GOOGLIES & CHINAMEN
An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 51
March 2007
Transvestite Matters
I like to have a picture on the first page these days and so am delighted to include the following communication from Mike McLagan
I am a friend of the Professor’s from Welwyn Garden in the seventies. He was somewhat leftist in those days but that is clearly not the case today. I now reside in Sydney and continue to follow cricket avidly. I have attached a photograph I took on the first day at the recent test at the SCG and would assume that the Barmy Army has members of all denominations and persuasions. I notice that you are now publishing photographs of various sexes and contribute this to give balance for your readership.
World Cup Matters
Everybody seems to be taking the World Cup extremely seriously, even England after their surprise victory in the Commonwealth Bank Trophy. But after England showed the way New Zealand had a clean sweep over Australia first beating them by ten wickets at Wellington with twenty three overs to spare and then twice in three days knocking off over 330.
These losses knocked Australia off the top of the ICC ODI rankings to be replaced by South Africa. George had already made them his outsider tip and so got his money on just in time. Then the Professor returned from another overseas jaunt and told me that he and Frank Foreman had also made them their favourites. They have just beaten Pakistan comfortably: three matches to one in a five match series and they only lost one wicket in the last two victories. In the first match of the series South Africa scored a staggering 392 for 6 with Boucher scoring 78 from 38 deliveries. Not to be outdone Pakistan in the second match scored 351 for 4 with Red Mist Afridi scoring 77 not out from thirty five balls including six sixes. He later in the series threatened a spectator and picked up a four-match ban from Chris Attila Broad who may have been trying to save his son from a similar hiding in the Caribbean.
I have some doubts about the quality of pitches in the Caribbean but the Great Jack Morgan assures me that they are going to be good. If that is the case then we can expect some high scoring which means that the successful sides will have to score heavily in the early overs when the fielding restrictions are in place and then again at the end of the innings. A score of 120 after the first fifteen overs is not uncommon nowadays and anything up to 100 can be expected from the final ten. This means that 300 must be the minimum aimed for and to be safe you probably will need closer to 350.
All of this means that selection is going to be tricky. There will be the temptation to pack the side with batting but the fifth bowler or combination of bowlers has been going for 100 in ten overs where part timers are being used. The sides with genuine all rounders will have a real advantage. It is now essential that the wicket keeper is both up to it behind the stumps and capable of holding a place in the top seven with the bat. Even this only leaves four bowling places and at least two of them must be capable of scoring 30 or 40 at this level. If you have no genuine all rounders your problem starts here and you get into the situation where you pretend that a batter who can bowl a bit in the nets can do it in the middle in a high pressure ODI or alternatively a bowler can do adequate business with the bat.
England have the advantage of Freddie as the fifth bowler who can bat at five or six, although he must score more heavily than he did in Australia and complete his ten overs. He is probably the best bowler of yorkers at the death in the competition. But England have gaping problems elsewhere. Nixon is not good enough to bat above nine, which pushes Dalrymple and Mahmood above him. It is a long time since the former scored fifty and the latter has yet to score at this level. At the top of the order Peg Leg will be a welcome return if he can stay fit but is completely out of match practice. He last scored runs in the middle at Southgate in June last year. Joyce, Bell and Strauss are quality stroke makers but do not have the improvisation to take advantage of the field restrictions in the first fifteen overs. Loye was a bold experiment in the winter but it failed, as he didn’t reach fifty in any of his innings. KP, now the PPS, will provide potential firepower but he is also out of practice. All told England will need more than a fair wind behind them to progress far.
The Indians have been warming up with a series win against Sri Lanka who were handicapped by the absence of Vaas and Murali. Sehwag is finding some form but he is being overshadowed by Robin Uthappa who is emerging as a phenomenal talent. Youvraj Singh is back from injury and in the final match of the series treated the Sri Lankan attack with disdain. Quick quiz: who has hit more sixes in ODIs than Freddie and KP together? Well the answer is Sourav Ganguly, of course, and he is back in favour with Greg Chappell and has been opening the batting with Sehwag. When they knocked off over 250 the Indians did it without any contribution from Dravid and Dhoni neither of whom got to the wicket and Tendulkar who is injured again. Of their bowlers Zaheer Khan is looking good and both Pathan and Agarkar can bat as well. If the Aussies are not going to retain the World Cup then I think my money will go on India.
But once you get to sudden death in these competitions anything can happen. New Zealand will be fancying their chances and will consider any target gettable. Sri Lanka arguably has the strongest batting in the competition and two of the most feared bowlers. If they get on a roll they will take some stopping. And then there are the hosts, the West Indians, who have in Lara and Gayle two of the very best left-handers in the competition. Gayle is due for some big runs and with his economical and puzzlingly effective off spinners he could be man of the competition. But Pakistan would claim they have the best batting and, in Afridi, the most devastating hitter of them all. There should be some fabulous cricket in the next two months.
