Archive for the ‘spirit of cricket’ Category

Greig wades in

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

In terms of eloquence, it was never going to match Kumar Sangakkara’s wonderful tour de force last year, but Tony Greig’s Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture certainly pulled no punches when it came to India and its influence on the world game.

In a room filled with cricket’s great and good and redolent with the smell of smoke from burning bridges by the end of it, Greig’s forty-minute speech used the word “India” fifty-two times in total as he took the BCCI to task for its self-interest and greed and for pursuing a policy bent purely on the maintenance of power and of getting one over on its erstwhile colonial oppressors.

“India is preoccupied with money and Twenty-20 cricket, and sees its IPL and Champions League as more important than a proper international calendar,” he said. “To compound the problems, India has not only sold part of the game to private interests but some of her administrators are seen to have a conflict of interest, which makes it more difficult for it to act in the spirit of the game… The net result of this is Test cricket is suffering… We can huff and puff as much as we like and have all sorts of external reports but this situation can only be resolved by India accepting that the spirit of cricket is more important than generating billions of dollars.”

Strong stuff, but after the initial collective thud of jaws dropping you got the feeling there may have been one or two heads in the room nodding in agreement.

He also took aim at the BCCI’s resistance to umpiring technology, its “indifference” towards anti-doping and corruption and problems which “could be resolved if India invoked the spirit of cricket and didn’t try and influence its allies in how to vote”.

Greig, of course, isn’t the first to criticise the Indian board for its selfish lack of interest in the wellbeing of the sport – Lawrence Booth issued a reminder to the BCCI not to abuse its “special gift: the clout to shape an entire sport” in his notes to this year’s Wisden Almanack – but no-one does “damn the torpedoes” quite like Tony Greig, and whether he will ever be invited back to India for a commentary stint in the future is anyone’s guess. You might think it, but Tony will damn well say it, and let’s be honest, many of us agree with him that India’s control of the sport at the highest level is deleteriously disproportionate.

Having said that, there is something slightly incongruous about a man taking a cricket board to task for its blatant commercialism, and the damage caused by government interference in the sport, when, as “tourism ambassador” for Sri Lanka, he managed to shoehorn a thinly-disguised advert for a hotel into his commentary during England’s recent Test series there. He also, unfortunately, joins the ranks of those bamboozled by bullshit and bad science in dragging up that long-discredited old chestnut of lie-detector tests to root out corruption. That and the fact that Greig – the man who was involved in the notorious 1974 runout of Alvin Kallicharran – was the man delivering the speech, and Stuart Broad – a man who thinks every lbw he goes up for is out, and when he is batting he never is – was involved in the panel discussion afterwards, might have made you do a double-take on seeing their names attached to a “spirit of cricket” lecture.

Anyway, whether or not you agree with what Tony Greig had to say, his speech was certainly not dull, and you can read the full transcript at the Lord’s site.

===
And so we come to that part of the year when students the length and breadth of the country are goggle-eyed through too much revision and Red Bull, and the “mid term report” metaphor gets trundled out and applied to England’s performance halfway through the international summer. The consensus seems to be Team England haven’t just performed with flying colours so far, but are on course for an A+ grade by season’s end.

Let’s not get carried away. The West Indies series was less a prelim than an open-book exam; for all our fervent hopes that the Windies would present England with some semblance of a challenge – and that’s not being patronizing though it’s easy of course to be magnanimous when you’re winning –  a competition never really materialized. Comprehensive victories by England were expected in the Tests, but less so in the ODIs and certainly the T20 match last Sunday was expected to provide a more level playing field, but only served to highlight the Windies’ frailties. Last time the West Indies visited England it was Shiv Chanderpaul who was the side’s star; this time around Marlon Samuels won cult hero status – that doughty, crease-occupying 76* at Trent Bridge showed how much he has matured as a Test batsman. Tino Best provided some entertainment as well, and you’d have needed a heart of stone not to feel for him when at Edgbaston he fell just 5 runs short of the first century by a no. 11 batsman. But the team never really clicked as a unit, and in the case of offspinner Sunil Narine, preceded by a large amount of hype on the back of 24 wickets in the IPL, there was only disappointment and a distinct lack of the “mystery spin” we were promised, though conditions weren’t exactly beneficial for him.

