Leg Side Filth

There is no sport in which sentimentality coexists with commercialism so closely, and at times so uneasily, as cricket. A Test match can play to near empty stands, and still have a large contingent of purists fretting over its continued existence; T20 is seen as its uncultured, uncouth offspring, the kid who threw away a university scholarship to go on the X Factor and is knee-deep in money, cheerleaders and rock and roll.

Success in sport means moving with the times. It is why Test cricket now uncomfortably straddles the line between traditionalism and an uncertain future, not knowing whether it wants to go forward or back, and why in building a successful cricket team pragmatism must take precedence when it comes to retiring the old guard and making way for new blood.

It is mission accomplished as far as England and Andy Flower are concerned: England sit at the top of the Test tree through the fortuitous butterfly effect of KP’s bust-up with Peter Moores, and a perfect synergy between Flower and captain Andrew Strauss. Both Australia and India are fighting their way through a period of transition, with both facing accusations of sentimentality for not putting their old warhorses out to pasture.

One warhorse who, in the view of many, should have had his passage booked to the knacker’s yard months ago is Ricky Ponting. The first suspicion of reverent sentimentality on the part of Cricket Australia came when he did not retire immediately after losing the captaincy, but was pushed down to number four in hopes he would rediscover his form. Two schools of thought can be ascribed to this: the first being that any possibility at all of a return to his imperious best was worth persevering for, and the second, and most likely, that no one wanted to be the one to swing the axe on a great career, and that if the failures persisted for long enough, Ponting would do the decent thing and retire himself.

You make a rod for your own back when you have achieved as much as Ricky Ponting has. Anything less than excellence means failure. The fact you scored your last hundred back in January 2010 – never mind that you have scored ten half-centuries since then – is failure. Your 78 against New Zealand at Brisbane this year still won’t be enough to silence the critics. The skill in being a success at parties is knowing when to leave. People are saying you are finished. You need to bow out gracefully, to make way.

Or, you could say screw all that, smile and nod and grit your teeth and keep your head down and do it the hard way, throwing yourself through the dirt in one of the most desperate singles you’ve ever taken, and, spitting out bits of the SCG wicket and with mud on your shirt, raise your bat to the pavilion in cricket’s version of the one-fingered salute to celebrate your 40th Test hundred.

This was more than just a fuck-you hundred to the critics calling for Ponting to be dropped. Comebacks like this are the culmination of the moment you realise that, when you get to this stage in your career, your biggest opponent is yourself. The engine of your talent is still what drives you; but the workings need a bit more TLC than they used to. Like a vintage Patek chronograph, the hallmark and craftsmanship remain unmistakable, but the timekeeping might no longer be as precise; the inner workings will need cleaning, dismantling and, in some cases, replacing.

Ponting, interviewed after a roll-back-the-years 134 – in which the swivel-pull made a triumphant return with all the fanfare of  a conqueror marching into a city – acknowledged that he has had to return to basics: “There were a few technical aspects of my game which I have been doing and which have now paid dividends. It’s all starting to come back. There’s rhythm about my batting again.”

Presumably – hopefully – now that the mechanism has been given a good old winding in that Sydney innings, he can continue keeping good time now for another year, another eighteen months, even. He will wind down eventually, to the extent where nothing will restart him, but that day is not yet.

Today, all the talk was of captain Michael Clarke’s historic triple-century. Tomorrow, all the talk will be about Sachin Tendulkar’s success or failure in chasing down that still-elusive hundredth hundred.

That all of this should, to a certain extent, overshadow the achievement of Australia’s ex-captain is understandable.

But that new shirt Ponting changed into after raising his bat was probably more symbolic than the dive through the dirt: clean shirt, clean sheet, renewed confidence, clean start.

Thank god for sentimentality.

Yesterday was a very off-kilter day; a weird day, not a great day. 80mph winds; another shooting at Virginia Tech; the world economy continuing to circle the drain in ever-decreasing circles; a murder-suicide involving a family of five in a small town near where I live.

If seven years in the funeral business has taught me anything, it is that life is mostly random and bad stuff can and will happen – often repeatedly, sometimes all at the same time. Misfortune is rarely a lone traveller and we like to think we control our own destines, when we are really just monkeys masquerading as organ grinders.

So watching Virender Sehwag imposing his will on everything around him at Indore on his way to becoming only the second man to score an ODI double ton felt, ironically, like a haven in a storm.

Sure, Sachin was the first, and one could argue at length whose was the greater innings, although being the first to break that psychological barrier when few dared contemplate the possibility will always remain an astonishing achievement.

Sehwag may have joined the Little Master by way of a flat deck against West Indian bowling on a ground with small boundaries. He may have had a bit of luck when he was dropped on 170 by Darren Sammy. And if you want to be statistically picky about it, Belinda Clark holds the record in a limited overs international with 229* for Australia against Denmark in the 1997 World Cup.

But when Virender Sehwag is in form there is no sight quite like it.

