G&C 268
GOOGLIES & CHINAMEN
An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 268
April 2025
Pat Cummins: You don’t really think that you’ll be fit for the 150th anniversary match at the MCG do you?
Ben Stokes: I might surprise you, but I can’t see me lasting five days.
Out & About with the Professor
Were there a competition for the title: “Saviour of County Cricket”, might the unlikely name of Colin Graves come in front of the nominations committee? The hostility to Graves among Yorkshire members (at least those members who turn up to AGMs) is to his “invention” of The Hundred. Never mind that he has bailed the Club out (twice), he is widely recognised as the begetter of a cricket competition designed, in Duncan Hamilton’s memorable phrase, “for people who don’t like cricket”. Given the success of The Hundred, there are, doubtless, many others claiming authorship of the idea; to give an outing to another favoured quotation: “Failure is an orphan, while success has many fathers” (Oscar Wilde…although, given his reputation for plagiarism, it might well, ironically, have been previously said by someone else).
But, whether you like it or not, and I imagine a fair proportion of Googlies readers are in the “not” camp, it has not only been a financial success at the gate, it has now generated the largest cash bonanza (variously estimated at £520 million) that the game has ever known.
It is difficult not to think of this as, in some sense, a success. In fact, it might be suggested that Hamilton’s dictum (while memorable) is not quite accurate. Could we say that The Hundred is for people who don’t like cricket very much, or like it a bit, but don’t care for the long, calm, peaceful, progress of the county game. The Hundred is neither long, nor calm, nor peaceful. The games take place to a cacophony of pop music, fireworks, dancing girls and demented DJs, whose function is to ensure that everyone is having fun, and if they are not…to make more noise. Nevertheless, The Hundred competition boasts more than 200 million tickets sold since its inception, with 500,000 ticket buyers in 2024, 30% of whom reported as being “new to cricket”. Presumably they enjoyed themselves, liked the racket, and, unlike me, didn’t wish that the “Go-Go” dancers would.
All the deals are not yet complete, but the money coming into cricket now is second only to that of football in team games and must be looked upon longingly by rugby (which seems to lose a top side every few months) and pretty much every other team game that there is. The algorithm for splitting up the money has been very well publicised with a distribution of the 49% of each franchise (10% going to recreational cricket and the remainder split between the 8 “hosting” clubs and the 11 non-hosting counties) and a different distribution for the sale of the remaining 51% should the host grounds wish (like Yorkshire) to do so. In that case the host clubs retain 80% of those funds.
What are they going to do with it all? There’s a lot of talk (especially in Yorkshire) of debt cancellation, as well as: “building reserves”, investment in “player pathways”, stadium development and “business projects to provide non-cricket income steams”. This last translates to building a hotel or a block of flats to provide rents into the future. Or, one supposes, anything else. Presumably, it will be up to individual county boards, plus the MCC, to decide what to do. These people are going to have to change focus dramatically from decades of frantic searching of ways of saving money, to enthusiastic but effective ways of spending it. What faith we can have in their decision making rather depends on the expertise of the people involved (or their ability to seek expert opinion). Googlies readers who have had close insight into the performance of one or other of these county boards over the years, may (or may not) feel confident.
There’s a price to be paid, of course. The bids for the franchises come from billionaires in India and the USA and such people seldom owe their fortunes to casual acts of generosity – they tend to want something for their money. Possibly the £145 million paid for the London Spirit franchise might not make a great dent in the wealth of Silicon Valley tech billionaires, whose origins are in India, but it would be naïve to think they are motivated solely by sentiment. One price the cricketing world will be paying is the month generally known as August. There will be virtually no First-Class cricket this August nor, one assumes, any August in the near future. The cricket calendar will not be accommodating The Hundred, The Hundred will be determining the calendar. In short, the venture capitalists will be demanding “prime time” for their investments. There may well be other demands as well and it will be interesting to see if the well-meaning folk at the ECB can be resilient in negotiations. Americans with money, as we have seen recently, tend to get their own way.
But The Hundred may prove to be mutable; two suggestions already include the expansion of the competition from 8 teams to 10 – possibly adding Bristol and Chester-Le-Street - and the reversion to the T20 format (thus removing its distinctive 100 ball character, emulated by no one else). What is clear, is that the money on offer is far too great to be refused or resisted. Professional cricket has, as we all know, changed dramatically in the last decade and will continue to do so, aligning itself to the form of the game that the public, now and in the future, is willing to pay to see… and the few hundred elderly spectators who will take to the terraces this Friday do not, frankly, look too much like the future.
