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.
At the beginning of the summer I was contacted by an editor from ESPNcricinfo who told me they were going to launch a high-quality digital magazine, The Cricket Monthly, complete with typeface of the old Cricketer magazine.
He said he'd like to commission me to write a piece, and asked whether I had any suggestions. To be honest, I wasn't sure how straight to play this: after all, my four pieces (including one pending) for The Nightwatchman have covered what Jacques Derrida teaches us about Graham Onions' career-best 9-67, the great Aussie cordon (Healy, Taylor, Waugh, Warne, Waugh), having my foreskin trapped in my box by Dean Headley, and the comparisons between cricket and bullfighting.
I had a few other equally niche ideas, but in the end thought I'd go for something more accessible and mentioned that Notts had signed Peter Siddle for what they at the time thought would be a full season, an increasingly rare thing to get someone of almost top-rank stature for the duration of the summer. I suggested a diary. They liked it. Notts were pretty good about getting me access to Pete, whom I spoke to on three occasions (I really ought to have tipped up more often at Trent Bridge, but the habitual dogsitting duties kept me out of Nottingham for the first 5 weeks of the season), and it was interesting to track his fortunes over the three months he ended up staying. The editing process wasn't quite so enjoyable, however, with every word agonised over and at least ten versions of the piece sent back to me.
The main problem, it seemed to me, was the lack of clarity over the brief. I suggested some writerly flourishes, some colour, and that sort of tone was OK-ed. However, when it came to editing my submission, many of these flourishes were tweezered out, to my mind devoiding the piece of much of its personality. I had occasion to wonder whether a more established writer would have had to endure the same treatment. I doubted it (the unconscious inclination to intervene would have tempered by the reputation of the writer; idiosyncrasies would be indulged). Then again, without a frame of reference regarding what they were after (TCM hadn't been published when I started), it was difficult to get a proper feel of what they were after, other than through the aforementioned brief.
Anyway, shits and giggles. It was my most lucrative fixed-fee commission to date. And, after more than a few emails with other sports writers sharing our gripes and grouches, I'm growing ever less concerned by the final piece that the public sees.
During the course of my largely unsuccessful attempt to draw Peter Willey into discussing some of the subtler aspects of umpiring – the editor thought that since he was no longer on the ICC payroll he might give it both barrels about various issues – I researched an article, on changing trends in the prevalence of lbw decisions, by Douglas Miller (a committee member at Bucks and someone who'd helped me a lot with my research on a Minor Counties book I'm working on) for the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians.
Despite Willey giving most of my questions short shrift, eventually forcing me to abandon the specialist 'Talking Cricket' interview and incorporate the better quotes into his Gleanings, I was able to use the research in a blog for ESPNcricinfo's The Cordon about umpiring bias, a slightly provocative title and an opportunity to have a pop at some of the ice-cream men who have brought frustration to my cricketing days. Not all of them, I hasten to add –and most of the ones that did were decent sports in the bar. I emailed the article to Douglas, an umpire himself, and his reply was exquisite: "I
wish it were a fable that an umpire puts himself at risk when giving a
captain out, but it isn’t! For myself, I just wish I was a better
decision-maker. In the end that is key to success. I am off to our
Thames Valley dinner tonight, where I shall see some who were out, some
who should have been given out but weren’t and some who shouldn’t but
were – but none of us will be sure in which category they lie!"
Taciturn. I didn't expect much else. Peter Willey is not someone you imagine using five hundred words where five will do. All fine, of course, except it can make the interview process difficult.
Ask him to speak about a subject other than himself, mind, and the words flowed (I suspect he would be better company face to face, with a beer in hand, than talking to a disembodies voice down the telephone).
Again, you imagine him being someone of forthright, if not trenchant opinions. He was that, and, once warmed up, he also offered plenty of pithy, economical observations on his own career, which encompassed 26 Test matches, 15 against the dominant West Indies teams of the mid-70s to mid-80s. He also played in the famous victory at Headingley in 1981, the third member of that team I've interviewed after Bob taylor and Chris Old (not sure Botham, Gower, Boycott, Brearley, Willis, Gooch or Gatting are going to be quite so easy to persuade...).
