Panesar at home and Pietersen’s spark

I managed to get to a couple of games last week, the first was the 3rd day of the County Championship game of Northants against Glamorgan where I managed to see ex-South African all-rounder Lance Klusener reach his highest first class score of 202*. He was helped by a decent batting performance from Monty Panesar, who held up an end while ‘Zulu’ got to his landmark after which Northants declared.

Monty batted reasonably well for  his unbeaten 30 odd, but rightly so Klusener was roundly cheered by the sizeable crowd, considering it was a Friday.

  

Glamorgan were visibly flat in the field and looked to have an uphill battle to save the game after losing a wicket before bad light ended the day’s play. Hence I got to see Monty bat as well as bowl.

On Sunday I managed to see England’s last performance of the ’summer’, beating South Africa in the 4th ODI at Lords in what turned into a 20 over slog in the gloaming. Pietersen’s captaincy has reinvigorated the England team and as a result had convincingly won the one day series before even getting to HQ. Which was just as well as the weather was shit. I have a friend that I regularly go to cricket with who seems to carry the rain around with him, I mean this summer he has literally always been under a cloud, that more often than not chooses to spill its guts.

Luckily the Lords drainage showed its worth and we were able to get underway shortly after 1pm. England choose to field and were going through fielding drills before the start.

South Africa actually started their innings really well with Amla and Gibbs hitting regular boundaries with Amla looking in especially good touch before a shambolic attempt at a run, ended in Shah running out the bearded opener. Gibbs was the only South African batsman to make a meaningful contribution before the rains came again in the 32nd over.

Between the innings I walked around the ground as is traditional at the innings break and got talking to one of the stewards alongside the pavilion, who like the rest of the people in the ground was disappointed at the reduced play. He was absolutely adamant that the ground should have a roof for such occasion! A well natured argument then ensured with I, even with having being continually been screwed over by the weather this year, advocating no roof as atmospheric conditions play such a large part in the game.

Continuing the walk around the ground I came to the Nursery Ground under the Media Centre where there were many people milling about. Suddenly a group of stewards parted the crowd and between the 2 support columns of the Media Centre came the serious looking Andrew Flintoff who strode purposefully to the nets to prepare for the innings. He looked in good touch when smashing a few throw downs in the nets.

It came in useful later when despite the near dark, Flintoff and Shah smashed several boundaries to reach the target of 137 with a few overs to spare. England had started slowly with Bell and Prior struggling to find the boundaries early on. After their dismissals, Shah, Pietersen and Flintoff played themselves in before teeing off. In the best of lights it’s a challenge to face the likes of Dale Steyn, so to watch the batsmen flog them to all parts in the dingy light was an immense end to the summer.

Ball tampering

In a quiet week for cricket, the subject of ball tampering has come to the fore after Marcus Trescothick admitted to using a humble mint to change the consistency of his saliva which he then applied to the ball. I’m assuming he applied it to one side to maintain a shine. Now those with a soft spot for the larger part of antipodean cricket will be thinking back to the 2005 Ashes and thinking hmmm… But you can stop right there as he used the technique in the 2001 which England lost convincingly.

So was it illegal? Going by the letter of the law, yes it was. But how on earth do you police the consistency and make up of a players spit? Take a swab before the beginning of each session? And what sort of stuff keeps the shine on the ball? Something of a grey area really.

There are three basic goals in ball tampering depending on the stage of the innings. At the beginning of the innings you want to retain the shine on the ball (or rather one side of it) as long as possible to assist conventional swing. Once the ball is around 40 odd overs old, in the more abrasive environments, the un-tampered ball will become scuffed assisting reverse swing. Obviously the earlier you can affect the reverse swing, by scratching up the ball, possibly with suitably sharp objects such as fingernails or bottle tops, the longer the fielding side have to bamboozle and bowl a team out. The third main way to change, or in this case retain the performance of the ball is to pick or pinch the seam up so that the bowler can hit the seam making the ball deviate off the pitch. There is a good article on the merits and penalties of the various different methods on the CricInfo site.

Of these ball tampering methods, scratching and the scratcher are the easiest to spot these being very much physical elements against which to enforce any offence. Picking the seam too is a very obvious thing to be seen doing especially with the many many cameras present at top level international cricket. The less obvious is using foreign substances to shine the ball. Where do you cross the line from cleaning the ball and artificially retaining its shine? By the letter of the law, does the shining of the ball on a bowler’s trousers, as every bowler does, fall foul of the laws of the game? It probably doesn’t, but how far removed is this from Marcus Trescothick’s actions with his minty fresh spit? Who knows. Whether it is right to do it or not, it gives a bowling side some small solace in the increasingly batsman friendly world of cricket.

My season of going to the cricket comes to an end on Sunday with the 4th ODI of England vs South Africa at Lords, before which I have a trip to Northampton to see Northants take on Glamorgan in the LV County Championship, day 3 of 4. Earlier this year on discovering that a close friend had never seen any top level British sport, I made a pact to take him to top(ish) level football, cricket and rugby before he gets married in January next year. I think he will enjoy tomorrow’s day in the sun the best of the three, having been nonplussed by Wolves vs Ipswich at the back end of the 2007-2008 season.

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.

Welcoming the English season

As those of you in the UK will know the weather has been most beautiful over the past few days and I for one have my eyes firmly set on enjoying the coming cricket season. No doubt that’s a cue for the heavens to open at regular intervals and to have not a single uninterrupted day’s play until September, when the nighttime starts to erode the hours in the day. But until then the optimism of a recently opened summer will abound.

Not having Sky Sports can make winters quite miserable for the English cricket fan, having to follow the action at work with over-by-over or ball-by-ball text commentary on various cricketing websites or late at night trying to pick cricketing details from the inane or quaint, depending on your point of view, BBC Test Match Special radio commentary. It would be nice to see some cricket that wasn’t restricted to 10 second news bulletins or YouTube through those winter months, but in a weird kind of way it does build the tension for the first game seen live in the season. I have been doing cricket watching warm ups, so to speak by watching Setanta’s sometimes patchy coverage of the IPL. Usually by the time I’ve left work and got home I can catch the run chase of that day’s match live, which if the side batting first haven’t collapsed badly is usually interesting.

I still really haven’t fully got to grips of who or what or how to support a team or individuals or cricket itself. It seems a bit odd and disenfranchised to back a team I’m watching on TV and have no connection with, through being local or having a particular liking for certain players. A good commentary on this is given by Soumya Bhattacharya in this article, so if people in India have trouble knowing who to support, what chance an observer in England? But then again millions of Premier League football fans around the world seem to manage, or do they? Does the fact that your Dad passed through Heathrow on the way to New York in 1980 make you an Arsenal fan? Or do you support them because a guy in their reserves 2nd XI is of the same nationality? Pretty tenuous either way; it would be interesting to see how overseas sporting allegiances are formed and for what reasons. Incidentally, at this point I’ll have to declare a soft spot for Rajasthan Royals as they seem to play intelligent cricket, whether they or any other IPL team will ever have a place in the heart of cricket fans alongside their chosen national team remains to be seen.

So here’s to another summer’s worth of cricket, let the runs flow and the wickets fall until stumps is called on another season, enjoy!

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.