Column 20, 2015 – Playing with a smile

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 123, Friday June 26, 2015.
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Giving up every summer Saturday to play cricket is a big ask.

Not just for you, but for your wife and kids. Or husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, mum and dad: whoever it is you share your life with.

There are myriad reasons to do it, untold ways in which cricket enriches our lives, characters and friendships, many of which this column has touched on in the past.

But the most important thing is to enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, there really isn’t much point.

And it’s not just us on village greens. The visiting Kiwis have reminded everyone, not least England, the importance of enjoying the game.

Brendon McCullum, short of runs this tour by his own lofty standards, has not stopped smiling. His charges, too, go about their business as if they’re actually enjoying being well paid to travel the world playing cricket. Fancy.

When McCullum got the captaincy two years ago, his countrymen regarded their national cricket team as “overpaid, under-delivering prima donnas,” he says, “and a lot of that was fair. One of the things we decided we had to change was the public perception of us as people.”

Coach Mike Hesson played his part, encouraging the team to “play like the kids who fell in love with the game in the first place.”

It shows.

Win or lose, the fun they’re having is infectious, and the joy of it permeates their cricket. They have reminded us all of the value of playing with a smile.

But the game is not always joyful. Saturday was probably the least fun I’ve ever had on a cricket field.

We were generally sloppy in the field, but the worst of it was 10 dropped catches. TEN! Two of us had hat-tricks of drops. I was one of them. They got easier too: the first was difficult, the second regulation, the third so straightforward I remain at a loss to explain how it ended up on the floor. It was gloomy and drizzly; we were off twice for rain; the ball was an oval bar of soap; the straight boundary was unprotectably short; we only had 10 men – we had plenty of excuses. Bottom line: we were dreadful, we got thrashed.

It’s difficult to enjoy a game like that.

Particularly difficult, after that abject nonsense in the field, to remain chipper having got out cheaply, then sat there watching all your teammates get out cheaply.

Difficult, but important.

About the only thing you can do when you’ve been that bad is shake the opposition by the hand one by one, look them in the eye, smile, and tell them well played.

Then go home, mope a little bit, but not too much. We owe it to our loved ones and the sacrifices they make to put a brave face on this nightmare of ineptitude, struggle through it, and turn up next week with full ear-to-ear grins ready to pretend it never happened.

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Column 19, 2015 – Full throttle

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 122, Friday June 19, 2015.
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Traction control is designed to help you not crash. It regulates power, minutely applies brakes and adjusts suspension to individual wheels, increasing grip and reducing skid risk.

It’s actually quite difficult to lose control of a modern car. It creates a false sense of confidence. I drove through town with a flat tyre the other day. It handled so smoothly I didn’t even notice. It masks problems.

Turn traction control off, however, and you have a very different beast. A drunken, lumbering, overweight behemoth with all the cornering prowess of an oil tanker.

But a car designed to function without all that nonsense in the first place – now that’s a different proposition altogether. No power steering, no ABS, no traction control. Just raw, stripped engineering. You can feel the tarmac through your fingers on the wheel and the seat of your pants. A beautifully balanced chassis and a honed engine perched directly over the drive wheels, right behind your head. There’s an elegance, excitement and sense of eager purpose to it that traction control can never give you. But if you lose it, you’ll lose it big time.

That’s a long set up.

I hope it’s worth it.

Attempting to play hard, aggressive, foot-to-the-floor, fast and furious cricket in a luxury family estate with the traction control off is asking for trouble. The England we saw at the World Cup was just not equipped for that kind of ride. They were still driving like they had a boot full of shopping and the kids’ bikes on the roof.

The engine – let’s keep this metaphor revving into the red zone – of that side is the same as this new one: Morgan, Root, Buttler. But it’s built on an all-new chassis with state-of-the-art running gear. And boy, does it go.

This shiny new vehicle, besides being a metaphor, is a mindset. It’s an attitude, a sense of belief, a statement of intent. And it has worked wonders in very short order.

In their first four outings, they scored over 400 for the first time, very nearly chased down 400 for the first time, made their third consecutive score of 300+ for the first time, and then their fourth, chasing 350 with six overs remaining. It’s the fastest scoring ODI series ever.

Previously, England’s approach to batting in one day cricket was not unlike our efforts in club cricket: play yourself in, keep wickets in hand, go hard when you’ve got a platform. Us mere mortals have to play that way.

