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On pitches where the bowlers can do very little, such as at the Asia Cup, the little they manage to do is priceless

Sidharth Monga in Karachi03-Jul-2008

On pitches where the bowlers can do very little, such as at the Asia Cup, the little they manage to do is priceless. The Indian medium-pacers put in just such a performance on a heartless pitch to restrict Sri Lanka to 308.To start off with, Mahendra Singh Dhoni made an aggressive move by playing an extra bowler. “We wanted to think a bit differently, to do things a bit differently,” Dhoni said, after the comprehensive win took them into the final. “If you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same result. We wanted to go with a 4-1 combination, because we have struggled in the middle overs. Since there is not much help in the middle overs, we wanted to have an option there.”
One other thing they did differently – and more importantly – was they opened the innings with RP Singh and Ishant Sharma. Praveen Kumar has, in his short career, been a superb new-ball bowler for India, but that is when he can get the ball to move. In Karachi, however, the pitch has not aided Praveen, and the move worked for India.What favoured Ishant and RP was that the pitch, for the first time in eight matches, had a hint of variable bounce, and as Mahela Jayawardene reckoned, was a bit a slower. And on such pitches bowlers like Ishant, who can hit that length consistently, can be difficult to handle. With RP bowling a tight opening spell of four overs for 11, Ishant was the one Kumar Sangakkara and Sanath Jayasuriya had to go after. A less humble man might claim to have chalked out a strategy to bowl in the blind spot around the left-hand batsmen’s hips – Ishant got edges down the legs off both Sangakkara and Jayasuriya just before they could explode. Those, in fact, were not the best balls he bowled, but he had an interesting battle going on with Jayasuriya building up to that dismissal.RP, who really should have been the Man of the Match, returned for a second spell within the Powerplays to bowl a maiden over to Jayawardene. In his last three overs, bowled at the death, he went for 20 runs and took Kaushal Weeraratne’s wicket, making sure the final charge never arrived.”I am pretty happy with the way they did today,” Dhoni said. “Ishant, RP and Pragyan [Ojha] bowled really well, it doesn’t mean that the other bowlers didn’t. You have to see they had the opportunity with the new ball, the rest of the seamers had to bowl with a fairly old ball.”The old ball has been a problem for India for some time now. They haven’t been great exponents of reverse-swing, and the yorker has been conspicuous in its absence. India did manage to restrict Sri Lanka to 77 in the last 10 overs, but that had a lot to do with the fact that they had got wickets at fairly regular intervals. It was mainly length bowling at the death, with a slower ball here and there; better batsmen than Sri Lanka’s last five would have cherished those dish-outs.Once again, when India came in to bat, Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir gave them an explosive start, which proved to be a blessing for the middle order that usually has a lot more running between the wickets to do than Sehwag or Gambhir. Out of the last 36 hours, India have been involved in cricket-related activities for about 24 hours, so the ease with which they reached the target in 46.5 overs doesn’t begin to reflect the magnitude of the effort. “These bikes are running on reserve energy,” Dhoni joked.Dhoni, Suresh Raina, and Rohit Sharma looked visibly tired by the end of it; the bowlers will be feeling it even more. In the two days that they have between today and the final, they will have to recover physically, and also work out how to put in the other half of the precious little they managed today.

On facing one of the all-time great West Indian fast men and living to tell the tale

Tony Cozier10-Feb-2009

When I first laid eyes on Wes Hall he was in the next parish. As I scratched my guard the bowler in the far distance at the end of a run that would become as identifiable as any in the game was the latest West Indies tearaway.I was the 17-year-old opening batsman for the Lodge School at a time when the three top secondary schools in Barbados were part of the highest division of domestic cricket, along with clubs that routinely included Test and first-class players (presumably it was supposed to be character building). He was 20, immense and with the chiselled physique of the light-heavyweight boxer his father was.Only a few months earlier he had been hurling them down, at appreciable pace but without much control, for West Indies on their 1957 tour of England. He had converted from keeping wickets to knocking them over only a couple of years earlier on leaving Combermere (along with Harrison College, cricket’s other favoured school in Barbados).He was said to be erratic and prone to no-balls. Neither claim lifted our confidence, for whatever else, he was decidedly quick. If he was not sure where the next ball would go, we certainly were not, and since the back-foot law was still in operation, he was pretty much stepping on the batsman’s toes every time he dragged.Somehow, through youthful eyesight, reflexes, bravado, luck, whatever, I clipped a boundary through square leg in the opening over on the way to a scintillating 24. The image has justifiably remained with me, as sharp as if on a high-definition TV screen. When, by now old friends, I felt comfortable enough to mention it to Wes a few months back, he quickly pricked my pride: “You lucky you still living!”Thankfully I never had to face him again. The next time I saw him in the flesh was in the Caribbean against India in 1961-62. He had developed into one of the most feared bowlers in international cricket and I was safely settled in the press box, relishing the thrill of that galloping approach, that explosive delivery, that menacing follow-through, that flying crucifix around the neck that I had first experienced from 22 yards, or considerably less, five years earlier.In the interim I had shivered through Canadian winters, blithely distracted from university studies by reports on
crackling shortwave reception that told of the coming of age of a raft of new stars under the guidance of Frank Worrell: Sobers, Kanhai, Hunte, Nurse, Gibbs and, of course, Hall.As one of the few West Indian journalists following the team in the subsequent years of dominance and in an era when players did not take a critical reference to a poor shot or a wayward spell as a personal insult, I developed friendships with most of those legends. It was most natural with Wes.It was not long before I came to appreciate what CLR James had immediately observed. “Hall simply exudes good nature at every pore,” he wrote in . It might seem a contradiction, for as James also noted, “Hall merely puts his head down and let’s you have it, and it’s pretty hot!” Yet it is a virtue that has never changed.

