Leg Side Filth

If Andrew Strauss sounded a little hoarse in the post-match presentation today, that is understandable. No doubt the result of much appealing, it was probably even more down to celebration, as England made sharp, clinical work of scything down India’s second innings to wrap up a historic 2000th Test match.

It’s been five days of ebbs and flows, ups and downs, and unexpected detours along the way. It’s seen scintillating batting and superb bowling from England and an India weakened by injury and absence and doing the best with what it had only to find England far too strong an opponent.

Above all, it’s shown that rather than the twitching corpse many alarmists would have you believe  Test cricket resembles – and that’s not to say there isn’t rightly concern for its future – it is capable of climbing off the canvas, kneeing you in the balls to get your attention, and making you forget every meaningless ODI and T20 you’ve ever been exposed to.

That’s not to say the shorter forms don’t have their place – and it’d be churlish of me to take too much issue with T20 considering Leicestershire are doing rather well in that format right now – but Test cricket remains the very greatest format the sport has to offer. Preferring Test cricket does not make you boring, uncool or an antediluvian dinosaur stuck in an ivory tower (not, of course, that there is anything wrong with this).

It means you want to see the best cricketers in the world being judged on their abilities to perform at the highest level. It means paying attention rather than instant gratification; it means witnessing moments of greatness or disappointment, or even sometimes moments of farce and anticlimax, but all of these are threads in a tapestry you can only truly admire by stepping back and viewing them in the context of the whole.

If this sounds a tad precious, I apologise. Like most cricket lovers I’ve spent hours trying to explain my love for cricket; sometimes, I’ve even managed to succeed. Tests like this sure make my job easier.

That’s not, however, to say it was a classic meeting of equals. India did not look like the number one side. Undercooked through lack of preparation, missing their star opener, their lead bowler hors de combat and the continuation of Sachin’s Lord’s hoodoo (34 in the first innings, 12 in the second) meant England always looked the better side. With a few exceptions, the galacticos could hardly be described as having performed well as a unit, and they will be hoping Zaheer Khan will at least be back for Trent Bridge where he performed so well in the Jellybeangate Test of ‘07, snaffling 9 wickets and a deserved Man of the Match award.

From the hard slog of Day One, to KP’s all-banners-flying double ton on Friday, with Ian Bell and Matt Prior in support; golden boy Stuart Broad regaining his lustre; Matt Prior’s rescue-mission ton after the wobble caused by a resurgent Ishant Sharma; Jimmy Anderson’s five wicket haul, his 11th in Tests and his third at HQ… We had drama, controversy (oh, for a full DRS!), queues since 2AM stretching down the Wellington Road and Tendulkar causing a near-riot as he came back from a net session before the start of play…

I love Test cricket so much right now, I should probably be served with a restraining order.

Tendulkar in the field, Day One

But. India are not the number one team for nothing. They may have the unfortunate habit of losing first Tests in series, but a two-match margin of victory for England is far away still.

India needed only 73 runs in their second innings to win at Trent Bridge the last time these teams met there. Tendulkar scored 91 in the first innings. The year after that, 2008, the new stand went up, with the resultant microclimate helping the ball to hoop round corners. Jimmy Anderson could run riot here, Tremlett has excellent form against India at this ground, and India will be praying Zaheer Khan is fit.

The best is yet to come.

One last thing. If I were told tomorrow that I’d be stricken with total amnesia regarding this match and that I would only be allowed to remember one moment from it, despite England’s superb victory, I’d choose to remember a shot played by a batsman on the losing side. That shot was Rahul Dravid’s airborne punch through extra-cover that took him to 98: daylight between feet and ground, every muscle tensed like a Bernini statue brought to life, a perfection of balance and timing with the added flourish that makes cricket-porn tragics like me take a long, deep and satisfied breath: the hot-spot replay showing the white heat signature bang in the middle of the blade.

The past five days have showcased everything that is great about Test cricket. And sometimes, true greatness comes distilled in a single moment.

I have been present at three of Kevin Pietersen’s five Test centuries at Lord’s.

I wasn’t present when he raised his bat after smearing the ball through the covers for four to bring up his 202*, but I was there to watch him lay the cornerstone, making bricks out of mud and constructing the foundation of a major personal achievement and a big England total through hard bloody graft.

The first day of this Test was a frustrating one for spectators, topped and tailed by rain, runs at a premium, Zaheer Khan and Praveen Kumar threatening with the new ball under a gloomy sky that made it hoop and swing.

I only go to Lord’s about twice a year these days – the provincial on day-release to the Big Smoke – but it’s a magical place even when it’s raining. I’m still recovering two days later due to acute shoulder knack after carrying all the assorted junk needed for a day at the cricket when the weathermen can’t make up their minds as to when it’s likely to chuck it down, and besides, one never knows when one will miss one’s last train back to Hobbiton and be forced to construct a shelter for the night made of sticks, cardboard boxes and a shopping trolley. It pays to be prepared. Add to that the accumulated spoils along the way of newspapers, programme, obligatory book purchased from the Lord’s shop, and I feel like a squaddy who’s done a ten-mile run with a full pack. Maybe I’ll be lucky and regain full use of my arms by Wednesday.

