The circus moves on

Autumn is early in the trees this year, pointing up the lingering death of the English cricket season. On the other hand, the weather has been gentle, warm, and forgiving to beleaguered cricket administrators, at least in the southern third of the country. Some years it could have been very different.

But as cricket gear is shoved back in the cupboard in autumnal England, the dust is being shaken from pads and chest protectors in the southern hemisphere. The hymn of prayer is never silent. The English and Australian teams had no time to think at all, swapping the brown leaves of Chester-le-Street in County Durham for Springtime with Graeme Smith and South Africa. Strangely the change (and lack) of air seemed to galvanise the English, although they’d warmed up by beating the no doubt bored Australians in the last of the seven one-day internationals, thanks to some excellent bowling from a buoyant Graeme Swann. Even so, the English batting creaked its way to victory, looking to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Some of the English batsmen looked extremely perplexed by their performances.

In South Africa it really was a new dawn, a new day. Anderson and Onions got into the Sri Lankan batting so quickly that their opponents were thereafter always playing catch-up in the first match, and Shah, Collingwood and the ever-improving Morgan simply blew the highly rated South African bowling away in the second. Simple, you see, this 50 over game. The ball seemed regularly to being thrown back from the crowd. Was it twelve sixes in the innings? Unheard of! This was Shah’s best innings for England, and psychologically it would have been useful if he’d made those last two runs to his century, even though in terms of the match it wasn’t significant. I think most English cricket followers were also highly entertained by the sight and sound of the South African captain Smith whingeing that he was refused a runner when suffering from cramp late in his (very good) innings in reply to the large England total. Why is it we English don’t care much for this fine batsman? Maybe he seems always to want the moral high ground, as part of his sporting policy. It’s a national sporting trait, noticeable in South African rugby and athletics too at the present time. Batter the opposition with every weapon you’ve got. It’s the sound of a nation stretching for status and credibility, against great odds. Andrew Strauss said he couldn’t remember such an accomplished England batting performance in a one-day international, and neither could the rest of us. But then of course two days ago, normal service was resumed as our batting fell away against the New Zealand attack on a pitch that, like a fair few in this competition so far, was a bit sporty early in the game. So now, and with a certain inevitability, England and Australia play each other in the semi-finals of this World-Cup-lite. Am I bothered? Not much about the result. But let’s hope it’s a close game, and that both sides escape the humdrum nature of the cricket which has dominated the past month or so.

It’s good to be shifted from our parochial view of a game, a political perspective, a way of life and to be reminded that when we’re world weary, others are excited about possibility and new beginnings. I don’t know about anyone else though, but I find it hard to hold these many separate universes in my head without compromising my own relish for tomorrow. I’m confused. What’s special about this moment then? My head is all for globalism, but my heart has some catching up to do.

The road to perdition

This morning in The Times the sportswriter Simon Barnes described it as the worst example of cheating in sport, and who’s to disagree. The idea that a young Formula One racing driver should be asked by his team boss to crash at high speed with incalculable consequences to himself, other drivers and even spectators, so that another team-member can win a race, is deeply shocking.

This is no longer sport as we like to conceive of it. Arguably, if we were to do some linguistic analysis of the notion of ‘sport’, we might conclude that in fact we should have to define such actions out of the term. Have an argument around the family table about that one.

As Barnes points out, money is the determining factor in all Formula 1 business, and so a turn of events like this isn’t completely surprising. Money has been the theme behind many of the articles in this blog, alongside dissertations on the aesthetics of the Game We Love, to the point that to underline the issues again would be wearisome. However, and not in the spirit of ‘I told you so’, I did say at the outset that Pietersen and Flintoff would be crucial factors in the account of this summer, that I expected that never subsequently would they be a major part of English cricket success, and that knowing what the major stories of the season might be was difficult.

Perhaps the most significant event of all is Flintoff’s announcement this week that from now on he intends to be ‘free-lance’. There’ll be no allegiance to Lancashire, his home club, or to England, except when he chooses to make himself available (which will presumably be only for major one-day tournaments). He’ll go where there’s most financial reward. His choice of agent, one Chubby Chandler, should have led us to expect this. Some commentators have welcomed the decision as a brave new honest world for cricket, and to be sure where Flintoff has led, others, presumably Pietersen included, will follow sooner rather than later. We will have to get used to enjoying the flowering of great talent for a shorter time, until sufficient momentum has been generated for the player concerned to take his business where the real money is.

It’s hard to conceive where this all takes us. I’ve already sketched out some of the possibilities. Hard though, not to feel a certain despair that in terms of direction of travel and theme, so much time, so many words have been spent on this.

As far as Flintoff goes, personally I hope that England wishes him well, but doesn’t consider him for selection again. They must move on without regret, accepting that he was a whole-hearted trier for his country, who ultimately failed to deliver to his full potential but gave us many memorable moments. We will have to learn to love the ones we’re with, game by game, and not grow too fond of them. And thank God, that in contrast with motorsport or football or athletics, the opportunities for the perversion of our sport are limited.