This is not to say it was his only characteristic. There was a wholehearted energy and enjoyment in everything he did, an obvious sense of fun, vividly captured on the black-and-white footage of the 1960-61 tied Test in Brisbane, featuring his famous frenetic last over and, not least, his equally frenetic half-century.After that series the Australian commentator Johnnie Moyes described Wes as “a rare box-office attraction, a man who caught and held the affections of the paying public”. So it has been throughout a life of several intriguing incarnations.After a couple of car crashes and the exhaustion of giving his all for several teams around the world took their toll and the “pace like fire” (the appropriate title of his autobiography) was extinguished, he took the usual path of retired players, into administration as selector, team manager and, eventually, board president. But there is more to Wes Hall than cricket. He entered politics in his 40s, spending 10 years as a Barbados cabinet minister, and more recently turned to the church to become a minister of a different kind, a legacy of a deeply religious upbringing.They were all connections from which I benefited. Wes was regularly my “reliable source” on complicated cricket issues and I was chuffed when he agreed to officiate at the weddings of my children, although I was careful to emphasise the need to keep the service short and to remind him of the time as Wes is renowned for his entertaining, if often prolonged, oratory as well as for his tardiness.His myriad cricket tales, embellished with highfalutin words as long as his run-up, are guaranteed to leave audiences convulsed in laughter, however many times they have heard them before. His description of that last tied Test over is one of the after-dinner classics.If he happens to be a little late, he is always worth waiting for. When he turned up at my 50th birthday bash at 1am,
numbers were beginning to thin. Wes kept it going for another four hours.

Duncan Fletcher wants to coach, but without the pressure of responsibility, and that’s exactly what the South Africa job gives him

Neil Manthorp20-Nov-2008

Duncan Fletcher was playing golf with three friends in Cape Town a few months ago when play was held up on a particularly long and treacherous par-three. There had still been no movement in his coaching career a year after having left the England job although there had been “a couple of offers”.”The trouble is,” he explained, “I just love the coaching part of the job. I don’t mind if I never attend another meeting or [don’t] have to do any administration ever again, but I really miss the actual coaching.”He said he didn’t want a fancy title or a pile of responsibility, just a tracksuit, a bag of balls and willing students. He made it sound as though he wanted to be somebody’s assistant, a position for which some might have regarded him as a little over-qualified. He accepted as much with a rueful smile.Now, the perfect solution has presented itself thanks to the foresight, maturity and confidence of the incumbent South Africa coach, Mickey Arthur, who is sufficiently secure in his position and own ability to push for Fletcher’s involvement on a consultancy basis. “It was my initiative and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he will make us a better team,” Arthur said. “You need to keep evolving and trying to stay fresh as a squad, and Duncan will add that extra dimension. As for feeling threatened by him, the idea is ridiculous. He doesn’t want my job. He just wants to do what he does best, which is coach.”To understand exactly what it is that makes Fletcher’s engine run, it is useful to speak to a man who has known him for over 20 years as friend, player and coach – former South Africa coach, Eric Simons. “Many coaches can identify the problem with a batsman or a bowler, but only a few can instinctively know how to help the player to fix it,” Simons said. “Duncan’s greatest pleasure in cricket is to see the lights come on in a player’s eyes when the realisation hits home, when he not only knows what he’s doing wrong but also how to fix it.”He was never in it for the glory – he didn’t want recognition or thanks, he just wanted to see players reach their potential and for his teams to win. That, to him, was the ultimate reward.”Fletcher is determined to stay out of the limelight, and requested that his contract with Cricket South Africa not include media duties, a request that Simons acknowledges may be more hopeful than practical. “If he’s still involved in a year’s time when England tour South Africa for a five-Test series, then he will have become part of the furniture, and the novelty will have worn off,” Simons said, “But they will still want to speak to him because he’ll always be associated with the Ashes, and he will always be one of England’s most successful coaches.”But to expect the Australian media to leave him alone when he arrives in Perth in a couple of weeks’ time might be wishful thinking.”Fletcher’s initial contract is for 50 days, and as Arthur said, “he didn’t come cheap, but a man with his record and experience shouldn’t come cheap”. The first 20 days will take Fletcher to Perth whereupon he will return to South Africa before rejoining the squad for the Australian return tour next year.Between South Africa and Hampshire, where he will also coach on a consultancy basis, Fletcher appears to have secured himself the very best assignments – coaching without hassle.When the green finally cleared, he had systematically worked out a strategy that had not occurred to anybody else. The par-three was playing straight into a vicious Cape south-easter, but it was only 176 metres. Nonetheless, everybody was coming up short. Fletcher slowly removed his driver from the bag, to the mirth of his colleagues, gripped down the shaft and hit the ball to 10 feet.”You do whatever it takes to get the job done,” he said, smiling.

The pitch was as bare as any in the preceding matches in the tropical Caribbean and just as heartbreaking for the bowlers