Anyway, while Day One didn’t give us much in the way of action, in the light of Kevin Pietersen’s mighty knock yesterday it’s interesting now looking back on the notes I made when I got home on Thursday. Pietersen looked like the proverbial long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs that day; the ball found the edge of his bat more than the middle, and England didn’t so much look in top gear as they resembled a pensioner backing a Lada Riva estate out of the driveway and onto a busy street via a sharp turn, the cat, and the cunningly placed tricycle belonging to the kid next door.

While Pietersen looked undeniably nervous, there was also a grit-your-teeth determination to him, to make it through the day and grind out the runs now matter how hard, or how ugly, they came. It is easy to say this with hindsight, but I had a feeling today would be the day which, by the application of sheer bloody-mindedness and strength of will, would be the acorn from which a mighty oak would grow.

You could point to the support of Ian Bell and Matthew Prior at the other end while KP was accelerating through the gears yesterday, but to me his most important partnership was with Jonathan Trott on the first day, because that was when runs for Pietersen came the hardest. He finished Thursday on 22*, while Trott outscored him on his way to another inexorable 50. If Trott had departed before play was called off due to bad light, the unsettling effect on Pietersen could have proved disastrous for his search for fluency.

Trott gets his 50

That fluency was in full, imperious flow by the time Pietersen raised his bat yesterday to acknowledge the applause marking his third Test double century. His second came seven months ago in Adelaide, and while it does not feel that long ago, sprinkled as it will remain with Ashes stardust, seven months is an eternity in cricket, and in a batsman’s career.

Forgive me if I’ve gone on about this before, but the public’s relationship with Pietersen proves endlessly fascinating to me. There’s of course been all the ruckus over his vulnerability to left-arm spin, which seems finally to have been laid to rest (Strauss is now the subject of the spotlight’s glare due to his own unfortunate weakness facing southpaws) and the frequently expressed view that no one should be given a free ride due to past brilliance if this brilliance is constantly “on the cusp” of returning.

With KP, though, there’s always the sense of schadenfreude when he’s out of nick, as if he is paying the price for his arrogance, and the urge to kick a man when he is down is a temptation many are too happy to give in to. When Pietersen does well, it is expected of him; when he does not, the glee, the carping over his South African heritage, the barbs levelled at his “ego”… well, it all provides good tabloid fodder when often there is precious little else to write about. So it goes. No doubt he is used to it.

Pietersen’s first 50 runs came from 134 balls; the 50 that took him to 100 from 82. From 100 to 150 took him 85 balls; from 150 to 200 only 25. By the end he was seeing each delivery like the proverbial football; Ishant Sharma the lugubrious, floppy-haired victim of this late and gloriously unrestrained hitting.

I wasn’t present to watch Pietersen in full, triumphant flow yesterday, but on Thursday I saw him do the donkeywork. I missed the edifice’s completion, but I was there when the first stone was laid, and that feels as great a privilege.

KP lays the foundations

Finally, another thing I’ve liked from the play so far has been the relative lack of rancour between the two sides, but we are of course only on day 3 of a possible 20 possible days of Test cricket (16 according to a confused Jonathan Trott in his amusing interview the other day) so there is time yet for a vigorous ejection of toys from prams.

The banter between Pietersen and Praveen Kumar especially has been good to see. These two know each other from the IPL (ex Bangalore team-mates) and the moment in which PK congratulated KP, and vice versa – Praveen having stepped up admirably in the absence of a hamstrung Zaheer to take his maiden Test 5-wicket haul – was a great moment.

Having had a discussion recently with another cricket fan on Twitter as to whether the notion of “the gentleman’s game” has ever been anything other than rose-tinted romantic idealism, it was a pleasant reminder that decency and respect for the opposition does not need to be a casualty in these days of spiralling sponsorship deals and endless arguments over technology.

Still, early days… This series has a long way to go yet.

If the Sri Lankan series just concluded was a humdrum, monochrome blur – the equivalent, in televisual terms, of a clapped-out black and white portable from Radio Rentals with a vertical hold problem and half its knobs missing – India are now here with a promise to dazzle us in flat-screen glorious 3D technicolour with a kick-ass sound system.

When it comes to a vision for the future of our great game, we all know it is the BCCI hogging the remote, but clear your viewing schedules now because this shit is going to be more overblown than a Cecil B. DeMille epic – though maybe not quite as long, satisfied as we must be with four Tests.

India are the number one ICC Test ranked nation. Their batting lineup is the stuff of legend, stats-porn and “best of all time” lists. If Sachin doesn’t make your World XI list, then I doubt there is anything else we could ever agree on. Some of these galacticos we may never see in England again.

