SIX DELIVERIES FROM TODAY AT THE O.D.I.*

ginger recklessness

With England having secured the essentially meaningless number one ODI ranking until they get annihilated in India in January, the final game of the series was basically played for pride alone: the wheee of a win as opposed to the meh of a draw. Still, (Confucius, he say) winning’s a habit and all that…

However, without Flower’s forbidding dressing room presence, England were undone by what the experts call ‘sh*t batting’. And there was a carrot-topped streak of indiscipline running through it.

First, Resilience’s Ian Ronald Belly-Lad, having prevented the ball from hitting the stumps by stopping it with one of his pads, a mode of dismissal known to the selfsame experts as ‘leg before wicket’ (or lbw), decided to spunk the sole review of the innings in the fourth over (the very fact that he had to discuss it at all ought to have told him to shuffle off for a dose of medicine…but then, he has a history of not wanting to go when dismissed on this ground). This was cricket’s equivalent of putting all your cash on the roulette wheel (red, obviously) on the first night of a once-in-a-lifetime’s-savings-funded fortnight in Vegas.

Then, after the awful inevitability of Ravi’s failure (see below), Body Language’s Jonny Bairstow played a cameo from off of the balls of his feet, bopping hither and thither to prod down the hot tin roof of a pitch, ‘taking it’ to Big Morkel with aggressive intent, before unnecessarily walking across his stumps and chipping one to deep square leg. Red Bull at a gate. After that, Eion Morgan skipped down the pitch to JP Duminy’s nondescript, _____ offies and got too close to the ball, slapping it flat to mid on.

Clearly, these donkeys cannot simply be browbeaten into performing better. No, management need the optimum balance of stick and carrot (top).

 Ozzy and Ravi

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a young (and undoubtedly high) Ozzy Osbourne earning a living in Berlin in the 1970s by being on call for an eccentric German aristocrat (if that is not itself tautological) whose highly particular fetish involved lying beneath a glass coffee table while someone (Ozzy, in this instance) perched above it and… – well, there’s not a sufficiently delicate way to put it – defecated atop the hitherto transparent surface. Whatever turns you on, I guess.

For any workshy young deviant, one for whom the last vestiges of ‘self-esteem’ have long since flown the roost, that is truly a gig to inspire envy. Getting paid for dumping – unbelievable, Jeff! (Mind you, I’m not entirely sure one could get away with listing it as a legitimate ‘job goal’ when signing a Jobseeker’s Agreement.)

Anyway, I mention Ozzy only to illustrate the fact that the modern world is full of cushty sinecures and chancers blagging it in easy billets, all of which brings us to Ravi Bopara, continually selected as a batsman for an international cricket team and yet not required to make any actual runs. Nice work if you can get it!

“But he brings a lot to the party,” his apologists counter. Fine, but his bag of cheap Es and wraps of meow-meow are no use if you don’t fancy the adult confectionary. 

narks

It’s the Big (well, Medium-Sized) Debate: are ODIs just a sugar rush (and not quite as good a sugar rush as the new stuff) providing little in the way of nourishment? Maybe. Either way, we all know “sugar’s rubbish”. But the ECB tried to persuade us that a five-match Australia series shoehorned into the middle of the summer was a worthy sporting attraction, that those bright yellow jerseys would compete with the other prominent bright yellow jerseys of the summer’s sports stories – the ones that started out clean, with the everyman brilliance of Bradley Wiggins, and yet ended sullied, with the news that seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was to be banned for steroids, WADA completely ignoring the fact that he has beaten cancer and thus had immunity from everything… Yet this hasn’t been the only sporting drugs story of late. Oh no.

Many felt that the ECB were clutching at straws when they accused the Saffers of being drugs cheats. Sour grapes, they said. Yet, after the crushing Oval Test victory that set up the D’Oliveira series win, Graeme Smith could scarcely have been more candid: “we owe a lot to hash”. He then skipped off to fashion a makeshift bong from a Gatorade bottle. Conclusive and damning evidence, no?

Amla, meanwhile, went of for some throwdowns. He was reported to have lent his prayer mat to Alistair Cook.