Tony Cozier at Chester-le-Street15-May-2009It might be the Test match ground nearer to the north pole than any other, with the corresponding chill in the air, but the opening day of the Test between the teams at the Riverside Ground was the Antigua Recreation Ground, Kensington and Queen’s Park Oval all revisited.The pitch was as bare as any in the preceding matches in the tropical Caribbean and just as heartbreaking for the bowlers. There was no bounce, no pace, no movement and, consequently, no excitement.The batsmen, in this instance Alastair Cook and the eager Ravi Bopara, gathered their runs with no fuss, just as Andrew Strauss had done with his three consecutive first innings hundreds in Antigua, Barbados and Trinidad.Ironically, while Strauss went cheaply this time, Cook and Bopara advanced past their hundreds, Bopara joining the elite company of Herbert Sutcliffe, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and Graham Gooch as the fifth English player with three in a row.The slowness of the surface curbed their more adventurous strokes, except for one over when Bopara lofted Sulieman Benn for four, six and four to move to within two of his landmark. He then apparently recalled Kevin Pietersen’s extravagance in the Sabina Test back in February when he hit four, four, six, also off Benn, and went for the glory of a six next ball to raise his hundred, only to lob a catch to the keeper. Bopara bided his time and got there with a single a few balls later.Even England’s first day scores were almost identical to those in the Caribbean – 301 for 3 at both the ARG and Kensington; 258 for 2 at Queen’s Park; 302 for 2 here.To their credit, the West Indies bowlers were undeterred by this continuing unfairness and plugged away all day, supported by enthusiastic fielding. One chance was missed, a difficult leg-side deflection off Lionel Baker when Bopara was on 51. A few edges were found and passed but there was nothing for the bowlers.More like this and, just as Chris Gayle
has warned, they will all be trooping off to the IPL and other Twenty20 events where four overs is the extent of their allotment. The main point of Gayle’s controversial and widely discussed comments before the match was that, as far as he was concerned, there is now so much cricket that he soon has to make a choice as to what to give up.As one tournament has followed another -Test, ODIs, Stanford, IPL – he, and a few others in the West Indies team, haven’t had a reasonable break for two years now.Gayle himself has been increasingly sidelined by injuries. Not unexpectedly, he said his choice would be for the shortest form of the game which just happens to be the most lucrative.
That inevitably is a threat to what the administrators refer to as the “primacy of Test cricket”, but pitches that contribute to give such bland, uneven contests such as this and those recently in the Caribbean and elsewhere, do so equally.A 101 reasons were put forward for the few thousand spectators sprinkled around stands yesterday – the early scheduling, the cold, the sporting public’s interest in the climax of the football season (in this neck of the woods, especially Newcastle United’s fight to remain in the Premiership), the recession and so on.More days like this, without any drama or tension, and with batsmen indulging themselves, will ensure that crowds, and television viewers, diminish even further.

Kapil Dev overcame huge odds to become one of the leading fast bowlers of his era. Most impressively, he was at his best against the best team of his time

S Rajesh14-Mar-2010For a nation starved of fast bowlers, the advent of Kapil Dev was a godsend. His batting was pretty handy as well, but there’s little doubt that his major contribution was as a pace bowler, offering India an attacking option with the new ball that they had sorely lacked till then.If the task of bowling fast on flat pitches wore Kapil down, he did remarkably well to camouflage that wear and tear over an international career that stretched 16 years.He announced himself in no uncertain terms in his first series, exhibiting pace and aggression hitherto unseen among Indian bowlers, but in statistical terms the returns from that series were meagre – seven wickets at an average of more than 60. In his first 10 Tests, he conceded more than 39 runs per wicket, and his batting was a stronger suit than his bowling. Sixteen wickets in four Tests against England started the golden run with the ball, and he followed that with 28 wickets in the home series against Australia and 32 in six Tests against Pakistan at an average of less than 18.Those performances signalled a peak in Kapil’s bowling career, when the pace was sharp, the outswinger working to perfection, and the wickets coming his way at a quick rate. In the 13 series he played between July 1979 and December 1983, Kapil’s bowling average went beyond 32 in only three series, while seven times he averaged less than 26. That was also the period when he averaged more than four wickets per Test, and took a five-for 17 times in 52 Tests.He still turned in lion-hearted performances with the ball after that, but not with the same consistency: in 69 Tests from the beginning of 1984, Kapil’s wicket tally dropped to 2.7 per Test, and he also went an entire series – three Tests against Australia at home in 1986 – without a wicket. His batting, though, went up a notch, thus ensuring that his batting average was higher than his bowling average in each of those three periods of his Test career. Of his eight Test centuries, five came during this phase.

Kapil’s best phase as an ODI bowler coincided with two famous victories in world events for India. During the period between May 1983 and March 1986, when India won the World Cup and the World Championship of Cricket, he averaged 31.25 with the bat and 20.39 with the ball, taking 69 wickets in 47 games. His performances remained impressive till the early 1990s, but in the last couple of years of his career his numbers fell away alarmingly: in 36 matches he averaged 13.50 with the bat and more than 37 with the ball. The only aspect that wasn’t affected was his economy rate, which remained well below four runs per over.Towards the beginning of the 1990s, the positive difference between his batting and bowling averages also began to close. Through most of the 1980s his batting average was more than the corresponding one for bowling, but the last time this happened was on December 15, 1991,when, after his 176th ODI, his batting average was 0.13 higher. As he neared the end of his career, his batting and bowling prowess both decreased, and he ended with a batting average almost four runs lower than the bowling one. (Click here for his cumulative ODI averages.)

Kapil’s overall numbers are impressive enough, but what stands out are his bowling stats against the best team of his generation. In 25 Tests against West Indies, Kapil took 89 wickets, which is his second-highest against a single team (he took 99 against Pakistan). The average of 24.89 is his best against any team, marginally better than the 25.35 he averaged in 20 Tests against Australia.In the 1980s, Kapil was among the best bowlers against a line-up that included Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes and Richie Richardson. He dismissed Greenidge eight times in Tests, and Haynes, Richards and Dujon seven times each. (Click here for more details.) In 19 Tests, Kapil’s bowling average against West Indies was less than 23; among those who bowled at least 1200 deliveries against them during this period, only Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee, the two other great allrounders of the era, had better bowling averages. Ian Botham’s numbers were a huge contrast to those of the three other allrounders, though: in 19 Tests he took only 58 wickets at an average of almost 36.