He may be an old dog, in terms of an international career that’s been going for 12 years, but one with no need of new tricks: see ball, hit ball, repeat again – further, faster, longer, harder. His 15th ODI hundred may have come from 69 balls, but as far as the West Indies were concerned the pleasure was all one way. By the time he was caught in the deep by substitute fielder Anthony Martin for 219 – ending a knock that included 25 fours and 7 sixes – he was seeing it like Sputnik.

It’s been a quiet series for Viru up until now. But when record books are rewritten, previous failures cease to matter quite as much. The wonderful thing about history-making knocks like this is that they are elevated to a level where extraneous factors such as the quality of the bowling, or the wicket, or whether or not you even give a fuck about ODIs anyway, become, for that moment, irrelevant. Only their greatness matters. It is the perfect distillation of excellence; the purity of achievement. When Virender Sehwag hits the ball as cleanly as he did yesterday, the planets realign, Armageddon is put on hold, the pale horse of the Apocalypse pulls up lame and the Pequod makes it back to port. And, more importantly, it gives us all something to smile about in these fractious times.

Bradman Fails Again. Hobbs Fails Again. The 2011 version: Sachin Fails Again.

The Little Master failed – again – to reach that hundredth-hundred milestone, falling just 6 short in India’s first innings at Mumbai. Upon his dismissal, more mundane matters came to the fore, such as India avoiding the follow-on. In the event, the match transformed into a last-day thriller that saw a draw with scores level. But when India’s series against Australia starts at the MCG on Boxing Day, the hype will pick up where it left off, all over again.

Of course the hype is deserved. But at the moment it is a false reality, and it is obscuring everything else.

In the iconic mind-bender The Matrix, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, sees a black cat walk past a doorway. A second later he sees another – exactly the same animal. It is not a case of deja vu as he (erroneously) supposes; it is the machines that control the world making a subtle change to the artificial reality they impose on mankind.

The only machine at work behind Sachin’s glitch of getting out 28 times in the nineties is a fear of failure precipitated by the pressure of expectation and the importance we give to statistics in a number-obsessed sport.  But the reality is that while the hype around Sachin’s next century continues, the Indian team are Tendulkar plus 10 men. The spectacle of people leaving the grounds when Sachin gets out, or the next man in walking to the middle in complete silence – even when this man is the captain – cannot long continue. Indian cricket grounds are where spectators go to watch Sachin, not necessarily the Indian team, or even Test cricket.

I am sure Tendulkar realises this, and it’s probably not making his quest for that elusive ton any easier. In a sport where only 6 runs short of a hundred is regarded as a failure, it would be churlish to call this a slump, or the beginning of the end of an extraordinary career.

But at some point the handover to the new galacticos will have to occur, and while Indian cricket is stuck in the never-ending loop of waiting for that hundred, it’s unfairly obscuring the achievement of the side’s young talent and relegating the team’s future to that of secondary importance, a mere side-show to the all-singing, all-dancing main event.

Ravichandran Ashwin has been blamed for not securing victory for India in Mumbai in his failure to attempt a second run, but 103 and 9 wickets have ensured Harbhajan Singh isn’t going to be recalled in a hurry.

Varun Aaron, whose feet probably haven’t touched the ground since receiving his Test cap, could turn out to be India’s Glenn McGrath. Already he has shown refreshing maturity in recognising that speed isn’t everything.

Virat Kohli, under pressure to protect his place from Rohit Sharma and Ajinkya Rahane, showed toughness to go along with that undoubted talent with his second-innings 63. Kohli, unlike Neo, might not know kung-fu – and he might not be The One – but he is starting to believe.

It would be wonderful if Sachin raises his bat at the MCG. That hundredth hundred we are all waiting for will be worth celebrating when it comes, but in and of itself the figure is an artificial construct and the waiting has imposed on us an artificial reality. We are in limbo, and cannot move forward. Kohli, Aaron, Ashwin: these guys are the future.

Rahul Dravid accepts he has always laboured in Sachin’s shadow. Once Tendulkar gets past his glitch – and fans come to an acceptance that he won’t be around forever – the next generation of Indian stars will hopefully be free to begin constructing their own reality.

On Thursday, Africa’s Western Black Rhino was officially declared extinct.

On the same day at Newlands cricket ground, 23 wickets fell, proving that Test cricket is thankfully still alive and kicking.

A decent pitch combined with incisive bowling and scatterbrained batting led to a veritable stampede of stats as milestones were passed and reputations tumbled along with the timber.  South Africa’s first innings total of 96 was the second-lowest since their readmission to Test cricket; Australia’s 47 all out their fourth-lowest ever and lowest against South Africa. Nathan Lyon’s 14 is only the eighth time a number 11 has top-scored in an innings. Not since 1924-25 have more than 22 wickets fallen in a day’s play; Shane Watson took the second fastest 5-wicket haul, in 21 balls. Vernon Philander, on debut, left Australia with nowhere to hide: his match haul of 8-78 comprises the 5th best bowling figures by a South African in his first Test.