Googlies Fifty Lunch, Awards and Related Matters
I met the Professor at Manchester Piccadilly Station in February for the Googlies Fifty Lunch. Whilst waiting for him to appear I used the gents for what turned out to be my most expensive piss to date and realised that there is already a congestion charge in Manchester. We had not pre booked a restaurant but I felt in safe hands as the Professor guided me through the back doubles to Canal Street where we were soon settled in at an exotically named establishment called Velvet, which, if noisy, otherwise proved perfectly adequate for our purpose.
The Professor, as you know, is a serious fellow and apart from celebrating fifty editions of this organ had set us the task of selecting the Wisden Five Cricketers of the Year for 2006. This can be a tricky task if you are not sure who has been a previous recipient of the award since no player may be selected twice for the honour. It did not take us long after sitting down to sheepishly admit that we had both brought along a copy of Wisden to be able to check the list of former awardees. Having established our Trainspotter credentials we got down to business.
It proved a fairly straightforward exercise and we quickly came up with the following list:
Ramprakesh and Youssef for their aggregates
Bell for his purple patch
Jayawardene for class
Monty for ebullience
Lehman, Cook and Collingwood also had claims but we felt confident that we had saved Mathew Engel the trouble of doing the job himself. At this point we hadn’t even ordered our starters and so were able to settle back to the more esoteric task of nominating the Googlies awards at our leisure.
The Professor was keen to nominate the Great Jack Morgan for the Curmudgeonly Award, which he now gets to keep outright following three successive nominations. The Professor suggests that the Great Man be set the task of composing a Strange Eleven composed entirely of players whose surnames are anagrams of Curmudgeon.
The Been There Done That Award goes to Mushtaq Ahmed who took Sussex to the title with one hundred wickets in just fifteen games. As a previous recipient of the Wisden Award he was ineligible for the first list. However, he facilitated the Pakistan Selectors getting the Forget Him We’ll Pick The Prat Award for their strange selection of Kaneria ahead of him for last summer’s test series.
The Bouncy Castle Leg Over Award goes to Inzy for his high stepping at Lords.
Damien Martyn gets the Eureka Moment Award for suddenly recognizing what the weak link in the Aussie test side was.
The Serves You Right Award goes to the thousands of Yorkshiremen at Headingley who preferred to watch Sven’s losers rather than the Sri Lankan record breaking run chase.
The Cricket is Just A Long Boring Game Award goes to the Yorkshiremen at Headingley who preferred to make plastic snakes out of beer mugs rather than watch England score heavily against the Pakistanis.
The Professor, generous as ever, nominated Jason Lewry for the Yellow Streak Award. You will have to re-read his Out and About notes if you can’t remember why.
The Surely Its Time To Call It A Day Award goes to Jimmy and the ludicrous, boring and pathetic droves in the Barmy Army. Now let’s just watch the cricket, eh lads?
The It Must Have Looked Good On My CV Award goes to John Emburey who having guided Middlesex to a double relegation found himself promoted to Director of Cricket for the coming season.
The Stringfellow Opportunist Award goes to Andrew Baker.
The Henry Kissinger Award for Diplomacy goes to Darrell Hair who also gets the following awards: Getting in the Game, Heavy Handed, Miserable Git, Pedantic Pratt, Fat Slob, Spoilsport.
The Motivational Award for Claptrap goes to David Graveney.
Eric Tracey has presented the Sat Nav Award to The Durham Sprayer for his Brisbane Ball.
The Great Jack Morgan sent us a text message that said that he would not be nominating anyone for the Wisden Five this year since Middlesex were so awful in 2006. He also picked up on my exchange with Peter Ray in the last issue and announced that I would not be his nominee for the Googlies Man of the Year Award but as a result would be compensated again with the Xenophobia Award.
Sartorial Matters
Haircuts, whilst a personal choice, become a very public matter when the cap or helmet is removed, except of course for our dread locked brethren who have it hanging from either. Chris Lewis famously had his “all off” in the Caribbean and then suffered sunstroke. More recently James Anderson and KP both displayed colourful streaks in their respective barnets and then there are, of course, those such as the Aussie trio Hamburger, Lee and Clarke, who choose to be blonder than they actually are.
All of these displays of hedonism were, however, put to shame by Scott Styris on his belated return from injury in the Commonwealth Bank triangular series. His head was simply breathtaking when he removed his cap when it was his turn to bowl. His scalp had been sporadically shaved and the remaining hair had been dyed white and gelled so that it stood perfectly upright.
I do my television cricket watching solo and wondered whether it was just me who had noticed this new setting of the bar in bad taste hairdos. It didn’t take me long to find the following on the King Cricket blog:
“Did anyone catch sight of Scott Styris's 'do' last night? It's ludicrous.
Styris is a dork, even by the standards of New Zealand cricket. They all seem like nice guys, but, you know, maybe too nice. Scott Styris, Joe Uncool, has clearly decided to address his innate dorkiness, seemingly ignorant of the fact that there is nothing he can do, because his dorkiness is far too deep-rooted to be affected by anything like a haircut. As a result of this, he has in fact compounded the situation by affecting a sort of horrendous mish-mash of 'the fin' and 'the mullet' - already the two worst haircuts ever created. Sadly the following photo hardly does it justice.”