India won only 24 of the 131 Tests that Kapil played, which indicates the team’s overall lack of strength. For almost his entire career, he didn’t have consistent fast-bowling support at the other end, which was the main reason why he was involved in only four Test wins overseas, two of which came in the same series, against England in 1986.Overall, Kapil averaged 18.30 in Test wins, which is next only to Erapalli Prasanna and Bishan Bedi among Indian bowlers who took at least 50 wickets in wins. However, Kapil only took 90 wickets in these 24 matches – fewer than four per Test – which suggests other bowlers, especially spinners when playing at home, had a large role to play in India’s wins.

Apart from his obvious skills as a bowler, Kapil was a more-than-handy batsman down the order. He batted at No.7 through most of his career, averaging a touch over 31, but his stats at No. 8, where he batted 58 times, are among the best for batsmen who’ve batted at that slot. With a cut-off of 40 innings at that position, only two – Daniel Vettori and Mark Boucher – have a better batting average at that number.

The aspect of his ODI bowling that stands out best is his economy rate. Admittedly, Kapil played in an era when ODI scores hadn’t reached the astronomical heights they have today, but even among his contemporaries, his economy rate was among the best.Of the 212 games in which he bowled at least five overs, 63 times he conceded fewer than three runs per over, which is 30% of those matches. Similarly, in another 32% his economy rate was between three and four. Only 34 times did he go at five or more per over.His best performance, in terms of economy rate, was against West Indies in Port-of-Spain in 1989, when he conceded only four runs in seven overs. West Indies won that match comfortably, though. Against Australia in Perth in 1991, he had figures of 1 for 5 in six overs. Those are the only two instances of his conceding less than one run per over. At the other end of the spectrum was his performance against Pakistan in Lahore in 1982, when he conceded 73 in seven in a shortened game.

Among bowlers who bowled at least 5000 deliveries during the period in which Kapil played ODIs, only six have a better economy rate. Among his three rival allrounders, Richard Hadlee has a lower economy rate, while the rates for Imran and Botham are slightly higher.

In the late 1800s, one man was synonymous with cricket, and enchanted all who came to see him bat. Truly was he nearly as big as the game

David Frith01-Aug-2010Today’s iconic image of William Gilbert Grace is a little misleading. The waistline was not always so protuberant and, equally obviously, the beard was not always streaked with grey. One of England’s finest amateur athletes in the 1870s, “WG” became a truly legendary figure not only on the strength of his phenomenal performances on the cricket field over several decades but through his extraordinarily dominant – sometimes bumptious – character.In a cricket environment that few moderns would comprehend, having played his first first-class match in 1865, when just short of 17, and failed to score, WG began totting up first-class centuries the following year with a huge 224 not out for an England XI against Surrey at The Oval. By the time of his final first-class appearance, just over 40 years later, he had laid down statistics that seemed likely to be forever unmatchable.And in one sense they have been just that. While he was not to be the only batsman ever to reach 100 centuries, in his day a run truly was a run. It was one of cricket’s all-time sensations when he registered 10 centuries in 1871. Few pitches in the 1870s and 1880s were batsman-friendly, and WG drew gasps of amazement and admiration as he clamped down on fast shooters on imperfect pitches – even at Lord’s – and whipped the ball to the boundary. His performances amazed and enchanted all who saw him play and read about him in the newspapers, especially in 1874, when he became the first to pass not only a thousand runs but a hundred wickets. Two years later he set yet another breathtaking mark, with the 1000-200 double.Although he was no lofty intellectual, from his rural boyhood he had devised a technique that took batting from its middle ages of development into something that moderns will instantly recognise. In the only brief film clip of WG Grace batting, in which he makes a few hits in the nets for the newly invented movie camera, what catches the eye is that large waistline and grizzled beard as he plays with a slightly angled bat, showing disdain for the ball. But here was the man who, when young, worked out a way of responding to all the bowling that came his way, pioneering the combination of forward play and back, cleverly using his feet, and venting that extraordinary confidence first perceived by his mother as she played with her little lad in the Gloucestershire apple orchard.His reputation for gamesmanship and as a bully was emphasised with each passing summer, and was facilitated by timid umpires and opponents and sycophants who, overwhelmed by his force of character, allowed him to prevail. In 1876, one of his greatest summers, in a non-first-class match for the travelling United South XI against Twenty-Two of Grimsby he was excused a plumb lbw when 6 because, conceded the umpire, the crowd had indeed come to see him play. He went on to 400 not out. In reality, as the players left the field, the scorer made it 399, but WG urged him to round it up to 400, and that was exactly what he did.It was a warm-up for one of the most purple of patches, as shortly afterwards the cricket world marvelled at the first triple-century, 344 for his beloved Gloucestershire in the follow-on against Kent at Canterbury in 1876. He then went straight back to Clifton and made 177 for his county against Notts. And with the visiting Yorkshire players now expecting him to be exhausted, he followed it all with 318 not out against them at Cheltenham.