But we’re an ageing hatchback to their race-tuned track cars. They can go, and keep going, at full throttle.

Occasionally of course, they’ll spin off the track. This has already happened to an extent: that record-breaking 300 was universally regarded as disappointing. Imagine that six months ago.

300 being a bit disappointing is a remarkable place to suddenly find ourselves. It’s going to be a fun ride. Buckle up.

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Column 18, 2015 – Girls allowed

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 121, Friday June 12, 2015.
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What does it mean to throw like a girl, run like a girl, play like a girl? These are the questions in the Always #likeagirl campaign, a major winner in last month’s D&AD awards, advertising’s equivalent of the Oscars.

For the world’s biggest advertiser (Always is owned by Proctor & Gamble, whose annual ad-budget is around $5 billion) this is provocative, unusual stuff.

With not a product demo in sight, the campaign sets out to reclaim the phrase ‘like a girl’, and flip its meaning from insult to empowerment.

It stole the show at this year’s Superbowl, dominating the conversation in both mainstream and social media. If you’re not in either advertising or America, you probably missed it. It’s worth Googling and pretty inspiring, even – perhaps especially – for those of us not generally in the market for sanitary towels.

My youngest daughter plays cricket after school on Mondays, and my niece plays in the U9 section of a big club. My oldest tells me cricket isn’t an option for her at school, just as netball isn’t an option for boys. This means I don’t know any females over the age of eight who play cricket.

So it was most heartening that the league side we played Saturday included three young women. They were not making up the numbers. One batted at four, one opened the bowling, the other was first change. All three had played district or county.

In sports like rugby where physical power is so central, girls playing in men’s teams is neither sensible nor common, but in cricket there is no reason why not.

The girls we played Saturday all said they enjoyed the challenge of playing men’s league.

Women’s cricket has come a long way in a short time. Believe it or not it was only 1999 when the MCC admitted its first women members. Former captain and women’s membership campaigner Rachael Heyhoe Flint was among those inaugurated in The Long Room at Lord’s, ending 212 men-only years. (The only woman previously admitted during play was Queen Elizabeth II.)

The women’s national side and the funding and support it received is probably the only unqualified success story of the Sky TV deal swelling English cricket’s coffers this last decade. Last year they entered the professional era with 18 centrally contracted players.

Two years ago there was quite a stir caused by the prospect of Sarah Taylor playing first class cricket for Sussex men’s team. It never happened, despite many high profile observers declaring her good enough.

It will happen. Like the 450 Test run-chase and the 10-ball limited overs 50, it’s inevitable. Another of those firsts just sitting out there waiting to be ticked off someone’s list. That someone may even now be out there learning their game in men’s club cricket.

And as for the ‘like a girl’ comparisons, on Saturday’s evidence, running and throwing like a girl seems like a pretty good idea to me.

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Column 17, 2015 – Umpires and mistakes

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 120, Friday June 5, 2015.
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Last Saturday, neither side had an umpire.

They are not mandatory at our level, but both sides are ‘expected to provide’ an ECB ACO qualified umpire, and normally do. Sometimes there’s only one, but it’s rare to have none. You need them. You miss that neutral authority.

Player-umpires are always problematic. It’s difficult to accept the bloke who was bowling an hour ago and batting five minutes ago as a neutral voice of authority.

Also they invariably officiate over their teammates as batsmen – never as bowlers, as they’ll always be in the field with them for that.

This is very tricky. You always risk the wrath of ‘triggered’ teammates, or ‘robbed’ opponents.

Now. I am not going to dwell on detail or specifics here – we did enough of that in the pub afterwards, which is where it should stay. Suffice it to say that as an umpiring side, we may have fallen short of elite level.

But never mind, I say. Everyone did what they thought was right at the time, at a task they were performing reluctantly, and if there were mistakes (there were mistakes) they were honest ones, driven by the compulsion to be fair to our opponents – to the detriment of our own team – rather than biased against them. They were, if anything, admirable mistakes.

Mistakes are not such a bad thing anyway. They usually even out. Perfection is unattainable. As long as the intent is pure, we must accept any errors.

Whatever you think of DRS (I have expounded on it in the past, and if anything am becoming less of a fan as time goes by) the one thing it consistently highlights is just how difficult the umpire’s job is.