“There is nothing so powerful”, wrote the philosopher J S Mill, “as an idea whose time has come”; and I sense that Mr Graves recognised that…even if we might wish it wasn’t true.
This & That
The IPL got off to a great start last weekend. Many players have changed franchises and so it takes a bit of getting used to who is playing for whom. In the opening match the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) failed to capitalise on a good start (109 for 1 after 10 overs) and ended up with a below par 174 for 8. The Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) opened with an incongruous pairing of Phil Salt and Virat Kholi and the former batted in his usual style and when he was out in the ninth over with the score on 95 for 1 victory became just a canter for his side.
The wickets in the IPL are normally good and sometimes very good. As the season progresses they can become a little tired and so much of the big scoring can come in the earlier stages. In Match 2 Riyan Parag, the new Rajasthan Royals (RR) captain, won the toss and invited the Sunrisers Hyderabad (SH) to bat. This was a very brave decision and one he has since, no doubt, regretted. SH opened up with their left handers Abhishek Sharma and Travis Head. Abhishek was out to the first ball of the fourth over with the score on 45. He was replaced by Ish Kish, who had joined SH from the Mumbai Indians (MI). His batting was a revelation and he tore into the RR bowling. Head was out in the tenth over with the score on 135 for 2. Ish Kish finished on 106 not out from 47 balls with the final score 286 for 6. The extent of the carnage is exemplified by the fact that there were only 12 sixes scored in the innings. Jofra Archer became the most expensive bowler in the history of the IPL as his four overs went for a staggering 76 runs. SH 286 was the second highest score in the history of the IPL and SH have made four of the five highest totals. In reply RR made a creditable 242 for 6 but they never looked like overhauling the SH score. Their total included 18 sixes, so they won on that count.
Nicholas Pooran is with the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) this year and was another sparkling debutant making 75 from 30 balls against the Delhi Capitals (DC). This helped his side to 209 for 8. In reply DC slumped to 65 for 5 but Ashutosh Sharma first with Tristan Stubbs and then Vipraj Nigam saw then through to 211 for 9 and an unlikely win.
There is no doubt that Maxwell is a genius or perhaps a flawed genius. Everything he does seems extravagant and so I suppose that you have to expect the absurd alongside the unbelievable. In his first innings at this year’s IPL he faced the slow left arm of Sai Kishore. To his first ball he attempted a full- blooded reverse sweep which he missed and the ball hit him on the arse. The fielders appealed, the umpire gave him out LBW and he trudged ingloriously off. A few balls later the broadcasters showed the Hawkeye version which showed that the projected flight of the ball would have cleared the top of the stumps by several inches.
In Match 5 Shreyas Iyer reached 97 from 42 balls with nine balls to go but found himself off strike for the rest of the innings. Although a personal loss he couldn’t have struck any better than his partner, Shashank Singh, who reached 44 from 16 balls and took his side to 243 for 5 which was just enough to beat the Gujarat Titans (GT) who reached a creditable 232 for 5.
In Match 7 SH were surprisingly restricted to 190 for 9 by LSG mainly due to the excellent bowling of Shardul Thakur. Nicholas Pooran then made 70 from 26 balls which included the fastest 50 of this year’s competition of 18 balls which enabled his side to stroll to victory with 23 balls to spare.
The early stages of the competition show a disproportionate number of left handers filling the top order positions- Head, Abhishek, Ish Kish, Jaiswal, Rickleton, de Kock, Narine, Sai Sudharsan, Priyansh Arya, Pooran and so on. This leads to a variety of practices. Fast bowlers have to bowl round the wicket to stand any chance of LBW. Leg spinners find themselves bowling a lot of googlies except for Liam Livingstone who changes to off spinners.
The popular wisdom seems to be coming round to my way of thinking. I have long said that very few players consciously direct the ball away from fielders. We are now told that the favoured practice is range hitting whereby batsmen convince themselves that the only thing they have to beat is the boundary cushion. It has been amazing how often the batsman has been caught on or near the boundary by a fielder in splendid isolation and who scarcely has to move.
No one can dispute the extraordinary developments that there have been in fielding in recent years, but one critical aspect seems to have gone out of the game. It is rare to see bowlers go to the stumps at the non-strikers end to aid in effecting a run out. The assumption seems to be that a direct hit will do the job and if it doesn’t then that’s too bad. In the early games in the IPL this year there must have been one instance per game where a bowler has elected to absent himself from a likely run out chance.