Of course the talk is all about Sachin. The printing presses of Britain’s newspapers are probably looking at an ink shortage after all the articles written about him in the Sunday sports sections. There’s even been the sly suggestion that The Little Master gave the Windies tour the swerve to give himself the optimum chance of his 100th international hundred coming at Lord’s. Given his highest score there is 37, we could be traversing the realms of wishful thinking rather than the cold hard face of probability, but it is nice to dream.

Just as much as I am looking forward to Sachin chasing that impossible dream, I am looking forward to watching Rahul Dravid, a man who has always laboured in Sachin’s shadow. The fact that both India and England have rock-steady, unflappable accumulators as their number 3s appeals to my sense of symmetry and anticipation of close contest. And if VVS Laxman shows us just a hint of the swivel-jointed wristiness that has made commentators purr and opposing nations weep (Australia in 2008, 2004, 2001 etc.) then that will make me exceedingly happy.

Of course, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see England grab the top spot with a 2-Test margin series victory. The chances of this happening are extremely unlikely, but I believe we have the better bowling attack, and “attack” will be the operative word against a side that will punish anything wayward. Chris Tremlett, with his height and bounce, will be aiming for the jugular. He will be re-entering the arena against some familiar faces. He was impressive against India at Trent Bridge in 2007, albeit in a losing cause, and knows he can give them problems. Graeme Swann, with his flight and guile, has the edge over counterpart Harbhajan, and when the ball swings, Jimmy Anderson is nigh-on unplayable.

As I’m writing this, Andrew Strauss has just scored a century for Somerset against India in the tour match at Taunton. Warm-up matches are of course not the be-all and end-all as far predictors of success go. Taunton’s is the flattest of flat decks, and the Indian bowling is rusty and missing three of its key men. Strauss may not have the strategic nous or the charisma of MS Dhoni, and must reassert his authority after handing over the captaincy reins to Alastair Cook in the ODIs against Sri Lanka, but he is an Ashes winner and one half of the duo, along with Andy Flower, who has built England up to the position of considerable strength they now occupy. He will have to do what Dhoni has rightly become famous for: leading from the front.

The kings of world cricket versus the pretenders to the throne: it is inevitable that proceedings at some point are going to get… tense. Heated, even. On-field decisions will be questioned, there will be trash-talking and sabre-rattling and India’s new coach, Duncan Fletcher, not exactly a “people person”, will no doubt get pissed off at someone. Fletcher has already found himself in the unenviable position of being a staunch advocate of the decision review system while at the same team being national coach for a country that wants fuck-all to do with it. Fletcher’s skill as a coach is almost universally unquestioned, though I can’t help feeling it will all end in tears at some point. In the meantime, I’m sure that a purported pay-cheque of £700,000 is a nice palliative.

The visitors, with much pomp and fanfare, are marching into the valley, but England can gain an early advantage in grabbing the high ground at Lord’s. India have arrived in England on the back of three Tests against the West Indies which many critics think they should have steam-rollered beyond a simple “job done” 1-0 scoreline. Some of their key players haven’t played any meaningful cricket since the IPL, and they are now in the process of chasing 462 at Taunton, with play currently suspended due to rain. As preparation for a Test series goes, it ain’t ideal.

Egos will be bruised, tempers will flare, drama will be ensue, and legends will be written.

Grab your popcorn. Fuck Harry Potter. This is the must-see blockbuster of the summer.

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.

England were disciplined, relentless, showed no mercy and dismantled their opposition.

Then the blokes came on.

The England women played before the men as a first course to the main attraction, but in terms of performance and results their billing could just as well have been reversed.

Granted, this was not quite the same team that lifted the trophy at the ICC World Twenty20 final in Barbados last year, with four of the 2010 team being, at the time of writing, absent from the game through injury, retirement, omission in the case of the then-captain Collingwood and, sadly, depression in the case of Michael Yardy.

But given both of England’s openers (including 2010 Man of the Match Craig Kieswetter) were out by the end of the third over and with only 12 runs on the board, and the only standout period being the 83-run partnership between Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan, you could be fooled into thinking 2010 was all some kind of bizarre error.

England deserve all the plaudits showered upon them as a Test side (the listlessness of the Tests just gone aside) but in the shorter forms of the game they still veer between the just-about-competent and the diabolically useless, with little in between.

You knew this match had the potential to go very wrong indeed from the moment it was divulged at the toss that Ian Bell would not be playing. When asked to explain this decision, England’s new T20 captain Stuart Broad made some sounds that may have resembled words, but they were so devoid of anything beyond evasive flannel I can’t remember a single damn thing he said.

I do remember what Broad said at the end of the match, when he was interviewed as the losing captain, but I’ll get to that in a bit, when you too, dear reader, can join me in frothing at the mouth in disbelief at the utter non-logic of it all.

We’re not in Barbados any more, Toto.

Anyway, Kieswetter and Lumb slogged their way ignominiously out of the reckoning as far as any meaningful contribution to this match was concerned, and after Kevin Pietersen departed, having finally laid our minds at rest that his horror trot could be over – let’s not mention the fact that Sanath Jayasuriya, who took his wicket, bowls left-arm spin – only one boundary was scored in the last 9 overs.