It’s a good job that he won’t be captaining Middlesex this season or I might have had to write a letter of complaint to the committee.
On the Professor’s Couch
After he sent me his nomination for Cheat of the Year, which I included in the last edition, I suggested to the Professor that he must have been watching too much television. He replied as follows:
You are right to say that I've been watching too much TV - this morning's effort was too much for anyone to take. Strauss' stumping must be just about rock bottom...when the opposition start to laugh at you it's time to come home.
There has been some good cricket to watch of course, in particular the South Africa/Pakistan series. The only trial here is the dreadful commentary. Ramiz Raja takes the brainless platitude award for his observation half way though the last test that: "Pakistan's cause would be helped by getting Jacques Kallis out". Oh really? "Yes", he went on: "Kallis's wicket would move them nearer to victory" ...then a little pause...and for a bit of extra emphasis..."Definitely".
I suppose there is a producer or someone telling them to say something - and so that is what they say. The sparse commentary style of Arlott and Benaud is, I guess, a thing of the past. Almost as bad is Michael Holding, whose elegant run-up and mellifluous voice can't excuse the pointless descriptions of what we can all see. The batsman stretches forward and the ball hits his pad and the commentary declares that: "The batsman stretched forward and the ball hit his pad". Well thanks "Mikey"; we can see that, that is why we all went out and bought TVs. I suppose its some relief from David Lloyd's hysterical "colour" that he seems obliged to give us - the latest seems to be the motorcar metaphor - as the game draws to a close, the "garage doors are open" and the "engine's running" and so on...and on.
On the subject of repetition, I was staying in a hotel in Birmingham this week and had the Daily Torygraph delivered gratis to my room. This is not a journal that I usually lay an ungloved hand on but it is nice to catch up on the views of the political wing of the BNP - so I had a quick look. The sports' pages had a lengthy gushing interview of Ramprakash by a woman who clearly had kept the evening free just in case, and a long self-pitying piece by Boycott on why England are doing so badly. Since readers of Googlies have all been made fully aware (before the event) of why we are doing so badly, there does seem to be some point to Boycott's observation that the "Seven Man Commission" appointed to investigate might not come up with anything new. But his real beef is not the appointment of a pointless commission but rather that he's not on it. What's worse, the England management don't invite him in to team talks and apparently treat him as if he was a journalist! Perhaps that is not the correct designation for someone who writes for such a publication. I wonder what is. Perhaps Ramiz could come up with a suggestion.
Positive Matters The Great Jack Morgan responded to the Professor’s thoughts on motivational mumbo jumbo
The last time I agreed with the Prof was around 1965 I think, so it is a big surprise to find myself in total agreement over this “being positive” nonsense. It is just used as an excuse to avoid the sensible course of action, which is to make sure that you do not throw your wicket away. This is even more important for the weaker side of the two competing in the series. If the weaker side does not throw its wickets away, it remains in the game and if you stay in the game, there is always a chance of nicking a win. Even if the win is not on, it should be possible to avoid defeat. If you avoid defeat, then you stay in the series and if you stay in the series, there is always the chance of winning it. “Being positive” in adverse circumstances leads to 5-0 defeats. Some England teams of the past were very good at staying in the match, staying in the series and sometimes nicking an unexpected win. I mentioned before that I would be happy to see “Boycott and Edrich” starts in preference to the erratic opening partnerships since Ashes 2005 and that is a good example of how not throwing your wicket away is a better plan than “being positive”.
Kelvin West Matters
Kelvin West tells me that he has taken up the UK franchise for the following highly successful Polish barbershop chain.
He will shortly be circulating readers with details of the locations of his Hot Cuts premises in the UK and looks forward to welcoming you all to the delights of his enterprise.
He tells me that on a recent trip to Poland he had his hair cut every day.
Strange Elevens
I received several responses to last month’s Strange Eleven:
Nick Reed asked: “Would I be right in thinking the Strange XI this time round are all multi-initialled (four or more) players? And further that including JWHT Douglas would have made it too easy and/or too painfully reminiscent of 5-0 Ashes defeats? You've also inexplicably failed to include the Sri Lankan first-class domestic bowler Rajitha Amunugama, or to give him his full name: Amunugama Rajapakse Rajakaruna Abeykoon Panditha Wasalamudiyanse Ralahamilage Rajitha Krishantha Bandara Amunugama.”
Tim Mansfield confidently claimed, “ It was one of the easier strange elevens, the solution not masked by the omission of Johnny Won't Hit Today!”
Paul Kilvington sent me this: “If printers charged by the letter for producing scorecards, then I think this edition's Strange XI would cost their team a pretty penny as I believe they all have (to use the politically correct expression) four forenames. Maybe we should call them the 4 X 4 XI?”
All the above win a ride in Ralph Pooley’s Triumph Herald. Here is this months side:
David Roberts Northants
Mike Harris Middx/ Notts
Piran Holloway Warks/ Somerset
Ryan Driver Worcs/ Lancs
Carl Gazzard Somerset
David Paynter Northants
Neil Edwards Somerset
Jack Richards (w/k) Surrey
Tony Penberthy Northants
Chris Ellison Yorks
Charlie Shreck Notts
All you have to do is decide which Jazz Hat fits them all.