“the sun always shines on TB” (A-ha!)

After some deliberation while he located the correct shelves in His omniscience, God, a.k.a. the Supreme Being (sometimes referred to as Allah or Yahweh), has given his final verdict in the great debate taking hold of Midlanders East and West – i.e. which city is the better: Birmingham or Nottingham? – and he has done it through the medium of weather.

The game here was played out under pale blue skies (prior to the floodlit part, smartass), as had been the T20 game against the West Indies and the four days of the Wisden Trophy Test. Down the road in Brummidge, things haven’t gone quite so swimmingly (well, you know what I mean). Three out of five days of their Windies Test were washed out, as was the Cashraker ODI against Australia in July.

Conclusive.

 Woak-o Oh-Yes!

With England missing the ambivalent hipsterism of Stuart Broad – “I’ll give the Barnet and clobber a whirl, but I don’t want to commit to all the sh*t on my arm” – it was good to see a frontline seamer of real batting ability at number 8 (a pet topic of someone of this parish).

“He could be whatever he wants to be,” pundits are wont to say of young cricketers of promise. Well, given that young people want to be things like dragons and drones and drills, it is doubtful whether one should adhere to that notion. Even so, his naked batting talent, the excellent positions he gets into, the instinctive movement of his hands, the range of strokes, all augur well for England’s search for Test-class all-rounders: here may be a fourth seamer eventually capable of batting as high as number 6.  

* NB. We have made it five in honour of England short-changing the crowd to the tune of 29 balls, thus allowing SA to knock off with 93 balls to spare. Please take it up with the ECB.

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KP, FEEDING FRENZIES, AND THE DISINGENUOUSNESS OF THE SCRIBES

It is too much to call it a witch hunt. It has certainly been a saga. But it is nonetheless easy to get carried away with things, to see Kevin Pietersen’s often gauche behaviour, his effulgent narcissism and crashing lack of social judgement as corroborating ‘evidence’ of some profound treacherousness when it was probably all little more than ill-judged sounding off from a player who is – yes – full of himself and needy and, frankly, not one of the lads, and so just as complicit in his own marginalization from Team England as the parody Twitter account that Stuart Broad had nothing to do with.

Over the last three weeks, Pietersen has provided the cricket writing press with what is often called a feeding frenzy, in which, in the words of media theorist Steven Johnson, “coverage of a story begets more coverage, leading to a kind of hall-of-mirrors environment where small incidents get amplified into Major Events”. Scribes with perhaps little personal agenda against the batsman (although it is fair to say that not many have warmed to him) have all weighed in. Salient among these was the ludicrously boorish radio interview of Michael Henderson – with his grandiloquent Mancunian intonation, a sort of reactionary version of Anthony H Wilson, and a man who, in the process of dismissing “riff-raff” supporters on 5Live and not-quite-namedropping “six England captains” apparently unanimous in their hardline views about Pietersen’s fate, seemed genuinely unaware of the irony in his long, rasped checklist of KP’s flaws.

Aside from the preposterous Henderson, there are journalists – would-be kingmakers, many – with little real idea about which way the ever-changing situation between the ECB, Strauss (now Cook) and Flower will tip yet who nevertheless find themselves writing things like “there can be little prospect of Pietersen ever playing international cricket again”. Maybe, maybe not. They speak of “the latest damaging revelations”. Maybe, maybe not. The assurance of the language is indicative only of the newspaper’s sense of its own influence. 

Anyway, on Monday my eye was turned by a brief exchange – one that seemed particularly illustrative of a blindspot among pressmen (well, a blindspot or species of speciousness) – that took place on Twitter between @countycricketkj and @newman_cricket (the latter being Paul Newman, cricket correspondent of the Daily Mail), an exchange in which the former, unwittingly, is cast as disgruntled naïf, the latter, as venerable hack. Also present is the trope of the impersonal, supra-personal media machine rumbling along, propelled by its editorial strictures and the friendly one-upmanship of professional rivals seeking scoops; look more closely, however, and beneath this dreary inevitability – that's just the way things are – we cannot avoid seeing the individual decisions (albeit circumscribed, limited) of conscious actors. 