Not with a bang but a wimpy

As I write, the sixth one day international between England and Australia is about to start. Australia have won the first five by playing competent cricket at a consistently higher standard than England, and at the moment look as if they might win the next hundred games were the series to be prolonged that far. As well it might be, if the ECB thought it could fill the stadiums and make a buck. In this form of the game, England aren’t very good just at the present. Times without number in this series, their batsmen have got set, only to make an error at a point which has disrupted the rhythm of the overall batting performance. Their bowling although solid and reliable, has lacked the cutting edge to put pressure on their opponents. Their fielding has been no more than respectable. It’s been dispiriting to watch and listen to. It’s taken the edge off a season which might have been remembered with affection. Now we just all want to get it over and done.

This isn’t how a story should end. The action should move from one fast-paced chapter to another, a cliff-hanger at every turn, until in the last twenty pages, there’s a dénouement of startling originality, with the intriguing possibility of a sequel left hanging in the air. If I tried handing in something like this, my editor would send me a stern note and tell me to do better, and quickly.

But maybe if you or I had bought a ticket to one of the games, and we hadn’t seen the Australians yet this summer it would still have provided golden moments. The chance to see heroes at close quarters is always special. Otherwise why attend athletics meetings in the aftermath of the World Champs, or be present for your football club any time after Christmas, when the writing’s on the wall that yet another mid-table slot is more or less guaranteed. We want to be there at Trent Bridge or Southampton, in the company of others, to appreciate just how blisteringly quick Brett Lee is at full throttle, to see Ricky Ponting bat in case he never returns to England, to enjoy the sight of Michael Hussey dropping a catch he’d have taken ninety-nine times out of a hundred, to remember how beautifully a cricket ground is mown, to take in the atmosphere a crowd creates, and have a memory to cherish over the Yuletide sherry. If you were there, what does it matter that the game was meaningless or pedestrian. You’ll have noticed, of course, but not as much as we who watch at a safe uninvolved distance from the comfort of our sofas will have noticed. Cor blimey guvnor, the TV pundits have even been on the backs of the crowds for not making enough noise, as if it’s their fault or something, rather than their right, handsomely paid for. Maybe athey were just engrossed in what was happening. You don’t have to shout your head off to enjoy something.

I remember watching absolutely inconsequential games of cricket in my youth, and revelling in them. Images stay with one for ever. Derek Shackleton, the Hampshire medium pace bowler of legendary accuracy and subtlety fielding tall and lean at the boundary’s edge, and swapping friendly words and a cigarette with a spectator, before going back to his bowling mark and putting six balls on to the pitch within a half-crown of each other. Can that have been so? I think it was. And in the same match, his bowling partner ‘Butch’ White, delivering at express pace from the ‘wrong’ foot, dropping short and being pulled off the front foot an inch or two from his eyebrows by my hero Colin Cowdrey to the midwicket boundary. How did Cowdrey have the bravery and time to do that? Without a helmet! Or another time at Canterbury, the Kent stalwart Alan Dixon, bowling off-cutters that looked so easy, I reckoned even I could have made a hundred, but still managing a five-fer not many. Brian Luckhurst squirting the ball to the square boundary time after time. Wayne Daniel at Lords, so quick the ball was quite invisible from side on. Kapil Dev hitting the ball with a smile into the top tier at Northampton’s County Ground. Massive, balding, Garth Le Roux hitting parked cars at the same venue. Wayne the larrikin Larkins belting Northants to an improbable victory against the clock with half a dozen sixes. Michael Holding whispering to the bowling crease from a run that started pretty much at the sight screen. A pretty much unknown Michael Hussey accumulating 329 runs with an efficiency that had one scratching the head. How come this guy couldn’t get in the Australian team? The results of the matches are rarely recalled, but a thousand individual images come back with clarity and gratitude just to have been there and captured them in the camera of the mind.

There is no cosmic significance in any of this, although if you view it with the eye of faith, you may think that a kindly God gave us these things for our comfort and relaxation. But there is shared ritual here, which needs the contrivance of the relevant authorities to nurture and support. The watcher on TV is on the fringes: he or she remains uninitiated into the true mysteries. All they will want is Big Bangs. The smell of fried onions (or until recently at Northampton Saints Rugby Club in a certain part of the main stand, ‘Deep Heat’ wafting up from the team changing rooms) is just as much a part of the action for the paying customer at the ground.

Get a new plan, Stan

I may be about to sound like the bloke you’d try hard to avoid at the party. This was the season when English cricket, even if it regained a pot, finally lost the plot.