South Hampstead Matters
Bob Peach has persuaded me to attend the South Hampstead Dinner that will be held in the clubhouse on Friday 30th March. He tells me that he has also recruited Steve Thompson, Peter Ray, Charlie Puckett, Russ Collins and Dave Perrin to fill out his table. If anyone wants to join us at this convivial event they should call Bob Peach (0208 459 7692) or Ken James (0208 965 1254).
Possibly the Final Ashes Matters
Steve Thompson sent me the following
A member of the Thompson family was present at the tour's highlight on Friday. Katie has been in Sydney since November and also flew to Melbourne for 2nd Day of the Boxing Day Test. Having been exposed to wall-to-wall coverage on arrival she is, after all these years, a convert and a good deal more knowledgeable. Never thought I'd see the day when she'd refer to Harmison bowling a 'crap line'! She'll be referring to 'new rinse' soon.
She's out there for a year and has been waitressing in Sydney but was unfortunately ill when Freddie showed up so only her friend waited on him and had her picture taken with him - the day after 5-0. Freddie was, inevitably, pretty pissed apparently. I apologise if my daughter's face painting hints at any dumbing down in my family's response to Test cricket.
Irritating trends in Modern Cricket number 44 I don’t buy it. The modern cricketer does not play too much cricket. In fact it is the opposite. He does not play enough. A top international batsman will do well to score a thousand runs in a calendar year. In the good old days his counterpart would clock up two thousand plus in an English season alone. You need to bat to hit form and when you find it you need to spend as much time in the middle as possible. You won’t get into a purple patch in the nets. In fact whilst there is nothing wrong with net practice in itself it is all too easy to convince yourself that the aerial shot you hit in the middle of the bat cleared mid wicket or deep square leg, although under match conditions it has an uncanny knack of finding the fielder. Mark Ramprakesh hits a Purple Patch most Augusts and scores the bulk of his season’s hundreds in the process. He doesn’t get to this point by not playing, rather he works on his technique by batting as much as possible and eventually everything gels.
If match practice is essential for batting it is even more critical for bowlers. It is crass of the England management to declare their various seamers fit for test cricket after a rigorous twenty minute work out in the nets. It was clear throughout the Ashes that Freddie did not consider himself match fit. He bowled a few quick deliveries but his spells were only three overs long. Modern test cricket is a 450 overs game. Split down the middle each side will have 225 overs to bowl. If you field five bowlers in your side they will have to average 45 overs each over five days, with the bulk of it concentrated into two or three days. How do you establish whether your injured players are fit for this? The only way is to bowl them for similar periods in practice matches. Harmison, Flintoff and Anderson clearly needed match practice prior to the Ashes series.
In some respects Central Contracts have been good for the English team but it has created a closed community in the Fletcher camp and he doesn’t really want them to play in any other games at all. This is not only detrimental to the players but it also deprives the counties and their supporters from seeing their better players in action. The centrally contracted players get no chance to play themselves back into form and have to endure the agonies of failure after failure at the highest level when they lose their touch. Just ask Strauss and Collingwood what December and January felt like. Ed Joyce has never scored heavily in one-day cricket. But in their wisdom the English management decided to turn him into an ODI opening bat. They decided he needed to supplement his gracefully timed shots with pinch-hitting slogs into cow corner. These must have looked good in the nets. In the middle the opposition soon worked out that he wasn’t a big hitter and was unlikely to clear the ropes. Consequently they let him play his new shot and he kept holing out. He was lucky that he was given a long run of failures before cutting the shot out and playing some longer controlled innings.
The central contract doesn’t allow for loss of form. If you are paying a player a huge sum of money it doesn’t make sense to drop him and bring in someone else. But if you don’t let him play away from the international arena he can only struggle back to form in international matches. England’s past is littered with players who were brought in when others were struggling against the best and they were dropped after a couple of failures themselves. What wouldn’t Mathew Maynard and Rob Bailey have given for a prolonged run. Nowadays you get dropped even if you do well if you are not a contracted player. Ask Owais Shah.
Molloy Matters Since last month’s edition my inbox has been overflowing with requests to identify which of the naked protesters in the surf was Ken Molloy. Well, Ken lives in Madrid these days and was not actually present at the protest. But for those of his fans who have not seen his grinning visage this millennium I am delighted to include the following mug shot to satisfy your curiosity.
Football Matters
One of the drawbacks of playing amateur football is that you often find that you have to put up your own goal nets when you play on public recreation grounds such as Wormwood Scrubs or Hackney Marshes. This can be a chore but Andrew Baker has found that his ladies team simply revel in this activity and are even disappointed if they arrive at a venue that has them pre-erected. Kelvin West sent me this photo of the team in action hanging the nets on Pitch 17 at Gunnersbury Park last weekend.