There could now be no doubt that his was the most famous face in Britain, apart from Queen Victoria’s and possibly Gladstone’s, and his popularity was enormous

Came 1895 and all of England was poised to celebrate his 100th first-class century. He made sure with 288 against Somerset at Bristol, and the banquets and testimonials began. WG demonstrated how he could drink anyone under the table, coupling his love of companionship with an aversion to long speeches. Three years later the event of the summer, the Gentlemen (amateurs) v Players (professionals) match at Lord’s, was dedicated to his 50th birthday. There he and all the other players were filmed as they walked by the pavilion. Grace’s amateurs lost in a thrilling finish, but there could now be no doubt that his was the most famous face in Britain, apart from Queen Victoria’s and possibly Gladstone’s, and his popularity was enormous.Although revered by the nation, Grace sometimes aired an abrasive nature that naturally caused upset. Charles Kortright, the fastest bowler of the age, once knocked his castle over and said, as WG reluctantly departed: “Surely you’re not going, Doc? There’s still one stump standing!”Nor did his two trips to Australia – in 1873-74 and 1891-92 – do much to enhance his reputation. There was no diplomacy about him when he perceived local umpires as inept or biased. So local spectators let him know what they thought of him. That first tour had been his and Agnes’ honeymoon, while on the second tour, financed by the Earl of Sheffield, Grace again took his wife, now with their two youngest children as well, and all for a very fat fee. Alas, if it was thought that the great cricketer’s presence in Australia would counter republican sentiments, His Lordship had picked the wrong man.The great George Lohmann found Grace too much during that tour and stated he would never tour with him again, “not for a thousand a week”. The skipper simply could not help himself. It was the same back in 1878, when Billy Midwinter of Gloucestershire defected to the touring Australians. Grace took a hansom cab from The Oval to Lord’s and kidnapped the player just as he was preparing to bat for the touring team against Middlesex, escorting him to the county match over the river.WG’s other overseas tour had been to North America in 1872, where his celebrity status was confirmed as the collection of carefree amateurs roughed their way through often difficult territory and capitalised on an enthusiastic social life.A pioneer in many ways, Grace was among the first cricketers to endorse products•ESPNcricinfo LtdTest cricket in the 19th century was a narrow avenue by comparison to the cluttered highway of today. Grace played no more than 22 times for England, fittingly scoring his country’s maiden Test hundred, 152, on his debut against Australia at The Oval in 1880 (when two of his brothers, EM and GF – Fred – also played). Six years later he made 170 against the visiting colonials, also at The Oval, though it was not until 1888, for his 10th Test, that he was appointed captain. He was pre-eminent and he was an amateur, but the tall and often brusque West Country doctor was not actually an establishment figure and was not quite of the social standing of Lord Harris, AG Steel and AN Hornby.It is less likely that any of those three would have run out young Australian batsman Sammy Jones as he was tapping down a divot, as WG Grace did in the famous 1882 Oval match, which saw the birth of the Ashes legend. This so fired up “Demon” Spofforth that he bowled with an irresistible fury that brought him a further seven petrified English wickets – though not WG’s: he made 32 out of the sickly 77, leaving the mother country eight runs short of victory.His last Test was at Trent Bridge in 1899, soon after the death of his daughter Bessie. (A son, Bertie, died in 1905). At 51 he knew he had had enough at the highest level: “I can still bat,” he lamented, “but I can’t bend!” A painful breach with his beloved Gloucestershire after 30 years led to a spell as manager and match organiser for the new London County club at Crystal Palace from 1900 to 1904, when he took the opportunity to invite old friends like WL Murdoch and promising young players to enjoy a few matches each summer.He so loved the game that he played as long as he possibly could, his last first-class appearance coming in 1908, at The Oval, where his major cricket had begun 43 years earlier. His final innings in any match was 69 not out for Eltham in July 1914, when he was 66. It was estimated that he had scored over 101,000 runs in all kinds of cricket (with at least 220 centuries), in addition to taking over 7500 wickets with his cunning round-armers.His bowling was accompanied by chatter that would be appreciated by modern chirpers in the field, though it was frowned upon in an age when courtesy and good manners were cherished. Naïve batsmen were sometimes invited to look at a flock of birds (sometimes imaginary) flying over a corner of the field – always directly across a dazzling sun of course. At his favourite position of point, he liked to air his views on batsmen and the state of the game, a practice even more annoying in view of his surprisingly high-pitched voice.With that failing voice he cursed the sinister German zeppelins circling over London with their bombs at the ready. The stress brought on the stroke which killed him in October 1915.Where did the “Doctor” come from? It can seem as if WG Grace spent all his time either playing cricket or raising a family or playing golf, lawn bowls or curling, or out with the beagle hounds or fishing. But he qualified as a medical practitioner in 1879 and was a conscientious GP for some years. But cricket was his life. Some have written of his “emotional immaturity”, his limited reading, his rather off-hand attitude towards wife Agnes. Perhaps one of his recorded utterances best sums it up: he believed that there was no such thing as a crisis, only the next ball.

Alastair Cook’s latest Ashes ton has effectively thwarted Australia’s faint hopes of saving the series