In the T20 series in New Zealand against Pakistan the hosts took an easy two game lead when they comfortably knocked off two low scores in the opening matches but in the third match having reached 204 were beaten by nine wickets with four overs to spare as Hassan Nawaz scored 105 not out from just 45 balls. This was after he had scored ducks in his first two matches. He reached his hundred in 44 balls to record Pakistan’s second fastest behind Shahid Afridi who achieved it in 37 balls against Sri Lanka in an ODI. However, New Zealand soon put this set back behind them and won the final two matches in the series.
Anyone would think that being England’s first choice spinner would guarantee an automatic choice in his county side but Somerset have shunted Shoaib Bashir out on loan to Glamorgan. Jack Leach (remember him?) is Somerset’s preferred first choice spinner and Glamorgan want Bashir as cover for the injured Mason Crane but he may still not get a game if the wickets are green since Glamorgan also have the ambidextrous Ben Kallaway in their side who also bats in the top order.
Shardul Thakur was due to spend a chilly Spring at Chelmsford having not been bought in the IPL auction. But he got a late call up to the Lucknow Super Giants after an injury to Mohsin Khan. He hasn’t let them down and is one of leading wicket takers in the competition.
When I switched on the Preston v Aston Villa match five minutes after it had started, I was amazed to see that there were vast numbers of balloons all over the pitch but that the referee had allowed play to proceed. Later in the fifteenth minute as Aston Villa manoeuvred around the Preston penalty area there were at least eight balloons in the area itself. I am amazed that the game wasn’t stopped and the balloons removed. Normally any incursion onto the playing area is not tolerated by the officials, but then any visitors to West Ham have to play through a haze of bubbles and there was the infamous beachball at the Stadium of Light…
Thompson Matters
It’s April and Spring when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to ....cricket; well at least it used to but I wonder whether it does in the numbers of a few decades ago? I sadly doubt it.
For the modern international cricketer, the dozens who have found a living globetrotting the world of white ball cricket, there is very little if any close season. Not for them the anticipation of and preparation for the English summer ahead and all that it entails.
For some the English winter was just too long to wait. I remember a story, which will not have been apocryphal, about the much-respected South Hampstead keeper of the fifties and sixties, Norman Cooper, who opened his front door to a mid-winter visitor, fully dressed to take the field complete with MCC sweater, pads and wicket-keeping gloves.
Casting my mind back to the late sixties, seventies and eighties I fondly remember the routine. First, there was the retrieval of the kit bag from wherever it had overwintered. There was always that sense of relief at discovering the absence of a jock strap that might have been festering there since early October. Then, the equipment. Boots and pads that needed whitening. And in those days studs that needed tightening or replacing. I suspect little of this happens today. Then, most importantly, the bat. A light sanding and then the oil. I haven’t smelt linseed oil for decades but I’m sure if I did it would generate anticipatory butterflies in the stomach as does still the smell of freshly mown grass. Pre-season sanding was very much part of the bat’s MOT. I remember a very young Mike Gatting starting a trend among Middlesex Young Cricketers in the early seventies of sanding all but the very middle of the blade to leave a very evident red, ball-shaped, sweet spot. For us lesser mortals who followed his example I think we quite correctly received a lot of abuse from our elders for such youthful arrogance.
If March had been sufficiently dry, outdoor nets would begin, perhaps in the very first week of April. Flat-batting anything around about a good length indoors at Finchley suddenly became self-evidently impossible and a more circumspect approach was required where twenty minutes of ‘good leaves’ felt like a reasonable net. Those first club nets would often see the arrival of new members. Some had come with reputations and others appeared, friend of a friend and in the area for a season or two, but with no known cricketing pedigree.
One such fresh face was Yorkshireman Richard Boothroyd who, memory serves, on first sight looked an unlikely sportsman; not quite a Sir John Curtice double but you get the picture. I’m not sure who was batting in the net when he came off his unmarked four paces and pre-judged by some as Third XI at best, but the resultant snorter soon put pay to any book by its cover judgements. Two years later he was taking hatfuls of wickets for Staffordshire in the Minor Counties.
In the early eighties South Hampstead was briefly led by Jon Anderson who went on to play Sheffield Shield for Victoria. The first pre-season net under the new regime was prefaced by a two-mile run around Willesden Green after which very few other than Jon were in any fit state to bat or bowl. Sod that for a game of soldiers was the overwhelming consensus.