After all of this excitement, Hashim Amla’s elegant, wristy drives through cover and down the ground provided a much needed come-down as he and Graeme Smith calmly saw South Africa home just before lunch on the third day.

Test cricket is magnificent, awe-inspiring, and it deserves saving. But like all endangered species, it needs some help.

Poachers and loss of habitat did for the Western Black Rhino, and Test cricket similarly faces the threat of endless ODI series encroaching on an already packed international timetable and the proliferation of T20 tournaments dangling the big-dollar carrot in front of cricketers for whom the choice to represent their country would otherwise be an easy one.

The format also needs to help itself – over-priced tickets, lifeless wickets, poor viewing conditions and the spectre of empty stands are just some of the things not helping Test cricket’s cause. That a love for the highest form of the game should ever be equated with purist “elitism” in contrast with its more populist forms would comprise not just a dumbing down of the entire sport but a failure of duty in the protection of its long and rich heritage.

What is also plain is that Australian cricket, after the phoenix-like attempt to rise from the Ashes that was the Argus review, must adapt or die. Captain Michael Clarke called the shot selection of his batsmen “disgraceful” and “horrendous”; his own fine innings of 151 he called “useless, a waste of time” in the context of his team’s defeat (a refreshingly honest admission, compared to Alastair Cook’s fatuous assertion that England are “getting close to where we need to be” after India’s 5-0 ODI whitewash).

Ricky Ponting’s career decline looks to be terminal; Brad Haddin is a lame-duck choice for keeper with the likes of Tim Paine and Matthew Wade waiting in the wings; and surely it must be time to knock the Mitchell Johnson experiment on the head: he is the strike bowler Australia want but who rarely turns up. A cull for the good of the herd is very much in order. Not that this should mean a slavish over-insistence on youth – Mike Hussey still has runs in him, and regardless of what you may think about Simon Katich’s handling of his dropping by Cricket Australia, Phillip Hughes’ continued ineptitude at the top of the order must surely increase your sympathy for him.

Those extraordinary events at Newlands were a perfect storm of individual weaknesses and standout performances distilled into one day. That the next match in this Test series should provide the amount of excitement we saw at Cape Town is unlikely. The fact that it is the last in a mere two-match series is criminal. Test cricket deserves better and the message to the boards and administrators is simple: don’t let this beautiful animal die.

It took a now-defunct tabloid newspaper and the British legal system to achieve what the ICC could not when Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif were found guilty of spot fixing yesterday. It was also reported that Mohammad Amir had pled guilty prior to the trail –  a fact suspected but not confirmed due to media restrictions in place throughout the proceedings.

Nearly every piece of coverage I have seen, heard or read on developments at Southwark Crown Court has included phrases along the lines of “a good day for cricket”, “a new start”, “just the kick up the backside the sport needed”. Excuse my cynicism, but the effect this will have on curbing corruption and cheating within the game around the world and especially on the subcontinent will be somewhere between jack and squat.

Sure, players might think twice about cheating on British soil due to the fact that if caught you could land yourself a stretch in chokey, but until the ICC’s anti-corruption unit invests considerably more than token amounts of time and expertise in tackling the root of the problem, it’ll simply be a case of having to take along a bigger suitcase of cash.

History bears me out on this. 1998’s Qayyum inquiry achieved nothing other than defining what exactly constitutes match-fixing: “deciding the outcome of a match before it is played and then playing oneself or having others play below one’s/their ability to influence the outcome to be in accordance with the pre-decided outcome”, something you could hardly struggle to work out yourself, unless you were devoid of any moral sense whatsoever.

A 2001 inquiry proved similarly ineffective – a report into match-fixing presented by Lord Condon “doesn’t seem to have told us anything that we don’t already know,” observed David Lloyd. “It’s just a factual report about things that have dripped out over the years… Cricket boards are saying ‘Yes, we will look at it’ but the issue just rumbles on”.

And the most notorious case of all, that which resulted in a lifetime ban for South African captain Hansie Cronje, has had so little impact on the way corruption is viewed within the sport that the biography I own of him amounts to little more than hagiography.

Image is a large part of why cricket’s administrators have buried their heads in the sand over this issue. Caught between the two stools of going after cheats with all the resources and expertise they can muster, while at the same time being unwilling to draw greater attention to the problem and risk blighting the image of the “gentleman’s game” and losing advertising and TV revenue, the ICC and national cricket boards seem to have opted instead for a middle path that acknowledges the existence of match and spot-fixing but has proved singularly ineffective in dealing with it.

Player amnesties and the banning of mobile phones in dressing rooms are all very well, but until cricket boards are able to take legal action against corrupt players for breach of contract  - rather than simply handing them a ban which, in time, may or may not be rescinded, according to who’s in charge and who does what for whom – then yesterday’s verdicts will constitute little more than chipping away at the face of an extremely large iceberg that could end up sinking the sport’s credibility entirely.

