GOOGLIES & CHINAMEN
An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 150
June 2015
IPL Matters
The 2015 IPL was widely heralded as the best ever. There was some fabulous cricket and more innovation that will filter its way into other forms of the game. The batting although often magnificent didn’t dominate as much as in some previous years and the bowling skills continue to develop to deal with the trying tasks faced by them. There were huge crowds in the massive stadiums and the 66,000 who watched the final was normal for many of the matches. The franchises have to balance their squads with overseas players and local talent. In one game de Villiers was batting with Sarfaraz, a seventeen year old local lad.
One of the mysteries in the early stages was the batting order utilised by the Royal Challengers Bangalore who staggered Gayle, Kholi and de Villiers amongst lesser mortals. Later they came to their senses and set them as their first three. Then in Match 40 Gayle unleashed 117 from 57 balls with 12 sixes and in Match 46 de Villiers made 133 not out from 59 balls out of 233 for 1. The third centurion in 2015 was Shane Watson who made 104 not out from 59 deliveries. The only Englishmen playing in this premier world competition were Eion Morgan and Ravi Bopara. This is bound to hold England back in developing its one day style.
Duckworth Lewis is utilised in this competition and in one match reduced to eleven overs RCB were set 136 to win. This target was further adjusted after another rain break to 81 in six overs. Gayle scored 39 from nine deliveries and RCB went on to win with a ball to spare which was quite a healthy margin in the circumstances.
As the pre play off matches drew to a close the Mumbai Indians, who lost their first four games, called up Alex Hales to their squad. As chance would have it I switched over to watch the T20 opener from Trent Bridge. Hales made his usual circumspect start as Notts chased a modest target set by Warwickshire. Then Hales decided to set about Boyd Rankin and hit the last three balls of his over for six. When he was given the strike back at the other end he hit the next three deliveries from Javid for six. He took a single off the next ball and then hit his next delivery, bowled by Barker for six as well. This gave him seven sixes from eight balls received. The Mumbai Indians won their play off matches to take the title but didn’t call upon Hales’ services.
Out and About with the Professr
What was the best day to be at the Lord’s Test? Well, the last day, I suppose; you would have left with the rosy memory of Ali’s excellent catch and a victory for a “newly resurgent” (oh yes?) England team. But what of days one, two, three and four? 354-7 England on Day One having been 30-4; elegant innings by Guptill and commanding knock from Kane Williamson on Day Two; important contributions from New Zealand’s middle/lower order on Day Three including an aggressive effort from McCullum (mercifully free of slogging) and England bowlers persevering; Cook’s hundred, Root’s second score of the match and above all, Stokes, on Day Four. Difficult to choose.
I only went (could only afford) one day, and it was the first, and what I saw in the first hour was all the gloom and depression that this journal (quite accurately) has reflected about the England team – leaderless, rudderless, hopeless. How things can change. I think only Test cricket can do this. There are of course ebbs and flows in one day and even T20 cricket (and obviously in four day matches) but the drama that is a Test match is nonpareil. Of course it isn’t always so, we all have sat through fairly dire day’s play (often featuring England) and plodded home wondering why we went in the first place, let alone paid a small fortune for the privilege. But to have been at Lord’s on the first day was indeed a privilege. I haven’t bothered to look it up, but my memory of home Tests as a young man is that dominated by attritional cricket. Perhaps Geoff Puller and Brian Luckhurst, Milton, Parkhouse and Prideaux all had games where they crashed the ball to all parts …I just don’t remember those occasions. We all know why things have changed: different bats, helmets, better pitches (?) and, overwhelmingly, the influence of one-day matches (take your pick or add to the list) but the result is undeniably exhilarating to watch.
When England were 30-4, 150 looked a long way off. Time to dig in, hang on, nurdle a few, hope for the odd bad ball and see what happens. Not quite the Root, Stokes, Buttler, way of doing things that. The Stokes rave reviews have rather passed over Root’s two vital innings. I have now watched him for about five years and the thing that always impresses is not the memorable stroke play (does he indeed have what we now seem to have to call a “signature shot”?) but the intent. It always seems, watching Root, that he is intent on scoring off each ball – defending is the fall back option when it doesn’t seem possible to score. I really don’t recall Noddy Puller batting like that.
Stokes seems to have put behind him the failures of last season (but it has been still only one game) and hopefully can carry his form on to Headingley and beyond. And maybe – just maybe – the experience of a broken hand has taught him some self-control (although it wouldn’t do to be too sanguine about that).
There are still problems of course, take your pick: the opening slot (I worry that Lyth is/has always been a little too lose outside off stump for Test cricket…but if he gets in he will score quickly); the Captaincy (has one win transformed Cook into a sagacious adventurous tactician?); the form of the quick bowlers – extremely variable, especially in the West Indies; and, above all, the absence of a quality spinner…and really no one in County Cricket looking likely to be good enough.
Still, time to savour, for a moment, a stunning game: record number of runs, record speed for a century, etc. etc. Whether or not my memory is sound about the past, the Thursday at Lord’s was a quite wonderful day…worth £100 of anyone’s money.
Wicket Keeping Matters
Nobody seems to want to talk about keepers these days. The Sky commentators were talking about modern keepers’ batting averages versus their earlier counterparts. It’s no surprise since the earlier guys were picked as keepers and the runs they scored were something of a bonus. Nowadays a batsman is picked who happens to own a pair of wicket keeping gloves, regardless of whether he has ever used them. Buttler, who didn’t even keep wicket for Somerset, has learned to dive around like a goalkeeper when the quicks are on but hasn’t got a clue when standing up to the spinners. His performance when keeping to Ali at Headingley was so pathetic the commentators for once stayed silent.
Presumably England will want to have a serious spinner in their side soon. Nothing will demoralise Ali, Root, Rashid, Riley, Patel or whoever they plump for more than having a duffer behind the stumps. With Ali and Broad currently at eight and nine in the order perhaps it is time to pick a keeper again? Buttler should take his chances on being picked as a batsman.
