Grassroots Cricket

A slight move away from the colours and noise of Twenty20 and One Day International cricket this week with a look at the game at the local level, true cricket. I’m lucky enough to live in Cambridge, so on summer weekends, there is usually a game going on either on Parker’s Piece which is one of the green open spaces in the city as seen below, or Fenner’s which is situated behind the building shown in the background of the picture below.

This was 20 over cricket before Twenty20, 150 odd runs scored in the first innings of 20 overs doesn’t exactly make it a boundary fest. I guess there are many factors as to why that is, daisies in the outfield indicate that the ball may not skip across it and the pitch itself didn’t exactly have the ball jarring the handle.

The other aspect that impressed me at this level was the excellent physical condition of the players. The batsman here is said to have done a sub-12 second 100 metres at one time and I would believe him. If it was freefall out of a plane.

 

But seriously, like all sports, the further away you get from international standards the lower the quality. But then like scarce diamonds in the mud, you really treasure them when you find those quality moments, a couple of nice drives down the ground were worth more than the runs they got. Though for the period I was watching, defence seemed to be the order of the day. This game isn’t just about batsman and there was some admirable bowling too.

 

As a spectator, I treated it like any other game. I nodded appreciatively at the good bits and shook it and muttered expletives under my breath at the not so good bits. Between times a few ales were sunk, so overall a quite relaxing way to waste an afternoon.

The next day I was in London and taking a stroll through Battersea Park while the lunch sunk in, happened upon some more park cricket. Plenty of bounce off the pitch here and short boundaries too, so I loitered and watched a couple of overs. It was 12 balls later that my sister’s boyfriend piped up and asked if we were watching County cricket. I almost managed to say yes.

I thought it would be resolved by now, but the Zimbabwe issue rumbles on. Please ICC make the right decision. Zimbabwe Cricket is closely linked to Mugabe’s government and the ICC has the power to show it condones the intimidating and violent behaviour of those in power to stay in power. Zimbabwe should be suspended from membership of the ICC.

England flatter to deceive, Windies look upwards and the Royals are crowned champions

Right, I’ve been quite busy over the past week, which means that the ‘blog has had to suffer. I apologise for this one, I will have more time next week for a super special entry, I promise!

The 3rd Test of England vs New Zealand started today at Trent Bridge in Nottingham and it wasn’t long before England were in deep Trent water at 85 for 5. I guess like any other England fan, I look at the top 6 English batsmen and think, that though it looks a touch defensive, on their day they should be able to post good totals. However, that’s ‘on their day’ and if doesn’t come against as lightweight attack as the Kiwis have, it could be a blue moon in daylight before it does happen. For my money England have really missed the aggressive impetus that Marcus Trescothick used to give at the top of the order since he retired. I dread to think what a South African attack will do to our batsmen later on this summer. At least Pietersen and Ambrose showed what was required and though they got out towards the end of the day, 273 for 7  is a great recovery considering the English post-lunch blues. If the home team can eke out another 40 or 50 runs, they should be confident of holding New Zealand to something short of that total when they come out to bowl.

Across the Atlantic in the Caribbean, Australia are finding a West Indies side that are at least up for the fight which is more than could be said on their tour of England last year, when they apologetically rolled over for a 3-0 defeat. In truth since that low point, West Indies Test match performances have improved in recent months with a win against South Africa in Port Elizabeth, a win against Sri Lanka in Port of Spain and genuinely competing with Australia for the first four days of the 1st Test at Sabina Park before capitulating on the last day. They have a battery of decent quicks, Taylor, Powell and Edwards supported by Bravo and a rock in their batting lineup, Chanderpaul, for others to rally around. Some decent batsmen to support ‘Tiger’, Sarwan and Gayle and a spinner would give them a better balance. So are the Aussies wobbling? I wouldn’t believe it, sure most of the marque names of the past decade have gone, but don’t believe for one second that the Aussies are about to relinquish their throne. Well done West Indies I say.

I can’t end a review of the week without commenting on the IPL finals. After Punjab threw it away in the semi, to my mind it could only be Warne’s Rajahastan Royals to win the title, albeit I thought they might do it a bit more comfortably than leaving it until the final ball of the match. Credit should go to their opponents Chennai for making the match one that ebbed and flowed right up to the last over, in grave contrast to the one-sided semi finals. My personal favourite moment of the semis was watching batsman after hapless batsman trying to slog Warne away and failing as he turned the ball at right angles off the pitch!