The Sunday before the first weekend inevitably requires a working party to attend to the needs of the ground. At South Hampstead that mainly involved moving the four enormous sight screens from their winter home down by the willow tree. If we were lucky there might be a dozen of us and if the preceding weeks had been wet the screens would be plugged and require lifting before they could be twinned-off and pushed uphill into position. For whatever reason it always seemed to be the Editor who was Gangmaster-in-chief. I can still hear his first ‘1,2,3, LIFT!’ followed by a collective expletive-filled groan and little if any movement of the white giant.
I have no concept of what now constitutes pre-season preparation at South Hampstead but fifty years ago this week we were preparing to begin the club’s Centenary year as Middlesex County League and Cup Champions. Fifty years on I have no doubt that those of us who are still around will be wishing our old club a fine 150th commemorative season.
Crocks Corner
In this era when bowlers have to carry out inappropriate fitness regimes and then spend more time on the treatment bench than actually bowling this feature celebrates the manifold complaints of elite athletes. Feel free to submit anything you notice
“Mark Wood is likely to miss all of England's home Tests this summer after having surgery on a left knee injury. The 35-year-old has been ruled out until the end of July, roughly around when the five-Test series against India is due to finish. It means the next time Wood could play Test cricket is on the Ashes tour of Australia in November.With Wood arguably England's first-choice seamer in Test cricket, this injury casts further doubt on the wisdom of playing him at the Champions Trophy.”
“Jofra Archer has not played Test cricket since 2021 and is working his way back to full fitness in white-ball cricket, while Brydon Carse suffered foot problems at the Champions Trophy that subsequently ruled him out of the Indian Premier League. Josh Tongue is only just returning from a lay-off of well over a year.”
“England fast bowler Brydon Carse has been ruled out of the Indian Premier League (IPL) with a toe injury that also ended his Champions Trophy campaign. The 29-year-old was signed by Sunrisers Hyderabad in November's auction but has been forced to withdraw from the T20 tournament, with South Africa all-rounder Wiaan Mulder named as his replacement. Durham's Carse struggled with blisters and cuts to a toe on his left foot during England opening Champions Trophy match against Australia in February and was subsequently ruled out of the rest of the competition.”
“England Test captain Ben Stokes is not expected to play for Durham in the early rounds of the County Championship as he continues his recovery from hamstring surgery, says his county coach Ryan Campbell. Stokes, 33, tore his left hamstring for a second time in five months in December and, having had surgery in the new year, has not played since. He will not feature when the County Championship begins on Friday, nor will his Durham and England team-mate Brydon Carse, who is still recovering from the toe injury which ruled him out of the Champions Trophy last month.”
Barnet Matters
Andre Russell has reverted to his white mohawk appearance for this year’s IPL. The Nottingham Forest midfielder, Danilo, has adopted a similar style drawing attention to his every movement as it is picked up by the TV cameras and broadcast around the world.
Wolves’ defender, Agbadou, has tight little braids over his scalp which he has dyed orange. It looks like he has worms crawling over his head.
Ged Matters
Once again Daisy is our narrator
I suggested in spring that we might get tickets for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium. Ged demurred.
“The hottest tickets this August will be for the Zara Larsson concert at Lord’s,” he said. “It’s a sell-out, but I’ve got us into the VIP area.”
According to Ged, hundreds of thousands of people had to resort to buying Taylor Swift tickets for Wembley because Zara Larsson had totally sold out Lord’s.
There was a firework display and a short cricket match before the start of the concert. I popped to the loo soon after the cricket finished and ran into a charming young blond woman, scantilly-clad in a most exotic fashion, entering the Long Room.
“What has become of the pavilion dress code?” I asked the accompanying steward. “Or is she a visiting dignitary wearing national dress?” “She seems ever so nice,” was all the star-struck steward could say in reply.
Turns out, that was Zara Larsson. She progressed from the pavilion to the stage, via the field of play. Her music and gyrations seemed to distract warming-up cricketers from their purpose.
Unfamiliar with Ms Larsson’s oeuvre, I had asked Ged to provide some guidance on appropriate dance moves. He had brought a couple of documents with him.
Unfortunately, it seems that Ged mixed up some pages from an Edwardian bat and ball sports coaching manual with his Zara Larsson dance moves documents. It is the sort of mistake that absolutely anyone could make, as long as that ‘anyone’ happened to be Ged.
Yet Ged’s paperwork mix up didn’t seem to matter; those Edwardian sports moves went down a storm. Ged and I are now confirmed Larssonists.
After Zara Larsson moved on, there was another cricket match. Ged and I moved on before the end of that second match.