Middlesex Matters
The Great Jack Morgan has been doing his duty
I arrived a few minutes late for the first day of the Middlesex v Durham Championship match at Lord's on May 2nd ("signalling problems in the Wimbledon area") and for the rest of the day there were no announcements about the toss (Durham actually won the toss and Paul Collingwood asked Middx to bat first, I discovered about 7.30pm when I got home and switched on the teletext) or team changes (Paul Coughlin for Graham Onions the only one, which I deduced by checking all the fielders' shirt/ sweater numbers (something that is not possible with the invisible Middlesex shirt numbers)). I doubt that Colly was very happy with his decision because Middlesex got off to a good start as Sam Robson and Nick Gubbins put on 66 for the first wicket. Robson and Nick Compton did better still with a stand of 113 for the second wicket before Compton surprisingly fell to England leg spinner Scott Borthwick for 50 off 96 balls with 9 fours. Adam Voges looked in fine form during his even better stand of 127 with Robson until the skipper departed for an excellent 57 off 91 balls with 8 fours. All this time, Robson had been constructing easily his best innings for many months (or nearer to 2 years actually) until he finally departed for an exemplary 178 off 300 balls with 26 impressive boundaries. Neil Dexter and John Simpson added 58 for the 7th wicket and Simpson guided the tail through to a total of 463 before he himself was last man out for a praiseworthy 58 off 96 balls with 10 fours. Australian Test Match pace bowler John Hastings was the pick of the visitors' attack with 4 for 87 from 33 testing overs.
The Durham reply was dominated by Keaton Jennings from Jo'burg who contributed an admirable 98 from 214 balls with 10 fours. Most of Jennings's partners managed to get a start, but it was surprising that his most durable companion at the crease was nightwatchman Chris Rushworth (who batted no 11 in the second innings) who made a spirited 40, the second highest score, off 81 balls with 3 fours and a six, out of a stand of 73 with Jennings. Rushworth's departure saw the visitors collapse from 229 for 4 to 294 all out with only skipper Collingwood (38*) looking like he wanted to save the follow on.
The Middlesex attack had been badly weakened by the loss of Tim Murtagh after only two balls of the Durham innings (no announcements, of course, but it was assumed to be a recurrence of the side/ back injury suffered at Taunton), but Jimmy Harris stepped into the breach with an outstanding 4 for 69 and good support came from Steve Finn (2 for 69), skipper Voges's slow left armers (2 for 20) and Simpson's 4 catches behind the stumps.
Middlesex, with a lead of 169, decided against enforcing the follow on, but this was not looking a good decision as they quickly slumped to 50 for 9. Robson had made 17 and when Murtagh heroically emerged at no 11 to bat with a runner, another 39 were added for the last wicket, Finn making 15 and Murtagh top scoring with 22 not out. No one else made double figures and Durham's heroes were two who had already made a significant contribution, Hastings (5 for 24 and 9 for 111 in the match) and Rushworth (5 for 38).
Durham's target was 259 with more than a day to get them, but they got off to a poor start and never recovered. The man responsible for this was Harris who has turned into a magnificent leader of the attack in this match: in 12.1 overs he returned the scarcely believable figures of 9 for 34, giving him match figures of 13 for 103 and Durham were all out for 71 (narrowly beating their lowest ever first class score of 63 v Middx at Lord's in 1996) in 24.1 overs. He now has 30 first class wickets this season at an average of 17.3. The key to Harris's recent success has apparently been his reversion to his natural action after some years of ineffectual tinkering by ECB coaches in an attempt to improve his pace. Harris's second innings bowling figures are the second best post war figures by a Middx bowler and he gives credit to the owner of the best post war Middlesex figures (10 for 45 v Derbyshire by Middlesex bowling coach Richard Johnson in 1994) for supporting his decision to revert to his natural action. The dismissal of Michael Richardson from Port Elizabeth typified the dismal Durham innings when he opted to leave a ball from Harris and saw two of his stumps cart-wheeling towards the wicket keeper. The match was over at 12.20 on day four, Middlesex had won by 187 runs and went to the top of the Championship Division One table. Middx 23 points Durham 4.
Carling Matters
Paddy Carling reports on an extraordinary day in the Kennington Club
A warm, sunny day and unsurprisingly a bigger than usual crowd for Surrey v Leicestershire but with Sangakkara and KP at the crease and possibly Davies and Roy to come whatcould possibly go wrong? Well initially it did. The great Sri Lankan was out to the eighth ball of the day and Davies swiftly followed. Roy played entertainingly but after four boundaries in five balls chased a wide one and was gone. However, KP was still there and batting as carefully as I can remember and he reached his hundred just before lunch to his immense glee. Lunch 222 for 5.
In the second session another 124 runs were added for the loss of Wilson, Batty and Curran and KP scored 76. There were nine overseas players in this match and at one point two Australians, Cosgrove and McKay, were bowling to two South Africans, KP and Curran. KP was dropped off a skier on 165 and went to tea on 177.
With support from Tremlett the ninth wicket added over 100 with KP getting 70 of them and this was followed by an unbroken tenth wicket stand of 110 for the tenth wicket of which Dunn contributed just 5. KP hit 34 fours and 14 sixes and a lot of these were scored with most fielders on the boundary. He also didn’t take singles for many magnificent strokes in order to keep the strike and not expose numbers ten and eleven. KP scored 149 out of 182 in the final session to finish on 326 not out. This in itself raises an interesting point because without the staunch support of Tremlett and Dunn KP could never have reached his mammoth score. It suggests that team spirit in the Surrey dressing room has not been lessened by KP’s presence and that at least two Surrey players do not regard him as a knob.
For my part and for all the spectators there we felt privileged and I could not imagine any other batsmen playing this well for so long including Cook, Lyth, Bell, Balance, Root, Ali and Buttler who are almost guaranteed places against New Zealand and Australia. After this for the management of England not to take a chance with KP for the New Zealand series seems criminally stupid. In the history of cricket great batsmen have not always been nice guys.
I have been lucky to see, recently, both this KP innings and de Villiers’ demolition of the West Indies at the SGC.
Other Counties Matters
The Great Jack Morgan enlightens us on events among the lesser counties
Somebody called Matthew Critchley (on debut?) made 137* at no 8 for Derbys to lift them from 103-6 to 343 a/o. He is a 19 year old leg spinner from Preston who played once in last season's 2nd XI Championship, scoring 18* and 4* and took 2-15; he also played in a friendly v Notts taking 5-50.
Another who had not played in the first XI before this season is 24 year old Lewis Hill from Leicester, who opened for Leics against Surrey at the Oval and made 126 out of 292 .He averaged 36 in the 2s last season.
Later I found out that both Critchley and Hill were playing in their second first class matches.
Ex-Middlesex man Steve Crook hit his second first class ton v Lancashire (his first was against us at Lord's last season), this one (102*) took 95 balls with 12 fours and a six, that is how he bats out for a draw!
Rob Keogh (163*) did brilliantly to save the game for Northants at Derby after being 182-7 having re-jigged the order (were they going for the win?) so he was able to get great support from no 9 (Josh Cobb, mainly a batsman), no 10 Rory Kleinveldt (SA Test allrounder) and no 11 Alex Wakely (injured captain and batsman only) and they finished on 390-9. I am not sure if they were going for the win or not, but they finished only 30-odd short.