There was a time long ago when the narrative of a season could be very easily followed – and, please bear with me, but here we have to go back to the nineteen fifties again. Then there were just two strands to the annual story. An overseas team would come to play England, arriving (by boat at first) in early May, warming up in leisurely fashion by playing a whole sequence of games against the English counties, the two universities and the M.C.C. The five Test matches would be played predictably in Birmingham, London (Lords), Leeds, Manchester or Nottingham and then London again (the Kennington Oval), the last one finishing well before the August Bank Holiday. If the visiting team were Australia, England would usually lose the series. If it was anyone else, they’d usually win. Parallel to this would be a County Championship in which each of (eventually) seventeen ‘first class’ counties would play each other at least once, often twice. A batsman could score as many as 3816 runs in a season (Denis Compton in 1947) or take as many as 304 wickets (Kent’s ‘Tich’ Freeman in 1928). Everything would be wrapped up nicely by the beginning of September at which point there’d be a nice little celebration up in Scarborough with one or two ‘festival’ matches where batsmen threw caution to the winds and bowlers went wearily through the motions. The rest of the time the bowling class (I don’t think it’s my imagination but generally they were of a lower social standing than the cravated batters) never suffered injury despite being entirely beer-fuelled while softy batsmen were sponsored by Brylcreem (Denis Compton again), drank G&T’s and were universally beautiful to watch, even though by modern standards they scored extremely slowly. No one was paid very much money. They played for the love (or the hell) of it. Indeed some of the best participants were truly ‘amateur’ (see ‘cravats’): their private income subsidised their play and the public’s enjoyment. This was truly another, though not a better age. After all, Herr Hitler and food rationing were still recent memories, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was about to tell the nation of ‘winds of change’ in Africa and encourage them that in Britain they’d ‘never had it so good’.

Then, one day cricket was invented. Cricket became professional through and through. The one-day final became a climax to the county season, even if winning the ‘Gillette’ trophy was seen as a consolation prize vis-a vis the three day county programme. Telly was still black and white.

The sixties saw a big change: if cricket was to survive as a national sport it had to renew itself and become both more commercial and more attractive to watch. Two Test series a year became an occasional practice and eventually by the nineteen eighties a permanent one. More one day competitions flourished. Cricket on a Sunday became an early sign of the social acceptance that England was now a secular nation, at least after lunch on the first day of the week. 40 overs a side was born as a pro game. With improved world transport, and better communications, more foreign cricketers sought employment in the UK, and the individual cricket authorities here welcomed them with increasingly open arms, kidding themselves that their presence would automatically ‘improve standards’, but really more concerned to boost income at the gates of the grounds or get the jump on their rivals down the road. The presence of the imports changed the attitudes of indigenous English cricketers: it arguably made them more venal and work-shy. To be fair, more travelling was now required of them, if not more cricket. Less overs were being bowled in total, less runs scored, fewer wickets taken than in days of yore. But at least they had nice sponsored cars in which to make the journeys. Latterly, as the first contribution of the twenty-first century to the game’s history, 20-20 has been added to the repertoire of cricketing entertainment and next year we’re promised two domestic competitions for this shortest form of the game. Oh good.

Because do you know what? Here I am, an interested, even fanatical punter, and I have to look up the details of what’s supposed to be happening when in the season. I’m unmoved by the ‘Friends Provident Trophy’ with its mix of leagues and knock-out. The ‘Pro-40’ league seems entirely irrelevant. I couldn’t tell you which team is in which division of the emasculated county championship, except that Northants (inevitably) are in the second division, as (amazingly) are bottom-placed Surrey for all their glitter and London swagger. Poor Mark Ramprakash. The final seal on his absence from the England team was that, despite the weight of his run-getting in recent years, none of it should count for his eligibility in the view of the press, because it had been achieved in Division Two. It didn’t matter. In which case, why are we bothering with Division Two at all?

The fixture list is a patchwork quilt. The final of the FP Trophy was separated from the rest of the competition by 20-20 matches. The county championship was suspended in mid-summer to allow one-day matches to flourish. The crowded, unrelenting international programme allows no room for the cricket-follower to pay attention to domestic matters. Only the final round of four day inter-county matches peeks out at the end of September – so let’s hope there’s still some interest in it by then. A season begun with cold hands stuffed in pockets while handfuls of spectators huddled together for warmth will end the same way shortly before October’s inevitable good weather. Professional cricket in 2009 is an animal designed by a committee and it really should be put out of its misery quickly. The administrators have done the almost impossible by creating a ‘product’ which gets worse, season by season, with every ‘innovation’ of format. The men in suits care only about numbers of ‘bums on seats’, regardless of their identity. Even there they’re losing headway. Yesterday’s eventually exciting one day match against Australia failed to sell out, and the atmosphere seemed to be tepid and distracted for most of the day. Ask yourself why that was.

Perhaps we should let professional cricket in England die. It sometimes seems as if, to echo the Gospels, we need to lose our life in order to re-gain it. I propose a moratorium. No cricket except the strictly amateur for five years. Think of it as a lengthy break for rain. Then, fresh with enthusiasm, let’s greet the sun and see the way to go.

Pastorale

While the English batsmen were clawing their way to victory last Saturday afternoon, I was walking through north west Kent along the long distance footpath which is called the London Loop. This describes a circle of roughly 150 miles broken by the Thames at Erith, and crossing the river in the west at Kingston. It passes through some surprisingly quiet countryside, given that its entire length is within the M25 London orbital motorway – but in case you’re thinking of trying it, I should warn you there are a few moments of grimness too!