The exchange:

KJ: “Whoever is leaking the KP stuff is forgetting that team unity involves all 11 players – not just 10”.

PN: “It’s not leaks…it’s journalism”.

KJ: “Issue isn’t what’s reported Paul, it’s where it’s come from”.

PN: “It doesn’t mean the ECB/whoever contact journos and offer them info like this. Believe me, there is little spin doctoring”.

[I should say here that I have omitted a tweet from before Newman’s second reply. We’ll get to that just now.]

What formed the background to all this was an apparently factual yet still insidiously scurrilous article by Newman that sought to muck-rake regarding some snub of Pietersen’s to James Taylor on day three at Headingley, first by walking off at tea with the South Africans (no mention of him giving Taylor a pat on the back as the latter left the field when dismissed) and then later in the dressing room. True? Yes. Over-inflated tittle-tattle characteristic of a feeding frenzy? Absolutely.

The article then makes an incredibly glib elision between KP’s absence from the ODI squad and Chris Woakes’ new boy, straight-bat observations about the atmosphere in the dressing room. To wit: “As it emerged that Pietersen swapped angry words with a senior player, after criticising debutant James Taylor and boasting of his own importance to England during his brilliant 149 at Leeds, another newcomer to the dressing room described the atmosphere within it now as ‘fantastic’.” Now. Not … not when? Or is it just to confirm that he was talking about the day of his arrival, and not the day of his non-arrival? And that “as it emerged”, too,  making sure you get the connection, is pretty craven. An everyday, conventional sort of craven, mind.  

Of course, everyone of sound mind who has managed to suffocate their inner fascist knows that the Mail is exactly the sort of institution that systematically preys on its readers’ basest emotions, a Leviathan that indulges in the most cynical, moralisingly middlebrow shit-stirring-for-profit. It is an editorial tone that happens to shore up, and foment, the prejudices of those who like their ivories (not ebonies) tinkled with that sort of misanthropic melody (Middle Englanders who would wet themselves if they had to deal with the world outside of their soft-furnished social codes), all the better to sell the same curtain-twitching drek the next day, and the next, and the next... You would hope that its sports writers might avoid their domain’s equivalent of knicker-sniffing. Not that Newman is by any means the only one guilty of it. Derek Pringle wrote a day earlier in The Telegraph: “According to some, there has been animosity brewing between [Pietersen and Strauss] for a while now and the pair were seen having a heated argument” at a PCA golf day. According to some. 

not part of the story

The feeding frenzy, hall-of-mirrors element can be glimpsed in the fact that, to all intents and purposes, any dressing room slight toward Taylor – and Pringle tells us, with no loss of proportion whatsoever, that it “plumbs new depths of obnoxious behaviour” – was part of the same episode, the same day’s bad behaviour from Pietersen, the same day of inhibition loss and tantrum, the same insecure defensiveness and lashing out. Exactly as he bats, in fact. ‘Man on 78-person shooting spree also fired three rounds at a passing chihuahua’ is not news. 

But it is highly revealing to see how Newman worded his defence of the article, or its provenance, on Twitter. He dispenses the mini-lesson about “journalism” and its ‘rules’ for the naïf’s benefit, a self-validating statement – on the order of a “this is just the way it is” – that thereby implicitly absolves himself of any ethical self-reflection.* Yet before that came the killer line that I had hitherto omitted: “I think there’s a misunderstanding on how things work. We seek out info that we feel is newsworthy/relevant by many means”. The devil is in the detail, in the phrasing: we feel is relevant… 

Here, then, it seems clear that the journalist is not so much documenting facts – if by that is meant writing from some neutral vantage point, exterior to a reality that they are thus describing in a purportedly ‘objective’ manner – as constructing a story, creating an entire ambience in which the shards of reported ‘facts’ will be received, as with the Bilbao Guggenheim and its Rothkos and Warhols. There is always a precise approach to the works, to the words. Although they may strive for ‘neutrality’, journalists are, like all writing, making an intervention from a position very much immersed in reality, part of the event's feedback circuits, and thus capable of causally affecting its outcome (even if that effect, in the case of the KP saga, is simply influencing public perception to the point where, say, a process of reconciliation becomes intolerable for all parties). It is, in a sense, a proof of Heisenberg’s Principle: the position and momentum of a particle cannot simultaneously be accurately measured because we inevitably affect things that we’re attempting to observe and measure. As for quantum physics, so for journalism.  