Samit Patel may have lost (some) weight but it’s not made him any quicker, as he was involved in an embarrassing run-out. Perhaps he’d have been less tardy making it back to his crease if there had been a pie placed on it.

Ravi Bopara dawdled nervously, Luke Wright’s continued inclusion continues to strike me as nothing other than Wrong, and that was all she wrote as England could manage only 136-9.

As only one world-class partnership came to the party for England, so it took the world-class Sri Lankan duo of Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara to take their side to victory with 97 runs between them. Theirs was a partnership of unruffled, assured excellence. They are two of the world’s best Test batsmen, and they played as such, showing that particular ability common to all true greats to pace their innings according to the demands of the format – a skill that seems beyond many of their England counterparts.

If Morgan and Pietersen were the thoroughbreds to the glue-factory rejects that comprised the rest of England’s batting, the bowling proved to be similarly in need of direction, with Jade Dernbach the only man to take a wicket (Jayasuriya, whose politically engineered inclusion in this team is a kick in the teeth for everything that cricket, and indeed democracy, stands for).

Dernbach – 6 feet 2, hair gel, body art – is highly regarded by England bowling coach David Saker. A seamer whose slower ball is the most effective weapon in his armoury, he alone gave the Sri Lankan batsmen pause on their otherwise inexorable march to victory.

It is hard, and perhaps slightly unfair, to judge Stuart Broad on his first outing as captain. But considering Eoin Morgan seemed to be doing much of the field-placing during the latter overs of the game as Broad fielded on the boundary, it may turn out to be a short-lived appointment.

Of course, you could also say Broad really didn’t have a heck of a lot to work with. Considering neither Patel or Bopara made any convincing argument to justify their recall to England colours, are we to assume that T20 is nothing but a training ground in which to blood new or inexperienced players and that the result of the match is worth gambling on for that reason? How much do England really care about T20 anyway? A mostly domestic phenomenon, there are precious few T20 internationals before the next World Cup in September 2012, and they looked a pale shadow of the unit that won in 2010.

You could also say: play your best team. Jayawardene and Sangakkara are prime examples of Test virtuosos who can adapt their games. Ian Bell is in superb form at the moment. He is averaging 331 in Tests this summer.

When asked again, pointedly, after the match was over why Bell had not played, Broad mentioned Bopara as giving them another bowling option (which makes Luke Wright’s selection even more baffling). “But I’m sure he [Bell] will be training hard and fighting to get into the team.”

Because, apparently, scoring a veritable shit-ton of runs just doesn’t seem to be enough.

Crazy.

The madness begins afresh tomorrow, when Alastair Cook will take the reins in an effort not to repeat the 5-0 hammering England sustained the last time these two sides met in an ODI series in England.

With any luck, this time the team selection might make slightly more sense.

“Embarrassing.”

“Shambles.”

“I don’t mind if we’re beaten, as long as we’re not humiliated.”

“Could have been worse: I could have bought a ticket on the Titanic.”

These were just some of the scathing comments overheard at Grace Road today as Leicestershire were bowled out for 48 on day 3 of their championship match against Northamptonshire, subsiding to abject defeat by an innings and 155 runs.

The day started off cool and overcast with a stiff breeze. By about 11:30 I’d noticed there were tears streaming down my face, and while this was down to the cold wind blowing across the field it could just as well have been despair at the fact that once again, our year seems to be heading south in at least one of the current formats.

Greg Smith fell at 11:19: three wickets down, 33 runs on the board.

James Taylor followed a couple of minutes later: 33-4.

11:26: 35-5.

11:34: 37-6.

11:41: 38-7.

At 11:57 Leicestershire were 40-9 and spectators started leaving.

At 12:08, it was all over.

Matthew Boyce was top scorer, with 12 – the only man to make it into double figures.

It is not the lowest ever total for the county – that was achieved, if achieved is the right word, in 1912, when Leicestershire were all out versus Kent to the tune of 24. It is not a statistic that makes the reading of today’s scorecard any easier.

That this should follow hard on the heels of the news that Warwickshire have approached the club with a view to buying James Taylor out of the last year of his contract at Grace Road does not seem coincidental.

Taylor was uncharacteristically out of sorts in this game, departing for no score this morning and making only 8 in the first innings. Leicestershire have said they have rejected Warwickshire’s offer, and will renegotiate a contract extension with Taylor to keep him at Grace Road.

Taylor was not included in either of the two England squads announced this morning, for the upcoming Twenty20 and ODIs versus Sri Lanka, despite many predicting he would be.

In answer to the very reasonable objection that surely, he is now the finished article, England’s selectors have indicated they would like to see Taylor face more first class bowling.

Warwickshire’s director of cricket is Ashley Giles, a part-time England selector.

Draw your own conclusions.

Bizarrely, as well as offering to buy Taylor out of his contract, Warwickshire have also offered Leicestershire one of their players in part exchange to sweeten the deal. I’m guessing this would not be Jonathan Trott or Ian Bell.

