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.

The First Test arrives…

Naturally with the start of the first Test of the summer, the sunshine of the past two weeks gives way to rain and delays the start of the first day until after lunch.

So Test cricket returns with England vs New Zealand at Lord’s and watching it seems somehow clean and refreshing compared to the night-lit colourfest of watching the IPL. A red ball, white clothing and proper cricket shots, a true battle between bat and ball in gloomy English conditions just feels more wholesome than seeing bowlers getting pasted to shortened boundaries.

Having said that Ross Taylor, the Kiwi number 4 didn’t seem to take the hint with his mode of dismissal having all the hallmarks of an IPL batsman trying to force the rate. Trying to pull a length ball outside off-stump but ending up spooning the ball high in the air for Paul Collingwood at slip to take a few steps back and pouch an easy catch. Taylor rightly slouched off with his tail between his legs, maybe when you have Geoffrey Boycott backing you, you’d feel the pressure too.

Predictably after winning the toss, Vaughan stuck the tourists in after a rain delayed morning. No doubt he rubbed his hands together with glee at the thought of his pacemen swinging and seaming the ball around to get the New Zealanders jumping. And a good start it was too with the tourists reeling at 109 for 5 as everyone sat down for their teatime cucumber sandwiches and pork pies.

But then Brendon McCullum who had opened the IPL a few weeks earlier with an explosive innings of 158 along with Jacob Oram in the anchor role, clawed the visitors back towards some kind of competitive total by the end of the day. McCullum counterattacked beautifully, he highlight being a huge straight six off Monty Panesar. Revenge was Monty’s towards the end of the day as he snuffed out McCullum’s innings 3 runs short of his hundred. He got 1 run closer than he did in 2004.

So what does tomorrow hold? With New Zealand 6 wickets down for 208 runs at the end of the day, England will look to eke out the next wicket early to expose the tail and if they can do that, they have a good chance of looking at about 250 run deficit when the start batting. The home batsmen then need to bat well into Saturday to build a decent lead. Easy to write, much more difficult to do. Vettori and Oram present a resilient barrier to closing the innings and England’s batsmen have done only just enough in recent months rather than batted to the full extent of their abilities.

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!

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.