Heisenberg: principled

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the power of the media – and for its practitioners – is, or can be, intensely libidinal. To be in an inner circle, to be party to the secret, to be at the cutting edge of history-in-the-making, provides an erotic frisson, a psychic reward. To pen paragraphs that take this tone or that, sentences dripping with rancour or revenge, apathy or aloofness, unleashes a voluptuous wave. Sade and Sacher-Masoch knew about this omnipresence of desire. The Nuremberg Rallies; doing the accounts; the Last Night of the Proms; the man in the dole office assiduously checking your Jobsearch; the stroll down the St John’s Wood Road, resplendent in one’s egg-and-bacon suit – entirely sexual.

The distinction to be made when weighing journalistic interventions, then, is not about ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ (no one knows all the ‘facts’ to be objective; no one writes free enough of institutional constraints to be subjective) but simply to follow the course of actions – actions perhaps with conscious motives; actions maybe having unconscious causes; actions with extraneous reasons; but actions always with repercussions... Is the pursuit of anecdotal evidence deemed “newsworthy” or “relevant” really free of any personal agenda, an axe to grind? Is the journalist truly allowing, as much as possible, the situation to follow its own internal course, free of interference, or is her line stoking the fires, itself stoked by a commercial logic (that of the paper) masquerading as news, as truth?

“You can normally spot when one of these [feeding frenzies] reaches its denouement,” Johnson avers, “since it almost inevitably triggers a surge of self-loathing that washes through the entire commentariat”. We may be having a breather with KP, but I’m not entirely sure we are there just yet.  

* The probable truth is that Mr Newman’s employer demands that type of story and he – like all of us, playing within the true rules of the game: those of capitalism – has most likely internalized any conscientious objection and dutifully carries out his work according to the desires of his employers. Their desires become his will. At least, that is the most charitable explanation, aside from having his copy tweaked by subs to fit the DM agenda.

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CRICKET AS 'PROBLEMATIC': CHOPRA AND WESTWOOD (GU blog extracts)

It is doubtful whether any aspirant coaches within the ECB system consult the hallowed MCC Coaching Manual these days, much less impose its occasionally dubious verities on their charges, for people now realize that technique, while based on certain sound principles (sound at the linguistic level, at least), is not about absolutes. Rather, it needs to be understood as a hand-to-hand combat of energies – always factoring in the continuous variation of pitch and overhead conditions – whereby the singular style and skill-set of each player presents for their direct adversary what philosophers like to call a ‘problematic’, a puzzle.

This has been amply illustrated at Edgbaston this morning where the squat left-handed orthodoxy of Ian Westwood and the upright right-handed idiosyncrasies of Varun Chopra have had the upper hand, managing to ‘solve’ the distinct problems posed by the skiddy medium pace of Tim Murtagh and the tall, lively Toby Roland-Jones.

Chopra’s technique involves several moving parts. Standing tall at the crease, with a straight-armed backlift that is definitely Made in Essex (more Ronnie Irani than Graham Gooch, mind), his trigger movement takes his back foot well outside off stump, his front pad on to the line of off, so that he often hides all three stumps, tempting the bowler to attack his castle yet with the line of his shoulders remaining open enough for him to work the ball through mid on, mid-wicket without playing around his front leg. One would imagine that, when out of form, synchronisation might be an issue; without having looked from side-on, there are suggestions that the amount of movement means not only is he not always playing from a stable base, but that his weight distribution might occasionally be too far over his back foot; that is, too much in the first part of his trigger movement. I would suggest that, as for all players who pick their bats up high, a sharp yorker first up might be worthwhile. Still, an England Lions appearance last week and approaching 750 Championship runs at over 40 suggest that his game is in reasonable order.