Umpire’s Call – a somewhat preposterous construction which basically reduces decision-making to tiny parameters within which the machines can’t agree – appears to be where elite umpires now operate. It is, as someone said on twitter during the proliferation of Umpire’s Calls during the second NZ Test, like arguing with your spouse: identical information can prove they are right or wrong depending on which apparently arbitrary position they took in the first place.

The thing is, mistakes are part of the game. They’re what get you out, and other people’s are how you get away with your own. They’ll never be entirely eradicated.

And would we want them to be?

The conclusion of ‘The Greatest Test’, Edgbaston 2005, was a mistake.

Kasprowicz gloves Harmison behind to the keeper and we cut to the umpire raising that flamboyantly crooked finger, the moment immortalised by the late great Richie Benaud simply shouting their names in breathless excitement: “Jones!” (pause) “Bowden!” It’s spine-tingling stuff even a decade on.

But replays clearly show that the glove was off the bat in the moment the ball struck it. DRS would have overturned that decision. Not out. Match and Ashes almost certainly lost. Is that what you want?

I’ll keep the mistakes, thanks. They’re all part of it.

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Column 16, 2015 – Playing on the mind

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 119, Friday May 29, 2015.
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Screwing up in cricket has a unique way of messing with your head.

Most team sports you’re part of a bigger whole, and it’s often hard to tell where the chain broke or who messed up. And if you miss a straight black on the pool table, or slice into the cabbages on the golf course, it’s only you it annoys.

But in cricket, your incompetence lets your mates down.

The core of it lies in that oft-quoted aphorism that it’s a team game played by 11 individuals. It is you – just you in the spotlight – who must do it. Make the runs, take the wicket, stop the boundary, CATCH IT!

This is why it’s fun. That pressure is wonderfully focussing, you will push yourself harder because others rely on you, and success is all the sweeter for it.

But it makes failure even more bitter. Dropped catches and disasters with bat or ball are harsh because it’s not just you they punish, it’s the team. Your inadequacies are manifest, laid bare for all to pick over. And, most cruelly of all, the structure of the game means there’s always plenty of time for you to mull over your mistakes.

Cricket definitely provokes self-analysis. Meeting with triumph and disaster (and treating those two imposters just the same) shapes your character, as well as your game.

I don’t think I’m overly sensitive, but I am not beyond kicking myself, and certainly prone to dwelling disproportionately on my failings.

A few weeks back I brought a low-scoring game to an abrupt conclusion, gifting the 14 runs they needed in four filthy deliveries.

It was a nasty time to bowl your first ball, the batsmen were set, the game was gone anyway – no matter how many excellent get-outs I am handed by commiserating teammates, or how true I know them to be, I also know I blew it. Not a day has passed since when I haven’t thought about it and shaken my head in disgust.

Occasionally I’ll daydream about what should have happened. How the game might have gone if those four deliveries hadn’t been ludicrous full-tosses. Wickets, maybe. Or dots. Dots would be fine.

Next time. There’s always next time.

So here’s a question: are introspective self-flagellating dreamers naturally drawn to cricket, or does cricket itself provoke that response in people? The game has its share of grumpy brooders, but it’s also full of happy-go-lucky idealists and self-aware, well adjusted realists. Few of any cast are exempt from this phenomenon. It’s not a simple question. I’m not sure it’s answerable.

But there is one thing we can be certain about: cricket plays on the mind.

I’m away with the family for half term, and as I write just played my last game for a fortnight. Clearly the best way to leave it is to bowl two overs for 20, and then nick off for a third ball duck.

Brilliant. Have a nice holiday.

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Column 15, 2015 – Massive trust issue

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 118, Friday May 22, 2015.
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In a grimly ironic mirroring of Downton’s disengagement charge against KP, over the last year or so there’s been a creeping feeling of disconnect from team England among fans.

Some of it is to do with selection: clinging on to Cook as ODI captain until giving it to Morgan was a poisoned chalice; the stupefying refusal to pick promising young talent like Hales and Rashid.

And some is an ongoing frustration with a kind of wilful conservatism of thought, an obfuscation of truth and reality with tedious, meaningless, cliché-ridden platitudes, and the apparent conviction that the way to run something ostensibly joyous and fun is through tracksuited Stasi whose main function seems to be calculated press leaks.