It’s infuriating when there’s a missing ingredient that stops true potential from coming to fruition and producing success, but from a Leicestershire fan’s point of view it was nice to get a glimpse of that potential when the Windies played a tour match at Grace Road and Darren Bravo, who never really fired in the Tests but made 66 against Leicestershire, gave all of us watching a reminder of the beautiful strokeplay that brings out those Brian Lara comparisons.

Darren Bravo at Grace Road

England now face Australia in a series of five ODIs, starting on Friday, and while Bill Lawry might be taking things a bit far in trumpeting Australia’s seam bowling attack as the best in the world, they’re sure to provide a far stiffer examination, and better preparation for facing a South African squad that looks, quite frankly, intimidating in its strength and depth.

===

I’m aware that this post is starting to resemble a smorgasbord, or a salmagundi if you will (hodgepodge if you want to be less charitable) but it’s a been a mixed fortnight in terms of cricket news, from the tragic (the passing of Tom Maynard) to the ridiculous (Andrew Flintoff’s reference to Mike Atherton as a “fucking prick”) and the downright predictable (yet another kiboshing by the BCCI of a move at ICC Board level to make the decision review system mandatory across the board).

Tom Maynard’s sad death deserves more than just a footnote, but as yet it’s hard to make sense of the sequence of catastrophic events that led to a talented young cricketer being hit by an underground train in the early hours of Monday, June 18th. What made the news harder to take in was the fact he’d only been on television a couple of days before, talking about a future which he was hoping would involve playing for England.

Last week I wrote my own tribute to another bright light that was snuffed out too soon for World Cricket Watch on my favourite cricketer, Victor Trumper. Trumper accomplished much in his short life before he was taken by illness at the age of 37. With Tom Maynard, only 23, we will never know what he could have gone on to achieve. We like to believe that life, most of the time, and discounting the odd random variable, is something we can more or less control. But when events like this happen, everything we think we know about the natural order of things is thrown into chaos; death becomes, in the words of writer Edward St. Aubyn, “a scandal, a catastrophic design flaw; it ruins everything”.

Rest in peace, Tom.

Test no. 2001 is a Pace Odyssey for England

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

In 2007, on the last day of the England-India Test at Trent Bridge, I made use of my complimentary Day 5 ticket to go and watch India rattle off the 63 more runs they needed for victory.

Granted, Chris Tremlett caused them a few hiccups in the form of three wickets that morning, but India were so obviously the stronger side that very few England fans turned up for the inevitable denouement.

Tendulkar had scored 91; Zaheer Khan had taken 5-75, and while England had had the better of a draw at Lord’s, they were thoroughly outplayed by the visitors in Nottingham. Tremlett aside, individual contributions for England were sporadic. Michael Vaughan, the cartilage in his right knee by this time crumbling quicker than a two-week old digestive biscuit, made a magnificent, into-the-breach 124 on the fourth day, but more was expected of other men who did not deliver. With bat, ball and aggression, India were the laser-guided missile aimed right at England’s soft underbelly.

What a difference four years makes. Since then we have had the IPL, fear for the future of Tests (though that hot potato was already being fiercely debated) and the DRS can has been prised open and worms are wriggling all over the damn place.

India have become the number one ranked Test side. England has won the Ashes twice, home and away.

Of more immediate import to a spectator at Trent Bridge this year, there also seemed to be a heck of a lot more wasps about. Buying an ice-cream could possibly have proved fatal.

We’ve already had a cracker of a first Test in this series, the 2000th, no less, which lived up to all the hype that preceded it, but gave us an India strangely apathetic and “undercooked”.

Duncan Fletcher has said in the past he likes his charges to go into a series a little underdone, which makes him sound like an avant garde chef with some strange Heston-Blumenthalesque ideas when it comes to cooking up the right ingredients for a Test-winning outfit. I’m assuming he may have meant something along the lines of al dente pasta rather than salmonella chicken, but such is Fletcher’s inscrutability, it’s impossible to tell. Like I said, I give him a year.

One other thing that’s changed since 2007 is that Stuart Broad is the new Botham. Which may or may not follow on from being the next Botham. And which I could also curmudgeonly extend to a future which contains the phrase “once touted as”, three words filled with gentle regret over lost potential, or a flame that burned out too soon.