Googlies and Chinamen
is produced by
James Sharp
Broad Lee House
Combs
High Peak
SK23 9XA
Tel & fax: 01298 70237
Email: [email protected]
An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 51
March 2007
Transvestite Matters
I like to have a picture on the first page these days and so am delighted to include the following communication from Mike McLagan
I am a friend of the Professor’s from Welwyn Garden in the seventies. He was somewhat leftist in those days but that is clearly not the case today. I now reside in Sydney and continue to follow cricket avidly. I have attached a photograph I took on the first day at the recent test at the SCG and would assume that the Barmy Army has members of all denominations and persuasions. I notice that you are now publishing photographs of various sexes and contribute this to give balance for your readership.
World Cup Matters
Everybody seems to be taking the World Cup extremely seriously, even England after their surprise victory in the Commonwealth Bank Trophy. But after England showed the way New Zealand had a clean sweep over Australia first beating them by ten wickets at Wellington with twenty three overs to spare and then twice in three days knocking off over 330.
These losses knocked Australia off the top of the ICC ODI rankings to be replaced by South Africa. George had already made them his outsider tip and so got his money on just in time. Then the Professor returned from another overseas jaunt and told me that he and Frank Foreman had also made them their favourites. They have just beaten Pakistan comfortably: three matches to one in a five match series and they only lost one wicket in the last two victories. In the first match of the series South Africa scored a staggering 392 for 6 with Boucher scoring 78 from 38 deliveries. Not to be outdone Pakistan in the second match scored 351 for 4 with Red Mist Afridi scoring 77 not out from thirty five balls including six sixes. He later in the series threatened a spectator and picked up a four-match ban from Chris Attila Broad who may have been trying to save his son from a similar hiding in the Caribbean.
I have some doubts about the quality of pitches in the Caribbean but the Great Jack Morgan assures me that they are going to be good. If that is the case then we can expect some high scoring which means that the successful sides will have to score heavily in the early overs when the fielding restrictions are in place and then again at the end of the innings. A score of 120 after the first fifteen overs is not uncommon nowadays and anything up to 100 can be expected from the final ten. This means that 300 must be the minimum aimed for and to be safe you probably will need closer to 350.
All of this means that selection is going to be tricky. There will be the temptation to pack the side with batting but the fifth bowler or combination of bowlers has been going for 100 in ten overs where part timers are being used. The sides with genuine all rounders will have a real advantage. It is now essential that the wicket keeper is both up to it behind the stumps and capable of holding a place in the top seven with the bat. Even this only leaves four bowling places and at least two of them must be capable of scoring 30 or 40 at this level. If you have no genuine all rounders your problem starts here and you get into the situation where you pretend that a batter who can bowl a bit in the nets can do it in the middle in a high pressure ODI or alternatively a bowler can do adequate business with the bat.
England have the advantage of Freddie as the fifth bowler who can bat at five or six, although he must score more heavily than he did in Australia and complete his ten overs. He is probably the best bowler of yorkers at the death in the competition. But England have gaping problems elsewhere. Nixon is not good enough to bat above nine, which pushes Dalrymple and Mahmood above him. It is a long time since the former scored fifty and the latter has yet to score at this level. At the top of the order Peg Leg will be a welcome return if he can stay fit but is completely out of match practice. He last scored runs in the middle at Southgate in June last year. Joyce, Bell and Strauss are quality stroke makers but do not have the improvisation to take advantage of the field restrictions in the first fifteen overs. Loye was a bold experiment in the winter but it failed, as he didn’t reach fifty in any of his innings. KP, now the PPS, will provide potential firepower but he is also out of practice. All told England will need more than a fair wind behind them to progress far.
The Indians have been warming up with a series win against Sri Lanka who were handicapped by the absence of Vaas and Murali. Sehwag is finding some form but he is being overshadowed by Robin Uthappa who is emerging as a phenomenal talent. Youvraj Singh is back from injury and in the final match of the series treated the Sri Lankan attack with disdain. Quick quiz: who has hit more sixes in ODIs than Freddie and KP together? Well the answer is Sourav Ganguly, of course, and he is back in favour with Greg Chappell and has been opening the batting with Sehwag. When they knocked off over 250 the Indians did it without any contribution from Dravid and Dhoni neither of whom got to the wicket and Tendulkar who is injured again. Of their bowlers Zaheer Khan is looking good and both Pathan and Agarkar can bat as well. If the Aussies are not going to retain the World Cup then I think my money will go on India.
But once you get to sudden death in these competitions anything can happen. New Zealand will be fancying their chances and will consider any target gettable. Sri Lanka arguably has the strongest batting in the competition and two of the most feared bowlers. If they get on a roll they will take some stopping. And then there are the hosts, the West Indians, who have in Lara and Gayle two of the very best left-handers in the competition. Gayle is due for some big runs and with his economical and puzzlingly effective off spinners he could be man of the competition. But Pakistan would claim they have the best batting and, in Afridi, the most devastating hitter of them all. There should be some fabulous cricket in the next two months.
