A damp squib

England’s win in the last Test of the summer was little more than a reasonable dessert following a disappointing main course that had looked so appetising when being weighed up on the menu some hours earlier. Prior to the South Africans arriving on these shores much of the media billed the series as an indicator of how competitive England were in the context of world cricket. So what does losing a 4 Test series 2-1 in your own backyard indicate?

The home nation not being in the rudest of health me thinks. With Australia far and away the best Test team and England, South Africa and the Subcontinental nations all supposedly close together in the chasing pack, England at home would expect to win Test series against all of those in the pack. However losing at home last year to India and this year to South Africa hardly gets any opposition boots quaking, let alone the Australians.

South Africa are not a bad team, in fact in my opinion they are underrated, the fact that they don’t have a “proper” spinner is often highlighted by Geoffrey Boycott among others, but is that such a bad thing? Where have a seen that before? A pre-Monty Panesar England perhaps? The one that won the Ashes in 2005 and several home series before that? Yes exactly. Stand up the King of Spain. The England team from that period is not so different from the South African team now. They should be congratulated on coming to England and not just being hard to beat but winning. Well done them. I can only hope this spurs England to take a long hard look at themselves to put things right.

Nothing ever fails for a single reason, so what went wrong?

Batting failures. The top order rarely put together the partnerships required to build the big scores needed in the first innings of a match to push home the advantage in each match overall. England batted first in the first 3 Tests making 593/8 declared, 203 and 231 respectively. In the latter 2 cases, at Leeds and Birmingham they lost comprehensively proving the scenario that a team batting first, if they are put in or chose to bat, need to put up good scores to not be significantly on the back foot with around 4 days of a game to play.

Lack of bowling penetration. In previous times, England have had a “go-to man”, a bowler that the captain could turn to, to break a batting partnership. In their pomp this would have been at different times, Harmison and Flintoff and arguably over the winter Sidebottom was outstanding. When the pitch was conducive to spin, even Monty Panesar chipped in, reference his performance at Old Trafford last year. The go-to man was not present in this series. Sidebottom’s form has dropped away and Harmison and Flintoff are only recently back in the team. Stuart Broad is an admirable cricketer but no strike bowler (8 wickets at 49) and lets not even mention the Pattinson episode.

Let’s look at the Test matches up to next summer. A paltry 2 Tests in India and 4 Tests in the West Indies before next summer where there may or may not be 2 or 3 Tests against Sri Lanka before the Ashes. What a way to prepare for the biggest Test series in world cricket.

England vs South Africa Preview

The forthcoming Test series between these two nations has been earmarked by many England watchers as a true indicator of where England are in world cricket with a view, whisper it, to the Ashes next year.

Over the last 8 months or so England fans have had something of a Kiwi overdose, playing them away then at home. Whose great idea was that? Playing the same team back to back to back to back to… If that doesn’t make the cricketing public of both England and New Zealand stop watching the game I don’t know what will. Perhaps that’s what makes the forthcoming series against the South Africans so appetising. Finally! Some different opposition! Those suits at the ECB are real masterminds…

As such there’s been a fair bit of build up in the media, plenty of talk of the pacy firebrand Dale Steyn and the resumption of KP’s duel against his homeland. On a lesser scale the duels between the two captains Michael Vaughan and Graeme Smith is being talked up. Simon Wilde in The Sunday Times points to a real chance of England suffering a home Test series defeat for the first time since the turn of the century, which is pretty uncharitable to India having won albeit with some luck. But hey, England had their fair share of it in winning the 2005 Ashes series. So what of England going into this series?

The team has good batsmen, but for my money lack something in terms of aggression especially up the order. Strauss and Cook aren’t going to take the opposition bowling to task and set the agenda. Which is why Trescothick and Strauss were such an excellent partnership at the top of the order. One clearly had the task of pushing the run rate along while the other accumulated. Guessed which one was which? When Strauss and Cook are together, neither one looks truly comfortable dictating the pace.

The places of the captain and Kevin Pietersen are the most secure in the batting line-up, so it falls to the other two specialist batsmen to prove themselves. Ian Bell absolutely oozes the textbook talent, but there is a suspicion that he only makes the big runs in easy game situations. A glance at when he makes his Test match hundreds shows that another member of the team has made a hundred previously in the innings. He needs to prove his worth in tough situations. Paul Collingwood on the other hand is stereotyped as a scrapper, but again he has something to prove following a poor home Test match series against the Kiwis. Ambrose is a good ‘keeper, but has something to prove after a poor recent ODI series with the willow.

Looking at the bowling, Monty Panesar should have a key role in the series being the only spin bowler of any note on either side (Paul Harris? Didn’t think so). Of the pacemen Sidebottom, Anderson and Broad don’t look as good a unit on paper as Ntini, Steyn and Morkel and will have to work hard to stay afloat.

Sidebottom is the most consistent of the 3 and has for my money supplanted Hoggard as the reliable element of the England attack. I think Anderson is greatly underrated; look at his performances in recent Test matches, albeit against the New Zealanders. His struggles against left handers have been highlighted and how he deals with Graeme Smith at the top of the order will be a key battle. Stuart Broad gets better with every match but has yet to be put in a situation where he can get England out of a tight spot or into an unassailable position.

Hence, my key battles for the series:

• Graeme Smith vs James Anderson
• Monty Panesar vs South African batsmen
• Dale Steyn vs England batsmen
• Kevin Pietersen vs South African bowlers

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.

Wisden winners

These five lucky, lucky batmeisters and ballmeisters got the nod to be Wisden Cricketers of the Year 2008:

• Ian Bell
• Shiv Chanderpaul
• Otis Gibson
• Zaheer Khan
• Ryan Sidebottom

Any arguments about these? The criteria being eye opening performances seen in last year’s English season and not having had a nomination before.

So, starting from the bottom, everyone’s favourite lank-haired, left-arm pace man had to be in, not only because there is only one man in such a category in world cricket, but because of his phoenix-like return to the England set-up after an extended hiatus. He’s now their no.1 bowler and deservedly, hopefully for the foreseeable future.

When Zaheer comes round to my place, I’m  not going to offer him something sweet for dessert, judging by what he did to England’s batting line-up at Trent Bridge last summer after being offered a few jellybeans, he’d be turning over tables and breaking plates. I bet Anil slips a few Maltesers into his bowling boots to fire him up, having said that, crushing honeycomb biscuit and chocolate in my shoes when I put my feet in them would piss me off too. Great performances though and deservedly in.

You hold up the match ball after taking 5 wickets in an innings, but how to celebrate after taking all 10 wickets? Presumably with on you a golden podium held up by your team, whilst mere mortals bow before you. Not sure if Otis did this but, that performance was the diamond headstone in a sparkling season for the Barbadian in the twilight of his playing career.

Shiv. For many a year he has been hidden, nay eclipsed, by the ink black shadow cast by the ego of a certain Mr Lara, so when he buggered off to pad his back pocket with cash playing in the ICL, many people feared for the already fragile nature of the West Indies batting line up. He ended the Test series against England with an average of nearly 150, categorically cementing Shiv’s place. He just needs his Mueller sponsored bully to stop punching him beneath the eyes before he goes out to bat…

Ian Bell is a class act. I’ve seen him play in an exhibition game at my local park and I’ve seen him play Test matches and ODIs at various locations around England. He is a batsman with class in the orthodox sense, but to my mind we are yet to see the best of him. Should players be selected as a Cricketer of the Year who are ‘on the cusp of greatness’? or at the top of their game? I think the latter, which is why I feel Ian Bell’s inclusion in this list is premature; his best is not yet upon us.