However, despite his reputation, I had intended doing a two-in-one interview (as I had with Jason Gillespie, Bob Taylor, Jimmy Adams and Gus Fraser): not just a breeze through his career for ESPNcricnfo's Gleanings, but also a chat focussed on umpiring for Talking Cricket. I prepared several questions – on whether it was advantageous to be an ex-player; on DRS and its trickle down effect on lbw decisions and dissent; on dealing with mistakes; on over-rates, chucking, bad light; on the ICC and India; on whether he practised his 'out' signal before starting* – and didn't really get enough to warrant a separate piece. So, I amalgamated the best lines with the Gleanings.
* NB: the best of the quotes that didn't make the final cut was probably the one in response to this, the most frivolous question (and thus the one I thought he'd think me the biggest wally for asking). His reply: "I never
practised my ‘out’ signal. My first first-class game was at Cambridge University
and I had five lbws before lunch. Ray Julien was at square leg spitting blood
because I was 5-0 up. I gave a couple of them out right-handed because I had a
sore shoulder, and it didn’t feel right. I didn’t get the same satisfaction".
As I may previously have mentioned, whenever I'm out and about at county cricket matches – often without any good (monetary) reason to be there – I'm usually on the look-out for potential interview targets.
Recently, while at Aigburth in Liverpool (pictured), Lancashire's main out ground, trying to complete a commission about Peter Siddle's (truncated) season with Nottinghamshire for ESPNcricinfo's new digital magazine The Cricket Monthly, I asked Lancs' press officer if I could chat with Ashwell Prince, the biggest name in their side (aside, possibly, from Jos Buttler, but centrally-contracted players are almost never worth chatting to unless you want bland corporate-speak).
He was great fun– surprisingly so, given many Saffers' tendency to oversimplify cricketing things– and the eventual Gleanings piece was one of may favourites, especially since its publication coincided with what was supposed to be his last ever game of professional cricket. He has since back-tracked and agreed to play one more year for his adopted, relegated county. Not sure the missus will be happy!
I was slightly surprised, however, that my editor at cricinfo decided not to go with the following quote, saying it sounded like "one long attempt at setting the record straight". Well, yes, exactly! Anyway, it was an interesting insight into how he felt hard done by at probably the height of his powers.
2008 was a very successful year for myself.
Then, on the Australia
tour, I broke my thumb in the last practice session on the eve of the First
Test – Makhaya Ntini bowled one on a length and it just took off. I missed the
series, South Africa
won, JP Duminy did well, and before I left Australia Mickey Arthur said to me:
“Look, you’re one of my main men. When your thumb has healed, you’ll go
straight back into the team”. It came to the return series in South Africa, my thumb had healed,
but in between there was a change of convenor of selectors. Apparently, I’m led
to believe, all selection was taken out of Mickey Arthur’s hands. I was left
out of the first two Tests and, by the third, Neil McKenzie had lost some form
and Graeme Smith had broken a bone in his hand, so Mike Procter rang me up and
said: “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is you’re playing, and we
want you to captain. The bad news is you have to open the batting”. I rang him
back and said: “Obviously, I’m happy to be back in the team, but if I’m
captaining the team, I’m batting in my normal position”. They wouldn’t accept
those terms and chose a new captain instead. Afterwards, it came out that,
because I’d been made a makeshift opener, I wanted to concentrate on that. But
that wasn’t the case.
Last month I was invited to the Cheltenham Literature Festival by The Nightwatchman, for whom I'd written three fairly eclectic pieces
— the first about what Graham Onions' career-best 9 for 57 could teach us about the 'deconstructionist' philosophy of Jacques Derrida (or vice versa); the next about the great Aussie cordon of Healy, Taylor, Waugh M, Warne and, in the gully, Waugh S; the latest about having my penis trapped in my box by Dean Headley
— with a couple more in the offing: about cricket's 'connection' with bullfighting and the Minor Counties' matches in the old Benson and Hedges Cup.