Like Michael Holding in his interview yesterday, I too was taken in by Salman Butt’s polished and duplicitous front which he put up for the cameras when he became Pakistan captain. Eloquent and dignified – since portrayed as “aloof and arrogant” by Graeme Swann in his recent autobiography – he genuinely seemed to have the best interests of his team and Pakistan cricket at heart. As it turns out he did, but only in an illegal, monetary sense, and even then only to benefit the few, mainly himself.

It is easier to feel some sympathy for Amir, the nineteen-year-old who seemed to have the brightest of careers ahead of him, but who was the only one out of the three who had direct contact with subcontinental bookmakers via mobile phone. His guilty plea was based on wrong-doing in the Lord’s Test, but evidence suggests he was involved in attempts to influence the Test at the Oval as well, something he has not as yet admitted to.

In the light of new information still emerging, it seems now the ICC has no choice but to widen the scope of their investigations into other players named by fixer Mazhar Majeed in his conversations with an undercover journalist. One could cynically say the ICC are only taking this action now because the bad publicity that surrounds the sport in the light of yesterday’s verdicts has left them with no other choice.

Whether anything of substance will be done to rid the sport of this vile cancer, or whether it will simply be a case of more meaningless reports, platitude-laden press releases and empty reassurances remains to be seen.

I for one am not holding my breath.

Two autobiographies by well-known international bowlers have been making the news recently. One of them is by an Englishman whose career has undergone a startling renaissance from under-achieving pain in the arse to the giddy heights of Ashes winner, captain of his country, and number-one ranked bowler in the world, while still managing to be a pain in the arse; the other provides the answer to the perennial question: “What’s pissing off Indian cricket fans this week?” As regards the latter, I am looking at you, Shoaib Akhtar.

As with most answers to this question, it inevitably involves Sachin Tendulkar, and once again it seems to be a thing of little consequence that has the faithful dusting off the pitchforks and kindling the flaming torches. Shoaib’s autobiography, Controversially Yours, seems to have the Sachinistas in a tizzy because in it he mentions that during Pakistan’s 2007 series in India, The Little Master, suffering from tennis elbow and subjected to a stream of short balls, may have treated Shoaib’s bowling with some trepidation.

Less Pavlovian than knee-jerk, the reaction in the Indian press and on the Internet was perhaps depressingly predictable. Sachin Tendulkar, backing away from a delivery? Scared of fast bowling? How dare you. The outrage. Etc.

Put it this way, if a fast bowler does not regard the batsman in his sights as anything other than a mortal, flesh-and blood-obstacle between himself and a wicket which must be removed, then he should probably consider a career in landscape gardening. Great bowlers do not give a flying proverbial for reputations. “Sachin may be your god, but he is not mine,” Shoaib quite reasonably proffered in response to the hoo-ha. Quite so.

One does wonder how Sachin feels about all of this, but if I were him the tendency of millions of fans to take massive umbrage on my behalf over some imagined slight would scare the bejesus out of me; I’d probably never leave the house.

Another “tell all” has also made the news this week. Graeme Swann, like Shoaib a bit of a “character” (tolerable on the field when taking wickets; during an extended rain break in the dressing room perhaps not so much), has spilled the beans on life in the England camp and his career at Notts and Northants. In his book The Breaks Are Off, out this week, he informs us that KP was a shit captain, Kepler Wessels was a twat, and that he has no idea why Darren Gough tried to rearrange his face in the hotel toilets in Johannesburg during England’s South Africa tour of 1999-2000.

The extracts I’ve read are all entertaining stuff, but it’s an anecdote about Samit Patel that has proved the most startling.

During the ill-fated and best-forgotten Stanford series in the Caribbean in 2009, several members of the England team came down with a stomach bug, the kind of malady that ends up finding expression “from both ends” as Swanny helpfully explains. Patel claimed to be among the afflicted, and this was accepted until he was spotted exiting the hotel shop with an armful of “two dozen Bounty bars”, saying it was the only food he could keep down.

It’s easy to poke fun at Samit’s complicated and well-documented relationship with food, but this suggests to me a problem slightly more serious than a propensity for nicking an extra samosa from the hotel buffet of an evening. It suggests that Samit is a binge-eater and the various failed attempts to get him into shape now make a bit more sense – how else can one explain the otherwise baffling ineffectiveness of playing for one’s country as an incentive?

The most unfortunate result of this revelation is that Samit could well go on to score a Test match double hundred, take 20 wickets, captain his country, save a small child from a burning building and physically transform himself into a slab of muscle and sinew capable of taking on a cyborg assassin from the future like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, and I’ll still always picture him with two dozen Bounty bars.

I hope they were at least of the dark chocolate variety; I can barely even manage one of the bastards.

Swann also documents a run-in he had with Patel at Notts back in 2008, accusing him of undermining him behind his back at a time when both men were vying for an England place, so I think it’s fair to say that this is one rift that’s not going to be mended any time soon.