Leicestershire also did well to bat on until after tea at the Oval totalling 480 in their second innings and setting Surrey 215 to win. They may even have thought that they had saved the game (especially with KP out of action), but Steve Davies (115* off 69 with 11 fours and 4 sixes) and Jason Roy (67 off 39 with 6 fours and 4 sixes) ensured that Surrey strolled it by 7 wickets.
It sounded like a dodgy wicket at Trent Bridge, but it allowed Somerset to claim their first win of the season over Notts, who are also struggling at the wrong end of the table. Warwickshire thumped Durham at Edgbaston and they are now 3rd and 2nd respectively behind the leaders Middlesex (84 points). K Barker had a decent game for Warwickshire: 102*, 4-54 and 5-103. TE Bailey took 5-12 as Leics disintegrated v Lancashire.
Blimey! Joe Denly led Kent to victory over Gloucs at Bristol with 117*, his first ton in the Championship since 2012. Great game at Northampton, where only one innings was completed, this will have the crowds rolling in... it is one of the effects of 5 points for a draw, of course.
Ollie Robinson (cont): yesterday he bowled Warwickshire out for 180 at Hove (6-33) and Sussex struggled in reply, but as I have acquired my 2nd XI Annual since I last wrote about him, I can now reveal a bit more information. He has been making occasional second XI appearances since making his debut for Kent in 2011 (he is from Margate and went to school in Canterbury) and last season represented both Hants and Yorks. He played twice in the 2nd XI Championship for Hants last season and 3 times for Yorks. These were his figures: H bowling 12-0-48-0; batting 78 runs in 3 inns av 26; Y bowling 10-1-36-0; batting 104 runs in 4 inns average 26! Matthew Hobden was another I knew little about, but he is at least in Playfair.
There was more fun at Hove where 27 wickets have fallen in little over a day and a half (bad weather claimed a big chunk of day 2), but it was not so funny for ex-Middlesex man Chris Wright who was surprisingly sent in at no three (was he a lunch watchman?) and soon had his chin split open, but after a lengthy delay, he carried on with blood all over his shirt, pads and bat! Luke Wells's 92 is far and away the highest score of the match in which the pitch will surely be reported? Do Sussex save up their dodgy pitches for Wk’s visits? That one at Horsham last year was nothing special was it?
There were similar problems at Worcester, where Durham slumped to 103 for 9, but S Borthwick (103) was then joined by last man G Onions (36*) and took the total to an almost respectable 198, whereupon Worcestershire collapsed to 65-6!
Ben Brown (53) and Chris Jordan (56*) were the Sussex heroes who steered them to a one wicket win over Warwickshire, but will there be a points deduction? There certainly should be because this is apparently a deliberate policy by Sussex, who have told the groundsman not to make "flat and dull" pitches and two 2nd XI matches have been abandoned this season because of unfit pitches (this from Lizzie Ammon in the G).
The Overton twins starred for Somerset in the interesting game at Taunton as they put on 76 (in 5.5 overs) for the last wicket with no 11 Jamie surprisingly outscoring his brother with 50 (off 19 balls with 7 fours and 3 sixes), but Craig did better with the ball as Yorkshire struggled a bit in their second dig.
John Hastings turned the game round for Durham at Worcester with 7-60 after they trailed by 125 on first innings and P Collingwood (111*) looks like winning it for them.
Fletcher was fit enough to make 23 at no 11 for Surrey as they sneaked a 10 run lead at Beckenham, but did not take the field. Surrey did not really need him however as Dunn, Ansari and Batty had Kent out for 204 and Surrey should now win this one.
Prince went on to 230 and received great support from Aaron Lilley (63 batting at 8) about whom I could remember little, so I looked him up and found that he did not play at all in the Championship last season, but he probably should have done as he averaged 40.25 with the bat and 22.92 with his off-spin in the 2nd XI Championship. La went on to 551 and should now win this one.
Yorkshire held on with some comfort at Taunton as Rashid became the second man in the match to make 99 (T Cooper was the other) as Somerset paid the penalty for not picking a front line spinner.
England’s Best Bowler
After Jimmy Anderson had gone past Botham’s test aggregate of wickets Ken Molloy directed me to an article by BBC’s Marc Higginson
Who is England's best-ever bowler in Test cricket? Is it Fred Trueman, who terrified batsmen on the uncovered pitches of the 1950s and '60s? Or is Sir Ian Botham a cut above the rest? Perhaps the best is still playing? There are not many batsmen who can cope when James Anderson is swinging the ball around. With Anderson overtaking Botham as England's all-time leading Test wicket-taker, BBC Sport devised a formula that attempts to reflect accurately each bowler's ability to get the best opposition batsmen out.
We asked Test Match Special statistician Andrew Samson to take the top 10 England Test wicket-takers and give each of their wickets a numerical rating between one and 11 based on the career average of the batsmen they dismissed. A batsman with an average of 55 or more would be worth 11 points, between 50 and 55 would be 10 points, and so on down to a batsman with a career average of 0-5, worth only one point. Those numerical ratings were added up and divided by the number of wickets taken.
Matthew Hoggard came out on top. Hoggard, 38, was one of the unsung heroes of the 2005 Ashes, when he helped England reclaim the urn from Australia after an 18-year wait. In the five matches, he took 16 wickets - dismissing Matthew Hayden (career average of 50.73) and Michael Clarke (50.79) three times apiece, and twice getting out Justin Langer (45.27), Adam Gilchrist (47.60) and Damien Martyn (46.37).
Of his 248 Test victims, 28% had a career batting average of more than 45. In comparison, only 10% of Botham's wickets were those of batsmen who averaged more than 45, while Anderson was just behind Hoggard on 27%. Of the players Anderson has dismissed the most, Australia bowler Peter Siddle (11 times) tops the list, followed by India great Sachin Tendulkar (nine), Australia captain Clarke (nine) and Aussie all-rounder Shane Watson (eight).
However, 7% of his victims averaged below 10, compared with Hoggard's 5%, which also contributed to him finishing behind Hoggard in the study. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. Four of the five batsmen Hoggard dismissed the most - India's Virender Sehwag (six times), Australian Matthew Hayden (six), West Indies opener Chris Gayle (five) and India's Rahul Dravid (five) - were among the most influential batsmen of his era.
Botham, widely regarded as England's greatest all-rounder, took 383 Test wickets and also weighed in with 5,200 runs, but only came eighth in our study. As well as his low percentage of victims with a high average, 28% of the batsmen he dismissed averaged below 20, compared to 22% for Hoggard.
Of the 44 batsmen to average over 50 in Test cricket, only six played in Botham's era. "He had a bit of a golden arm. He used to get batsmen caught in the covers, caught at mid-wicket, caught hooking. He just had a knack of getting people out. "He never thought the game was up. He had total belief in his own ability, which is what makes great sportsmen stand out."