But let’s not go there yet – this is NOW, dammit. And it is glorious. England are leading this four match series 2-0 and are one win or two draws away from being the Big Fromage. The Edam of Excellence. The Gouda of Greatness. The Cottage Cheese of Clinical Conquest. The Dairylea of Dominance.

You can tell I am writing this near tea-time.

Broad was given the Man of the Match Award for not only reminding us he can bat, but also for proving his critics right when they said he’d never be successful if he kept banging it in half-way down the pitch with every delivery and with delusions of grandeur about being England’s “enforcer” rattling around in his blond head.

With a little bit of help from the DRS (no referral for the Harbhajan Singh lbw that turned out to be a deflection from bat onto pad so obvious it only needed the replay to see it) the boy Broad bagged himself a hat-trick and the gratitude of a nation, helping us all to feel a little less irritated at his tendency towards petulance and wilful obstinacy, when all it took was pitching the bloody ball up and bowling straight.

Hat-trick ball

Hat-trick ball

Jimmy Anderson chipped in as well with a thunderbolt of an in-swinging leg-cutter that sent VVS Laxman’s off-stump cartwheeling; one of those Jesus deliveries we see every so often from Anderson and that, if you are a worshipper of fast bowling, make the heart sing.

Broad may have deservedly been dubbed Man of the Match, but Tim Bresnan was Man of the Day with his 90 off 118 balls and his first five-wicket haul in Tests; that Bressie-lad did all this on Yorkshire Day must surely prove which side of the Pennines the Great Almighty is more partial to.

While pace won it for England, one batting feat for England is impossible to talk about without mentioning the controversy that accompanied it. In 2007 there was Jellybeangate; in 2011 it was Runoutgate, or whatever the Twitter “hash tag” is that’s been appended to it. Bell’s 159 came not just with a single slice of luck, but the whole damn pie: the Flan of Fortune, if you will.

Of course there have been two distinct, polarized points of view regarding the run-out. First, that Bell was wandering out of his ground and off for his tea because he assumed the ball Eoin Morgan had flicked off his pads had gone for four and that the over had been called, in which case all he was guilty of was extreme doziness and India’s move in removing the bails was a rather sly one.

On the other hand, never do the umpires’ job for them, and never assume. The run-out was legitimate; the umpires followed the letter of the law in giving him out, and well, hard cheese, Ian… you won’t be doing that again in the future, will you?

Uncomfortable memories of the Murali runout in 2006 and the 2008 Collingwood-Elliott incident at the Oval were dredged up; furious debate erupted over the Laws versus the Spirit of the game; the crowd howled its fury and disappointment and Trent Bridge turned into the Terrordome.

So when a small, ginger-haired batsman re-emerged from the pavilion, eyes cast sheepishly down but defiantly practising his forward defensive on his way back out to the middle, the boos that greeted the umpires and the Indian fielders turned into cheers when it emerged MS Dhoni had withdrawn his appeal, after being requested to do so by Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, and by bending the rule that says you can only withdraw an appeal while the batsman is still on the field of play.

Everyone agreed that India had done A Good Thing. And I’d like to think Paul Collingwood may have benefited from a 20 minute break so that cooler heads might have prevailed after Ryan Sidebottom barged into Grant Elliot.

But I have a couple of issues with all of this. It is all very well citing the Spirit of Cricket, and it is of course a good thing to aspire to decency and fairness in the sport in which you choose to participate, or indeed of any other aspect that constitutes daily life and your interactions with others.

But if it had been, Kevin Pietersen, say, instead of Ian Bell at the centre of this brief but intense shit-storm, would Dhoni still have withdrawn his appeal?

One man’s spirit of cricket could very well represent a lack of killer instinct to someone else. My problem with the admirable but nebulous “spirit of the game” is that in the end it is all down to who, where, when and what – who is at the crease, the match situation, what it means for the series, the risk of having your house burned down back in India versus having missiles thrown at you on an English cricket ground.

We stopped expecting batsmen to walk when they knew they’d nicked it long ago. If you walk, you are regarded as a charming eccentric whose playing career will no doubt come to a premature end because of it. Who’s to say in ten years we’ll look back at what happened at Trent Bridge and wonder, with the Test top spot up for grabs, at the admirable but charming quaintness of Dhoni’s action?

When “doing the right thing” involves the inevitable conflict between morality and self-interest, there is never any guarantee that the “right” decision will be made.

