In the wake of England's World Cup drubbing by NZ I caught up with (an imaginary) Peter Moores to hear what he had to say on a variety of topics, including the preparation, the current state of mind, Alastair Cook, the current skipper, Hales, Bopara, Taylor, Ballance, Finn and Broad>
Eloquent and lucid as ever, he brings the sort of robust pow-wow bandwidth that allows Team England and media to unite the silos. Read and learn.
A couple of weeks ago, the English had their traditional (whatever the sport) pre-World Cup optimism. Since then we've been smashed by Australia and tanked by New Zealand, exposed as playing a rigid, old-fashioned version of one-day cricket.
A couple of weeks ago, you might have had a bit more enthusiasm for reading a semi-regular contribution to the cricket365 website concerning players for whom the 2015 World Cup probably represents a final curtain on this stage – players such as Shahid Afridi, Kumar Sangakkara, MS Dhoni, Jimmy Anderson, Michael Clarke and Dan Vettori.
So, 2014 seems a long way away now. It sorta is. Seven weeks, in fact. Which means it's quite a long time since I updated this blog. Here's a piece for South Africa-based cricket365 looking at ... oh, you worked it out from the title, right? C365's Top Debutants of 2014
Mohammad Amir: pariah or victim of circumstance? Scourge of the game who ought to have been banished ad infinitum, or a gullible and naive tool of his captain and his agent's malign schemes?
Clearly, both arguments are tenable, but this piece for ESPNcricinfo's The Cordon tries to look beyond the moral issues – which, heaven knows, has been done to death – and examine the seeming inevitability of his cricketing resurrection, specifically whether the five-year absence from the game might actually have helped him.
OK, so he isn't really my favourite cricketer, but Brian Lara had already been taken...
Anyway, it was a great honour to have a piece accepted for this cricinfo column, which has featured many of my favourite cricket writers (perhaps there's a column in that?), including: Gideon Haigh (on Chris Tavare), Rob Smyth (on Martin McCague), John Hotten (on Geoff Boycott), Rob Steen (on Flintoff), Jarrod Kimber (on Bryce McGain), Malcolm Knox (on Allan Border), Alan Tyers (on Botham).
It's well worth checking a few of these out. There are several other good ones: Lawrence Booth on Allan Lamb, Tanya Aldred on Shane Warne, David Frith on Ray Lindwall, Peter Roebuck on Harold Larwood, Andrew Miller on Gus Fraser... Meanwhile, here's my text, but without the mangled edit on one of the sentences (this in itself might provide a clue as to why Kack was my [second] favourite cricketer). Appropriately, it's also perhaps my favourite piece for ESPNcricinfo thus far. The original (which I called Bristles in Bristol, so the editor redeemed himself somewhat) can be found here.
* * *
TOP DOG OF THE UNDERDOGS
Growing up in a minor county, my first in-the-flesh
exposure to famous cricketers usually came in those sorely missed
David-and-Goliath games of the old NatWest Trophy. Malcolm Marshall, Ezra
Moseley, Allan Lamb, Robin Smith and Aravinda de Silva all came to play Staffordshire
at Stone, my home town. And before them, in 1984, when I was 11, was Jack
Russell, then an unknown member of an unglamorous Gloucestershire side who arrived
to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of an inevitable victory.
I’d love to claim it was love at first sight, but the
truth is I barely noticed him – which, conventional wisdom will (erroneously) tell
you, is the hallmark of a good wicketkeeper. However, I do remember when the
seduction process was complete, and it took a single ball to seal it. It was
the moment the pleasantly attractive girl from your physics class turns up to
the school disco in pink hotpants.
To this day, I’ve only seen one legside stumping off a
quick bowler in Test cricket, probably fewer than the number of switch-hit
sixes if I cared to think about it. Gladstone Small was the bowler, Dean Jones
the man overbalancing at the crease, and Jack, with ninja-like celerity,
hopping sideways while seeming stillness itself, the magician who whisked off
the bails before gambolling like a lamb into the arms of Alec Stewart, later the
quietus to his international career. Its unadulterated brilliance could be
gauged from the reaction of the grizzled old pros converging upon him to
celebrate: Ned Larkins, Eddie Hemmings, David Gower, Graham Gooch, all laughing
at the absurd majesty of it all, a heist carried out to perfection. And that’s
what a legside stumping feels like: pickpocketing the opposition.
My dad was a wicketkeeper. I wasn’t, although, strangely,
I often seemed to find myself walking out in pads and gloves to do it. It was
one long trauma. On one occasion, I lost a tooth; on many, I lost the plot. I endured
a West Indian
Test bowler pounding the ball into hotspots, broke several fingers (hands
groping round the batsman’s backside for a lost flight path), missed three stumpings
in a final off a leg-spinner who forgot the googly signal, and, worst of all, dropped three catches in a
single over off one of Jack Russell’s future teammates, Jeremy Snape, while
playing for Staffordshire Under-13s.