Trueman has the best bowling average of anyone in the top 10. He took his 307 wickets at an average of 21.57 - Hoggard's is 30.50, Anderson's 29.77 and Botham's 28.40.
While no formula will be perfect, there is a distinct generational split in the table - with modern-day bowlers such as Hoggard, Anderson, Graeme Swann and Stuart Broad ranking higher than Botham, Trueman and Statham. Batting averages are generally higher in the modern era, pitches are better and boundaries smaller. Bats are also bigger and Twenty20 has opened up new scoring shots for batsmen. That has clearly had a bearing on the result of this study.
King Cricket Matters
Ged writes:
As the end of the season approached, it dawned on me that the pile of reading I had hoped to take with me to Lord’s and read on sunny days was mostly still waiting to be read. Not that there had been a shortage of sunshine in the summer of 2014 – indeed it was one of the best that I can remember, but there had been a shortage of midweek first-class cricket at Lord’s during that quieter (work-wise) part of the summer. Indeed Middlesex played no first class cricket at all, anywhere, between 22 July and 31 August. Rant over.
I had arranged to take Charley The Gent Malloy to see the Durham game the following week, so needed to shop for some picnic food and did have space at least to take an afternoon at Lord’s at the end of the Warwickshire game.
books inhabit a sort of limbo or purgatory, in which material worthy of perhaps two or three faintly decent I grabbed a book, which I felt I really needed to read for work, then wandered over to HQ, arriving around half-two. I held little hope of making too much headway into the book before stumps in those circumstances, but I needn’t have worried.
I once wrote a book review for Strategy magazine, in which I elucidated a scale I named the FDA (faintly decent article) scale. My theory is that most business and management articles has been relentlessly padded out into a whole book. Sadly (or perhaps happily in these circumstances), the book I had taken with me to Lord’s was worth a mere two-and-a-half on the FDA scale. Thus, I was able to finish reading it (or rather discern all that was useful to me from it) and close the book just before the stumps were pulled out of the ground.
Sated (book-wise if not cricket-wise) I wandered home via the Porchester Waitrose, in order to buy the picnic food for next week. I very rarely visit any supermarket, let alone one that close to Lord’s. I vaguely hoped that I might see Tim Murtagh weighing up the relative merits of Golden Grahams and Special K in there. Or possibly even Sam Robson asking an assistant to direct him to the shelf where he might find quinoa with bulgar wheat. But no cricketers were to be seen in that supermarket. Shameful. So I quickly bought the small number of items I needed for next week’s picnic and went home.
Bob Cozens
Bob died in April after a short illness, aged 67
Bob started at St Clement Danes on the same day in 1959 as Jack Morgan and me. He didn’t play a lot of cricket until he worked on the bins one summer and returned tall and thin having lost all of his chubby appearance. He then started bowling left arm fast and if there was a quick wicket he was decidedly sharp. He joined South Hampstead CC in the late sixties and soon found himself captaining the second XI.
At some point he decided that fast bowling was too hard and took up slow left armers. He could hardly have anticipated his subsequent success particularly as South Hampstead had a rich vein of exponents of this skill- Alan Cox, Keith Hardie and Cliff Dickeson. However, by the mid seventies he had broken into the first eleven and twice took one hundred wickets in a season.
When younger he could play an innings but in later years was primarily known as a successful lower order hitter. He was also a very useful slip fielder.
After my Dad died in 1974 it was Bob who co-wrote and produced the South Hampstead reviews with me. For much of this period he was also my lift to the Rangers. He was a Chartered Surveyor and devoted many hours to supervising the extensions to the South Hampstead pavilion in the late seventies.
Bob was a kind and generous man who will be missed by his friends and family.
Ritchie Benaud
Alex Bowden wrote this in King Cricket
Mourning everyone.
Richie Benaud has died and a small part of our brain that responds to blue skies, lengthening days and Test cricket has also died. You can’t spend as long in someone’s company as most of us have spent listening to Richie and not feel like you know them.
There are other public figures who we see a lot; people who are familiar from newspapers and TV – but you don’t actually sit there with them for any length of time. That’s the difference. Richie was, in a very real sense, part of many cricket fans’ lives. He wasn’t just the soundtrack – which would be enough cause for mourning in itself – he was the portal through which the sport arrived. He brought cricket and taught cricket and most of us will be forever grateful for that.
Don’t speak – the art of commentary. Commentating’s like writing – everyone thinks they can do it. They think that just because they know the English language, they can do the job. It doesn’t really work like that. You know the bit in a Test match when they pan round all the people in fancy dress. They did that once while Michael Slater was on commentary. Batman came on screen. “There’s Batman,” he informed us.
It’s not easy to talk for two minutes when you have no script and haven’t planned in advance what to say. Nor is it easy to sit silent for two minutes when you know you’re working as a commentator. But it’s about adding value.
Sometimes that takes a lot of words and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, Richie Benaud didn’t require many words to put into place what should be the first rule of TV commentary: “Put your brain into gear and if you can add to what’s on the screen then do it – otherwise shut up.” The impossible trick
Poor commentators are easy to name, but what’s truly telling is that even the good ones start to get on your nerves with certain things after a while. Nasser Hussain’s pluralisation, for example: ‘Your Gayles, your McCullums, your Kohlis, your Maxwells’.
Point is, you can’t talk for hours and hours and hours and not get on someone’s wick. Cricket is a long game and familiarity breeds irritation. No commentator is universally loved – you need only read a ‘dream commentary team’ debate on social media or in the comments of a website to appreciate that fact. Except Richie was universally loved. At least insofar as that’s possible. We feel the same about Richie’s death as David Cameron does. Shane Warne’s written something that moved us. These aren’t people who we’d normally agree with, let alone both on the same day, but yet we’re united by this.
To touch so many people without also pissing them off when you’ve commentated on long, drawn-out Test matches for fifty years is an incredible, just about impossible achievement. Richie Benaud is, sadly, irreplaceable.
He wasn’t a bad cricketer either. Not a bad cricketer at all.
Rangers Matters
The Great Jack Morgan draws our attention to wholesale changes at Loftus Road
The Guardian has another long article on Rs, this one by Dominic Fifield, who reckons Rs might lose 25 players in the close season. This number comprises ten who are out of contract (Barton, Hill, Ferdinand, Zamora, Dunne, SWP, Henry, Faurlin, Murphy and Furlong); four whose loans are ending (Kranjcar, Isla, Vargas and Zarate, who has already gone I believe); six who they would not try hard to hang on to (Traore, Hoilett, Sandro, Diakite, Onuoha and Taarabt); and five who they do not want to lose, but who will be attracting interest (Austin, Green, Phillips, Fer and Caulker, though JSCR would put the last in the won't try hard to keep category).
