The second day at Trent Bridge was just as scorchio as Day 1 had been. Personal highlights of the day were speaking to Geoffrey Boycott at lunch, pitching an interview to Nasser Hussain, soliciting a brief lesson in cultural history from Tony Cozier and doing a slot on Cricinfo’s ‘The Two Chucks’ video blog.
Here's my copy for the day, published on the Spin website.
*****
“Dot, dot, dot,
dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot”. No, this is not an Eastenders homage to the scene in which Alan
Partridge tries to get the attention of Dan (Steven Mangham) on the
Chorister’s Country Club car park, but the sequence of deliveries faced by DJ
Sammy first thing this morning as he closed circumspectly in on a first Test
hundred.
However, rare must it be that a captain’s personal aura of
authority can have grown and shrivelled so much within such a short space of
time. For it was toward the back end of the middle session that Jonathan Trott
was making him look like one of the Academy net bowlers. Then, after tea, he
bowled at KP with the keeper stood up. I’m not sure Derryck Murray ever did
that to Colin Croft or Andy Roberts when they were third seamers. If only he
had an all-rounder at number 6 to take off the heat, a Bravo, say…
2. ROACH MATERIAL
Few things are more deflating in cricket than taking wickets
with no balls. Naturally, this is less of an issue when you are creating
wicket-taking opportunities at regular intervals – when the ball is nipping,
nibbling, hooping or otherwise misbehaving. But on a chapatti-flat pitch with
the sun beating down and a three-and-half-man attack [note to self: pitch this
as new Charlie Sheen vehicle], it is especially galling. But to do so twice is bordering on the criminal. Beneficiary
both times of Kemar Roach’s sloppiness was Alastair Cook (on 1 and 12), who
must have thought that all his Christmases had come at once (which would only
be fair, given his birth date of December 25). However, the chef, one of
the best Cooks to have played the game, failed to kick on. Roach,
meanwhile, was last seen being kept away from his belt and shoelaces. “This is
a league game, Smokey. There are rules”.
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| Portly but nimble |
3. WE LOVE YOU RAVI , WE DO
Windies sole wicket-taker was the chunky spunk from Guyana , Ravi
Rampaul, a man who has been pilloried recently for his Samitian approach to
Body Mass Index, treatment that your correspondent considers downright ‘fattist’.
Thus, despite bowling a few sharp bouncers (“double chin music”) and getting
the ball to reverse swing nicely during the evening session, when he bowled a
spell of 5-1-9-1, he was still subject to cruel chants from the sozzled crowd
late in the afternoon.
Anyway, along with Chanderpaul, Rampaul’s presence in the
side –, plus players like Davendra Bishoo, Sunil Narine, and Denish Ramdin
around the squad – led me to ask the doyen of Caribbean cricket broadcasting,
the august Tony Cozier, about the history behind the Indian influx to Trinidad
and Guyana. I duly learned that they came as indentured labour to work on the
holdings of freed slaves in the mid-nineteenth century, but only in the larger
territories where land was ample.
What a delight. What a privilege. What a warm and ego-free
man.
4. HACKNEY DE PHRAIZ
In the course of the aforementioned history lesson, Tony
Cozier (or ‘Coze-dog’ as I felt able to call him some four minutes into our
relationship) mentioned that, unlike the Indians, who kept their cultural
moorings, the freed African slaves
took the names of their colonial masters. He then proceeded to reel off a list
of men such as Shane Sillingford, Winston Benjamin, Patrick Patterson…
The wonderfully evocative names of Caribbean
cricketers have long been a source of fascination for me, ever since the David
Baddiel gag about them having a new quick called Cumbersome Briefcase. Not only
are they one of the best vehicles through which to hear the melodiousness and
cadences of Cozier’s voice, but they also fall into a few interesting
categories, from the ideological (Fidel Edwards, Nixon MacLean, Nikita Miller) to
the cannabis-themed (Kemar Roach, Floyd Reifer, Daren Ganga).
I mention all this because it is my intention to launch and
market a ‘Windies name generator’ app for iPhone. It will take a suburb of London and add a
polysyllabic olde worlde profession, giving you the likes of Kensington Cobbler
or Putney Stevedore. Dragon’s Den,
here I come.
5. STRAUSS RAUS? NEIN
Strauss’s second hundred of the series, his twenty-first in
Tests, led me to think about the way fortune and contingency stalk our lives,
now bestowing their favours, now scuppering even our most mundane wishes. Had
the scheduling been different, with a more potent or skilled bowling line-up (I
grant you, Windies new ball attack is not shabby), then he might not have been
able to render his position as captain quite so impregnable.
The skipper rarely looked troubled and batted at a tempo that
suggested he was here for a long time rather than a good one. The four pillars
of his batting were in evidence – back-foot tucks off his pads, cuts of varying
lateness, cover drives and delicate lap sweeps – as he progressed serenely to
102 not out at stumps. In contrast to the effusive rib-cruncher at Lord’s, he this
time received something of a shall-I-shan’t-I bear-hug from KP, who should look
to rectify this and go full-on should Strauss make it a Daddy hundred tomorrow.
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| Hug buddies |
6. KP & THE
SUNSHINE BAND
Finally, we could be in for another mawkish dose of
faux-humility tomorrow as the former Cannock CC number 9, ‘Kelves’ Pietersen,
will look to kick on from an occasionally brutal, regularly disdainful 72 not
out and into three figures. One of the most imposing and intimidating physical
presences at the crease there has ever been, perhaps in the same bracket as Sir Viv and
Haydos, Pietermaritzburg’s favourite son was especially contemptuous today toward
the off-breaks of Shillingford, giving the charge to the first ball he faced to
smear a six over long-on, while at one stage going down to play a lap sweep and
improvising a Dilscoop-cum-ramp shot that went wide of slip – clearly an homage
to his secret drinking buddy and notable one-day improviser, Nicholas Verity
Knight.
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