Westwood, meanwhile, is a figure of stillness and compaction. The problematic he poses for bowlers concerns his height and, consequently, their length. On the flipside, Roland-Jones’ bounce from this firm surface has discomfited him on more than one occasion – a short ball being jabbed involuntarily from the splice to the safety of a vacant leg gully region and a few balls of good length hitting him amidships. However, when his defence has enticed the bowler to search for a fuller length, he has been good enough to transfer his weight and drive crisply and powerfully in the arc from cover to mid on.

It has been an intriguing battle. 


The above was published by the Guardian on County Cricket- Live! for August 22, day one of Warwickshire vs Middlesex.  

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SCHOPENHAUER'S PORCUPINES (GU blog extracts)

One of the things that never fails to fascinate about county cricket crowds is how they distribute themselves around a ground – particularly in the wraparound plastic seating of the modern stadium. Usually, one will find a section of the ground in which the more gregarious and garrulous congregate, there as much for the company as the on-field spectacle. Then there will be stands in which the sprinkling of supporters attain an almost mathematically precise distance from one another, happy with their own thoughts yet not too isolated to prevent them from sharing the odd grumble.

The major variable in all this is the temperature, which puts one in mind of Schopenhauer’s famous allegory of human sociality, or intimacy – the fable of the troop of porcupines in the cold, venturing just close enough to keep each other warm (perhaps we can substitute ‘sane’ or ‘emotionally connected’) but not so close that they start to prick one another. That, it seems to me, is how the few hundred or so fans array themselves in a 20,000-seat cricket ground. 

At any rate, the pockets of support here at Edgbaston will be enthused not only by the rising ambient temperature – allowing themselves to become less intimate with their neighbours than they might otherwise have been – but also a good effort from their team to skittle Middlesex for 287. 


The above was published by the Guardian on County Cricket - Live! for August 21, day one of Warwickshire vs Middlesex. Report here. 

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MICHAEL RICHARDSON (GU blog extracts)

Down in Nottingham doing twelfth man duties for Durham for the first two-and-a-half days was Michael Richardson, the reserve wicket-keeper and son of former South African Test gloveman Dave, now the ICC’s CEO, of course.

Richardson fils knows the city very well, having studied Finance, Accounting and Management for three years at the University of Nottingham (following three years at Stonyhurst College in deepest Lancashire), during which time he played two seasons a mile or so along the river south-west of Trent Bridge for the wonderfully named Notts Unity Casuals CC – the place at which Notts’ Director of Cricket Mick Newell played all his club cricket, from the junior ranks right up until he finished in 2002. (Incidentally, Unity were not founded by football hooligans, nor are they some sort of oblique satirical reference to Kelvin Pietermaritzburg’s applecart upsetting.)

“I was told that if I had any ambition to play for Nottinghamshire, I should go and play for them” Richardson recalls, possibly victim of one of the oldest sales lines in English league cricket. Newell claims never to have seen Richardson bat at Unity (“busy”, he reckons) but did once share a beer down there with Richardson Snr. Mind you, the presence of his father used to make Michael “a little nervous, for some reason”.

Also at Unity for Richardson’s first season was adopted Son of Notts, Darren Bicknell – Surrey-born, of course, but still up here playing for Caythorpe in the Nottinghamshire Premier League as well as Cambridgeshire in the Minor Counties Championship, and still scoring runs in that slow-motion-yet-never-rushed manner of his. Richardson says that he learned much from ‘Denzil’, a batsman who fell just 69 shy of 20,000 first-class runs: “He always used to have a quick strike-rate, but not really liking for shots. Because he was such a good timer of the ball, he didn’t really look to manufacture anything. He just batted within his means and made the bowlers come to him”.

There in the second season was livewire Pakistani Test keeper Adnan Akmal, “a lovely chap, actually, who took the gloves from me”, just as he later would his own brother, Kamran.

Richardson now spends his winters working for Durham’s main shirt sponsor, Brewin Dolphin, the year-round residency helping him in his quest to gain a UK passport (at present, he plays as an EU passport holder, courtesy of his half-German mother, that he cannot pass on). The work also ties in with his degree as he keeps half an eye on his post-cricketing life, where he may also follow his father’s footsteps.