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An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 268
April 2025
Pat Cummins: You don’t really think that you’ll be fit for the 150th anniversary match at the MCG do you?
Ben Stokes: I might surprise you, but I can’t see me lasting five days.
Out & About with the Professor
Were there a competition for the title: “Saviour of County Cricket”, might the unlikely name of Colin Graves come in front of the nominations committee? The hostility to Graves among Yorkshire members (at least those members who turn up to AGMs) is to his “invention” of The Hundred. Never mind that he has bailed the Club out (twice), he is widely recognised as the begetter of a cricket competition designed, in Duncan Hamilton’s memorable phrase, “for people who don’t like cricket”. Given the success of The Hundred, there are, doubtless, many others claiming authorship of the idea; to give an outing to another favoured quotation: “Failure is an orphan, while success has many fathers” (Oscar Wilde…although, given his reputation for plagiarism, it might well, ironically, have been previously said by someone else).
But, whether you like it or not, and I imagine a fair proportion of Googlies readers are in the “not” camp, it has not only been a financial success at the gate, it has now generated the largest cash bonanza (variously estimated at £520 million) that the game has ever known.
It is difficult not to think of this as, in some sense, a success. In fact, it might be suggested that Hamilton’s dictum (while memorable) is not quite accurate. Could we say that The Hundred is for people who don’t like cricket very much, or like it a bit, but don’t care for the long, calm, peaceful, progress of the county game. The Hundred is neither long, nor calm, nor peaceful. The games take place to a cacophony of pop music, fireworks, dancing girls and demented DJs, whose function is to ensure that everyone is having fun, and if they are not…to make more noise. Nevertheless, The Hundred competition boasts more than 200 million tickets sold since its inception, with 500,000 ticket buyers in 2024, 30% of whom reported as being “new to cricket”. Presumably they enjoyed themselves, liked the racket, and, unlike me, didn’t wish that the “Go-Go” dancers would.
All the deals are not yet complete, but the money coming into cricket now is second only to that of football in team games and must be looked upon longingly by rugby (which seems to lose a top side every few months) and pretty much every other team game that there is. The algorithm for splitting up the money has been very well publicised with a distribution of the 49% of each franchise (10% going to recreational cricket and the remainder split between the 8 “hosting” clubs and the 11 non-hosting counties) and a different distribution for the sale of the remaining 51% should the host grounds wish (like Yorkshire) to do so. In that case the host clubs retain 80% of those funds.
What are they going to do with it all? There’s a lot of talk (especially in Yorkshire) of debt cancellation, as well as: “building reserves”, investment in “player pathways”, stadium development and “business projects to provide non-cricket income steams”. This last translates to building a hotel or a block of flats to provide rents into the future. Or, one supposes, anything else. Presumably, it will be up to individual county boards, plus the MCC, to decide what to do. These people are going to have to change focus dramatically from decades of frantic searching of ways of saving money, to enthusiastic but effective ways of spending it. What faith we can have in their decision making rather depends on the expertise of the people involved (or their ability to seek expert opinion). Googlies readers who have had close insight into the performance of one or other of these county boards over the years, may (or may not) feel confident.
There’s a price to be paid, of course. The bids for the franchises come from billionaires in India and the USA and such people seldom owe their fortunes to casual acts of generosity – they tend to want something for their money. Possibly the £145 million paid for the London Spirit franchise might not make a great dent in the wealth of Silicon Valley tech billionaires, whose origins are in India, but it would be naïve to think they are motivated solely by sentiment. One price the cricketing world will be paying is the month generally known as August. There will be virtually no First-Class cricket this August nor, one assumes, any August in the near future. The cricket calendar will not be accommodating The Hundred, The Hundred will be determining the calendar. In short, the venture capitalists will be demanding “prime time” for their investments. There may well be other demands as well and it will be interesting to see if the well-meaning folk at the ECB can be resilient in negotiations. Americans with money, as we have seen recently, tend to get their own way.
But The Hundred may prove to be mutable; two suggestions already include the expansion of the competition from 8 teams to 10 – possibly adding Bristol and Chester-Le-Street - and the reversion to the T20 format (thus removing its distinctive 100 ball character, emulated by no one else). What is clear, is that the money on offer is far too great to be refused or resisted. Professional cricket has, as we all know, changed dramatically in the last decade and will continue to do so, aligning itself to the form of the game that the public, now and in the future, is willing to pay to see… and the few hundred elderly spectators who will take to the terraces this Friday do not, frankly, look too much like the future.