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An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 150
June 2015
IPL Matters
The 2015 IPL was widely heralded as the best ever. There was some fabulous cricket and more innovation that will filter its way into other forms of the game. The batting although often magnificent didn’t dominate as much as in some previous years and the bowling skills continue to develop to deal with the trying tasks faced by them. There were huge crowds in the massive stadiums and the 66,000 who watched the final was normal for many of the matches. The franchises have to balance their squads with overseas players and local talent. In one game de Villiers was batting with Sarfaraz, a seventeen year old local lad.
One of the mysteries in the early stages was the batting order utilised by the Royal Challengers Bangalore who staggered Gayle, Kholi and de Villiers amongst lesser mortals. Later they came to their senses and set them as their first three. Then in Match 40 Gayle unleashed 117 from 57 balls with 12 sixes and in Match 46 de Villiers made 133 not out from 59 balls out of 233 for 1. The third centurion in 2015 was Shane Watson who made 104 not out from 59 deliveries. The only Englishmen playing in this premier world competition were Eion Morgan and Ravi Bopara. This is bound to hold England back in developing its one day style.
Duckworth Lewis is utilised in this competition and in one match reduced to eleven overs RCB were set 136 to win. This target was further adjusted after another rain break to 81 in six overs. Gayle scored 39 from nine deliveries and RCB went on to win with a ball to spare which was quite a healthy margin in the circumstances.
As the pre play off matches drew to a close the Mumbai Indians, who lost their first four games, called up Alex Hales to their squad. As chance would have it I switched over to watch the T20 opener from Trent Bridge. Hales made his usual circumspect start as Notts chased a modest target set by Warwickshire. Then Hales decided to set about Boyd Rankin and hit the last three balls of his over for six. When he was given the strike back at the other end he hit the next three deliveries from Javid for six. He took a single off the next ball and then hit his next delivery, bowled by Barker for six as well. This gave him seven sixes from eight balls received. The Mumbai Indians won their play off matches to take the title but didn’t call upon Hales’ services.
Out and About with the Professr
What was the best day to be at the Lord’s Test? Well, the last day, I suppose; you would have left with the rosy memory of Ali’s excellent catch and a victory for a “newly resurgent” (oh yes?) England team. But what of days one, two, three and four? 354-7 England on Day One having been 30-4; elegant innings by Guptill and commanding knock from Kane Williamson on Day Two; important contributions from New Zealand’s middle/lower order on Day Three including an aggressive effort from McCullum (mercifully free of slogging) and England bowlers persevering; Cook’s hundred, Root’s second score of the match and above all, Stokes, on Day Four. Difficult to choose.
I only went (could only afford) one day, and it was the first, and what I saw in the first hour was all the gloom and depression that this journal (quite accurately) has reflected about the England team – leaderless, rudderless, hopeless. How things can change. I think only Test cricket can do this. There are of course ebbs and flows in one day and even T20 cricket (and obviously in four day matches) but the drama that is a Test match is nonpareil. Of course it isn’t always so, we all have sat through fairly dire day’s play (often featuring England) and plodded home wondering why we went in the first place, let alone paid a small fortune for the privilege. But to have been at Lord’s on the first day was indeed a privilege. I haven’t bothered to look it up, but my memory of home Tests as a young man is that dominated by attritional cricket. Perhaps Geoff Puller and Brian Luckhurst, Milton, Parkhouse and Prideaux all had games where they crashed the ball to all parts …I just don’t remember those occasions. We all know why things have changed: different bats, helmets, better pitches (?) and, overwhelmingly, the influence of one-day matches (take your pick or add to the list) but the result is undeniably exhilarating to watch.
When England were 30-4, 150 looked a long way off. Time to dig in, hang on, nurdle a few, hope for the odd bad ball and see what happens. Not quite the Root, Stokes, Buttler, way of doing things that. The Stokes rave reviews have rather passed over Root’s two vital innings. I have now watched him for about five years and the thing that always impresses is not the memorable stroke play (does he indeed have what we now seem to have to call a “signature shot”?) but the intent. It always seems, watching Root, that he is intent on scoring off each ball – defending is the fall back option when it doesn’t seem possible to score. I really don’t recall Noddy Puller batting like that.
Stokes seems to have put behind him the failures of last season (but it has been still only one game) and hopefully can carry his form on to Headingley and beyond. And maybe – just maybe – the experience of a broken hand has taught him some self-control (although it wouldn’t do to be too sanguine about that).
There are still problems of course, take your pick: the opening slot (I worry that Lyth is/has always been a little too lose outside off stump for Test cricket…but if he gets in he will score quickly); the Captaincy (has one win transformed Cook into a sagacious adventurous tactician?); the form of the quick bowlers – extremely variable, especially in the West Indies; and, above all, the absence of a quality spinner…and really no one in County Cricket looking likely to be good enough.
Still, time to savour, for a moment, a stunning game: record number of runs, record speed for a century, etc. etc. Whether or not my memory is sound about the past, the Thursday at Lord’s was a quite wonderful day…worth £100 of anyone’s money.
Wicket Keeping Matters
Nobody seems to want to talk about keepers these days. The Sky commentators were talking about modern keepers’ batting averages versus their earlier counterparts. It’s no surprise since the earlier guys were picked as keepers and the runs they scored were something of a bonus. Nowadays a batsman is picked who happens to own a pair of wicket keeping gloves, regardless of whether he has ever used them. Buttler, who didn’t even keep wicket for Somerset, has learned to dive around like a goalkeeper when the quicks are on but hasn’t got a clue when standing up to the spinners. His performance when keeping to Ali at Headingley was so pathetic the commentators for once stayed silent.
Presumably England will want to have a serious spinner in their side soon. Nothing will demoralise Ali, Root, Rashid, Riley, Patel or whoever they plump for more than having a duffer behind the stumps. With Ali and Broad currently at eight and nine in the order perhaps it is time to pick a keeper again? Buttler should take his chances on being picked as a batsman.
Middlesex Matters
The Great Jack Morgan has been doing his duty
I arrived a few minutes late for the first day of the Middlesex v Durham Championship match at Lord's on May 2nd ("signalling problems in the Wimbledon area") and for the rest of the day there were no announcements about the toss (Durham actually won the toss and Paul Collingwood asked Middx to bat first, I discovered about 7.30pm when I got home and switched on the teletext) or team changes (Paul Coughlin for Graham Onions the only one, which I deduced by checking all the fielders' shirt/ sweater numbers (something that is not possible with the invisible Middlesex shirt numbers)). I doubt that Colly was very happy with his decision because Middlesex got off to a good start as Sam Robson and Nick Gubbins put on 66 for the first wicket. Robson and Nick Compton did better still with a stand of 113 for the second wicket before Compton surprisingly fell to England leg spinner Scott Borthwick for 50 off 96 balls with 9 fours. Adam Voges looked in fine form during his even better stand of 127 with Robson until the skipper departed for an excellent 57 off 91 balls with 8 fours. All this time, Robson had been constructing easily his best innings for many months (or nearer to 2 years actually) until he finally departed for an exemplary 178 off 300 balls with 26 impressive boundaries. Neil Dexter and John Simpson added 58 for the 7th wicket and Simpson guided the tail through to a total of 463 before he himself was last man out for a praiseworthy 58 off 96 balls with 10 fours. Australian Test Match pace bowler John Hastings was the pick of the visitors' attack with 4 for 87 from 33 testing overs.