I was just as thrilled to meet Jon Hotten, aka 'The Old Batsman' [click here for an example of the man's talents], as I was about the prospect of bumping into various literary heroes: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Kevin Pietersen...
Jon was chairing proceedings in the Waitrose / Nightwatchman tent, diligently mentioning the sponsor's name at the start of each session, expertly deflecting the intrusive interjections of one or two northern folk in dutiful attendance who seemed particularly keen to steal the, ahem, limelight from whoever it was talking. Apparently, there is no subject sufficiently esoteric for it not to be brought back to a tale about the Yorkshire League. The only thing that really kept 'Steve' quiet were the plentiful jam tarts and gourmet nuts on offer from Waitrose.
Anyway, I was there for a little over 24 hours, only attended one session that wasn't in our stall, but had a grand old time drinking and chewing the fat. I wrote a short piece about it all over on my (much neglected) non-cricket blog, Motionless Voyage, which I reproduce here because I'm essentially a very lazy person.
AMIS IS AS GOOD AS A MILE
It
was an interesting experience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival,
where the highlight of my talk — I was chucked a bit of a hospital pass
by the organisers: “Cricket, the perfect sport for a spot of philosophy”
— was being interrupted by a bumptious Yorkshireman (is there any other
sort?), who, shortly after I’d told the not especially philosophical
tale of getting my foreskin trapped in my box by Dean Headley when I was 16 years old, barked: “What’s your best cricket story? You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine…” On the upside, I went to (my writing hero) Martin Amis’s Q&A in
the main tent, The Times Forum. He was talking about his new Auschwitz
novel, The Zone of Interest, telling several hundred guests
that “the black hole in Hitler Studies was his sexuality” and
speculating that he was “probably a pervert rather than asexual. Maybe a
coprophile”. I was due to ask the next question from the floor when the
session was ended — good job, probably, as my heart felt like I was
just coming up on a steroid overdose.
An hour later, having told my colleagues from the Waitrose /
Nightwatchman stand what my question would have been while guzzling the
complementary wine a bit too unselfconsciously, Amis walked into the
writers’ hospitality lounge (out of my line of sight) and was
momentarily stood alone. “Go and ask Martin Amis your question, Scott”
said the editor, Matt. After a moment’s thought (about the same length
of time I used to take at school when persuaded, or goaded, into doing
the sort of idiotic though entertaining stunts that regularly got me put
on daily report), I said, “alright then”.
“Hi Martin. So, I was going to ask you the next question when your session was wound up earlier.”
“Fire away”.
“Yeah, I was fascinated by what you were saying about the War being
lost from 1941 and Hitler essentially spending the rest of it punishing
the German people for their shortcomings. I once heard a definition of
fascism as ‘a manic attack by the body politic against itself, in the
name of its own salvation’. Does that chime with your knowledge of Nazi
Germany? And, if so, was the average German complicit in that
self-destructive delirium?”
He took a couple of steps away from me and put down his glass of
wine. My ‘crew’ thought he was abandoning the conversation — and you
couldn’t really have blamed him — but he then pivoted back and, after a
beat, said: “Well, that definition might take some time for me to
absorb, but there was definitely a lustful frisson [immaculately
pronounced] in their administration of petty cruelties. They knew what
they were up to, alright”. Then someone much more important and much
less earnest than me caught his attention, and he was off air-kissing
some Camilla or Priscilla in a Chanel suit.
I returned to the table, and received a small and un-ironic round of
applause. “Did you take a photo of that, Matt?” “I didn’t, mate. I was
too much in awe”. “No worries”, I said, secretly crestfallen. “But I’ve
got to say, your body language was strong: hands in pockets, relaxed
shoulders…”
Then Dame Judy Dench walked in. Heads turned. I had nothing for her, so went and got some more wine.
