The original cricketer

You thought that when it was said of Ranji that he “never played a Christian shot in his life” it was just a figure of speech? Well, it appears there is more to it than that, it was perhaps an almost literal reference if this recent story is true: it appears that Jesus played cricket as a child. Read on here.

Action replay

Watching Ajantha Mendis bowl is a sublime pleasure. A smooth unfussy action, a grip as unique as anything we’ve seen in world cricket and a beguiling bag of tricks (especially the carrom ball) that makes batsmen wonder whether they would be better off signing up for the ICL. The sight of Mendis in action sent my mind back to all the bowlers I’ve seen in action in the last 25-some years, to the bowling actions that are still vivid in my mind purely for the fact that they were different from the rest of the pack. Here are ten picks, not in any particular order and not by any means comprehensive. And just to reduce the recency effect, the list does not include any current players.

It cannot be otherwise, a list of unforgettable bowling actions has to start with the man with the most evocative of nicknames, Whispering Death. While I’ve seen a YouTube video of that over to Geoffrey Boycott, my memory of watching live action of Michael Holding is mostly from the evening of his career, when he cut down his pace and was more a line-and-length second change bowler. I remember feeling sorry for the man because he once snared a batsman out caught and bowled. ‘Caught and bowled? Isn’t that a spinner’s mode of dismissal?’ thought my youthfully ignorant mind. But the grace of the man’s bowling action was no less even in those twilight days of an indisputably great career. Just for the perfection of his action, he deserved one more wicket in his test career – 249 is just not Holding.

The only thing I shared in common with this great was a lack of height relative to my cricket-playing school mates. But that was precisely what made me try to imitate his action: the energetic run up in short strides, the little leap before delivery, the chest on posture before delivery with the hand framing the face in a perfect right angle, all culminating in a vicious wicket-taking delivery more often than not. OK, I didn’t manage that last part too well but Malcolm Marshall certainly did, with 376 times in test matches.

He’s considered the most creative fast bowler to have inhabited this planet and few would disagree with that assessment. Years after Alan Davidson, the world had a left-arm fast bowler of genuine class when Wasim Akram was plucked out of nowhere by Imran Khan. The bustling run up, the pendulum-like action, the whippy action almost off the wrong foot, the follow through that was more of a run-through and the limitless variety made him one of the most watchable bowlers in world cricket. (I remember the phrase ‘bends the ball’ being used for the first time in connection with Akram.) And then there was the appealing and the subsequent celebration – sheer ecstasy. Remember his celebrations after dismissing Krishnamachari Srikkanth and Mohinder Amarnath (in successive balls) in the Bangalore test against India in the 1986-87 series?

It’s an action I rate as imposing as Michael Holding’s, probably more fearsome even. Augmented by the sun cream on the lip that made him look even more formidable, Allan Donald was truly a sight to behold. Marry that with some genuine pace and unrelenting aggression and you get a great career record. The brilliant smile after getting one more opposition wicket matched the ferocity of the wicket-taking act itself. I find the term White Lightning tautological and a touch pejorative, but there is absolutely nothing amiss in Donald’s action.

Back where I grew up in small town South India, jaggery used to be made in the street in the market area. Rows and rows of men used to stand barefoot on mounds and mounds of the raw material and pound at it with their feet. Never mind if you’ve never seen this act in your life, if you’ve seen Patrick Patterson at the top of his run-up, you’ve seen a very good imitation of it. Except that the batsmen didn’t find the end-product too sweet. A pity he didn’t play more than 28 test matches, but then a bowling average of 30.90 just wouldn’t do for the West Indies in those halcyon days.

English cricketers of the last two decades may not believe it but England actually had a medium pacer who played a significant role in an Ashes victory. Running in from between cover and mid-off, Richard Ellison focused on outswingers that almost mirrored his run-up (in helpful conditions) – ask Allan Border and his cohorts about that delirious (if you’re English, that is) fourth day of the fifth test of the 1985 Ashes as England took a 2-1 lead in the series. Ellison continued the good form into the sixth test as England wrapped up the series 3-1, but his record either side of these two test matches was rather moderate though he ended with a career average of just a dot under 30.