“There is nothing so powerful”, wrote the philosopher J S Mill, “as an idea whose time has come”; and I sense that Mr Graves recognised that…even if we might wish it wasn’t true.
This & That
The IPL got off to a great start last weekend. Many players have changed franchises and so it takes a bit of getting used to who is playing for whom. In the opening match the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) failed to capitalise on a good start (109 for 1 after 10 overs) and ended up with a below par 174 for 8. The Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) opened with an incongruous pairing of Phil Salt and Virat Kholi and the former batted in his usual style and when he was out in the ninth over with the score on 95 for 1 victory became just a canter for his side.
The wickets in the IPL are normally good and sometimes very good. As the season progresses they can become a little tired and so much of the big scoring can come in the earlier stages. In Match 2 Riyan Parag, the new Rajasthan Royals (RR) captain, won the toss and invited the Sunrisers Hyderabad (SH) to bat. This was a very brave decision and one he has since, no doubt, regretted. SH opened up with their left handers Abhishek Sharma and Travis Head. Abhishek was out to the first ball of the fourth over with the score on 45. He was replaced by Ish Kish, who had joined SH from the Mumbai Indians (MI). His batting was a revelation and he tore into the RR bowling. Head was out in the tenth over with the score on 135 for 2. Ish Kish finished on 106 not out from 47 balls with the final score 286 for 6. The extent of the carnage is exemplified by the fact that there were only 12 sixes scored in the innings. Jofra Archer became the most expensive bowler in the history of the IPL as his four overs went for a staggering 76 runs. SH 286 was the second highest score in the history of the IPL and SH have made four of the five highest totals. In reply RR made a creditable 242 for 6 but they never looked like overhauling the SH score. Their total included 18 sixes, so they won on that count.
Nicholas Pooran is with the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) this year and was another sparkling debutant making 75 from 30 balls against the Delhi Capitals (DC). This helped his side to 209 for 8. In reply DC slumped to 65 for 5 but Ashutosh Sharma first with Tristan Stubbs and then Vipraj Nigam saw then through to 211 for 9 and an unlikely win.
There is no doubt that Maxwell is a genius or perhaps a flawed genius. Everything he does seems extravagant and so I suppose that you have to expect the absurd alongside the unbelievable. In his first innings at this year’s IPL he faced the slow left arm of Sai Kishore. To his first ball he attempted a full- blooded reverse sweep which he missed and the ball hit him on the arse. The fielders appealed, the umpire gave him out LBW and he trudged ingloriously off. A few balls later the broadcasters showed the Hawkeye version which showed that the projected flight of the ball would have cleared the top of the stumps by several inches.
In Match 5 Shreyas Iyer reached 97 from 42 balls with nine balls to go but found himself off strike for the rest of the innings. Although a personal loss he couldn’t have struck any better than his partner, Shashank Singh, who reached 44 from 16 balls and took his side to 243 for 5 which was just enough to beat the Gujarat Titans (GT) who reached a creditable 232 for 5.
In Match 7 SH were surprisingly restricted to 190 for 9 by LSG mainly due to the excellent bowling of Shardul Thakur. Nicholas Pooran then made 70 from 26 balls which included the fastest 50 of this year’s competition of 18 balls which enabled his side to stroll to victory with 23 balls to spare.
The early stages of the competition show a disproportionate number of left handers filling the top order positions- Head, Abhishek, Ish Kish, Jaiswal, Rickleton, de Kock, Narine, Sai Sudharsan, Priyansh Arya, Pooran and so on. This leads to a variety of practices. Fast bowlers have to bowl round the wicket to stand any chance of LBW. Leg spinners find themselves bowling a lot of googlies except for Liam Livingstone who changes to off spinners.
The popular wisdom seems to be coming round to my way of thinking. I have long said that very few players consciously direct the ball away from fielders. We are now told that the favoured practice is range hitting whereby batsmen convince themselves that the only thing they have to beat is the boundary cushion. It has been amazing how often the batsman has been caught on or near the boundary by a fielder in splendid isolation and who scarcely has to move.
No one can dispute the extraordinary developments that there have been in fielding in recent years, but one critical aspect seems to have gone out of the game. It is rare to see bowlers go to the stumps at the non-strikers end to aid in effecting a run out. The assumption seems to be that a direct hit will do the job and if it doesn’t then that’s too bad. In the early games in the IPL this year there must have been one instance per game where a bowler has elected to absent himself from a likely run out chance.