About seven or eight miles from the Thames the route passes through the urban village of Old Bexley, a mile or so from the house where I spent most of my childhood and adolescence. From the High Street, the walker hangs a left up raggety Tanyard Lane, goes under the railway bridge, and turns right parallel to the railway up a path which will eventually bring her to an open space where once there were large gravel pits – this is the shallow valley of the River Cray. To the left about two hundred yards from Tanyard Lane is the ground of Bexley Cricket Club. Cricket has been played on this spot since the mid eighteen-seventies, but the history of Bexley C.C. goes back at least to 1805. It’s still today a very pretty ground, well managed and almost pastoral, given that this is distinctly suburban London. Quite by accident, I’d timed my arrival perfectly: it was midday and the game was in its first over. I stood and watched from the fence for a moment. The second over began, bowled from the far end. I took out my camera, clicked on the fourth or fifth ball, and as if I’d summoned up magic the batsman clipped the ball loosely off his pads and the fielder at mid-wicket took an easy catch. Disconsolate, his day ruined, the batsman walked from the ground slowly, so slowly, and threw his bat through the door of the little pavilion where it landed amongst his kit with a clatter and a curse. Drawn in by the little drama, I went through the ground gate and sat down on a bench by the scoreboard to ease my blistering heels and eat a sandwich. I was amazed to be greeted – in more friendly fashion than in many churches - and handed a hymnsheet – I mean a scorecard. There were as far as I could see, no other spectators apart from the teams and their immediate acolytes.

The next surprise was to recognise the bowler at the near end, who was also fielding beside me at third man when he wasn’t lumbering to the crease. I asked the man who’d handed me the scorecard, ‘Isn’t that Darren Cousins, who used to play for Northamptonshire?’ He said it was. ‘You follow Northants then?’ I admitted it was where I lived. Cousins is now in his mid to late thirties, I guess, at county level a worthy journeyman seam bowler, who for a couple of years did rather well in Northampton, on a pitch which was never exactly bowler-friendly. It seems he now lives in Cambridge but makes the round trip of 140 miles each weekend to play for Bexley in the Kent Premier League: the opponents this week, St. Lawrence, whose home is the Kent county ground at Canterbury. Only one other name on the scorecard meant anything - St. Lawrence’s P.G.Dixey, a young wicketkeeper currently on the fringe of the Kent side, kept from it by the excellent Geraint Jones. But 140 miles! No money for this, probably not even expenses, unless they’re paying him a subsistence wage to be a ‘senior pro’ and coach the kids.

It was evident I was watching a good class of cricket, and much, much better than the standard I remembered from occasional childhood visits. Cousins was not having one of his better days, but Jason Benn, bowling from the far end, was distinctly swift, even on an evidently sluggish pitch, particularly when he bent his back. The batting was cautious and entirely measured. A lovely checked extra cover drive was played off Cousins, never an inch off the turf, technically quite perfect. Checking the scorecard on the web a few days later, the second wicket pair got to 79 before the next wicket fell, and the new batsman, Charlie Hemphrey, eventually went on to make a classy century. I’d have stayed longer, but I was only halfway to my eventual destination at Petts Wood station, and I knew I’d have to nurse my feet on the way – it’s either my gait or my right boot, but too often I end up wounded when I walk. However, it was good to be reminded where the heart of the game beats in England, played for fun, but with great attention to detail. It deserves an audience. What a pity there isn’t one! I’d like to think that if I were ever to retire back to Bexley, I’d be a regular on the bench, swaddled in my peasant’s smock, and shaking a stick at each wicket that fell. Yet, there are probably equally fine prospects around the Northamptonshire villages, and who’s to say the quality of play may not be as good there too.

You're not going to like it Mr. Spock

If there’s life on planets in distant solar systems, and it's intelligent, do you think it plays sport? It seems a likely universal that, however many legs you've been given, you’d want to know who can move them the fastest. Perhaps unknown to us fleas really do have their own Olympic Games to celebrate who can jump the highest. The joy of football is its ease of play in a variety of situations, so perhaps an analogue for the ‘beautiful game’ is a possibility somewhere out near Alpha Centauri. Citius, altius, fortius. But somehow the eccentricities of cricket seem unlikely to be mimicked anywhere else in the depths of space, though maybe that’s just another tedious example of a human wrongly thinking that the world revolves around him. Well at any rate, if aliens ever make contact, let’s hope that they have a sense of play for mutual enjoyment, rather than the crueller notion that seems, for instance, endemic to cats. ‘To play with’ has a number of connotations. But I digress.