The Durham reply was dominated by Keaton Jennings from Jo'burg who contributed an admirable 98 from 214 balls with 10 fours. Most of Jennings's partners managed to get a start, but it was surprising that his most durable companion at the crease was nightwatchman Chris Rushworth (who batted no 11 in the second innings) who made a spirited 40, the second highest score, off 81 balls with 3 fours and a six, out of a stand of 73 with Jennings. Rushworth's departure saw the visitors collapse from 229 for 4 to 294 all out with only skipper Collingwood (38*) looking like he wanted to save the follow on.
The Middlesex attack had been badly weakened by the loss of Tim Murtagh after only two balls of the Durham innings (no announcements, of course, but it was assumed to be a recurrence of the side/ back injury suffered at Taunton), but Jimmy Harris stepped into the breach with an outstanding 4 for 69 and good support came from Steve Finn (2 for 69), skipper Voges's slow left armers (2 for 20) and Simpson's 4 catches behind the stumps.
Middlesex, with a lead of 169, decided against enforcing the follow on, but this was not looking a good decision as they quickly slumped to 50 for 9. Robson had made 17 and when Murtagh heroically emerged at no 11 to bat with a runner, another 39 were added for the last wicket, Finn making 15 and Murtagh top scoring with 22 not out. No one else made double figures and Durham's heroes were two who had already made a significant contribution, Hastings (5 for 24 and 9 for 111 in the match) and Rushworth (5 for 38).
Durham's target was 259 with more than a day to get them, but they got off to a poor start and never recovered. The man responsible for this was Harris who has turned into a magnificent leader of the attack in this match: in 12.1 overs he returned the scarcely believable figures of 9 for 34, giving him match figures of 13 for 103 and Durham were all out for 71 (narrowly beating their lowest ever first class score of 63 v Middx at Lord's in 1996) in 24.1 overs. He now has 30 first class wickets this season at an average of 17.3. The key to Harris's recent success has apparently been his reversion to his natural action after some years of ineffectual tinkering by ECB coaches in an attempt to improve his pace. Harris's second innings bowling figures are the second best post war figures by a Middx bowler and he gives credit to the owner of the best post war Middlesex figures (10 for 45 v Derbyshire by Middlesex bowling coach Richard Johnson in 1994) for supporting his decision to revert to his natural action. The dismissal of Michael Richardson from Port Elizabeth typified the dismal Durham innings when he opted to leave a ball from Harris and saw two of his stumps cart-wheeling towards the wicket keeper. The match was over at 12.20 on day four, Middlesex had won by 187 runs and went to the top of the Championship Division One table. Middx 23 points Durham 4.
Carling Matters
Paddy Carling reports on an extraordinary day in the Kennington Club
A warm, sunny day and unsurprisingly a bigger than usual crowd for Surrey v Leicestershire but with Sangakkara and KP at the crease and possibly Davies and Roy to come whatcould possibly go wrong? Well initially it did. The great Sri Lankan was out to the eighth ball of the day and Davies swiftly followed. Roy played entertainingly but after four boundaries in five balls chased a wide one and was gone. However, KP was still there and batting as carefully as I can remember and he reached his hundred just before lunch to his immense glee. Lunch 222 for 5.
In the second session another 124 runs were added for the loss of Wilson, Batty and Curran and KP scored 76. There were nine overseas players in this match and at one point two Australians, Cosgrove and McKay, were bowling to two South Africans, KP and Curran. KP was dropped off a skier on 165 and went to tea on 177.
With support from Tremlett the ninth wicket added over 100 with KP getting 70 of them and this was followed by an unbroken tenth wicket stand of 110 for the tenth wicket of which Dunn contributed just 5. KP hit 34 fours and 14 sixes and a lot of these were scored with most fielders on the boundary. He also didn’t take singles for many magnificent strokes in order to keep the strike and not expose numbers ten and eleven. KP scored 149 out of 182 in the final session to finish on 326 not out. This in itself raises an interesting point because without the staunch support of Tremlett and Dunn KP could never have reached his mammoth score. It suggests that team spirit in the Surrey dressing room has not been lessened by KP’s presence and that at least two Surrey players do not regard him as a knob.
For my part and for all the spectators there we felt privileged and I could not imagine any other batsmen playing this well for so long including Cook, Lyth, Bell, Balance, Root, Ali and Buttler who are almost guaranteed places against New Zealand and Australia. After this for the management of England not to take a chance with KP for the New Zealand series seems criminally stupid. In the history of cricket great batsmen have not always been nice guys.
I have been lucky to see, recently, both this KP innings and de Villiers’ demolition of the West Indies at the SGC.
Other Counties Matters
The Great Jack Morgan enlightens us on events among the lesser counties
Somebody called Matthew Critchley (on debut?) made 137* at no 8 for Derbys to lift them from 103-6 to 343 a/o. He is a 19 year old leg spinner from Preston who played once in last season's 2nd XI Championship, scoring 18* and 4* and took 2-15; he also played in a friendly v Notts taking 5-50.
Another who had not played in the first XI before this season is 24 year old Lewis Hill from Leicester, who opened for Leics against Surrey at the Oval and made 126 out of 292 .He averaged 36 in the 2s last season.
Later I found out that both Critchley and Hill were playing in their second first class matches.
Ex-Middlesex man Steve Crook hit his second first class ton v Lancashire (his first was against us at Lord's last season), this one (102*) took 95 balls with 12 fours and a six, that is how he bats out for a draw!
Rob Keogh (163*) did brilliantly to save the game for Northants at Derby after being 182-7 having re-jigged the order (were they going for the win?) so he was able to get great support from no 9 (Josh Cobb, mainly a batsman), no 10 Rory Kleinveldt (SA Test allrounder) and no 11 Alex Wakely (injured captain and batsman only) and they finished on 390-9. I am not sure if they were going for the win or not, but they finished only 30-odd short.