While one must perforce give praise to Northants’ bowling attack for their clinical and comprehensive dismantling of the home side this morning, it’s surely not a stretch to think that the questions surrounding Taylor’s future, and thus that of the club, has unsettled what is a close-knit dressing room. They would not be human otherwise.

And this is what gets me, as a Leicestershire fan: that feeling of being torn between pride that one of our own is worthy of such covetous attention, and despair at the disruption this will inevitably cause the club. God knows we have had enough of that and more the last few months.

The sun came out from behind the clouds today as the last wicket fell. For Leicestershire, however, the outlook is once again distinctly gloomy.

Last man walking - Nadeem Malik is the not-out batsman as Leicestershire are skittled for 48

When Sri Lanka look back at this Test series, the number they may well call to mind won’t be the 119 Kumar Sangakkara scored in rescuing his side from defeat on another rain-shortened day at the Rose Bowl.

It won’t be the magnificent 193 new captain Tillakaratne Dilshan made on his way to breaking the record for the highest total by a Sri Lankan batsman at Lord’s.

Nor will it be the 112 runs made by keeper Prasanna Jayawardene, who has been as quietly impressive with the bat as he has been with the gloves in this series.

No: the number which will prove of most significance, which will cause them the most pain and upon which their 2-0 series loss to England can be traced, is 24.4. This was the amount of overs the Lankans lasted in their second innings at Cardiff, and this was all the time it took to bowl them out for 82.

It may be reductive and over-simplistic, given there were other factors at play – a lacklustre bowling attack incapable of taking 20 wickets, and 369 overs lost during the series due to appalling weather, to name only two.

But to a team already burdened by the machinations of cricket board and government, with two of its veterans in Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene resigning their captaincy and vice-captaincy positions and a subsequent “difference of opinion” with Sri Lanka Cricket regarding the timing of their arrival in the UK from the IPL, their woeful collapse at Cardiff meant the difference between drawing the series and losing it.

England have a strong, established batting line-up and it was always going to take something special for a bowling attack diluted through retirement, injury and plain inexperience to make inroads into it.

No one seriously expected the visitors to win this series, and critics wrote them off after Cardiff with the view that this was a hiding they would never come back from. In truth, they showed more fight than some were willing to give them credit for. Sangakkara’s last day Rose Bowl ton, backed up by gutsy contributions from Rangana Herath and Thilan Samaraweera, showed the underdog may have been limping badly, but was not ready to lie down and die.

England, albeit helped by a green, seaming Rose Bowl wicket and a returning Jimmy Anderson, constituted simply too terrifying a prospect with the ball for Sri Lanka’s batsmen: Mahela Jayawardene in particular looked extremely uncomfortable against the aggressive pace and bounce of Chris Tremlett, with a few raps to the fingers for his pains. Stuart Broad predictably bowled better once he was made to relinquish the new ball, showing both a canny psychological nous on the part of the England management, who must have guessed he’d be stung into keeping a more disciplined line and length, and also a praiseworthy and obvious realization that Tremlett is by far the more effective opening partner to James Anderson.

What also will not be forgotten is the downright bizarre nature of this series. As England’s first Test series since winning the Ashes, it was always going to be underwhelming, but with the combination of rain and rumours of Sri Lankan dressing-room discontent at Sanath Jayasuriya being foisted on the team for Saturday’s T20 and the first ODI, it was easy to feel cheated at not being able to see the Sri Lankan team at their best.

England performed sometimes adequately and at times superbly to win the series. Today they seemed a little flat in the field, and as often happens, once it became obvious that the opposition were digging in it was as if they became resigned to having the game dictated to them rather than maintaining the intensity needed to force a win.

Perhaps the rain, the fact Broad and Tremlett were carrying slight niggles, the fact they were 1-0 up, and the strangely low-key atmosphere were to blame for this lull in England’s attack. It is not a luxury they will be able to afford against India.

Andrew Strauss, after England’s comprehensive defeat by Ireland at the World Cup, said that England always raise their game against stiffer opposition. This piece of self-reassurance came a crashing great cropper against Sri Lanka in the quarter finals. Strauss will now take time out to work on that left-arm seam weakness for Middlesex, and the ECB have come to an arrangement with Somerset that Strauss will play at Taunton against India in July’s tour match. Some of the more level-headed commentators are cautious in treating Strauss’s technical difficulties as a full-blown malaise, though I do wonder whether Kevin Pietersen, with his glorious knock of 85, felt free to play at his ebullient, confident best now that the press are no longer focusing on him.

Infuriating, bizarre, underwhelming, anticlimactic. While Sri Lanka will probably look back at that innings in Cardiff and cringe, perhaps they will just prefer to blank it from memory altogether. With a fighting spirit still in evidence, the return of Lasith Malinga, a return to a format they are acknowledged masters at –  and with maybe a few breaks in the weather – hopefully the upcoming ODIs will help them do just that.

It was a glove that “ricocheted”. It was a bat handle that “bounced off the wall”. It was, says the culprit Matt Prior, simply that the dressing room window “exploded” when he put his bat down next to the others.