Andrew Miller at the SCG05-Jan-2011It wasn’t much fun being an Englishman in Australia on the last Ashes tour in 2006-07, but at least the Barmy Army landed a blow for Blighty with the best sledge of the trip – a mocking line of T-shirts bearing the legend: “Captain Cook only stopped for a ****”. On the back, there was a picture of the skipper perched on a dunny in Botany Bay, apparently intending to move onto pastures new once he’d done what he had to do.Nearly two-and-a-half centuries later, the descendants of that expedition show no sign of moving on, and neither did the latest English-born Cook to leave his mark on the country’s east coast. Much like the T-shirt version, Australia had expected Alastair Cook’s visits in this series to be brief and perfunctory, as befitting an Ashes career average of 26.21 in 10 previous Tests. But at the back-end of a campaign that began with him matching his previous tally Down Under in a single Test at the Gabba, Cook has marched on to conquer some of the most extraordinary peaks in the game.By the time he snicked off to Shane Watson for a monumental 189, Cook had batted for 36 hours and 11 minutes in the series, or the equivalent of six full days out of the 19-and-a-half that have taken place to date. No Englishman has ever spent longer at the crease in a Test series, and only Wally Hammond, who scored 905 runs on the Ashes tour of 1928-29 has amassed more runs than Cook’s current tally of 766. With a lead of 208 and two days of the Test still to come, it’s not impossible that he’ll get one last opportunity to push on towards the elusive 800 mark – which has been passed on just nine occasions in Test history, and only six times by a player not called Don Bradman.”It hasn’t sunk in yet, well, it has a little bit,” said Cook, who flies back to England at the conclusion of this match, while his team-mates press on to play the one-day series. “When I get home and it’s cold in a week’s time, and you’re on the farm walking the dog, you think actually, yeah, I’ve achieved something special. But it would be even better if we play well for the next two days and get the right result.”Like his fellow left-handed opener Graeme Smith, who stunned England with consecutive innings of 277 and 254 at Edgbaston and Lord’s in 2003, Cook will never be a player to please the purists. He’s a functional entity with a manufactured technique, and when his mechanics let him down – such as occurred in England last summer – he can look both ugly and horribly ineffective, a combination of factors that can leave him closer to the chopping block than a pretty practitioner such as a Gower or a Lara.As far as the England management are concerned, however, Cook is a banker, and has been ever since he defied jet-lag, debutant nerves and India’s spinners to rack up a century on debut at Nagpur in March 2006, when he had only recently turned 21. The faith in his temperament has superseded all qualms about his technique, and it’s remarkable to think that he has now amassed 1022 first-class runs on the current tour of Australia, even though he began the tour with a dreadful pair of innings against Western Australia at the WACA.He made 5 and 9 in that game to reawaken the doubts about his Test berth, but responded with a century at Adelaide in the second warm-up match at Adelaide, and has scarcely looked back since. “I could only have dreamt about this six or seven weeks ago, especially after that first warm-up game,” said Cook. “I didn’t get any runs and this looked a long way away, so I can’t really believe what I’ve achieved and what the side has achieved. It’s been a good couple of months but there are two days of hard work left.”Throughout his latest epic, in which he matched Michael Vaughan’s feat of three centuries in Australia in 2002-03, Cook’s watchfulness outside off stump was matched by a keen appreciation of his scoring opportunities, particularly off the toes whenever Australia’s seamers overpitched, and through midwicket and point respectively on the regular occasions they banged it in too short. He rode his luck on two notable occasions, on 46 when a no-ball referral earned him a second chance, and again on 99 when Phil Hughes failed to scoop a low chance at short leg. But Australia found him to be a roadblock once again, as their faint hopes of saving the series were effectively thwarted.Given that Cook’s game is built on the solidity of his character, the numbers that he has racked up in the past eight months are extraordinary. Going into the second innings of the Pakistan Test at The Oval back in August, he had limped to 106 runs in eight innings at the puny average of 13.25, and was one false stroke from being dropped from the side (if only for the fourth and final Test at Lord’s, because his mental strength would have been sorely missed at the Gabbatoir). Typically, he responded with a gutsy 110, and has now made 886 runs in his last nine innings, at the extraordinary average of 110.75.”I had a tough summer, it was obviously well documented, but when you score runs people tend to leave you alone,” said Cook. “So it was important in that second game at Adelaide, where I scored that hundred in the second innings, I just thought to myself I can score runs in Australia. It gave me that little bit of confidence that you need, and that time in the middle to tell myself that my gameplan does work if I execute it well. It’s worked well so far this trip.”The exact reason for Cook’s transformation still eludes him, however, but all that matters to him is that he enjoys the sensation of being in the form of his life. “Form comes and goes, and I couldn’t hit the middle of the bat six months ago,” he said. “But that’s the secret of sport, isn’t it, why form comes and goes as much as it can do, I don’t know. But you keep working hard and enjoy it when you do do well, because there were some pretty dark times last summer and I’m sure there will be in my career at some other time.”One key reason may be his supreme fitness. As he admitted at Adelaide during the second of his back-to-back hundreds, Cook has been blessed with a physique that hardly sweats even in the most extreme temperatures. What is more, England as a squad have adopted an exhaustive regime under their former rugby-playing fitness trainer, Huw Bevan, in which they practice batting while already knackered. Though he admitted it wasn’t always fun, Cook conceded that the benefits were plain to see.”There’s the modern game, you have to be fit to bat for a long time, it’s not to look good on the beach unfortunately,” he said. “I remember turning up to Perth and before I’d even batted for the first time on tour I had to do a pre-fatigue session. That’s how seriously we were taking it, and I was pretty grumpy at the time because all I wanted to do was bat. But little things like that adds on, and you get rewards later on.”You work hard physically, you work hard on the mental side of the game, but when you’re in this form it all happens quite easily,” he added. “Suddenly, you bat for an hour and you don’t realise you’ve batted for an hour, whereas last summer when I was desperately trying to bat for ten minutes, it felt like a lifetime. You just get in that rhythm, that tempo, and tell yourself not to make mistakes. When you’re not worried about your technique or anything else, that makes it a lot easier. Physically you get a little bit tired, but you’re rather be a little bit tired and get a hundred.”

Stuart MacGill, perhaps doomed to forever be thought of as the leggie who wasn’t Warne, talks about missing the buzz of the game, helping the old enemy, and the infamous boot camp of 2006