Cricket fans among my teammates, friends and family, colleagues and twitterati, probably quite accurately represent the general spectrum – from a passing interest if there’s no football or rugby on, to statistic-chewing fanatics who will get up at 3.30am to watch Pakistan v Bangladesh. There has been a marked shift in attitude among them of late. Many don’t feel that the England cricket team represent them anymore.

Another factor in the loss of hearts and minds has been the consistent and prolonged lack of respect, for both their employees and their public, shown by the ECB.

Paul Downton and Peter Moores both probably deserved to lose their jobs, but neither deserved to find out the way they did. Moores was actually in the middle of an international fixture when journalists told him he’d been fired. Who, precisely, did that benefit? What does it say of an organisation that they think so little of their own people? Something for potential employees to be mindful of, be it a new coach or a new chef.

The great irony of KP-gate this time around is that it’s not about KP. It is indeed, as Andrew Strauss insisted, about trust. Just not in the way he thinks. It is again ironic that he used the word and hid behind the concept so heavily last Tuesday.

Colin Graves told the cricketing public: forget personalities, if Pietersen went back into county cricket and scored lots of runs, the selectors couldn’t ignore him.

10 weeks later, Pietersen makes his extraordinary front-page-grabbing 350 for Surrey, and with jaw-dropping hypocrisy, even by his new employer’s standards, Strauss publicly declares once more that Pietersen will not be considered for selection regardless.

You’re damn right there’s a “massive trust issue”, Straussy old bean.

For the first time I’m aware of – perhaps ever? – many English cricket fans are actively willing England to fail. They’d rather see McCullum with his foot on Cook’s throat. Because it might lead to change? Because they prefer that stripe of cricket? Who knows.

I’m personally not feeling quite that disenfranchised yet, but I understand why people are.

Graves, Strauss and whoever they recruit as coach have some serious work to do. And the most important stuff is nowhere near the field.

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Column 14, 2015 – All-rounders

Printed in The Cricket Paper, issue 117, Friday May 15, 2015.
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Selection in professional cricket, especially at the highest level, will always depend on the balance of the side, which is invariably dictated by the available talent pool.

The simple option, taking the keeper as read, is five batsmen and five bowlers. This can leave you a bit light on batting though, so what you really want is an all-rounder.

So option two is five batsmen, an all-rounder and four bowlers. This is the classic set up. If you haven’t really got an all-rounder, you’ll have to compromise on the purity of your batsmen, and pick a couple who can bowl a bit, as sort of two halves of your fifth bowler.

A luxury version is four batsmen, two all-rounders, four bowlers. But you don’t see that a lot outside of T20, because genuine international class all-rounders are very, very rare.

A genuine all-rounder can be defined as someone you could pick solely as a specialist bat OR as a dedicated bowler – but who just happens to be both. One of the five best batsman AND one of the five best bowlers in the country.

Apply that criteria strictly, and you’ll see there really are very few in the international game. Lots of players we call all-rounders fall short of it – they’re really bowlers who can bat, or batsmen who can bowl.

In club cricket, standards are naturally a little more relaxed, so you’re much more likely to have players who satisfy the genuine all-rounder criteria. Ravi Bopara and Luke Wright, for example, while arguably slightly wanting in both disciplines internationally, would be blow-them-away match winners in most clubs.

All-rounders in club cricket are pretty common. In fact, most clubs have got at least a couple, and if they have a good game, it’s amazing how often they decide it. They are usually the players you remember from prior encounters in previous seasons.

Our first league game of 2015 was against old friends and rivals Godshill. We know them well, and were well aware that their star all-rounder would be key. Coops is a fine swing bowler and a monstrous batsman. He doesn’t slog, but he hits the ball as hard as anyone I’ve ever played with or against. To field close in the covers to him, I would want to be clad in 20 layers of bubblewrap.

It’s an over-simplification of course, but not by much: the game would be decided by whether or not we could get him out.

We could not.

England have a promising all-rounder in Ben Stokes. Still maturing as a player – mentally more than physically, as his recent run-in with Marlon Samuels ably demonstrated – he is prodigiously talented. If he can harness that temper rather than surrendering to it, he could yet be the real deal. My money is on England going for option two when they line up against a powerful New Zealand at Lord’s next week. Let’s hope he makes the difference.

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