Last summer I had the pleasure of a long and winding
chat with Jimmy Adams, the former West Indies captain and now head coach at Kent. Either
side of lunch on Day 2 of his team’s Championship game at Derby,
we walked back along his career path, pausing for a long look at the Windies
rivalry with Australia
through the nineties – two hours and twenty minutes; two features for
ESPNcricinfo.
Ever predictable, at one stage I asked him which he
considered his best ever knock.
Unpredictably, he replied – in that wonderful Caribbean drawl always threatening to break into a
fully-fledged Jamaican patois – by asking me what my best ever innings was.
I could see his point. It isn’t easy when you’re put on the spot. So, I gave
him three: two for shot-making (always the aesthete’s fix), one for context.
Actually, come to think of it, all three had an element of context – perhaps,
rather than their context being the reason they’re outstanding, or stand out, that context is precisely the reason I even remember them.
Anyway, these are the three I mentioned –
coincidentally, scores of 73, 72 and 71 (at least, that’s what I remember),
probably symptomatic of my atrocious fitness and skittish concentration.
However, since I’m not one to condense a yarn to, say, 500 words when it can be
spun out to 2000, it’s perhaps best if I break it up into three (massively self-indulgent,
self-congratulatory, positively masturbatory) parts. It subsequently became apparent to me that both the bronze and silver medallists ended with me in highly compromised, unconscious states…
Click the links for the full yarnathon:
3rd place: 73 vs Himley, Staffs Cup Final 2003
No-one really thought England were going to be any good, did they? Right. Thought not. But we didn't expect them to be that bad. Boy, they really stunk the World Cup out.
What we got was timid batting, without any of the courage or innovation on show anywhere else, and predictable, paceless, samey bowling that was about as frightening as a custard pie. On top of that, and perhaps worst of the lot, was uninspired or uninspiring leadership that fell back on dismal management-speak, that hid behind stats and data when a basic feel for the game might have told them that their plans – both tactics and strategy – weren't working.
We thought 275 was chaseable. We shall have to look at the data. That was the response after Bangladesh.
So, I wrote my maiden (non-guest) blog for ESPNcricinfo's The Cordon about that. Not by choice (I'd originally chosen to write about South Africa and choking) but out of blood-boiling necessity. I wanted its title to be one of Par for the Course or England Need Data Protection Act. Never mind.
Data-obsessed England need Reality Check
Another Gleanings interview, this time with the founder of the doosra: Saqi bhai.
Parts of our conversation that didn't make it included a few thoughts on his brief time sub-pro'ing for Burslem in the NSSCL, and his comments on Imran Tahir (which were positive).
We didn't speak about the time a certain former housemate of mine and one-time colleague at Wollaton CC lofted him for a straight six to bring up his maiden Premier League hundred. He wouldn't be drawn on whom, out of him, Usman Afzaal and Alex Tudor, wasn't being paid the year he played for West Indian Cavaliers (league rules limiting the number of paid players to two).
And he claimed not to know anything about the nightclub that Saeed Anwar – the man responsible for the increasing religious devotion in the Pakistani squad during the 1990s – used to have in the basement of his Lahore residence, before the tragic death of his three-year-old daughter led him to seek solace in Islam.
Still, he told me a couple of funny yarns about his cricketing days, and one heartbreaking story of a talented quick bowler who injury got the better of.
Saqlain Mushtaq: Gleanings
Some interviews go smoothly, yet the end result might be bland. Others don't quite pan out so unproblematically, although perhaps the end result might be dynamite.
This chat I had with Mark Butcher definitely falls in the latter category, although not because Butch was hard work. Far from it. In fact, he is one of the easiest-going ex-cricketers I've spoken with. Which is exactly the reason the interview didn't turn into an unmediated disaster.
See, after speaking to him for about an hour, I realized that my dictaphone had switched off. Batteries had gone. I'd missed 15 minutes. Ordinarily, this would have been a manageable crisis. Here, it was a total disaster, since the period of his career we'd just been talking about was 1999 and 2000, when he was dropped from the England team, split up from his wife (the sister of Surrey and England teammate Alec Stewart), started drinking, was dropped to Surrey 2nds, asked his dad to reconstruct his game, fought his way back to England reckoning and was involved in Hansie Cronje's fixed game in Pretoria.
So, for a 100% quotes piece, that's quite a few dynamite passages disappeared into the forever.
Arse.
There was no question of me trying to maintain a professional demeanour. I knew instantly that I'd lost all the juice. So, I told him I'd fucked up and asked whether he'd mind me typing up the passages from memory -- and some of them had great witticisms (either off-the-cuff or polished through repeated telling at after-dinner speeches and suchlike). He said it would be no trouble, and that I should bung them over.
Anyway, we spoke for another 40 minutes, after which I bade farewell and hurriedly spoke into my phone, recording as much detail as i could of the 'original' quotes. I then emailed them over and, like a dutiful subeditor, Butch polished them up nicely and fired them back the next day. Absolute legend.
Anyway, it is one of the interviews I'm most pleased with. Slow to get him warmed up, and I'm sure a couple of nuggets he held back for a book of some kind (including a little cheeky racism from the Saffers in 1998), but a really enjoyable experience.
Mark Butcher: Gleanings
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.
Moores wants Brave Sheep
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.
The Last Hurrahs: Part One | Part Two
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