Interview by Richard Edwards17-Jan-2011″I think we [legspinners] give ourselves a hiding, but I wouldn’t swap it for the world, and I knew what I was doing to myself”•Paul Kane/Getty ImagesYou come from a famous cricketing family. What was it like following in the footsteps of your father and grandfather?
They had both played for Western Australia, my dad in the early 1970s and grandpa just after the war. My grandpa [Charlie MacGill] was a bit of a hero for us – he opened the batting and bowling for WA and he knocked over Bradman as well, which always looks good on your CV.Because of that were you always destined to be a cricketer?
You know what, I think it was the opposite. When I was about 15 I said to my dad, “I don’t think
I can play cricket anymore. I’m going to play tennis.” I’d hurt my shoulder, so I couldn’t bowl. God knows how I worked out I could still serve a tennis ball. Anyway it turned out I wasn’t much chop at tennis, so I decided to give cricket another go.So you weren’t a schoolboy prodigy?
I finished school in the 1st XI but I was a fringe player. A career in cricket was the furthest thing from my mind but the year I finished school I just started to do better and better in grade cricket and managed to work my way up fourth grade to second grade. Everything happened very quickly and I went from playing bits-and-pieces cricket at school to, within 12 months, being in the Western Australia squad.You were one of the first players to go to the Australian cricket academy. How much did that help your game?
I had played a few games for WA 2nd XI and got picked to go to Sri Lanka with an Academy XI at the beginning of 1991. Unbeknown to me, my mum and dad had a meeting with Rod Marsh [who was going to take over the academy later that year] when I was away. The academy was an amazing time for me. You got access to amazing opportunities.Why did it take you so long to break into State cricket?
I was 20 when I was at the academy, but it took until I was 26 to start playing regular first-class cricket, so you can imagine that was pretty frustrating. The one question that bounces around your head all the time is whether or not you’re good enough. I performed well in club cricket over that period. I bowled to lots of touring teams and took wickets regularly. But the frustration kept increasing, to the point that by 1995 I decided that I needed to leave Western Australia to find out once and for all.Is it true you were used by England to prepare them for facing Shane Warne?
It is. I bowled to the England tourists in 1994-95. I spent a lot of time with that side in Perth, bowling to them all day, every day. They were helping me out with a bit of pocket money on the side as they prepared to face Warney but I think he got a hat-trick in the first Test, so I didn’t do much good!How big a wrench was it to leave WA and head to New South Wales?
I figured that going to NSW, the home of spin bowling in Australia, that would give me some answers. There were five spin bowlers in the NSW squad and I wasn’t even a member of the State squad when I came over. I caught the train from Perth to Sydney, put the car and my life on it and took a bit of a punt. I guess my feeling was that I would find out one way or the other because I needed to put it to bed at that stage – I needed to know if I could do the business. It proved to be a good decision. The first season I averaged around five wickets a match for my club and we won the Premiership, I was added to the State squad and I played the very first game of the following season.Can you remember the moment you found out you had been picked for Australia?
Trent Johnston, who has since captained Ireland, was playing with me for North Sydney. He received a message and he came up to me when I was bowling. I don’t like people talking to me when I’m bowling, so there was a bit of a sigh. I thought he wanted me to move my field but instead he said: “I just wanted to let you know that you’re going to Adelaide this week and you’ve been picked to play for Australia.” It’s hard to explain but seriously every time I tell that story – and it just happened to me again now – I get very emotional. That’s the moment for me, the moment that validates everything I’ve ever done.You managed to pick up a decent first scalp too…
Jacques Kallis sweeps the ball very well and the boundaries at Adelaide are very short, square of the wicket. I thought, “Christ, what’s going to happen here?” so I bowled my first variation – my slider or zooter – and he played all round it. It was a relief, not just because it was my first wicket but because there was a lot of pain coming my way if he had hung around.

“I don’t have the luxury of playing IPL, but I wish I could play still, not just for the money but I really, really miss the competition. I would die to be able to play State cricket”

You’ll probably be remembered as Shane Warne’s understudy. Does that rankle?
A lot of people ask me about Shane Warne but let me tell you, I never competed with another player – it’s not massively helpful. Having him in the side was a huge advantage predominantly because he was such a superstar. The huge advantage when you play for your country is that you’ve got the best bowlers from every [state] team playing together, which means it’s a hell of a lot easier playing for your country than for your state.When do you think you peaked as a cricketer?
There are probably three main periods when I was at my best. One was in my second Test match, in Pakistan, when everything sort of clicked. I started landing everything roughly where I wanted to and it hadn’t really been that way on the tour up to that point. The second would have been my statistically most pleasing Test, which was the one against England at the SCG during the 1998-99 Ashes. I was very tired at the end of a long season but I managed to pick things up and get it going again. The third one was a Test in the West Indies in Barbados [in 2003] when I took nine wickets. It was a real flat deck and we were in the field for a ridiculous amount of time. That was probably my best performance.That tour to Pakistan has become famous for your reading exploits – how many books did you really get through?
It wasn’t 24, the number was actually 17. I must stress, though, that the quality wasn’t great. I wasn’t reading Jane Austen or , it was more your pulp fiction that you find on a shelf of the newsagent’s at airports.You were a victim of the infamous John Buchanan boot camp in 2006. Did that shorten your career?
I think that the premise and goal of the boot camp has merit. Unfortunately in an international cricketer’s season, the time is just not there. When I did my boot camp it was at the start of the longest season Australia had ever played. The intention was good and honourable, but, mate, seriously, choose something that’s not going to finish someone’s career. It wasn’t just me, we had an amazing run of injuries that summer – Brett Lee, Brad Hodge, Michael Clarke, Shane Warne and Michael Kasprowicz – who never played again.”A lot of people ask me about Shane Warne but let me tell you, I never competed with another player – it’s not massively helpful”•Getty ImagesDo legspinners take more punishment than other bowlers anyway?
I would certainly argue that they do. I can’t feel the end of my fingertips now, and both my knees are shot to pieces. I think we give ourselves a hiding but I wouldn’t swap it for the world and I knew what I was doing to myself. I wish that I had been looked after a little better, but I played for Australia and I had a good time. We work very hard for ourselves but also for our country, and I wish I could still play but I can’t. I don’t have the luxury of playing IPL but I wish I could play still, not just for the money but I really, really miss the competition. I would die to be able to play State cricket.Was it tough to call it a day on that tour to the West Indies in 2008?
The reason I called it a day was because I was experiencing symptoms that were supposed to have been fixed by the carpal tunnel surgery that I’d had. My left hand went and then a day later my right hand went too. I couldn’t feel when the ball was leaving my hand. It was a debacle. I wasn’t fit to do what I was being asked to do.Are you enjoying your new career?
I do breakfast radio on Triple M in Sydney. I’m not sure if I’m any good at it but I enjoy it and I’m hoping that eventually I manage to find something that in some way replaces the buzz I used to get from cricket. I don’t know if a professional sportsman ever manages to do that.