Choosing to be a spinner in the 1980s in the West Indies was as wise as writing capitalist slogans on red curtains. May be Clive Lloyd got fooled when Roger Harper started off from the top of his run-up – those clearly were a fast bowler’s strides. As Harper reached the crease, he slowed down to a complete halt. Then came the graceful high arm delivery, almost in slow motion. Soon Lloyd and his successors (and most of the opposition batsmen, one must admit) saw through Harper’s action, and he got to play only 25 tests, though he ended up with a perfectly respectable bowling average of 28.06. Of course, the one lasting image of Harper in your mind is almost certainly likely to be the run out (or stumped-and-bowled as one commentator gloriously described it) of Graham Gooch in the MCC Bicentenary match in 1987.

The two back-to-back limited overs tournaments in early 1985 constitute perhaps the most glorious phase for the Indian team. One image that stays in my mind from that time is that of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan twirling the ball from one hand to another before beginning his run-up – a friend referred to it rather uncharitably as an elegant version of milking a cow, but that instinctive mannerism of Siva was one of the more mesmerising images of that season. The stumpings of Javed Miandad at the MCG and Imran Khan in Sharjah were sheer magic. A pity the man came to pieces immediately afterwards.

Finding an Australian to fit into this list was the toughest act of them all (I’ve given up on the Kiwis and the Sri Lankans) – nothing wrong with their actions except that they were all so normal and orthodox. Sure there was a buzz when Shane Warne runs in, but it has nothing to do with the action, more with what he made the ball do. Greg Mathews I considered for his tendency to bowl with his hat on, but that was more an eccentricity than an action thing. Bruce Reid looked different only because he extremely lean and lanky. Then the current coach of Pakistan (is he still?) came to mind. Geoff Lawson seemed to have a double action – in the last shuffle before his delivery stride, he almost looked like he was going to deliver the ball. It was another action I attempted to imitate in my school days, but with little success.

Yes, I did mention early on that I have considered only current players for this list, but I sneak in Mushtaq Ahmed because I don’t think he will play any more international cricket, not even for the nation that is known to be the most indecipherable in its selection logic. Mushtaq’s action was impishness itself. You may argue that Abdul Qadir was the original – I agree there are similarities, but I would put Mushtaq’s action ahead of Qadir’s. There was a certain boyishnees about it, the run-up was more energetic and the dimple in the cheek (even the beard he currently sports cannot hide it) as he breaks into a wide grin after befuddling yet another Englishman was a sight for sore eyes. You’re tempted to imagine that if he had been handled better by the selectors, he would have done much better than finish with a rather modest 185 wickets at 32.87 in 52 tests.

What other names come to your mind?

Oh captain my captain

It is no surprise that Michael Vaughan and Paul Collingwood have given it up – it is not easy captaining the English cricket team in today’s era. The demands are just impossible.

To begin with, the selectors, the media, the public all want their captain to score runs. Where would they have found Mike Brearley if that had been the condition in the 1970s? Or Mike Denness before him? Even Vaughan resigned because such inhuman demands were placed on him. There’s one of two things he can do: pat his bowlers in the back after grounding yet another catch or launch into a flowing cover drive. Which would make a bigger difference to his team’s fortunes you think?

The media in particular (and we know how they rule the selectors’ minds, don’t we?) wants the captain to be kind to their representatives as well. So when Vaughan questions the cricketing records of a journalist, he’s pilloried. There’s no place for a candid captain nowadays, is there? Now who else does this expectation rule out?

As I write this piece, national selector Geoff Miller comes up with a new demand: he wants one person for both the test and the limited overs captaincy. It’s a shame on Andrew Strauss, isn’t it? May be he can offer to keep wickets in one-dayers. He does have a successful precedent in India’s Rahul Dravid, doesn’t he?

Some sections of stakeholders (selectors, officials, media, the public, the blogerati, the neighbourhood dog) are beginning to ask for experience in a captain as well. Come now, imagine the kind of people whose services England would have lost out if such a silly demand had been taken seriously in the past – Tony Lewis and Chris Cowdrey are just two illustrious names I would like to mention. I fear we may have lost the services of that wizard, Robert Key, for good (or bad, come to think of it). Alastair Cook, as an extension of the same logic, may be deemed too green just now.

Finally, and this is surely the work of a Tony Greig baiter, there are ear-splitting whispers that the selectors should stick to true Englishmen as captains, not people who adopted England as their country. So that puts paid to the hopes of Kevin Pietersen – he can win matches for England with his bat, no problem, but he can’t use his brains to lead them to victory. The English have a nation to defend, what is a few losses on the field?

So who does that leave us with? Andrew Flintoff? Will he behave with the media? Ian Bell? Isn’t he likely to be too aggressive? Ryan Sidebottom? Now why is no one talking of his candidature?

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.