Whatever the explanation behind the broken window at Lord’s, this was the story that dominated the newspapers the day after the 2nd Test against Sri Lanka meandered to a lacklustre draw, and with rain forecast for the Rose Bowl, this is one Test series that – one extraordinary collapse aside – has failed to fire the imagination.

From an England perspective, Lord’s was mostly about the negatives. The bowling was underwhelming: Stuart Broad was undercooked, while Tremlett and Swann did their best on a wicket that gave them nothing. Steven Finn’s line and length were, along with Jimmy Anderson, notable by their absence.

Things were slightly more encouraging on the batting front. Kevin Pietersen was out for a low score in the first innings – thankfully not to left-arm spin this time – but he did take the first steps on the tentative road back to form in the second to the tune of 72 runs. That KP may finally be crawling from the slough of despond in which he’s been neck-deep for the last year or so is a great sign, if only because folk might finally shut up about it.

But while we might finally be Shutting the Fuck Up About Kevin, tongues are now wagging over Andrew Strauss’s current susceptibility to left-arm seam, and the rather serious development whereby he seems to have forgotten where his off-stump is. Strauss relinquished the ODI captaincy to ensure his longevity in the Test format, so this is slightly worrying.

Speaking of ODI captaincy, the new man in the job, Alastair Cook (MBE) carried on carrying on, with yet another Test hundred to his name with an innings for the most part so funereally paced and utterly devoid of flair, I can’t remember a fucking thing about it.

If this had been Jonathan Trott, he’s have been lambasted for being too slow, and if this had been Kevin Pietersen, he’d have been howled at for being too selfish, given that Cook finally speeded up once he’d passed three figures. Whether or not Cook felt annoyed enough at getting out to a soft dismissal on 96 in the first innings and thus was determined to get his century in the second, only he can say – but if this isn’t the definition of selfishness, I don’t know what is, considering England had a Test to win. But then Cook isn’t South African, so that’s okay.

You can tell I’m on the fence about Alastair Cook – of course there is room in cricket for every type of player, and I am thankful for Cook’s current rich vein of form, but I cannot for the life of me understand why his stolid, tentative approach is deemed a virtue at the same time as Jonathan Trott is being beaten around the head with the “boring” stick.

There was one batsman at Lord’s who could certainly not be labelled boring, and that was, of course, Tillakaratne Dilshan, who probably decided that having to face the cameras in a post-match interview after one’s team is bowled out for 82 is an experience one would really rather not repeat, so, with an underdog’s rage, a captain’s heart and helped by some god-awful English bowling, he set about pasting the opposition to all parts on Saturday, which was the day I turned up – fortuitously, as it turned out to be the best day weather-wise.

Explosive in T20s and ODIs, only slightly more circumspect in Tests; Dilshan’s aggression always makes him a joy to watch.

Deprived of an option in the ballot this time around for a seat in the Mound Stand (comfier seating), I was in the cave that is the Lower Edrich, which has a great view of the middle but occupies a blind spot as far as the scoreboard goes, necessitating the use of guesswork, a portable radio, and keeping count in one’s head as each milestone approaches. Suspended from the roof above me was a hoarding commemorating Sidath Wettimuny’s 10-hour 190 in 1984 – the highest Test innings for a Sri Lankan batsman at Lord’s… until Dilshan decided it was going to take something epic to wash away the taste of Cardiff.

It was a long day in the field for England, and by the end of it the lads sitting behind me were simultaneously chanting demands for the Dilscoop as well as pleading hopefully for a wicket.

Dilshan hadn’t broken Wettimuny’s record by the end of the day but he was well on the way to it, being not out on 127 at the close.

Dilshan: more bounce than the England seamers

There was to be no Sri Lankan collapse on the last day – a recurrence of Cardiff’s last day dramatics was unlikely, given visiting sides always tend to raise their game at Lord’s – but England are going to struggle badly against India if this is the best performance they can muster.

I dug out the Ashes 2010-11 DVD box-set the other night and re-watched Melbourne. Aside from that rush of nostalgia and recognition through having been there when history was made, I was conscious of watching a switched-on, aggressively turbo-charged England going for the jugular and with the exception of the last few Australian wickets to fall – a typical case of England easing off the gas when they look to have it in the bag – you knew you were watching a side at the top of their game and who were ravenous for victory.

At Lord’s against Sri Lanka, they looked like rather than going for the win, they just didn’t want to lose. Given India are taking their upcoming visit to these shores very seriously indeed – they have sent what is basically a second-string line-up to the West Indies due to resting their major players – and given Strauss’s current travails as a batsman, I suspect the spectre of Zaheer Khan and Co. looming over the horizon is not something England will be relishing.

And so to the Rose Bowl on Thursday for the last Test. The wicket will most likely be flat, and there will most likely be rain. Awesome.

Jimmy Anderson has been named in the squad after recovering from his side strain. His pre-Test workout was supposed to have been Lancashire’s recent rained-off T20 game, though how much 4 overs constitutes a workout of any usefulness whatsoever is highly debatable.