The third over of Bangalore’s innings, bowled by Prasanth Parameswaran, cost 37 runs. Here’s how Chris Gayle did it

ESPNcricinfo staff08-May-20112.1 SIX, Sorry, it’s Gayle who is into the attack, makes room, gets under a length ball, opens the face, and clears point easily.
2.2 (no ball) SIX, this is ridiculous. Demolition. Slower ball, in his swinging arc, and he lofts it over point again. What’s more? It’s a no-ball.
2.2 FOUR, Short ball, at this gentle pace, murdered past midwicket.
2.3 FOUR, Mahela said at the toss he had plans for Gayle. Right. The plan seems to have four to five men on the off-side circle and bowl back of a length. PP does just does that, and he punches it between extra cover and cover.
2.4 SIX, Carnage. Gayle makes room, wallops a length ball over cover. He has taken this Go Green campaign seriously, and will finish this before flood lights can come on
2.5 SIX, Where do you hide when Dilshan and Gayle are going like this? He is toying around with them. Comes down the track and goes straight this time. 91 metres. Over the sight screen.
2.6 FOUR, inside edge, but that too goes wide of the keeper for four. This is robbery in day light. Bangalore are demolishing Kochi. In case you didn’t notice, 37 runs came off this over.

Twenty years after Peter Roebuck’s last first-class game he was still struggling and often despairing, searching for something to fulfill him

Peter English13-Nov-2011Scatty and focused, brilliant and fallible, muscular yet incredibly fragile, Peter Roebuck was too many men rolled into an irreplaceable one. Individuals like him often sit on the outside, making choices and then fretting over the consequences.Minor ones, like weighing up describing Shane Watson as a banana-bender, willow-wielder, or leather-flinger. Or see-sawing over whether he really wished he’d played for England or had been right to feel relief that he never faced international scrutiny or expectation. Or life-ending ones like in the moments before his fatal decision in South Africa.In the end it was a wonder he lasted so long, dealing with demons and demonising which shadowed him during his playing days and forever after. Deep down, I think, he knew he would determine his end. A modern-day Harold Gimblett.Two weeks ago he wrote that in retirement Simon Katich would enter the most challenging phase of his life. Twenty years after Roebuck’s last first-class game he was still struggling and often despairing, searching for something to fulfill him.He had tried funding orphans in Africa, sending them on to university and successful careers. He’d been a de facto grandfather and cricket coach. Of course there was his prolific writing and his never-to-be-replicated style. There’d been properties a few minutes from Bondi Beach in Sydney and Straw Hat Farm in South Africa, along with intermittent dreams of a shift to India.Roebuck was full of flaws and imperfections, but this is not an apology for him. Nobody agrees with all the decisions a person makes. Roebuck didn’t really do friendship, but he was a cherished one of mine.As a young man I stayed at his house for a summer. He’d call me ‘Master English’ and at times it sure felt like boarding school: chores, informal lessons while watching the cricket, and gardening. I’d met him years before at my first Adelaide Test. A friendly hello was followed with tips on writing and a crash-course into the Tale of the Many Roebucks. A letter followed filled with, I presume, more advice – but it was illegible. In those early days of resisting laptops he had developed a style of shorthand for copytaking that only one person could decipher. Eventually emails made written conversation possible and became a popular medium for advice and lecturing which, when you knew him, dripped with Roebuckian care.”No idea about babies,” he typed from Sri Lanka in September, “except don’t read books and just respond as a human – no one is perfect!” He was great at delivering advice, but rarely took it. Not from others or himself.Roebuck occasionally reflected that he shouldn’t have criticised Richard Hadlee in the lead-up to Somerset’s County Championship match against Nottinghamshire in 1986. As a new newspaper writer he felt compelled to tell the truth and pointed out some weaknesses of a fast man presumed by most to be at his peak. Somerset batted, Roebuck opened and the angry Hadlee’s first ball should have bowled him – or hurt him. Somehow it didn’t and almost two days later Roebuck’s obduracy – the perfect word for him, especially in a three-day game – had taken him to an unbeaten 221, his highest first-class score.He was one of only two English county players to register hundreds against the Australians in 1989 and it always made him chuckle that the other was Mark Nicholas, another media- and hemisphere-hopping ex-pro. That summer pushed him closer to an England cap, but then he captained the A team in a one-day loss to the Netherlands and that was that. The flashbacks made him smile and he was always surprised to hear stories about himself that were always true.My favourite Roebuck anecdote has him batting in a county game and calling his partner, wicketkeeper Neil Burns, for a mid-pitch conference, seemingly to discuss the state of the game. Maybe it was 20 for 5, or 30 for 6 (you never relied on Roebuck for a genuine fact or stat) and there was lots to discuss. It was also six days into an away trip for Somerset and Roebuck’s brain was scrambling amid the carnage. “Neil, I think I’ve left the key in the front door of my house.”Doubtless, Roebuck will still be made fun of. Moreover, he will be missed. For his mix of rambling and astute monologues, his engaging company and writing, and being the subject of so many intriguing stories. For always losing his straw hat and complaining about his laptop. For insisting he was more Australian than everyone else in the press box. For so often exiting mysteriously before play, a dinner or a tour had ended.