Leicestershire also did well to bat on until after tea at the Oval totalling 480 in their second innings and setting Surrey 215 to win. They may even have thought that they had saved the game (especially with KP out of action), but Steve Davies (115* off 69 with 11 fours and 4 sixes) and Jason Roy (67 off 39 with 6 fours and 4 sixes) ensured that Surrey strolled it by 7 wickets.
It sounded like a dodgy wicket at Trent Bridge, but it allowed Somerset to claim their first win of the season over Notts, who are also struggling at the wrong end of the table. Warwickshire thumped Durham at Edgbaston and they are now 3rd and 2nd respectively behind the leaders Middlesex (84 points). K Barker had a decent game for Warwickshire: 102*, 4-54 and 5-103. TE Bailey took 5-12 as Leics disintegrated v Lancashire.
Blimey! Joe Denly led Kent to victory over Gloucs at Bristol with 117*, his first ton in the Championship since 2012. Great game at Northampton, where only one innings was completed, this will have the crowds rolling in... it is one of the effects of 5 points for a draw, of course.
Ollie Robinson (cont): yesterday he bowled Warwickshire out for 180 at Hove (6-33) and Sussex struggled in reply, but as I have acquired my 2nd XI Annual since I last wrote about him, I can now reveal a bit more information. He has been making occasional second XI appearances since making his debut for Kent in 2011 (he is from Margate and went to school in Canterbury) and last season represented both Hants and Yorks. He played twice in the 2nd XI Championship for Hants last season and 3 times for Yorks. These were his figures: H bowling 12-0-48-0; batting 78 runs in 3 inns av 26; Y bowling 10-1-36-0; batting 104 runs in 4 inns average 26! Matthew Hobden was another I knew little about, but he is at least in Playfair.
There was more fun at Hove where 27 wickets have fallen in little over a day and a half (bad weather claimed a big chunk of day 2), but it was not so funny for ex-Middlesex man Chris Wright who was surprisingly sent in at no three (was he a lunch watchman?) and soon had his chin split open, but after a lengthy delay, he carried on with blood all over his shirt, pads and bat! Luke Wells's 92 is far and away the highest score of the match in which the pitch will surely be reported? Do Sussex save up their dodgy pitches for Wk’s visits? That one at Horsham last year was nothing special was it?
There were similar problems at Worcester, where Durham slumped to 103 for 9, but S Borthwick (103) was then joined by last man G Onions (36*) and took the total to an almost respectable 198, whereupon Worcestershire collapsed to 65-6!
Ben Brown (53) and Chris Jordan (56*) were the Sussex heroes who steered them to a one wicket win over Warwickshire, but will there be a points deduction? There certainly should be because this is apparently a deliberate policy by Sussex, who have told the groundsman not to make "flat and dull" pitches and two 2nd XI matches have been abandoned this season because of unfit pitches (this from Lizzie Ammon in the G).
The Overton twins starred for Somerset in the interesting game at Taunton as they put on 76 (in 5.5 overs) for the last wicket with no 11 Jamie surprisingly outscoring his brother with 50 (off 19 balls with 7 fours and 3 sixes), but Craig did better with the ball as Yorkshire struggled a bit in their second dig.
John Hastings turned the game round for Durham at Worcester with 7-60 after they trailed by 125 on first innings and P Collingwood (111*) looks like winning it for them.
Fletcher was fit enough to make 23 at no 11 for Surrey as they sneaked a 10 run lead at Beckenham, but did not take the field. Surrey did not really need him however as Dunn, Ansari and Batty had Kent out for 204 and Surrey should now win this one.
Prince went on to 230 and received great support from Aaron Lilley (63 batting at 8) about whom I could remember little, so I looked him up and found that he did not play at all in the Championship last season, but he probably should have done as he averaged 40.25 with the bat and 22.92 with his off-spin in the 2nd XI Championship. La went on to 551 and should now win this one.
Yorkshire held on with some comfort at Taunton as Rashid became the second man in the match to make 99 (T Cooper was the other) as Somerset paid the penalty for not picking a front line spinner.
England’s Best Bowler
After Jimmy Anderson had gone past Botham’s test aggregate of wickets Ken Molloy directed me to an article by BBC’s Marc Higginson
Who is England's best-ever bowler in Test cricket? Is it Fred Trueman, who terrified batsmen on the uncovered pitches of the 1950s and '60s? Or is Sir Ian Botham a cut above the rest? Perhaps the best is still playing? There are not many batsmen who can cope when James Anderson is swinging the ball around. With Anderson overtaking Botham as England's all-time leading Test wicket-taker, BBC Sport devised a formula that attempts to reflect accurately each bowler's ability to get the best opposition batsmen out.
We asked Test Match Special statistician Andrew Samson to take the top 10 England Test wicket-takers and give each of their wickets a numerical rating between one and 11 based on the career average of the batsmen they dismissed. A batsman with an average of 55 or more would be worth 11 points, between 50 and 55 would be 10 points, and so on down to a batsman with a career average of 0-5, worth only one point. Those numerical ratings were added up and divided by the number of wickets taken.
Matthew Hoggard came out on top. Hoggard, 38, was one of the unsung heroes of the 2005 Ashes, when he helped England reclaim the urn from Australia after an 18-year wait. In the five matches, he took 16 wickets - dismissing Matthew Hayden (career average of 50.73) and Michael Clarke (50.79) three times apiece, and twice getting out Justin Langer (45.27), Adam Gilchrist (47.60) and Damien Martyn (46.37).
Of his 248 Test victims, 28% had a career batting average of more than 45. In comparison, only 10% of Botham's wickets were those of batsmen who averaged more than 45, while Anderson was just behind Hoggard on 27%. Of the players Anderson has dismissed the most, Australia bowler Peter Siddle (11 times) tops the list, followed by India great Sachin Tendulkar (nine), Australia captain Clarke (nine) and Aussie all-rounder Shane Watson (eight).
However, 7% of his victims averaged below 10, compared with Hoggard's 5%, which also contributed to him finishing behind Hoggard in the study. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. Four of the five batsmen Hoggard dismissed the most - India's Virender Sehwag (six times), Australian Matthew Hayden (six), West Indies opener Chris Gayle (five) and India's Rahul Dravid (five) - were among the most influential batsmen of his era.
Botham, widely regarded as England's greatest all-rounder, took 383 Test wickets and also weighed in with 5,200 runs, but only came eighth in our study. As well as his low percentage of victims with a high average, 28% of the batsmen he dismissed averaged below 20, compared to 22% for Hoggard.
Of the 44 batsmen to average over 50 in Test cricket, only six played in Botham's era. "He had a bit of a golden arm. He used to get batsmen caught in the covers, caught at mid-wicket, caught hooking. He just had a knack of getting people out. "He never thought the game was up. He had total belief in his own ability, which is what makes great sportsmen stand out."