Someday, it will surely be possible – as a sociological experiment and not just for the laughs – to put Graeme Swann and Shoaib Akhtar in a room together in some remote government laboratory in the Mojave desert and see which of them comes out alive. Just call me the cricket equivalent of Philip Zimbardo…

I’ve been away. Not “away” as in prison, brokering a Middle Eastern arms deal, or monitoring the skies for the arrival of our alien overlords in a tumbledown cottage in the Lake District while donning a tinfoil helmet and searching for evidence of Nazi submarine bases under the polar icecaps.

That was last year.

No, I’ve been north of the border on my annual visit to my parents. During that time, Graham Dilley and Steve Jobs passed away. I was made aware of the former and somehow missed the latter until the morning of my drive back to Leicester. Mind you, this is not quite as bad as when I was in Paris in the summer of 1997, and completely unaware of the fact that not only had Princess Diana been in Paris during that time, but had died in one of the city’s underpasses. Switching on the TV in my hotel room to watch them unloading her coffin at a British air base proved a slightly surreal and discombobulating experience.

Jobs’ passing, like Diana’s, proved a familiar apotheosis to a similar cult of personality – only with post-it notes stuck on the windows of Apple stores rather than the ransacking of the nation’s flower supplies for a state funeral.

I wouldn’t call myself a drinker of the Apple-flavoured Kool-Aid, but will be forever thankful to Mr Jobs for allowing me to keep abreast of developments in the sport I love while on these yearly visits up north.

The council estate my parents live on now is only slightly less of a shithole than the one I grew up on, where recreation consisted of folks cutting the heads off cats and throwing themselves off multi-storey buildings while ripped off their tits on glue. It’s safe to say Whitfield was a cricket-free zone. A sport seen as being played only by poofs and Englishmen, the foisting of Test match coverage on Scottish television was regarded in our house with the same dismay as Thatcher’s Poll Tax and the ridiculous price of Betamax video recorders.

Graham Dilley was part of that tantalising wonderland of grass and white flannels glimpsed in the time it took for my father to mutter, “Christ, bloody cricket. This is what we pay our licence fee for,” before stabbing at the off-button with an authoritative finality. I was ten years old in 1981, and all I knew of cricket was from reports on the 6 o’clock news. Botham was so totemic that even a working-class kid growing up in the poverty-blighted wasteland of a Scottish housing estate could not but be aware of his existence, or of his greatness, and of the bright satellites of Gower, Willis and Dilley who circled in his orbit. The names didn’t mean a heck of a lot to me at that time, but they were wrought with significance; linked to great men, and great achievements.

A few years later, in 1986, when I was in high school, a bloke turned up to one of our PE classes to teach us how to play cricket. I wish I could remember who he was; he was only there for the one day. The bat felt like a railway sleeper in my hands and my backlift was non-existent. But the first time I made contact with the ball gave me, if not quite a lightbulb moment, a grudging recognition that this could be a sport I would in all probability be useless at, but that I would actually enjoy. Horse-racing was my favoured sport at that time – our biology teacher eventually gave up any pretence of trying to impart any knowledge and would retire to the staff-room for an hour-long fag break while the kids threw their chairs out the window and I sat reading the Racing Post from cover to cover. (1986 was the year of Dancing Brave, beaten by half a length in the Derby by Shahrastani – I was gutted.)  But an hour’s coaching from some guy I never knew the name of, twinned with snatched glimpses on a Radio Rentals telly of Botham and Dilley batting their team not just to safer ground, but to a position from which they would win, sowed the seeds of something that would bloom much later, and that would prove very deep-rooted indeed.

My parents are aware of my zeal for cricket, and have come to regard it now with less scorn and more puzzled bemusement – similar, I imagine, to how they’d react if I breezily announced I’d opened a gay brothel in Basingstoke, or had joined the Masons.

Their house still remains a cricket-free zone, but I am all right with that, due to careful planning each year that ensures my visits do not coincide with major internationals. That, and making sure my shiny mobile gadget courtesy of Mr Jobs is charged at all times.

If this Scottish boozer were ever to run a cricket team, sign me up - and god help the opposition

The only cricket I missed this year while I was up in Scotland was the Champions League T20, or more precisely, the remainder of the tournament after Leicestershire crashed out (two matches, two defeats, still FLT20 champs so am not overly devastated).

All the things that bothered me about this tournament returned with a vengeance once the Leicestershire lads had gotten on the plane back to Blighty, and from then on my interest level plummeted from the giddy heights of “infinitesimal” to an only slightly more apathetic “fuck-all” once Somerset had gone down to a Mumbai Indians side curiously permitted to bend the rules as to its allocated quota of overseas players.

The crass commercialism, the all-white cheerleaders (presumably the organizers think that objectifying women is fine as long as it isn’t Indian women who are being objectified), the often dire standard of cricket on offer… somehow all this seems easier to put up with when it is on the ridiculously overblown scale of the IPL, a viewing experience akin to standing behind the engine of a 747 at full throttle.

When it’s on the scale of a smaller tournament, one that has already fostered a significant amount of ill-will through playing hardball with broadcasting rights, when you add all of the above to rules cooked up through expediency and financial motives rather than fairness, it becomes easier just to ignore it.