In the T20 series in New Zealand against Pakistan the hosts took an easy two game lead when they comfortably knocked off two low scores in the opening matches but in the third match having reached 204 were beaten by nine wickets with four overs to spare as Hassan Nawaz scored 105 not out from just 45 balls. This was after he had scored ducks in his first two matches. He reached his hundred in 44 balls to record Pakistan’s second fastest behind Shahid Afridi who achieved it in 37 balls against Sri Lanka in an ODI. However, New Zealand soon put this set back behind them and won the final two matches in the series.
Anyone would think that being England’s first choice spinner would guarantee an automatic choice in his county side but Somerset have shunted Shoaib Bashir out on loan to Glamorgan. Jack Leach (remember him?) is Somerset’s preferred first choice spinner and Glamorgan want Bashir as cover for the injured Mason Crane but he may still not get a game if the wickets are green since Glamorgan also have the ambidextrous Ben Kallaway in their side who also bats in the top order.
Shardul Thakur was due to spend a chilly Spring at Chelmsford having not been bought in the IPL auction. But he got a late call up to the Lucknow Super Giants after an injury to Mohsin Khan. He hasn’t let them down and is one of leading wicket takers in the competition.
When I switched on the Preston v Aston Villa match five minutes after it had started, I was amazed to see that there were vast numbers of balloons all over the pitch but that the referee had allowed play to proceed. Later in the fifteenth minute as Aston Villa manoeuvred around the Preston penalty area there were at least eight balloons in the area itself. I am amazed that the game wasn’t stopped and the balloons removed. Normally any incursion onto the playing area is not tolerated by the officials, but then any visitors to West Ham have to play through a haze of bubbles and there was the infamous beachball at the Stadium of Light…
Thompson Matters
It’s April and Spring when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to ....cricket; well at least it used to but I wonder whether it does in the numbers of a few decades ago? I sadly doubt it.
For the modern international cricketer, the dozens who have found a living globetrotting the world of white ball cricket, there is very little if any close season. Not for them the anticipation of and preparation for the English summer ahead and all that it entails.
For some the English winter was just too long to wait. I remember a story, which will not have been apocryphal, about the much-respected South Hampstead keeper of the fifties and sixties, Norman Cooper, who opened his front door to a mid-winter visitor, fully dressed to take the field complete with MCC sweater, pads and wicket-keeping gloves.
Casting my mind back to the late sixties, seventies and eighties I fondly remember the routine. First, there was the retrieval of the kit bag from wherever it had overwintered. There was always that sense of relief at discovering the absence of a jock strap that might have been festering there since early October. Then, the equipment. Boots and pads that needed whitening. And in those days studs that needed tightening or replacing. I suspect little of this happens today. Then, most importantly, the bat. A light sanding and then the oil. I haven’t smelt linseed oil for decades but I’m sure if I did it would generate anticipatory butterflies in the stomach as does still the smell of freshly mown grass. Pre-season sanding was very much part of the bat’s MOT. I remember a very young Mike Gatting starting a trend among Middlesex Young Cricketers in the early seventies of sanding all but the very middle of the blade to leave a very evident red, ball-shaped, sweet spot. For us lesser mortals who followed his example I think we quite correctly received a lot of abuse from our elders for such youthful arrogance.
If March had been sufficiently dry, outdoor nets would begin, perhaps in the very first week of April. Flat-batting anything around about a good length indoors at Finchley suddenly became self-evidently impossible and a more circumspect approach was required where twenty minutes of ‘good leaves’ felt like a reasonable net. Those first club nets would often see the arrival of new members. Some had come with reputations and others appeared, friend of a friend and in the area for a season or two, but with no known cricketing pedigree.
One such fresh face was Yorkshireman Richard Boothroyd who, memory serves, on first sight looked an unlikely sportsman; not quite a Sir John Curtice double but you get the picture. I’m not sure who was batting in the net when he came off his unmarked four paces and pre-judged by some as Third XI at best, but the resultant snorter soon put pay to any book by its cover judgements. Two years later he was taking hatfuls of wickets for Staffordshire in the Minor Counties.
In the early eighties South Hampstead was briefly led by Jon Anderson who went on to play Sheffield Shield for Victoria. The first pre-season net under the new regime was prefaced by a two-mile run around Willesden Green after which very few other than Jon were in any fit state to bat or bowl. Sod that for a game of soldiers was the overwhelming consensus.