Googlies Fifty Lunch, Awards and Related Matters
I met the Professor at Manchester Piccadilly Station in February for the Googlies Fifty Lunch. Whilst waiting for him to appear I used the gents for what turned out to be my most expensive piss to date and realised that there is already a congestion charge in Manchester. We had not pre booked a restaurant but I felt in safe hands as the Professor guided me through the back doubles to Canal Street where we were soon settled in at an exotically named establishment called Velvet, which, if noisy, otherwise proved perfectly adequate for our purpose.
The Professor, as you know, is a serious fellow and apart from celebrating fifty editions of this organ had set us the task of selecting the Wisden Five Cricketers of the Year for 2006. This can be a tricky task if you are not sure who has been a previous recipient of the award since no player may be selected twice for the honour. It did not take us long after sitting down to sheepishly admit that we had both brought along a copy of Wisden to be able to check the list of former awardees. Having established our Trainspotter credentials we got down to business.
It proved a fairly straightforward exercise and we quickly came up with the following list:
Ramprakesh and Youssef for their aggregates
Bell for his purple patch
Jayawardene for class
Monty for ebullience
Lehman, Cook and Collingwood also had claims but we felt confident that we had saved Mathew Engel the trouble of doing the job himself. At this point we hadn’t even ordered our starters and so were able to settle back to the more esoteric task of nominating the Googlies awards at our leisure.
The Professor was keen to nominate the Great Jack Morgan for the Curmudgeonly Award, which he now gets to keep outright following three successive nominations. The Professor suggests that the Great Man be set the task of composing a Strange Eleven composed entirely of players whose surnames are anagrams of Curmudgeon.
The Been There Done That Award goes to Mushtaq Ahmed who took Sussex to the title with one hundred wickets in just fifteen games. As a previous recipient of the Wisden Award he was ineligible for the first list. However, he facilitated the Pakistan Selectors getting the Forget Him We’ll Pick The Prat Award for their strange selection of Kaneria ahead of him for last summer’s test series.
The Bouncy Castle Leg Over Award goes to Inzy for his high stepping at Lords.
Damien Martyn gets the Eureka Moment Award for suddenly recognizing what the weak link in the Aussie test side was.
The Serves You Right Award goes to the thousands of Yorkshiremen at Headingley who preferred to watch Sven’s losers rather than the Sri Lankan record breaking run chase.
The Cricket is Just A Long Boring Game Award goes to the Yorkshiremen at Headingley who preferred to make plastic snakes out of beer mugs rather than watch England score heavily against the Pakistanis.
The Professor, generous as ever, nominated Jason Lewry for the Yellow Streak Award. You will have to re-read his Out and About notes if you can’t remember why.
The Surely Its Time To Call It A Day Award goes to Jimmy and the ludicrous, boring and pathetic droves in the Barmy Army. Now let’s just watch the cricket, eh lads?
The It Must Have Looked Good On My CV Award goes to John Emburey who having guided Middlesex to a double relegation found himself promoted to Director of Cricket for the coming season.
The Stringfellow Opportunist Award goes to Andrew Baker.
The Henry Kissinger Award for Diplomacy goes to Darrell Hair who also gets the following awards: Getting in the Game, Heavy Handed, Miserable Git, Pedantic Pratt, Fat Slob, Spoilsport.
The Motivational Award for Claptrap goes to David Graveney.
Eric Tracey has presented the Sat Nav Award to The Durham Sprayer for his Brisbane Ball.
The Great Jack Morgan sent us a text message that said that he would not be nominating anyone for the Wisden Five this year since Middlesex were so awful in 2006. He also picked up on my exchange with Peter Ray in the last issue and announced that I would not be his nominee for the Googlies Man of the Year Award but as a result would be compensated again with the Xenophobia Award.
Sartorial Matters
Haircuts, whilst a personal choice, become a very public matter when the cap or helmet is removed, except of course for our dread locked brethren who have it hanging from either. Chris Lewis famously had his “all off” in the Caribbean and then suffered sunstroke. More recently James Anderson and KP both displayed colourful streaks in their respective barnets and then there are, of course, those such as the Aussie trio Hamburger, Lee and Clarke, who choose to be blonder than they actually are.
All of these displays of hedonism were, however, put to shame by Scott Styris on his belated return from injury in the Commonwealth Bank triangular series. His head was simply breathtaking when he removed his cap when it was his turn to bowl. His scalp had been sporadically shaved and the remaining hair had been dyed white and gelled so that it stood perfectly upright.
I do my television cricket watching solo and wondered whether it was just me who had noticed this new setting of the bar in bad taste hairdos. It didn’t take me long to find the following on the King Cricket blog:
“Did anyone catch sight of Scott Styris's 'do' last night? It's ludicrous.
Styris is a dork, even by the standards of New Zealand cricket. They all seem like nice guys, but, you know, maybe too nice. Scott Styris, Joe Uncool, has clearly decided to address his innate dorkiness, seemingly ignorant of the fact that there is nothing he can do, because his dorkiness is far too deep-rooted to be affected by anything like a haircut. As a result of this, he has in fact compounded the situation by affecting a sort of horrendous mish-mash of 'the fin' and 'the mullet' - already the two worst haircuts ever created. Sadly the following photo hardly does it justice.”