For all that cricket’s so steeped in stats, it’s sometimes a very illogical game in terms of who wins and who loses. Unpredictable, sometimes even rather random in its elevation of individuals to hero status, it maintains its charm by means of arcane laws and (in England at least) meteorological whim. And so it’s been at London’s Oval cricket ground these past few days, as England stuttered to a famous victory in the final Test match of the summer, and thus regained the Ashes they’d lost so overwhelmingly in Australia two years ago. If you still don’t know the significance of ‘The Ashes’ I once again commend you to Google where I’m sure many folks are gagging to tell you about this piece of Anglo-Australian heritage, which has resulted in an enduring and fascinating sporting rivalry. Anyway, 2009 now goes down in history alongside 1953, 1956, 1981 and 2005 as a Great Moment in recent English cricket history.

Here’s how it happened, though I still retell it through something of a haze of disbelief.

On Tuesday and Wednesday last week the weather was good in London. On Wednesday it was very good indeed with one of those puzzling and frustratingly short temperature spikes which England sometimes experiences. For one day and one day only, the mercury ascended to just around 30 degrees.

Now it was in everyone’s interests that the fifth Test produce a result. If the match were to have been a draw, the rules say the Ashes would have stayed with Australia, because the series itself would have been drawn one match apiece, and Australia were the winners in the previous series. England therefore went in to the match fully committed to attempting a victory. But no doubt the Aussies too would have preferred a win so that they could go home saying that they’d beaten the Poms fair and square. Again. Australians are like that.

But what seems to have happened last week was that the wicket was left exposed to the elements for longer than usual. Before the commencement of play it was, ex-England captain Michael Atherton observed ‘the colour of a rich tea biscuit’. Nevertheless I think everyone expected that like most Oval pitches it would be absolutely hard and true at least for the first half of the match. Later, maybe, spin bowling would be a decisive factor. So it was something of a surprise to see the ball begin to take chunks out of the surface of the wicket on the second day. One one occasion an Andrew Flintoff delivery caused a positive explosion of dust. These things play on the minds of batsmen. If the surface is uneven, the ball is likely to deviate awkwardly when it pitches: the batsmen can never trust to the line of the ball. The unusual state of the pitch can only have been conscious preparation by the groundstaff – but of course they wouldn’t have known which side it would have favoured, until the coin had been tossed, so this was a gamble, not a conspiracy. One thing was certain: the side winning the toss and batting had the advantage – and on this occasion that was England. Or so the logic ran – except that in the event, both sides scored more runs in their second innings than in their first.

The composition of both sides was controversial. The Australians omitted their spin bowler, Hauritz, presumably because their battery of quick bowlers had done so well for them at Leeds, and it would have seemed churlish to discard any of the four quite so quickly. As things turned out it was a pusillanimous piece of selection, although not as crucial as it might have been had the Australian batting been more steadfast in their first innings. If the game had been closer, Hauritz might have been the difference. By contrast England took the gamble of playing fast bowler Harmison and debutant batter Trott. The first selection turned out to be useful, the second absolutely inspired. Or remarkably good luck. When Trott has played a dozen more Test matches, we’ll have a clearer idea about that. In the event Panesar was omitted, and eventually this can be seen as a good decision in view of his lack of form. However there was a moment on the fourth day when we wondered if we would lose for lack of the 'turbanator'.

Once again, the umpiring in this match was undistinguished. Billy Bowden and Asad Rauf have made too many quixotic or just plain wrong decisions in this series, and they kept to their form here. Batsmen were given out caught when they hadn’t hit the ball, and leg before wicket when they had. Decisions were given against batsmen when the bowler by overstepping the bowling crease had bowled a no-ball – an ‘illegal’ delivery. It would be hard however to make a case that one side suffered more than the other: perhaps the Australians came out of it marginally worse off. This often seems to be the case for teams playing away from home, even with neutral umpires. Is the crowd the critical factor, even in mild-mannered Britain?

On the first day England spluttered their way to 307 for eight wickets. There was a fifty from Strauss, and a good half century from the recalled Bell. He needed to show that he could contribute to the first innings of a ‘chips down’ Test match. But largely the tendency for English batsmen to give their wicket away once they’d made a good start to their innings was confirmed. Collingwood was particularly to blame: his technique outside the off-stump at present is inadequate. Cook looks to have lost his way technically too. His strength square of the wicket on the off side has become a weakness, and he’s lost his balance and composure at the crease. Prior and Flintoff also fell to shots they won’t have been proud of. Trott played very solidly and confidently for someone making a Test debut in such an important match until he was ‘run out’ as he overbalanced playing the ball into the leg side. Katich’s reactions were tremendous in throwing down the stumps before the batsman had time to recover: an excellent piece of fielding.

On the second morning, Broad and the tail enders squeezed out a few more runs to take England to 332, but the pundits were pretty much agreed: this was an inadequate England score on this pitch. The expectation was that the Australians would score far more heavily, and put possibly terminal pressure on the English when they batted again. England had thrown it away.