IPL set for grand finale

So 56 games after this ‘hurricane’ through the game began one of 4 teams stands on the edge of becoming the inaugural winners of the Indian Premier League, if they can get to Sunday and win in the final.

So who’s there? Making an absolute mockery of the notion that you get what you pay for, or perhaps proving that having money doesn’t necessarily mean you know what to do with it, the 3 highest spending clubs did not make it to the semi-finals!

• Mumbai Indians – Squad Cost: $111.90million;
• Bangalore Royal Challengers – Squad Cost: $111.60million;
• Deccan Chargers – Squad Cost: $107.01million.

Well done to those franchises who obviously got dazzled by star players instead of those who could do a job for them!

True congratulations should go to Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals, who finished top of the table with the lowest squad cost in the tournament ($67million). Is Warne the finest captain Australia never had? On this evidence yes. He has shown that no matter how much money you squirt around, it is no substitute for the nous that he has. If he were a footballer he would be a top level manager. What little he did spend on foreign imports they played a key part for him. Graeme Smith and Shane Watson, Sohil Tanvir and Watson again with the ball can all hold their heads high. He also brought through young local players such as Asnodkar and Trivedi, showing much promise with bat and ball respectively.

In second, Kings XI Punjab powered by the awesome batting performances of the imported Aussie Shaun Marsh, who tops the runscoring table with 593 runs from 10 innings at an average of just under 75. Just to underline his performances, he is 70 runs ahead of his nearest rival who took an extra 3 innings to get into that 2nd place. It wasn’t all his work mind with international class acts like Sangakkara, Jayawardene and the captain Yuvraj all weighing in with runs. Their bowling line-up is at least as good as their batters with Sreesanth, Chawla and Ifran Patan all currently in the top 10 wicket takers list of the tournament. A solid all-round team.

Chennai Super Kings snared third spot with the captain Dhoni being one of the few high cost players to be near worth his asking price. He has inspired his team into the semi-finals and he should get kudos for this. Matty Hayden got them off to a flyer before he left for the Caribbean, as I predicted he would, but in terms of batting their’s has been a team effort rather than outstanding individuals. Similarly with the bowlers, though I’m sure Murali will be disappointed to only have 8 wickets from his 13 games. Their best player has arguably been the South African Morkel whose hard hitting has got him 225 runs at a strike rate of 150 and 13 wickets.

The last team in the semi-finals are the Delhi Daredevils by a single point from the 5th placed team, the Mumbai Indians. Getting them off to blazing starts in the tournament are the opening pair that took India to the first ever international Twenty20 trophy last year in South Africa. Gambhir and Sehwag have pedigree and the fact they have batted together at international level is obvious, Gambhir playing the ‘anchor role’ (strike rate: 144) to Sehwag’s more swashbuckling stance (strike rate: 187). No team is just made of batsmen however, as I’m sure the Master of Miserly, Glenn McGrath, influencing the attack might have something to do with why they’ve got to the semi-finals.

Looking over all the teams, I feel Kings XI Punjab team have got the best balance and come into the finals off the back of a big win against the Royals, who did admittedly rest players knowing they were already in the finals. Chennai and Delhi have teams that are batsman led with few match winning bowlers. It is because they have effective bowlers as well as batsmen that I back Kings XI Punjab to win on Sunday.

Does the IPL erode classical batting?

The past few weeks have seen cricket purists mourn what they see to be the core skills of the game, being eroded by the need, as they see it, for big slogging with further degradation of classic cricket shots such as the cover drive. Is there any truth in these claims?

In theory, the 20 over game suits those batsmen that can score quickly and is assumed by cricketing purists to be burly batsmen who like to crash their runs through boundaries with strength, rather than timing. So lets look at the leading runs scorers in the high profile Indian Premier League tournament as of the end of play today (1st May 2008).