Admittedly, there is a pleasing symmetry in the fact that another meaningless T20 tournament for the Attention Deficit Disorder generation lost me in the time it took to remind myself there’s an India-England ODI series coming up soon.

Make of that what you will.

In other news, I hear that Josh Cobb will be in attendance at the Kowloon Cricket Club at the end of this month as a result of his call-up to the England squad for the Hong Kong Sixes tournament. If ever a competition was made for Josh it’s this one, and hopefully he’ll get the chance to propel a cricket ball through the window of one of those surrounding skyscrapers.

It also seems now to be a certainty that Leicestershire will lose James Taylor, as he has not signed a one-year contract extension offered by the club and has informed them he wishes to move “with immediate effect”. Whatever the outcome, I wish James the best of luck. One can only hope that whichever county he ends up with will hardly see him as he will be away on England duty.

One competition aside, 2011 was a year of dashed hopes and squandered potential for the Foxes. Next year, we will be minus James Taylor, Paul Nixon and Andrew MacDonald. But I am predicting big things from Ned Eckersley; Martin van Jaarsveld has come aboard and thanks to this year’s T20 success there will be slightly more money in the kitty to play with. Australia and the West Indies will be visiting Grace Road. If anything, I’d like next year to be slightly less bipolar.

Hope is the little light that keeps the winter darkness of the off-season at bay, and my annual Scottish sojourn the gateway between the end of the domestic season and long weeks spent shivering in front of the television watching an endless string of ODIs sprinkled with the odd Test match.

Roll on Friday, Hyderabad, and India v England.

As I write this, Leicestershire are en route to Hyderabad to take part in the Champions League T20 tournament. They booked their place in this series by dint of reaching the English domestic T20 final at Edgbaston back in August, which they of course went on to win.

As the crowning achievement to a superb domestic T20 campaign it is a fitting reward, and all Leicestershire fans will wish them well ahead of their first match against Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday.

The financial rewards are, of course, very welcome, and so is the shiny FLT20 trophy residing in the display cabinet at Grace Road.

But that the departure for India followed hard on the heels of yet another crashing defeat in the LV= County Championship serves as a reminder that as a season of contrasts the difference between Leicestershire’s T20 form and its performances in Championship and CB40 matches in 2011 could not have been more stark.

In the Championship, Leicestershire finished at the bottom of Division 2 by some considerable margin – compare their 88 points to the next team above them, Kent, who amassed 149. They won only one game, against Glamorgan at the start of the season. Among their defeats, scores of 34 all out against Essex at Southend, and 48 all out at Grace Road versus Northants, are but only two moments in a long litany of failure which Foxes fans will be keen to have scrubbed from the memory banks.

The team are not incapable – with a couple of exceptions it is virtually the same lineup that won 7 matches last year, finished fourth in Division 2 and was in with a shout of promotion – but if anything their performance as a unit in the four-day game seems to have gone backwards.

Over the last few days, the only part Leicestershire has played in the greater scheme of who ended up where in the table was as a potential spoiler to Middlesex eventually ending up as division champions. There were rays of hope for next season for the Foxes: first innings centuries for Greg Smith and Ned Eckersley (who also took six catches behind the stumps during the visitors’ first dig), and useful 50s for the two as well as a much needed 80 (from a personal as well as a team standpoint) for James Taylor in Leicestershire’s second innings as the Foxes strove for at least the moral victory of making Middlesex bat again.

Wayne White put his back into the bowling to give Middlesex some palpitations on their way to a negligible target of 124, but as a win for the visitors was never in doubt, it was a case of sweeping up the shards of a team’s shattered respectability.

Last year, I seem to recall, ended on a note of hope for the new season, too, so you’ll excuse me if I take a pass this time on the Michael Vaughan method of taking the “positives” out of the situation.

As with so many of Leicestershire’s championship endeavours in 2011, the bad more often outweighed the good – one instance in this match just gone being that Leicestershire’s extremely indifferent bowling in the last 30 overs of Middlesex’s first innings allowed the visitors to score an additional 182 runs after being 320-8.

I realise I might sound curmudgeonly about all this, given the team are embarked on what will be, for many of them, one of the biggest adventures of their young lives, and with the promise of riches for the club at the end of it.

Indeed, it’s easy to gloss over failures in other formats. T20 gets people through the turnstiles, money into the club’s coffers, entry into international tournaments and sponsorship and publicity.

For a small, struggling club like Leicestershire, this is immense. Through the combination of numerous initiatives, cuts in expenditure and success in the T20, the club is in considerably better financial shape than it was last year.

The 40-over competition is also popular with the fans – there have been some decent crowds at Grace Road for the CB40 matches – but despite this it is widely disregarded as the least important of the three domestic competitions, and Leicestershire very quickly gave the impression of not really caring about the format either, given the frequency with which players were rested.