I’ve always thought wicketkeeping – specifically,
standing up to seamers – the most difficult of cricket’s arts, with the
possible exception of legspin, and so felt an exaggerated admiration for anyone
who did it well. Jack’s silken glovework was, evidently, a marvel – the preternatural
ease with which he took the awkwardly bouncing ball as it melted gratefully
into those black mitts, body contorting yet hands smooth and slow, like an
expert cocktail waiter sweeping through a busy room.
Neat and tidy as a keeper he may have been, but there
was a meticulous scruffiness about everything else. The first year he sewed the
three lions over the Gloucestershire badge on that trademark bucket hat was
1988, the second Summer of Love. He fidgeted his way to 94 on debut at Lord’s,
each run an affront to the game’s aesthetics, and in the Ashes the following
year made a maiden hundred in the city then known as Madchester. Little did my baggy-loving
mates realize that my headgear was an homage not to the Stone Roses, but to a certain
stumper from Stroud.
Jack’s batting was not a thing of beauty. In fact, crouching
over his bat as he shovelled, swept, sliced and slapped, it was almost
deliberately ugly, a calculated provocation, as was so much of his cricket. Even
his leave-alone was in-your-face, pulling back the curtain rail then, like some
feral neighbourhood kid, staring straight into your living room to see what he could
nick. Or not nick, as was famously the case in his epic rearguard with Mike
Atherton in Johannesburg,
which he later immortalised in a painting entitled The Great Escape, aptly for such a staunch flag-waver. Ordinarily, I’d
have been turned off by such obstinate quirkiness and untempered patriotism (even
his keeping technique resisted the Australian fashion, as he saw it, for taking
the ball on the inside hip), but his glovework redeemed all.
Jack was the eccentric’s eccentric in a métier given to eccentrics. Insisting
your Weetabix are soaked for precisely eight minutes; having the same meal 29
nights consecutively on tour; taking a suitcase full of baked beans away because
you didn’t trust hotel food; washing your own kit in the hotel room because you
didn’t trust the staff – none of this suggests a man comfortable with flux and
uncertainty. Yet uncertainty is what hung over much of his England career,
whenever the runs dried up.
As the insecurities grew, ever more quirks and tics
were introduced. He began standing at forty-five degrees (and too deep, they
said), facing cover-point. The consistency dropped, as were one or two
straightforward catches, once prompting him to lock himself in his room for two
days. There was evident frailty there – a brain scan would doubtless have revealed
synapses held together with rubber bands and string – and sympathy duly morphed
into empathy.
By the time the decade – and his England career
– was done, Adam Gilchrist had transformed perceptions of the keeper’s role
forever. In Test cricket’s futures market, legside stumping stock had been
ditched for batting pugnacity. Russell was part of a dying breed. Perhaps, with
a frontline bowler who could have batted at No7, he’d have won many more Test
caps than the 54 he accrued (and never wore). Instead, Stewart donned the
gloves in an attempt to balance the side.
Yet the unmistakeable hue of genius never waned, and
it was at Gloucestershire, in his final years, before chronic back trouble
curtailed his career, that his regal brilliance truly flourished. John
Bracewell, his coach, believed that it was only when he stopped thinking about
being selected for England
that he became “unquestionably the best keeper in the world”. Prior to this, he
felt, Jack had been too conservative, too keen not to make mistakes, too keen to go unnoticed – thus giving the lie to
the old saw. Now, with the coming of autumn, he stepped forward, right up to
the stumps, and gave full rein to his gifts, the ringmaster in an unheralded
Gloucestershire team that won six limited-overs trophies in three seasons.
On pitches the colour of gruel, Ian Harvey, Mike Smith
et al created the anxiety, the asphyxiation, and as the veins popped in
batters’ heads there was Jack the mosquito, puncturing their flesh for a slurp
of claret. Barking – oh, he was barking – relentlessly at his teammates, he
would habitually walk in front of the stumps to applaud and chivvy, all a
pretext for irritating the batsman, getting in his space. It brought new
meaning to occupation of the crease –
here, in the sense of an invading army. The pickpocket had become a mobster. A
bailiff.
I admired his brazen, cartoonish villainy. Face inscrutable
behind those sunglasses, that daft hat and his bristles, Jack would narrate the
batsman’s anxieties for the benefit of his swarming team. He gave this reluctant
and increasingly part-time wicketkeeper something to aspire toward. Sure, my Teflon
glovework would always be found wanting, but I could always usefully piss the
batsman off.
It was not genteel comportment, but then the cricket I
played wasn’t genteel. The existential stakes were high: glory, ignominy and
self-esteem, all were forged by this innings, that shot, a catch, a victory.
There was no place to be genteel. My nickname then was Dog (as in Scotty…), and
the cricket was dog-eat-dog. And in that there was no better example, no more
terrorising terrier, than Jack Russell, top dog of the underdogs.