And at 73 for no wicket, and the initial storm of fast bowling weathered, that seemed to be the script. However Stuart Broad had other ideas. By keeping the ball full and allowing it to swing he quickly removed the heart of the Australian batting to the extent that sixteen overs later they were 111 for 7, and the match was effectively won, though the English weren’t yet daring to allow themselves believe it. Broad has often looked ineffective in these first years of his international career, but here he showed that with his height and rhythm he can cause problems when he’s prepared to be patient and consistent. These unglamorous, slightly dogged virtues can be hard for a golden lad to make his own in an age where media attention rakes in the cash. After slightly stiffer resistance from the tail, Swann – who was bowling very nicely – wrapped up the innings at 160, and to their surprise England found themselves batting again. They stuttered and stumbled to 58 for 3 at the close with Strauss and Trott clinging on. Collingwood and Cook had again failed. At this point the expectation was that the wicket would deteriorate further and England would be lucky to make 200. Since the lead was 172, the task for Australia would still be formidable – probably beyond them.

But again, on Saturday, the pitch confounded everyone. Although it looked bad, and dust continued to puff up from the ball when it pitched, batting was obviously quite possible. Strauss was excellent in making 75, and Trott extraordinary in maintaining his calm to end on 119. The late middle order was enterprising, particularly Graeme Swann who biffed 63 from 57 balls to leave Australia absolutely on the ropes. When England eventually declared at 373 their opponents now had to make more runs to win the match than anyone had ever previously achieved in any Test anywhere. Only the weather could save them now, and that didn’t seem likely.

And yet. And yet. Although logic told us that it couldn’t possibly happen, not on this pitch, not in this match, as Australia went to close of play at 80 without loss, we began to wonder. I said to someone after church on the Sunday morning that I thought it would go to a fifth day at least, and although a wicket fell in each of the first two overs of the day, one to Swann, one to Broad and both lbw, by mid afternoon with Australia 217 for 2 and Ponting and Michael Hussey looking quite untroubled, anything still looked achievable. Then in the space of a few overs the English fielding, so often lack-lustre, regained them the initiative. Thus far Flintoff’s match had been a quiet one apart from clean bowling Hilfenhaus to end the first Australian knock and striking four quick boundaries second time around. Did Ponting assume that the injury Flintoff was carrying would provide him with an extra second or two to make his ground in taking a quick run? If so, he was wrong. Flintoff’s quick gathering of the ball and direct hit to the stumps saw off the Australian captain. And then, Michael Clarke replayed Trott’s first innings overbalancing act, revealed by the cameras as a frame away from safety when Strauss too flicked down the stumps from a short distance away. Thereafter, there was scant resistance from a demoralised batting line up, and by about ten to six, the England team were expressing their jubilation. Even the neglected Steve Harmison had played a part, prising out three of the Australian batters. The atmosphere at the end of the match reminded me of an extremely large fete – good natured, jolly, but rather restrained. There was little or no triumphalism.

When the Australians were beaten in 2005, there was daftness in the air – open-top buses, MBE decorations from the Queen for all of the players, including some, like Paul Collingwood, who had contributed little to the victory, loose talk about England being the best team in the world, lionising of players who still had much to prove. The legacy was the infamous trip Down Under which followed eighteen months later, where the English players were exposed as hollow men. Four years later the mood has been far more sombre and appropriate, partly by design, insomuch as the players now move immediately into one-day matches where reputations will quickly be enhanced or redressed, and partly because a lesson has been learned.

What might better be said of this match, which ebbed and flowed – as the series has done – with collective wills evident and individual skills glowingly expressed – is that it was a great advertisement for the enduring appeal of a sport perhaps, in this form, in its twilight years. I’m grateful to have been able to follow it. Its memories will warm the cockles of my heart as Bolton Wanderers play some other mid-table EPL soccer club on a dark January Saturday afternoon.

England 332 and 373 for 9 declared: Australia 160 and 348.
England won by 197 runs, and won the series 2-1

Sorry, Mr. Spock. Unlikely. Illogical. But true. Throughout the series Australia scored more runs, and took more wickets. Their fielding was better. They were the better team man for man. They remain one place ahead of the English in the world rankings. Yet at a few key moments they weakened, and so lost. Even in the weird and wonderful world of cricket, this is quite rare.

Tribal matters

A significant book could be written about the history of race and cricket. Someone’s probably done it already, and without looking it up I’d guess that C.L.R. James the great West Indian socialist and writer about the game may have been the one. At the very least he’ll have serially passed comment on many of the relevant issues while he was alive. But it’s still a developing story. How sad that the only native Australian to have represented his country in recent times, Andrew Symonds, should have hit a brick wall with the game’s administrators in the way he’s done. How odd that so few British born people of Afro-Caribbean descent are currently even knocking on the door of the English team. And what a lesson to us that the effects of ‘apartheid’ still rumble on, forty years after John Arlott brought Basil D’Oliveira – a ‘coloured’ man - out of the South African cricketing wilderness eventually to play for England. You can’t overturn the consequences of evil politics overnight. Like cricket, that’s a long game.