But continued under-performance in the four-day game can only hurt the club in the long run. Future England players are judged by their performances in this format. Warwickshire are likely to take a second tilt at prising James Taylor away from Grace Road over the winter, and given the clubs’ relative performances this year, one could hardly blame him for going. While the likes of Greg Smith and Ned Eckersley are talented but callow enough that rival clubs will wait a couple of years before brandishing their chequebooks, Leicestershire’s continued poor performance will not encourage these players to stay should a county with a Test ground come calling.

Success in glitzy T20 tournaments is all very well, but the goal of promotion to Division 1 of the County Championship should take precedence over everything else. There is, of course, the feeling that Division 2 breeds reduced expectation – sure, there is the sop of a trophy for winning it, but the reward of promotion looks distinctly second-best compared to hoisting the trophy amidst the kind of scenes we saw at Taunton yesterday. The irony is, of course, that Lancashire ended up 2011 County champions with a team appreciably no better than Leicestershire’s in terms of “star quality” – but they triumphed through a combination of consistency, self-belief and unwavering determination to attain that one clear shining goal that they never lost sight of.

Leicestershire need to get themselves into a position where that goal can become a reality, and that means promotion. Hopefully the money that’s come as a result of their T20 success can be used in this direction. Andrew McDonald will not be with us next year. I’ll be very surprised if James Taylor hasn’t played his last championship game for the Foxes. There’s talk of finding a senior batsman to add some much needed experience and stability to the batting and to act as a mentor to the youngsters (HD Ackerman filled this role admirably a couple of years back when Cobb and Taylor were still wet behind the ears). Martin van Jaarsveld is one name that’s been bandied about, and Nic Pothas has recently become available after being released by Hampshire. Either of these would be very welcome additions indeed.

I, like other Foxes fans, will be sitting on the edge of my seat over the next couple of weeks, cheering the team on in their Indian adventure, willing them on to another final and another trophy. One can be nothing but immensely proud of them for their success in T20 this year. But one would hope that once their plane touches down back in the UK, when they leave behind the heady atmosphere of a steamy subcontinent, the bright lights of the Indian stadiums and the crowds and the adrenaline, and return to a chilly, misty, leaf-strewn Grace Road, that their attention turns once more – and with some urgency – to next year’s County Championship.

And that should include trying to figure out what went so catastrophically wrong in 2011, and what can be done to fix it.

Jigar Naik ponders how to bring Middlesex's innings to a swifter conclusion

It’s been a right old up-and-down week as a Foxes fan.

Thursday: Leicestershire crash to defeat by Surrey at Grace Road in the latest chapter of what has been a dismal championship season.

Same day: James Taylor makes his England ODI debut and scores 1 off 8 balls.

That evening: news spreads that Harry Gurney, the man who has helped bowl the county to T20 Finals Day, is off to Nottinghamshire on a three year deal. Not only that, but injury means that he will not be taking part in  Saturday’s extravaganza.

Friday: the England ODI and T20 squads are announced. James Taylor is in neither of them.

Today, Saturday, August 27th: Leicestershire win their semi-final versus Lancashire by the skin of their teeth, conceding 6 off the last ball of the match to take it to a super-over. Big Will Jefferson, fresh from 121 against Surrey, is the hero of the hour. He wins it for the Foxes with a balls-out, guns-blazing, almighty heave into the crowd for 6, followed by a primal scream of triumph.

Nerve-shredding? Only slightly.

T20 finalist; place in the Champions League qualifiers assured: I was prepared to accept this should they fall at the last hurdle. Actually to hell with that. A loss would have been gutting. It would have been the end of a dire week, and it would have hurt like a motherfucker.

In the final, Somerset limited Leicestershire to 145-6. Abdul Razzaq, opening instead of Andrew McDonald, made a subdued 33. Josh Cobb’s stay at the crease was worth a brief but entertaining 18; Jefferson again played his heart out for 35. Around the 12th over, as wickets started falling regularly, momentum ebbed.

It was a total that looked about 20 short. 20 runs is the difference between twitchy uncertainty and fatalistic resignation.

And then the magic. A true team effort that shows what a small county – struggling financially, plundered for its talent, written off by all and sundry – can do when it believes.

Five Somerset wickets fell in the space of 19 runs – Hildreth, Pollard, Trego, Suppiah and Buttler.

Josh Cobb and Matthew Boyce were the double-act that headlined the show. Every wicket of Cobb’s was caught by super-sub Boyce on the midwicket boundary.

A superlative diving catch by Paul Nixon to dismiss danger man Pollard would have done credit to a man twenty years younger; he will have to put that retirement on ice for a bit longer because boys, you’ve bagged yourselves a trip to Hyderabad.

Hell, Charlie Fox even won the mascot derby.

“Good luck to the underdogs,” Hampshire captain Dominic Cork said prior to the final.

See, the thing with underdogs is: sometimes they have a tendency to bite you on the arse.

Well played, lads. Well bloody played.

It’s cool that you get an actual trophy for being the world’s number one Test side.

That the ICC, in its wisdom, found it suitable to bestow on the reigning table-topper a mace which looks more like a tent peg, majorette’s baton, turkey baster, or artificial inseminator used on a cattle farm, does admittedly tend towards a more “what the heck is this?” reaction, rather than, “wow, this’ll look great on the ECB mantelpiece”.

