that constitutes the first action in a cricket game, be replaced by the Bid. His suggestion seems to have been considered worthy enough to be picked up by the Financial Times (caution: opens a pdf file). Considering no move has been made in this direction so far, it is safe to assume that the ICC did not deem it worthy to interfere with tradition in this one regard. (Considering the financial and marketing implications that the concept of “the Bid” suggests, certain quarters that run certain forms of the game may be interested in it, but hush, let’s leave cricket to people who understand the on-field game, shall we?)

It’s surprising when you think about it, but many of the traditional rituals of the game haven’t really changed, notwithstanding what else has happened to the game in the last few decades. As Gideon Haigh writes in this Cricinfo piece, the taking of the guard is still as unquestioned and unthinkingly automatic an activity with batsmen as it was from the days of the primo professional allrounder of the early 19^th century, William Lambert. (A relatively recent augmentation to this charade is the slightly pretentious and dare I say, sanctimonious, act of taking guard again after reaching a landmark like a hundred or a triple-hundred.) Similarly, that oh-so-quaint British tradition of a tea break still persists in test matches, and lunch continues to be taken after the first two hours of play in the day, even though the clock barely tips over to half-past-eleven in the sub-continent. Test cricket is still played in whites, notwithstanding the fact that players are used as sandwich men in some forms of the game, especially the IxL (replace x with either alphabet, depending on who you support).

Back to the toss. It is a chance beginning to the ritual called the match, and of late, players (do I remember Steve Waugh protesting against it as well?) have questioned the need for it and have suggested that it be done away with. But as rituals go, do you really want it to go? Instead, what if we use it as a kind of a marker-laying for captains to play their hands?

Traditionally, the toss-winning captain decides on two things – who would bat first and, if he decides to bat first, what roller should be used on the pitch. What if we increase the ambit of decisions that can be made immediately after the toss? Like choosing which overs to use as powerplays in a limited overs game? Now that makes it less of an unmixed blessing, doesn’t it? Or choosing what roller to use on each day of the test? And just to take away the luck factor to an extent, how about defining a set of decisions that will be taken alternately between the toss-winning captain and the opposing captain? And the toss winner just gets to make the first move.

Of course, the easiest option is to just eliminate the toss, but then how do you get the game started? Surely not cede home advantage or away advantage or any of those suggestions that were mooted in the past? As for the bid, I suggest we leave that to the people who manage the game outside the ground. I fear it is already happening.

Tailpiece: There is one unquestionable (at least by those who understand the game) abomination that needs to be tossed away when it comes to this ritual: using the toss to determine the winner of a game, a rule that applies in the Twenty20 format when the scores are level at the end. You know the cliché I am thinking of here.

Earlier posts in this series

50Fifty

More new balls

Limited over tests

Half-and-half

What next?

I wonder why no one thought of it before: using the trouser as more than just a piece of cloth to protect one’s modesty. The kiwis have hit on it, high-tech bowlers' trousers, specially designed to put shine on the ball, and Dipak Patel springs the second surprise of his life. (The first, lest you start thinking the 1992 World Cup, is having managed to have played at the apex level in the first place.)

The more interesting mention, as published in this cricinfo story is the introduction of the IonX BaseLayer performance underwear which is claimed to improve performance by 2.7%. The performance of the balls, I suppose.

From a cricketing perspective, the more sobering sound byte in the story comes from Patel himself.

"When I came into cricket I was surprised to find there are no regulations about what materials you can and can't use."

The game seems to be setting itself for controversy, considering the number of gaps it offers for misinterpretation. Not so long ago, there was an MCC debate and decision on the use of graphite in cricket bats. And quite some time back, a certain famous personage tried an aluminium bat, didn’t he?

So what is the next performance-enhancing accessory likely to be? A Velcro surface on wicket-keeping gloves perhaps? (Did I hear Kamran Akmal nod enthusiastically?)

Corrigendum published 06-June-08: The Patel responsible for this performance gear innovation is Dipal Patel and not Dipak Patel. Apologies for the mistake.