But for now, aged 25, he wants to develop his game further and add to his nine first-class appearances. Standing in his way is the redoubtable ‘Colonel’ Mustard: “It would be a lie if I said I didn’t [look at the county cricket wicket-keeping merry-go-round] but I’ve got a few opportunities with the seconds and I’d like to break in to the first team as a batsman”.

If he does, he’ll be secretly hoping his Dad isn’t there to watch.

The above was published by the Guardian on County Cricket - Live! for August 17, day three of Nottinghamshire vs Durham. Report here. 

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AWESOME SEX (GU blog extracts)

It was nice finally to get some food in the belly – fish, chips and mushy peas, if it’s of any interest – as your correspondent has felt a little bleary-eyed today after burning the candle at both ends in a couple of Nottingham’s hostelries these last two nights.

On Wednesday I partook of a Big Lebowski quiz, annexing myself to a team comprising four members of a band called Awesome Sex (“a sort of – ugh – techno-pop”, I presume, but didn’t ask) which has recently splintered from Hot Japanese Girl. Nice to see new fourpieces using SEO when choosing their names these days...

Anyway, there were many White Russians imbibed, although mixed with a little too much ice for Awesome Sex’s taste (‘Jackie’ did not make“a helluva Caucasian”). It was just a pity that Rob Smyth wasn’t in town, for his Spin column this week contained, as an epigraph, one of the more gratuitous Lebowski references you’ll ever see. In the spirit of such gratuitousness, then, if anyone happens to be an aficionado of the movie and has some free time when it starts raining shortly (gloom here that Scyld would be contractually obliged to describe as “Stygian”), I once posed the question: What can The Big Lebowski teach us about cricket? It’s just a game, man.

Last night I popped in to see An Audience with Carl Froch, the Nottingham-born “three-time world super-middleweight champion” being interviewed by 5Live’s Darren Fletcher before posing kerchingingly for photos with his fans (they cost £10 each). Overall impression was of an articulate, magnanimous, down-to-earth figure who spoke with good humour about his life in and out of the ring and the three-fight plan he has to bring his career to a close, culminating in an open-air affair at Forest’s City Ground: “my Vegas, my Madison Square Garden”. One thing he has never done is duck an opponent (not literally, of course), unlike a couple of the British “silver-spoon jobs” who went soft with multi-fight TV contracts behind them, and he said that if he were forced to fight any of the Benn-Eubank-Collins triumvirate of the division’s Golden Era (this side of the Atlantic, at least), he would have chosen the former as “he probably would have walked on to me shots”. Nails.  

In the time it has taken me to type out that paragraph, the players have been forced off by a steady drizzle. 


The above was published by the Guardian on County Cricket - Live! for August 17, day three of Nottinghamshire vs Durham. Report here. 

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PHLEGMATIC NEWELL (GU blog extracts)

Aside from a three-over burst of anger and frustration from the gesticulating Notts fielders (and all the other emotions Brian from Spaced used to depict in his work), the cricket at Trent Bridge this morning has progressed fairly serenely, which suits only one side. Stoneman has again looked impressive and has 74 out of Durham’s 111 for 1.

The source of Notts’ ire was a couple of loud, consecutive appeals against Keaton Jennings that were rejected by umpire Steve Gale, who the fielding team clearly feel owes them a couple, maybe three, from yesterday. Mullaney got a stinker (height), Franks had a rough’un (pitched outsde leg), Hales’s might also have been going down. I asked Mr Onions last night whether he felt they were all out and, pre-empting an answer, qualified it with “…even though it will say so in tomorrow’s paper”, failing to realize that I could have in fact written that they were dubious. “Well, there you go”, he answered, unable to prevent the hint of a grin appearing.

Walking round from pavilion to press box when the grousing on the field and grumbling in the stands were at their brief zenith, Mick Newell had a spectator (a real one, not Nev) say: “Need some new umpires aaht there, Mick”. Newell deadpanned: “Well, there’s enough in the crowd”.


The above was published by the Guardian on County Cricket - Live! for August 17, day three of Nottinghamshire vs Durham. Report here. 

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