It’s a good job that he won’t be captaining Middlesex this season or I might have had to write a letter of complaint to the committee.
On the Professor’s Couch
After he sent me his nomination for Cheat of the Year, which I included in the last edition, I suggested to the Professor that he must have been watching too much television. He replied as follows:
You are right to say that I've been watching too much TV - this morning's effort was too much for anyone to take. Strauss' stumping must be just about rock bottom...when the opposition start to laugh at you it's time to come home.
There has been some good cricket to watch of course, in particular the South Africa/Pakistan series. The only trial here is the dreadful commentary. Ramiz Raja takes the brainless platitude award for his observation half way though the last test that: "Pakistan's cause would be helped by getting Jacques Kallis out". Oh really? "Yes", he went on: "Kallis's wicket would move them nearer to victory" ...then a little pause...and for a bit of extra emphasis..."Definitely".
I suppose there is a producer or someone telling them to say something - and so that is what they say. The sparse commentary style of Arlott and Benaud is, I guess, a thing of the past. Almost as bad is Michael Holding, whose elegant run-up and mellifluous voice can't excuse the pointless descriptions of what we can all see. The batsman stretches forward and the ball hits his pad and the commentary declares that: "The batsman stretched forward and the ball hit his pad". Well thanks "Mikey"; we can see that, that is why we all went out and bought TVs. I suppose its some relief from David Lloyd's hysterical "colour" that he seems obliged to give us - the latest seems to be the motorcar metaphor - as the game draws to a close, the "garage doors are open" and the "engine's running" and so on...and on.
On the subject of repetition, I was staying in a hotel in Birmingham this week and had the Daily Torygraph delivered gratis to my room. This is not a journal that I usually lay an ungloved hand on but it is nice to catch up on the views of the political wing of the BNP - so I had a quick look. The sports' pages had a lengthy gushing interview of Ramprakash by a woman who clearly had kept the evening free just in case, and a long self-pitying piece by Boycott on why England are doing so badly. Since readers of Googlies have all been made fully aware (before the event) of why we are doing so badly, there does seem to be some point to Boycott's observation that the "Seven Man Commission" appointed to investigate might not come up with anything new. But his real beef is not the appointment of a pointless commission but rather that he's not on it. What's worse, the England management don't invite him in to team talks and apparently treat him as if he was a journalist! Perhaps that is not the correct designation for someone who writes for such a publication. I wonder what is. Perhaps Ramiz could come up with a suggestion.
Positive Matters The Great Jack Morgan responded to the Professor’s thoughts on motivational mumbo jumbo
The last time I agreed with the Prof was around 1965 I think, so it is a big surprise to find myself in total agreement over this “being positive” nonsense. It is just used as an excuse to avoid the sensible course of action, which is to make sure that you do not throw your wicket away. This is even more important for the weaker side of the two competing in the series. If the weaker side does not throw its wickets away, it remains in the game and if you stay in the game, there is always a chance of nicking a win. Even if the win is not on, it should be possible to avoid defeat. If you avoid defeat, then you stay in the series and if you stay in the series, there is always the chance of winning it. “Being positive” in adverse circumstances leads to 5-0 defeats. Some England teams of the past were very good at staying in the match, staying in the series and sometimes nicking an unexpected win. I mentioned before that I would be happy to see “Boycott and Edrich” starts in preference to the erratic opening partnerships since Ashes 2005 and that is a good example of how not throwing your wicket away is a better plan than “being positive”.
Kelvin West Matters
Kelvin West tells me that he has taken up the UK franchise for the following highly successful Polish barbershop chain.
He will shortly be circulating readers with details of the locations of his Hot Cuts premises in the UK and looks forward to welcoming you all to the delights of his enterprise.
He tells me that on a recent trip to Poland he had his hair cut every day.
Strange Elevens
I received several responses to last month’s Strange Eleven:
Nick Reed asked: “Would I be right in thinking the Strange XI this time round are all multi-initialled (four or more) players? And further that including JWHT Douglas would have made it too easy and/or too painfully reminiscent of 5-0 Ashes defeats? You've also inexplicably failed to include the Sri Lankan first-class domestic bowler Rajitha Amunugama, or to give him his full name: Amunugama Rajapakse Rajakaruna Abeykoon Panditha Wasalamudiyanse Ralahamilage Rajitha Krishantha Bandara Amunugama.”
Tim Mansfield confidently claimed, “ It was one of the easier strange elevens, the solution not masked by the omission of Johnny Won't Hit Today!”
Paul Kilvington sent me this: “If printers charged by the letter for producing scorecards, then I think this edition's Strange XI would cost their team a pretty penny as I believe they all have (to use the politically correct expression) four forenames. Maybe we should call them the 4 X 4 XI?”
All the above win a ride in Ralph Pooley’s Triumph Herald. Here is this months side:
David Roberts Northants
Mike Harris Middx/ Notts
Piran Holloway Warks/ Somerset
Ryan Driver Worcs/ Lancs
Carl Gazzard Somerset
David Paynter Northants
Neil Edwards Somerset
Jack Richards (w/k) Surrey
Tony Penberthy Northants
Chris Ellison Yorks
Charlie Shreck Notts
All you have to do is decide which Jazz Hat fits them all.