Andy Flower’s assertion that “We felt that Bell wasn’t attempting to take a run and therefore we wanted to ask the Indian side to reconsider their appeal” does not sit all that easily with his admonition to Andrew Strauss after the England captain’s recall of Sri Lankan batsman Angelo Mathews in a Champions Trophy clash in 2009. Mathews was run out after a collision with Graham Onions that was entirely accidental – Onions was genuinely trying to get out of Mathews’ way – but Flower stated afterwards: “I just wouldn’t have done it. I would have sent the batsman on his way. He ran into the bowler. Simple deal.” Hmm.

Pondering a lucky escape

Pondering a lucky escape? Bell in the field on Day 4

I think Dhoni made the right decision but Bell, according to the Laws of the game, was completely in the wrong and his on-camera interview after close of play was evasive and defensive; no doubt he had been coached on what to say, as he could barely give a straight answer to any of the questions.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said of all this ruckus is that England did not win by 22 runs – or the 69 more runs Bell put on with Morgan after the former was reinstated.

International incident narrowly averted. Going by the blizzard of gushing, laudatory press releases that began landing on journos’ desks soon after, Dhoni’s act of chivalry seems to have been seized on with some relief by the various governing bodies at being handed a break from having to deal with the rather more pressing concerns of slow over-rates and the non-use of Hawk Eye in lbw decisions.

Shane Warne referred to the “warm, fuzzy” feel-good feeling that enveloped Trent Bridge after the resolution of Bellgate. While cricket is currently dislocating its shoulders slapping its own back, and enjoying an enthusiastic orgy of self-fellatio, a bigger storm could very well be brewing on the horizon.

The true spirit of cricket

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
Kumar Sangakkara at Lord's

Kumar Sangakkara at Lord’s

Back in June, Vic Marks wrote an article on The Cricketer magazine’s website bemoaning the fact that Twitter has removed all the mystique from our sportsmen.

He speaks of Bradman and Hutton et al. as “distant, glamorous men; they were charismatic partly because we did not know everything about them… Now via twitter we would know precisely what they had for breakfast and which TV programme they watched”.

To dismiss Twitter as all noise and no signal, is, of course, dismissively simplistic. For communicating breaking news it is unparalleled – it takes a lot of skill to pack punchy, useful and immediate info into 140 characters. With brevity, there is often considerable wit. Dismissing Twitter because of its bite-size format is like saying that haiku isn’t a valid form of poetry because it’s too fucking short.

And hey, maybe hero-worship of the kind that Marks writes about is over-rated, anyway. People are, after all, just people. Interesting, however, that Sachin Tendulkar has a Twitter account and that doesn’t seem to have affected his god-like status in the slightest.

True, much of what is posted on Twitter is banal. If I had a pound for every time a cricketer mentioned they’d eaten at Nando’s, I would have been able to buy the bloody company. But I like Twitter. It’s like sitting in a crowded boozer with several conversations going on at once. You can tune out what you don’t want to listen to, and join in the ones that are interesting or entertaining. There are days I can live without it. But I like knowing it is there. Communication, in any form, is useful and serves a purpose.

But some things need a bigger platform. There are some things that need to be said, and that take one man, standing in a room in front of others, and an uninterrupted length of time in which to say them.

And last night, while sitting at my laptop, I listened, live and in real time, to Kumar Sangakkara do just that.

Sangakkara is a remarkable individual. Intelligent in an age in which it is unfashionable to be so, a lover of literature in a world where admitting you have never read a single book since you left school is worn as a badge of pride. All that and a cover-drive, as Christopher Martin-Jenkins memorably said in his introduction, to rival Wally Hammond’s.

As this year’s speaker at the MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture, Sangakkara admitted there were many things he could have talked about: spot-fixing, the DRS, the future of Tests and various other issues that have featured heavily on cricket’s radar lately.

That he chose to speak about Sri Lankan cricket in its context of an island nation torn apart by war, and his experiences growing up during it, all the way through to the national team’s World Cup triumph in ‘96, the tsunami of 2004 and the attack on the team bus in Lahore, was really nothing less than you would expect from a classy individual who takes his responsibility as a sportsman and as an ambassador for his country very seriously indeed.

During the one hour Sangakkara spoke, he did what only great writers or orators can do: transport the audience from its comfort zone and enable it to experience the unfamiliar, and, in the case of the incident in Lahore, the terrifying.