Name	Total runs	Fours	Sixes	Runs in boundaries	% of runs in boundaries	% of runs in the ‘v’
M Hayden	189	24	6	132	70%	43%
B McCullum	188	13	15	142	76%	n/a
R Sharma	178	19	7	118	66%	40%
K Sangakkara	175	22	4	112	64%	39%
G Gambhir	174	23	2	104	60%	18%

(Stats from Cricinfo.com)

The renown big hitters Hayden and McCullum, are numbers 1 and 2 in the leading runs list gives some weight to the purist argument of batsmen muscling their runs by smashing the ball to or over the boundary rope. However, the stroke makers Sangakkara and Gambhir at numbers 4 and 5 give credibility to the counter argument of non-power players being able to prosper in this form of the game. The relative high amount of 4s among the boundary count of these two players would seem to indicate a preference for shots along the ground, whereas McCullum has more than half his boundaries clearing the ropes giving an indication of his powerful hitting, even though the boundaries of the IPL grounds have apparently been made smaller for the tournament.

Often the mark of an assertive classical batsman is one that plays with a straight bat and hence often accumulates his runs in front of square in the ‘v’ roughly from around mid-on to mid-off, hence the final column of the above table is a very crude indicator of a batsman gaining runs in a ‘classical’ fashion. McCullum’s figures have not been included as the vast majority of his runs were gathered in his explosive innings on debut, in the inaugural IPL match, but a visual indication of his run scoring areas is given here. Perhaps it is too early to spot any patterns with all the batsmen barring Gambhir scoring a good proportion of their runs in the ‘v’ going against the purist notion that the IPL encourages cross bat slogging. A closer look at Gambhir’s scoring areas reveals that he is more of touch player preferring to use the pace of the cricket ball to nudge runs square on both sides of the wicket.

So is the IPL diluting classical cricket skills on the part of the batsman? At the moment it’s hard to say, the early signs are that there are unsurprisingly more boundaries being hit in a batsman’s time at the crease, but there also seems to be little sign of the degradation of proper cricket shots in preference of cross bat slogging. As is the case with most arguments, the answer would appear to lie somewhere between the extreme points of view.

Premier League ills?

It has been 5 years since the ECB introduced Twenty20 to the English game for monetary reasons and to raise the profile of cricket. Outside of the game’s core fans, the traditional image of cricket is seen as eccentric, overlong and boring. Thus by shortening the duration of the game to suit the shorter attention span of a public, increasingly used to near instant access to goods and services, it was made more accessible to those unfamiliar with it. A game could be watched with a result in a few hours at the weekend or after work. English cricketing counties who had grown used to playing mostly in front of empty seats with the occasional geriatric occupant, suddenly had crowds to deal with, what a novel concept! Twenty20 games gave County cricket some form of guaranteed income at a time when the future monetary security of such institutions was looking generally shaky. A similar situation can be seen with Allen Stanford’s 20/20 tournament in the West Indies.

So what of the Indian Premier League? To my mind, it has more parallels with the top level of English football than it does with English Twenty20 cricket; analogous to football in England, cricket is the number one sport in India. Sponsors fight hand over fist to be involved with Premiership teams and for the top teams these are international brands and should the the IPL continue in it’s current vein, the successful teams will attract similar sponsorship. In India each team already has rich owners who one hopes is supporting the venture for the love of the game rather than purely for financial gain.

This is where the Premiership has strayed. For example, why would an American with no interest in football want to buy a football team? The concern of the genuine fan who pays through the turnstile (and the nose) to support their team is low down on the list of priorities. Big money is there to be made in both international and domestic markets, through TV rights, shirt sales and the like. The Premiership has become an unsustainable cash cow making the rich, richer still. Why aren’t Premiership games shown on terrestrial television, where the most people can watch it? Money. Why change the home and away kits every single season? Money. Why would  Premiership bosses suggest playing a 39th league game somewhere apart from England? Cold Hard Cash is the answer to all these questions and cricket authorities, especially those running the IPL needs to watch and learn from football’s mistakes to ensure it does not take cricket fans for granted.

Don’t get wrong, I enjoy the game in all it’s forms, but unless world cricket is managed properly we could see the devaluation of top level international cricket which would be a grave tragedy. I’m not saying the way it’s managed at the moment is perfect, just look at the recent England vs New Zealand fixture overload, but while the game is in a relative state of flux, organisers need to be led by more than just the need to fill their bank accounts.

Domestic cricket in India has the head start over English Counties as the popularity for the game amongst the general populous is already there, so there should be little issue over the underlying financial security of domestic Indian cricket. Where 20 over cricket has become the financial lifeblood of English County Cricket and in other countries, it should not be milked to the point of exhaustion. The long term support of the fans is a greater commodity than the short term contents of their wallets.