Finn will be the man for the drop; perhaps harsh considering that at Lord’s, in between overs of unutterable filth, he did take wickets, and did improve as the match went on.

I’ve already mentioned the new One-Day captain, but this was hardly a sparkling outing for the new T20 captain, either. Stuart Broad is struggling badly – he currently averages 35.97 runs per wicket – but he is English cricket’s Golden Boy and seemingly beyond censure. I don’t know why this is. He’s a good bowler when in form, but doesn’t seem to have the patience to want to wear batsmen down with McGrath-like, keep-it-simple, top-of-off-stump line-and-length bowling. He tries to be too clever, and often forsakes patience for aggression, occasionally leading to a chat with the match referee and the imposition of some negligible penalty. (McGrath was a far better multi-tasker, showing you could be consistent and a bastard and still take wickets.)

Every seamer should aspire to McGrath-esque precision-genius, but that is just me.

Finn: better than Broad?

I know I shouldn’t write off the Rose Bowl, given I made that mistake with Cardiff. But Lord’s hero Dilshan will not be playing due to a broken thumb, and Sri Lanka seem to be regarding these Tests as a warm-up for the ODIs that follow.

That the ODIs promise to be a far more gripping prospect than the Tests sadly constitutes another nail in the coffin of the format all cricket boards should be hell-bent on protecting, but in today’s money-driven reality, it seems to be all about the saying, and not much about the doing.

Test cricket already seems to be marginalized. But again, that might just be me. Sometimes though, when faced with ODI series that never end, and T20 tournaments that proliferate like fungi, it feels like it, and a future without Test cricket does not really appeal to me.

With a first day wicket so flat it looked like the proverbial road to nowhere, this 1st Test instead proved a considerably bumpier affair for the team that found itself on the losing side.

Because yes, in spite of the bore-fest of the first four days, some superb batting performances notwithstanding, this encounter that looked like dribbling to a stale, bloodless, rain-diluted draw ended up anything but.

The moral of this story seems to be, if you are an England fan and you wish to attend the Cardiff Test – only go on Day 5. The first four days will be shit. The last day will be awesome.

In the run-up to the Test the brickbats in the press were reserved for Sri Lanka’s bowlers, but it was the batting that ended up being steamrollered by England yesterday.

A first innings total of 400; England reply with 496 declared (big runs for Cook, humongous runs for England’s Bradman, Jonathan Trott, and a handy ton for Ian Bell) and Sri Lanka all out for 82: more wickets than you could shake a damp umbrella at – all of them in fact, courtesy of Messrs Tremlett, Swann and Broad and the whole thing wrapped up in 24.4 overs, albeit after another late start due to this horrible bloody weather that seems to be paying us all back for the temerity of enjoying an unseasonably early spring.

How much did this bring back memories of this same ground against different opposition in 2009, and how badly must Sri Lanka have hankered after their own Jimmy and Monty double-act?

The bowling by England was too good. Swann made use of the rough outside off-stump that had given Rangana Herath some encouragement, and England team-sheets should now come pre-printed with Chris Tremlett’s name on them as standard. The old days where the latter’s perceived lack of bottle was questioned seem now to be part of some ridiculous alternate reality.

Jonathan Trott continues to astound. I’ve made no secret of the fact I’m a big fan of the bloke, because one of the great things about cricket is that it can provide a happy hunting ground for the oddest of talented eccentrics, and Jonathan Trott surely numbers among them.

Aside from all his scratching and muttering at the crease, and his OCD dressing room habits, there is also something amusingly Hakkinen-esque about his interviews. The great Formula One champion Mika Hakkinen was famed for his laconic utterances and his deadpan statements of obvious fact, all with a barely raised eyebrow that put paid to accusations of a lack of humour or intelligence.

When Trott (unbeaten on 125 on his way to an eventual 203) was asked at the end of the third day what England had to do to win this match, he responded, deadpan: “Score more runs than they do”.

And that is what England did, to the tune of an innings and 14 runs worth.

And that with three bowlers. Jimmy Anderson has been ruled out of the Lord’s Test with a grade one side strain and Jade Dernbach, most likely due to his performance in the Lions match, has been drafted in to the squad – though I’d be very surprised if Steven Finn was not an automatic inclusion in the XI come Friday morning.

There’s been a degree of agitation about the prospect of yet another South African born player pulling on an England shirt – which some folks really need to get over – but it’s another man of South African origin and erstwhile our brightest star who is the real source of concern.

We are talking about Kevin – again. This is the 19th time in Tests he has fallen victim to a left-arm spinner and denying there is a problem will not make it go away. It is real and it is messing with his head and there is going to have to be a drastic resetting of his entire approach if he is going to fix it.

Even before Herath got him, as he tried wildly to chop the ball to the off side with the result that it rebounded from pad onto bat, his footwork had all the assuredness of a stricken animal scrabbling for purchase on the blood-slick floor of an abattoir before the slaughterman puts it mercifully out of its misery. It was truly painful to watch, with a messy, protracted denouement: the on-field decision of not out was overturned on review with the aid of hotspot, which showed a clear mark on the pad together with a side-on view that showed ball hitting back leg before bat.