The Sunday before the first weekend inevitably requires a working party to attend to the needs of the ground. At South Hampstead that mainly involved moving the four enormous sight screens from their winter home down by the willow tree. If we were lucky there might be a dozen of us and if the preceding weeks had been wet the screens would be plugged and require lifting before they could be twinned-off and pushed uphill into position. For whatever reason it always seemed to be the Editor who was Gangmaster-in-chief. I can still hear his first ‘1,2,3, LIFT!’ followed by a collective expletive-filled groan and little if any movement of the white giant.
I have no concept of what now constitutes pre-season preparation at South Hampstead but fifty years ago this week we were preparing to begin the club’s Centenary year as Middlesex County League and Cup Champions. Fifty years on I have no doubt that those of us who are still around will be wishing our old club a fine 150th commemorative season.
Crocks Corner
In this era when bowlers have to carry out inappropriate fitness regimes and then spend more time on the treatment bench than actually bowling this feature celebrates the manifold complaints of elite athletes. Feel free to submit anything you notice
“Mark Wood is likely to miss all of England's home Tests this summer after having surgery on a left knee injury. The 35-year-old has been ruled out until the end of July, roughly around when the five-Test series against India is due to finish. It means the next time Wood could play Test cricket is on the Ashes tour of Australia in November.With Wood arguably England's first-choice seamer in Test cricket, this injury casts further doubt on the wisdom of playing him at the Champions Trophy.”
“Jofra Archer has not played Test cricket since 2021 and is working his way back to full fitness in white-ball cricket, while Brydon Carse suffered foot problems at the Champions Trophy that subsequently ruled him out of the Indian Premier League. Josh Tongue is only just returning from a lay-off of well over a year.”
“England fast bowler Brydon Carse has been ruled out of the Indian Premier League (IPL) with a toe injury that also ended his Champions Trophy campaign. The 29-year-old was signed by Sunrisers Hyderabad in November's auction but has been forced to withdraw from the T20 tournament, with South Africa all-rounder Wiaan Mulder named as his replacement. Durham's Carse struggled with blisters and cuts to a toe on his left foot during England opening Champions Trophy match against Australia in February and was subsequently ruled out of the rest of the competition.”
“England Test captain Ben Stokes is not expected to play for Durham in the early rounds of the County Championship as he continues his recovery from hamstring surgery, says his county coach Ryan Campbell. Stokes, 33, tore his left hamstring for a second time in five months in December and, having had surgery in the new year, has not played since. He will not feature when the County Championship begins on Friday, nor will his Durham and England team-mate Brydon Carse, who is still recovering from the toe injury which ruled him out of the Champions Trophy last month.”
Barnet Matters
Andre Russell has reverted to his white mohawk appearance for this year’s IPL. The Nottingham Forest midfielder, Danilo, has adopted a similar style drawing attention to his every movement as it is picked up by the TV cameras and broadcast around the world.
Wolves’ defender, Agbadou, has tight little braids over his scalp which he has dyed orange. It looks like he has worms crawling over his head.
Ged Matters
Once again Daisy is our narrator
I suggested in spring that we might get tickets for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium. Ged demurred.
“The hottest tickets this August will be for the Zara Larsson concert at Lord’s,” he said. “It’s a sell-out, but I’ve got us into the VIP area.”
According to Ged, hundreds of thousands of people had to resort to buying Taylor Swift tickets for Wembley because Zara Larsson had totally sold out Lord’s.
There was a firework display and a short cricket match before the start of the concert. I popped to the loo soon after the cricket finished and ran into a charming young blond woman, scantilly-clad in a most exotic fashion, entering the Long Room.
“What has become of the pavilion dress code?” I asked the accompanying steward. “Or is she a visiting dignitary wearing national dress?” “She seems ever so nice,” was all the star-struck steward could say in reply.
Turns out, that was Zara Larsson. She progressed from the pavilion to the stage, via the field of play. Her music and gyrations seemed to distract warming-up cricketers from their purpose.
Unfamiliar with Ms Larsson’s oeuvre, I had asked Ged to provide some guidance on appropriate dance moves. He had brought a couple of documents with him.
Unfortunately, it seems that Ged mixed up some pages from an Edwardian bat and ball sports coaching manual with his Zara Larsson dance moves documents. It is the sort of mistake that absolutely anyone could make, as long as that ‘anyone’ happened to be Ged.
Yet Ged’s paperwork mix up didn’t seem to matter; those Edwardian sports moves went down a storm. Ged and I are now confirmed Larssonists.
After Zara Larsson moved on, there was another cricket match. Ged and I moved on before the end of that second match.
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