One of the unexpected consequences is that so many white South Africans with cricket in their blood have made Britain their home – though for differing reasons. After D’Oliveira came Tony Greig, six and a half feet of blond aggressive intent, who rallied English cricket briefly before sailing on to Australia where he helped change the sport into something else, floodlights, pyjama clothing and all, during the late seventies and early eighties. Then there was Allan Lamb, who the town and county of Northampton got to know very well during the nineteen eighties: a diminutive, dashing, bristling batsman with a robust sense of humour. He teamed up with Ian Botham, and even now TV ads for British meat occasionally pop up using a ‘Beefy and Lamby’ strapline – a joke probably understood by a diminishing number of the audience. Then we had great hopes of Graeme Hick, a refugee from Zimbabwe. On his first showing in England with a young Zimbabwe team he scored two big double-hundreds. We believed that Hick’s powerful frame and broad bat would deliver a cascade of runs for England after his qualification. But by the time he’d qualified the fearlessness of youth had ebbed away, and although Hick played often for England, in the Test match arena he became famous for not delivering as it was hoped he might. In the contemporary side, there’s Pietersen of course. This time, as opposed to Tony Greig, the cricketer has left South Africa because he feared that racial bias against a white man might militate against selection for the country of his birth. Andrew Strauss too has as many South African credentials as English, although the trace of accent is now very slight. And now welcome Jonathan Trott, the latest recruit to the English Test team, another man of giant physical stature, one of whose forbears, Albert, played with distinction for both England and Australia in another age.

Whether Trott is a wise selection we’ll find out in less than a week’s time. He’s had a great season with the bat, and is said (well they would, wouldn’t they!) to have a great temperament. He used to bowl a bit of medium pace too, but as often seems to happen in England, this talent has been neglected recently. In his stead the selectors could have chosen Mark Ramprakash to play on his home ground. Like Hick his record in Test cricket (and Ramps last played some years ago) doesn’t measure up to his enormous talent, which in the last five years has simply taken apart anyone who’s bowled against him on the county circuit in a way without precedent in my lifetime. But the selectors in their wisdom have decided a leopard can’t change his spots. Trescothick, the other English batsman of massive talent, seems still too mentally fragile to respond to the call, so Trott it will be. Hot to Trott? Or on a bad trot? Pick your headline.

One has to wonder what subconscious messages have been sent to players by those choosing England teams in recent years. How is it that the three talented players mentioned above – Hick, Ramprakash and Trescothick – have all failed to perform for their England? Surely there must have been – must still be – a failure to nurture on the part of coaches and administrators? And when you add to that the current form of Monty Panesar, whose game seems to have suffered a terrible crisis of confidence, a pattern seems to be established. (Panesar has been picked for the Oval, but has picked up a mere handful of wickets this season against mediocre opposition at great cost.)

There must be the suspicion that ‘man management’ (itself a gender specific phrase) operates, has operated, at a very poor level in the England set-up. If you don’t fit the system, because of raw talent, or colour, (or sexual orientation?) or eccentricity, you don’t get support. Can that really be true?

Good luck to England on Thursday. They’re going to need it if the weather stays fair. They haven't necessarily given themselves the best chance.

It ain't what you do...

On rare occasions sport can be genuinely moving. For me, this is usually when the human body is celebrated by an individual who at their absolute peak of condition shows off the wonderful things it can do. The triumph of heptathlete Jessica Ennis at the World Athletics Championship over the weekend was an instance. I’ll treasure the memory because she’ll perhaps never again be so perfectly able to deliver her combination of skills free from injury or anxiety. It was the kind of glowing performance only a twenty-two year old who’s never won anything major could turn in. Almost as marvellous was the obvious camaraderie between most of the competitors as they congratulated each other afterwards – I’m not sure the Ukrainians were joining in the dancing, but then there’s always a serpent in Eden.

Her triumph was followed by Usain Bolt’s mind-boggling 9.58 win over one hundred metres. I suppose one’s reaction to that should have been the same, but here it’s the desperate wish to believe which colours the result. His sudden improvement over the distance, along with that of other Jamaican sprinters, and their board’s equivocal reaction to positive doping tests, leaves a nagging anxiety. Some of us remember how we were taken in by ‘Flo Jo’ too well.

I don’t find myself moved by cricket very often, and less as I get older. There are the moments when great cricketers retire. One such was Curtley Ambrose, the great West Indian quick bowler at the Oval ground a few years ago, on a golden late afternoon – the ebbing of his career along with a particular season. Intimations of mortality – but also the celebration of a singular physical presence, fluid, purposeful, a man literally towering above those around him. Again it’s filthy lucre that spoils things. If sports men and women are paid to do a job at outrageous rates, excellence is what they’re supposed to deliver, and woe betide them if they don’t. We, who earn far less than they, are robbed of some of our power to worship and wonder.