This is of course not helped by an image of Kevin Pietersen, in the England dressing room at yesterday’s close of play, brandishing it whilst clothed only in a towel and not looking at all camp in the slightest.

Anyhoo, England are number one. Day 5 at the Oval, the last day of the English Test summer, proved to be a slightly tense affair, at least during the morning session. For the first time this series India, following on, managed to last an entire session without losing a wicket, but when Amit Mishra finally fell after lunch for a valiant 84, the end was swift in coming.

Graeme Swann, who has already had the death knell sounded prematurely on his career by at least one journalist alert to his relative paucity of wickets lately, roared back into the spotlight he so adores with a six wicket haul. England’s batting had again been rock solid as the batsmen made the most of a flat deck prior to its last day disintegration and Swann’s rampage.

Sachin Tendulkar, more likely unsettled by Mishra’s wicket rather than the prospect of being out in the 90s for the ninth time in his Test career, fell on 91 to a brave lbw decision given by umpire Rod Tucker, who even now is probably fleeing the country having changed his name to “Todd Rucker” and wearing comedy beard and glasses to avoid recognition. It was a marginal decision, but the correct one – even had lbw referrals been allowed in this series, Hawk Eye would have shown the ball clipping the top of leg stump.

While not quite as invested in the cult of Tendulkar as so many are, I have to admit to mixed feelings on the Little Master failing in his bid to bag that hundredth hundred in these Tests.

Had he reached that ton, the talk would have been on nothing else. It is, fundamentally, a contrived statistic – “52nd Test century” would not have sounded as significantly monumental – and scored in the context of a series lost 4-0, especially when placed against Rahul Dravid’s epic, battling first-innings 146*, it would have meant very little.

Coming at the end of a Test series in which India managed to score 300 only once – exactly that and no further – as one player after another fell by the wayside due to injury and unfitness, as the world’s erstwhile number one collapsed like a bloated behemoth under the weight of its own hubris against a side hungry, honed and ready for the kill… a Tendulkar milestone under these circumstances would have provided only bathos in a series that’s been nothing from India’s point of view but a long extended failure.

Worse, it would have overshadowed the bright light of Rahul Dravid’s star which has shone undimmed through this series, along with flashes of spark from Praveen Kumar (what a lion-hearted character he is). No doubt it would also have been used to go some way towards papering over the cracks of India’s many failings.

Good umpiring, as Rod Tucker demonstrated, is no respecter of reputations. And neither is this England team.

I can’t help, though, but wonder whether this is simply a blip on India’s part, or the outward manifestation of a more insidious decay. While the team is on the verge of straddling that uncomfortable territory known as “transition”, with its galacticos looking towards retirement sooner rather than later, and its young hopefuls still inexperienced and making their way, I doubt anyone could ever have foreseen them being on the receiving end of such a thorough hammering. Kris Srikkanth, India’s chief selector, has been quoted as saying of his selection committee, “I can proudly say that we have done a good job” – uncomfortably reminiscent, not only of the band playing blithely on while the ship is busily humping an iceberg, but of Andrew Hilditch’s similarly self-deluded sentiment in the wake of Australia’s last Ashes drubbing.

While the England lads are no doubt nursing well-deserved hangovers, there remains a salutary lesson in all of this. Ian Botham thinks England can be number one for at least the next 8 years. The fall from the number one spot may come sooner than one would like, due to reasons entirely outwith England’s control: South Africa have Test series coming up against Australia, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, the first two of which will be at home. England do not play another Test till January.

There is also the small matter of ODIs, a format England have hardly excelled at of late. Prior to a five-match series against India, England play Ireland on Thursday, with many senior players being rested, including the captain, Alastair Cook. It’s understandable that the bowlers, especially, should be given a break, and I’m excited at the fact James Taylor has received a call-up, but the inexperienced nature of the squad (Mike Atherton, in an understandable slip of the tongue, referred to it the other day as the Lions squad, ten of whom have been included) has rather pissed Ireland off.

This is not surprising when not only are England resting Cook and other key players, but Eoin Morgan, an Irishman, will be captaining them. The match also seems to be a glorified fitness test for Jonathan Trott, who appears to have recovered from his shoulder injury. All this on top of the fact England were soundly thrashed the last time these two sides met, and you could forgive the Shamrocks for thinking that the latest England tactic consists of “thinly-veiled insult”.

This match has “banana skin” written all over it. As long as Taylor gets a ton, I’m not too fussed.

But if you are an England fan, you’re already resigned to England being shit at ODIs.

By the grace of Flower’s canny management and the team’s superlative performances, it seems England have ascended to the lofty heights of Test supremacy. Rather than fret over hyperbole, ODIs, talk of “sporting dynasties” and what may happen in the future, I am content, at least for the next couple of days, to savour the fine wine of victory and watch endless repeats of the highlights.

It’s still a daft looking trophy, though.