Pietersen’s mind seems now so scrambled that even the most innocuous left-arm trundler must seem like the devil incarnate. Perhaps he needs to heed Jonathan Trott’s advice – to keep it simple – because these demons need exorcising, and pronto.

What a bizarre Test this has been. Seems I was a bit previous in writing off this match, but then I get the feeling I wasn’t the only one. I like it when cricket proves me wrong. I like it when Test cricket proves me wrong.

To Lord’s!

“I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”
– The Talented Mr. Ripley

In the film based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Tom Ripley, a young man down on his luck and making a meagre living as a men’s room attendant in Manhattan, manages to con his way into a hedonistic, moneyed European lifestyle through the expediency of a borrowed dinner jacket, a case of mistaken identity, and a talent for three things: lying, pretending to be somebody else, and forging signatures.

As his lies grow ever more convoluted, his desperation to maintain the world he has inveigled himself into and the identity he has built for himself rises accordingly. Morality becomes blurred, murder becomes a means and everything becomes subservient to maintaining the illusion. In this, he is successful. While there are a few instances where his luck and ingenuity almost desert him, he is never caught.

Adrian Shankar’s luck seems to have run out for good last week, when the Worcestershire batsman had his contract terminated because of doubts surrounding the documents he presented to the club upon signing with them.

While many inconsistencies have emerged regarding his background, with questions being asked about certain dubious achievements – junior tennis prodigy, member of the  Arsenal youth academy, prolific run-scorer in a Sri Lankan T20 tournament over the winter which conveniently no-one can find any records for – it is the mystery surrounding his age that seems to have landed him in hot water, and which has now led Worcestershire to contact the police.

Shankar, studying Law at Queen’s College, Cambridge, first played for the university cricket club in 2002, and captained it in 2003 and 2004. His figures were modest, with a score of 143 against Oxford being the only time he ever made more than 40, and marked him out as being of no exceptional ability.

On his profile page on the university’s website, his year of birth is given as 1982. However, when he signed for Worcestershire in May of this year, he presented the club with a photocopy of his passport which gave his year of birth as 1985, and 26 was the age duly mentioned in the club’s press release announcing their new star acquisition.

Shankar is supposed to have come to the club’s attention over the winter, where he is purported to have played in the Sri Lankan Mercantile League T20 tournament in which he was leading run-scorer and averaged over 52. According to Shankar’s Twitter feed, now deleted, he does seem to have been abroad this winter, and the league in question does seem have existed, and matches do seem to have been played.

However, it was a breakaway tournament unsanctioned by the Sri Lankan cricket board, and with players unpaid and legal proceedings ongoing, the league’s website has been taken down, conveniently making it impossible to check Shankar’s scores or whether he even participated in the tournament at all.

Shankar is not the first cricketer to lie about his age. Basil d’Oliveira also pretended to be three years younger when he signed for Worcestershire back in 1964, to help sway the England selectors. In the subcontinent, the practice of fudging a cricketer’s age is allegedly rife.

But what has made this particular episode rather more serious is that the ECB awards incentives to counties fielding young England-qualified players and Shankar, by giving his age as 26, seems to have slipped in under the threshold. It is perhaps concern at possible accusation of complicity in this that has prompted Worcestershire to report the matter to West Mercia Police.

And thus has ended a ten-year cricket career, in which he has played 2nd XI cricket for Middlesex, Lancashire and Worcestershire along with his early appearances for Bedfordshire School and Cambridge University, and with the odd game of club and Minor County cricket along the way. It is a path he now seems to have been helped along with the aid of untruths, unverifiable achievements and spurious testimonials. The latter includes a glowing quote from Cambridge coach Chris Scott in the Lancashire press release in which he is supposed to have called Shankar the best batsman seen in the Cambridge side since John Crawley – Lancashire removed the quote when Scott called them to protest he had said no such thing.

One does wonder why Shankar was ever made Cambridge captain at all, especially given Scott’s recent damning assessment that the bowling he faced during his innings of 143 was “unbelievably bad” (amusingly, the bowling attack contained future England and current Middlesex player, Jamie Dalrymple).

I would be lying if I said there was a part of me that doesn’t admire Shankar’s chutzpah. His record as a cricketer is average, sure, but one could point at more than a few players of underwhelming ability currently treading water in the county system; the difference being of course that they may not have used subterfuge to get there.

Would Shankar’s lies have been more excusable if he had been more talented? D’Oliveira’s dissembling about his age seems a very small thing in the light of the great significance of what he went on to achieve. If Shankar had somehow bloomed as a batsman and scored several hundreds for Worcestershire before his lies caught up with him, would we have found it easier to forgive him?

A young man  – though not quite so young as we were led to believe – of average ability, but of above-average intelligence, it seems that in the end Adrian Shankar seems not to have been smart enough.

We all of us have dreams. Plainly some of us will go to greater lengths than others to achieve them.