South Hampstead Matters
Bob Peach has persuaded me to attend the South Hampstead Dinner that will be held in the clubhouse on Friday 30th March. He tells me that he has also recruited Steve Thompson, Peter Ray, Charlie Puckett, Russ Collins and Dave Perrin to fill out his table. If anyone wants to join us at this convivial event they should call Bob Peach (0208 459 7692) or Ken James (0208 965 1254).
Possibly the Final Ashes Matters
Steve Thompson sent me the following
A member of the Thompson family was present at the tour's highlight on Friday. Katie has been in Sydney since November and also flew to Melbourne for 2nd Day of the Boxing Day Test. Having been exposed to wall-to-wall coverage on arrival she is, after all these years, a convert and a good deal more knowledgeable. Never thought I'd see the day when she'd refer to Harmison bowling a 'crap line'! She'll be referring to 'new rinse' soon.
She's out there for a year and has been waitressing in Sydney but was unfortunately ill when Freddie showed up so only her friend waited on him and had her picture taken with him - the day after 5-0. Freddie was, inevitably, pretty pissed apparently. I apologise if my daughter's face painting hints at any dumbing down in my family's response to Test cricket.
Irritating trends in Modern Cricket number 44 I don’t buy it. The modern cricketer does not play too much cricket. In fact it is the opposite. He does not play enough. A top international batsman will do well to score a thousand runs in a calendar year. In the good old days his counterpart would clock up two thousand plus in an English season alone. You need to bat to hit form and when you find it you need to spend as much time in the middle as possible. You won’t get into a purple patch in the nets. In fact whilst there is nothing wrong with net practice in itself it is all too easy to convince yourself that the aerial shot you hit in the middle of the bat cleared mid wicket or deep square leg, although under match conditions it has an uncanny knack of finding the fielder. Mark Ramprakesh hits a Purple Patch most Augusts and scores the bulk of his season’s hundreds in the process. He doesn’t get to this point by not playing, rather he works on his technique by batting as much as possible and eventually everything gels.
If match practice is essential for batting it is even more critical for bowlers. It is crass of the England management to declare their various seamers fit for test cricket after a rigorous twenty minute work out in the nets. It was clear throughout the Ashes that Freddie did not consider himself match fit. He bowled a few quick deliveries but his spells were only three overs long. Modern test cricket is a 450 overs game. Split down the middle each side will have 225 overs to bowl. If you field five bowlers in your side they will have to average 45 overs each over five days, with the bulk of it concentrated into two or three days. How do you establish whether your injured players are fit for this? The only way is to bowl them for similar periods in practice matches. Harmison, Flintoff and Anderson clearly needed match practice prior to the Ashes series.
In some respects Central Contracts have been good for the English team but it has created a closed community in the Fletcher camp and he doesn’t really want them to play in any other games at all. This is not only detrimental to the players but it also deprives the counties and their supporters from seeing their better players in action. The centrally contracted players get no chance to play themselves back into form and have to endure the agonies of failure after failure at the highest level when they lose their touch. Just ask Strauss and Collingwood what December and January felt like. Ed Joyce has never scored heavily in one-day cricket. But in their wisdom the English management decided to turn him into an ODI opening bat. They decided he needed to supplement his gracefully timed shots with pinch-hitting slogs into cow corner. These must have looked good in the nets. In the middle the opposition soon worked out that he wasn’t a big hitter and was unlikely to clear the ropes. Consequently they let him play his new shot and he kept holing out. He was lucky that he was given a long run of failures before cutting the shot out and playing some longer controlled innings.
The central contract doesn’t allow for loss of form. If you are paying a player a huge sum of money it doesn’t make sense to drop him and bring in someone else. But if you don’t let him play away from the international arena he can only struggle back to form in international matches. England’s past is littered with players who were brought in when others were struggling against the best and they were dropped after a couple of failures themselves. What wouldn’t Mathew Maynard and Rob Bailey have given for a prolonged run. Nowadays you get dropped even if you do well if you are not a contracted player. Ask Owais Shah.
Molloy Matters Since last month’s edition my inbox has been overflowing with requests to identify which of the naked protesters in the surf was Ken Molloy. Well, Ken lives in Madrid these days and was not actually present at the protest. But for those of his fans who have not seen his grinning visage this millennium I am delighted to include the following mug shot to satisfy your curiosity.
Football Matters
One of the drawbacks of playing amateur football is that you often find that you have to put up your own goal nets when you play on public recreation grounds such as Wormwood Scrubs or Hackney Marshes. This can be a chore but Andrew Baker has found that his ladies team simply revel in this activity and are even disappointed if they arrive at a venue that has them pre-erected. Kelvin West sent me this photo of the team in action hanging the nets on Pitch 17 at Gunnersbury Park last weekend.
Googlies and Chinamen
is produced by
James Sharp
Broad Lee House
Combs
High Peak
SK23 9XA
Tel & fax: 01298 70237
Email: [email protected]