Sangakkara’s retelling of this was utterly gripping; bullets hitting the bus “like rain on a tin roof”, Sangakkara’s moving his head seconds before a bullet burying itself in the side of the seat where his head had just been, Tharanga Paranavitana, on his debut tour, standing up and yelling that he had been hit:

I see him and I think: “Oh my God, you were out first ball, run out the next innings and now you have been shot. What a terrible first tour.”

It is strange how clear your thinking is. I did not see my life flash by. There was no insane panic. There was absolute clarity and awareness of what was happening at that moment.

I hear the bus roar in to life and start to move. Dilshan is screaming at the driver: “Drive…Drive”. We speed up, swerve and are finally inside the safety of the stadium.

We all sit in the dressing room and talk. Talk about what happened. Within minutes there is laughter and the jokes have started to flow. We have for the first time been a target of violence. We had survived.

We all realized then what some of our fellow Sri Lankans experienced every day for nearly 30 years. There was a new respect and awe for their courage and selflessness.

We were shot at, grenades were thrown at us, we were injured and yet we were not cowed. We were not down and out. “We are Sri Lankan,” we thought to ourselves, “and we are tough and we will get through hardship and we will overcome because our spirit is strong.”

I admit that while Sangakkara was recounting this, there were times during this part that I had to remind myself to breathe.

Sangakkara was also scathingly critical of the damage done to Sri Lankan cricket since 1996 through the self-interest of certain individuals interested only in two things: money, and power.

Accusations of vote buying and rigging, player interference due to lobbying from each side and even violence at the AGMs, including the brandishing of weapons and ugly fist fights, have characterised cricket board elections for as long as I can remember.

We have to aspire to better administration. The administration needs to adopt the same values enshrined by the team over the years: integrity, transparency, commitment and discipline.

This is, of course, particularly relevant given the ICC’s new recommendation that all national boards make themselves free of political interference within two years. Given Sanath Jayasuriya has only recently flown home after being foisted onto the national team for a grand total of two matches by his country’s government, it would seem Sri Lanka has some way to go in this. It has also now transpired that sports minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage “has ordered Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) Interim Committee to examine the remarks made by Sangakkara during the lecture,” according to the country’s national news agency.

In this respect, it’s not been a great few weeks for cricket.

England’s dire showing in the last two ODIs aside, politics has been foisting its corrupt, immoral and bloated self-interest on the sport too often for my liking. The Jayasuriya affair, the 2009 genocide of the Tamils, the demonstrations outside cricket grounds, hell, even boggle-eyed Eurosceptic and professional little-Englander Nigel Farage made an unwelcome (by me, anyway) appearance in the TMS box.

I’m an idealist, but I am also a realist.

Sport and politics are inseparable: ‘twas always thus, and always will be. Cricket has at various times been the sport of colonial oppressors, an opiate for the masses, and a tool for propaganda, the acceptable face of oppressive regimes to present to the wider global community as “proof” of their reasonableness and fair play.

Sometimes I think we cling to cricket because, like a great number 3 batsman, it provides us with an anchor, something around which this whole crazy and often fucked-up innings called life can revolve and which can get us through to stumps with some respectability. We wish to live our lives the way we would wish to see our cricket played, so we can hold the mirror of one up to the other and not have it break with an almighty crack.

Kumar Sangakkara expressed this more eloquently than I or anyone else ever could when he said at the end of his speech:

My loyalty will be to the ordinary Sri Lankan fan, their 20 million hearts beating collectively as one to our island rhythm and filled with an undying and ever-loyal love for this our game.

Fans of different races, castes, ethnicities and religions who together celebrate their diversity by uniting for a common national cause. They are my foundation, they are my family. I will play my cricket for them. Their spirit is the true spirit of cricket. With me are all my people. I am Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim and Burgher. I am a Buddhist, a Hindu, a follower of Islam and Christianity. I am today, and always, proudly Sri Lankan.

I admit I am a cynic. I look for ulterior motives in most things. It does not make me paranoid: it makes me prepared.

I know that in reality, there is rarely any such thing as a unifying force for good.

But when Kumar Sangakkara tells me that cricket can be just that, I believe him.

You can listen to Sangakkara’s speech, in full,  and read the transcript at the Lord’s site.