Trueman has the best bowling average of anyone in the top 10. He took his 307 wickets at an average of 21.57 - Hoggard's is 30.50, Anderson's 29.77 and Botham's 28.40.
While no formula will be perfect, there is a distinct generational split in the table - with modern-day bowlers such as Hoggard, Anderson, Graeme Swann and Stuart Broad ranking higher than Botham, Trueman and Statham. Batting averages are generally higher in the modern era, pitches are better and boundaries smaller. Bats are also bigger and Twenty20 has opened up new scoring shots for batsmen. That has clearly had a bearing on the result of this study.
King Cricket Matters
Ged writes:
As the end of the season approached, it dawned on me that the pile of reading I had hoped to take with me to Lord’s and read on sunny days was mostly still waiting to be read. Not that there had been a shortage of sunshine in the summer of 2014 – indeed it was one of the best that I can remember, but there had been a shortage of midweek first-class cricket at Lord’s during that quieter (work-wise) part of the summer. Indeed Middlesex played no first class cricket at all, anywhere, between 22 July and 31 August. Rant over.
I had arranged to take Charley The Gent Malloy to see the Durham game the following week, so needed to shop for some picnic food and did have space at least to take an afternoon at Lord’s at the end of the Warwickshire game.
books inhabit a sort of limbo or purgatory, in which material worthy of perhaps two or three faintly decent I grabbed a book, which I felt I really needed to read for work, then wandered over to HQ, arriving around half-two. I held little hope of making too much headway into the book before stumps in those circumstances, but I needn’t have worried.
I once wrote a book review for Strategy magazine, in which I elucidated a scale I named the FDA (faintly decent article) scale. My theory is that most business and management articles has been relentlessly padded out into a whole book. Sadly (or perhaps happily in these circumstances), the book I had taken with me to Lord’s was worth a mere two-and-a-half on the FDA scale. Thus, I was able to finish reading it (or rather discern all that was useful to me from it) and close the book just before the stumps were pulled out of the ground.
Sated (book-wise if not cricket-wise) I wandered home via the Porchester Waitrose, in order to buy the picnic food for next week. I very rarely visit any supermarket, let alone one that close to Lord’s. I vaguely hoped that I might see Tim Murtagh weighing up the relative merits of Golden Grahams and Special K in there. Or possibly even Sam Robson asking an assistant to direct him to the shelf where he might find quinoa with bulgar wheat. But no cricketers were to be seen in that supermarket. Shameful. So I quickly bought the small number of items I needed for next week’s picnic and went home.
Bob Cozens
Bob died in April after a short illness, aged 67
Bob started at St Clement Danes on the same day in 1959 as Jack Morgan and me. He didn’t play a lot of cricket until he worked on the bins one summer and returned tall and thin having lost all of his chubby appearance. He then started bowling left arm fast and if there was a quick wicket he was decidedly sharp. He joined South Hampstead CC in the late sixties and soon found himself captaining the second XI.
At some point he decided that fast bowling was too hard and took up slow left armers. He could hardly have anticipated his subsequent success particularly as South Hampstead had a rich vein of exponents of this skill- Alan Cox, Keith Hardie and Cliff Dickeson. However, by the mid seventies he had broken into the first eleven and twice took one hundred wickets in a season.
When younger he could play an innings but in later years was primarily known as a successful lower order hitter. He was also a very useful slip fielder.
After my Dad died in 1974 it was Bob who co-wrote and produced the South Hampstead reviews with me. For much of this period he was also my lift to the Rangers. He was a Chartered Surveyor and devoted many hours to supervising the extensions to the South Hampstead pavilion in the late seventies.
Bob was a kind and generous man who will be missed by his friends and family.
Ritchie Benaud
Alex Bowden wrote this in King Cricket
Mourning everyone.
Richie Benaud has died and a small part of our brain that responds to blue skies, lengthening days and Test cricket has also died. You can’t spend as long in someone’s company as most of us have spent listening to Richie and not feel like you know them.
There are other public figures who we see a lot; people who are familiar from newspapers and TV – but you don’t actually sit there with them for any length of time. That’s the difference. Richie was, in a very real sense, part of many cricket fans’ lives. He wasn’t just the soundtrack – which would be enough cause for mourning in itself – he was the portal through which the sport arrived. He brought cricket and taught cricket and most of us will be forever grateful for that.
Don’t speak – the art of commentary. Commentating’s like writing – everyone thinks they can do it. They think that just because they know the English language, they can do the job. It doesn’t really work like that. You know the bit in a Test match when they pan round all the people in fancy dress. They did that once while Michael Slater was on commentary. Batman came on screen. “There’s Batman,” he informed us.
It’s not easy to talk for two minutes when you have no script and haven’t planned in advance what to say. Nor is it easy to sit silent for two minutes when you know you’re working as a commentator. But it’s about adding value.
Sometimes that takes a lot of words and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, Richie Benaud didn’t require many words to put into place what should be the first rule of TV commentary: “Put your brain into gear and if you can add to what’s on the screen then do it – otherwise shut up.” The impossible trick
Poor commentators are easy to name, but what’s truly telling is that even the good ones start to get on your nerves with certain things after a while. Nasser Hussain’s pluralisation, for example: ‘Your Gayles, your McCullums, your Kohlis, your Maxwells’.
Point is, you can’t talk for hours and hours and hours and not get on someone’s wick. Cricket is a long game and familiarity breeds irritation. No commentator is universally loved – you need only read a ‘dream commentary team’ debate on social media or in the comments of a website to appreciate that fact. Except Richie was universally loved. At least insofar as that’s possible. We feel the same about Richie’s death as David Cameron does. Shane Warne’s written something that moved us. These aren’t people who we’d normally agree with, let alone both on the same day, but yet we’re united by this.
To touch so many people without also pissing them off when you’ve commentated on long, drawn-out Test matches for fifty years is an incredible, just about impossible achievement. Richie Benaud is, sadly, irreplaceable.
He wasn’t a bad cricketer either. Not a bad cricketer at all.
Rangers Matters
The Great Jack Morgan draws our attention to wholesale changes at Loftus Road
The Guardian has another long article on Rs, this one by Dominic Fifield, who reckons Rs might lose 25 players in the close season. This number comprises ten who are out of contract (Barton, Hill, Ferdinand, Zamora, Dunne, SWP, Henry, Faurlin, Murphy and Furlong); four whose loans are ending (Kranjcar, Isla, Vargas and Zarate, who has already gone I believe); six who they would not try hard to hang on to (Traore, Hoilett, Sandro, Diakite, Onuoha and Taarabt); and five who they do not want to lose, but who will be attracting interest (Austin, Green, Phillips, Fer and Caulker, though JSCR would put the last in the won't try hard to keep category).
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