The rather abbreviated Edgbaston symphony subsided as we all expected it to, although there was an unexpected coda as, after Anderson’s early departure from the crease, Broad and Swann laid about the bowling joyfully. They both made sixty odd, but might have made fifteen between them on another day. Once they located the ball’s direction of travel (and it took each batsman a while) they struck the thing mightily, and for a while discomfited the Australian bowlers, particularly Clark. He took it in good part, accepting the crowd’s applause for being hit all round the ground, while scratching his head under his baggy green cap. Broad was doing to him what he’d done to Broad a day earlier, but with interest accruing.

Commentators coo about Broad’s potential as a batter, and reminisce about his likeness to his father. I remember Broad senior as an awkward customer, who enjoyed one notably successful season on tour in Austalia, but realistically achieved little else internationally. He had an improbable stance at the crease, born of the fact that like his son he was a tall man – in common with Basharat Hassan the one time Nottinghamshire player his bottom stuck out an amusingly long way as he waited for the bowler. Come and hit me, it said, and I expect they did a few times too. We’re told that Broad Junior was an opening batsman at school and was a relatively late convert to fast bowling. He stands tall, can punch the ball through the off-side, and tucks the ball nicely off his legs, but as yet if he drives from the front foot, he looks uncertain, and the ball often becomes airborne. The repertoire of shot isn’t great at present. Jury out.

Swann is an annoying batsman. He has oodles of talent, and apparently little application. His attitude at the crease rarely suggests permanence. There’s a touch of the Pietersen defence mechanism: this is the way I play – accept me as I am, which is encouraged by modern forms of the game. If he could show some discrimination and learn when to play tight, and when to play expansively, he too could score Test match hundreds. But let’s not cavil: these two entertained the crowd until lunchtime, and recovered some self-belief for a badly battered side. Whether they did enough to dispel the demons in advance of the final act of this Ashes drama remains to be seen.

I find it hard to imagine ever being dewy-eyed about any of the cricketers on display at Edgbaston. What are they doing to engender love in the hearts of those who watch? It’s both what you do, and the way that you do it.

England 102 and 263 Australia 445

It don't mean a thing...

…if it ain’t got that swing! Try a little experiment next time you have a spare wall and a partially deflated light children’s plastic football to hand – or rather to foot. Stand ten metres away from the wall and kick the ball with the outside of your foot with the intention of hitting the wall on the full. You may find that the ball swings two ways, first to the right (the equivalent of the cricketing ‘inswing’ and then to the left - the ‘outswinger’). The heavier or more inflated the ball, the more difficult it is to reproduce the result – it’s very hard indeed to achieve with a real football. So why does it behave like that? Over to the physicists, I’m afraid. I’m merely reporting the phenomenon, not explaining it.

The ‘swing’ of a cricket ball is still mystifying too, although there are many scientists and sports gurus who claim to understand it. Most bowlers however, even at the highest levels of skill, know there are days on which however much they polish one side of the ball or unbalance it with rubbed in sweat or dirt, however much they concentrate on a correct, upright or slightly canted seam position, the ball will obstinately maintain an arrow straight passage through the air. Other days, as is the current expression, they’ll bowl hoops without apparently having to try. The individual ball clearly has an influence, as do the atmospheric conditions, but the results are always unpredictable. ‘Reverse’ swing is now in our vocabulary too - easier to show than explain in print. Get a handy bowler to show you the principle. This phenomenon too is elusive.

The two-way swing thing does happen in cricket, although usually as a before and after bouncing thing. Wicketkeepers are sometimes left grasping at air as a rogue delivery sells them a dummy. And sometimes bowlers of extremely moderate pace are said to ‘wobble’ the ball – probably a combination of the direction of the breeze and their own natural tendency to swing the ball one way or another. At the age of fifteen I was one such, although an extremely open chest at the point of delivery plus a bowling arm which tended to drop into my stomach meant that the ball mostly just swung in to the batsman, often by quite a prodigious amount. Usually I got batsmen out clean bowled as the ball disappeared under their nose and cannoned into the leg-stump. It was a trick quickly worked out however, and anyway as I grew taller the amount of swing I could generate reduced substantially. Sadly I never learned to properly bowl an outswinger by changing my body position and adjusting the follow-through of my arm. I wish someone had been on hand to properly advise me apart from the one itinerant coach who briefly muttered about ‘bracing my leg’. I get the point now, but didn’t then.

At Leeds, England failed to claw back the fine mess their batters had gotten them into because their bowling lacked discipline, and two of their bowling attack, Harmison and Broad aren’t gifted swingers of the ball. They’re tall men who ‘hit the deck hard’ i.e. their speed and bounce are their main weapons. Anderson is the best England swing bowler, but he seemed to be carrying an injury which reduced both his pace and accuracy, and there was noticeably less attack in his approach to the bowling crease. His swing on this occasion often seemed telegraphed to the batsmen. Onions isn’t yet experienced enough to carry the weight when his colleagues aren’t firing on all cylinders. But there are destructive days to come from him, although maybe not in this series now: like Anderson at his best he can swing the ball late in its flight and at a good pace. The later the ball moves, the more likely the batsman is to feather an edge to the wicketkeeper or slip fielders.

Briefly in the late afternoon we hoped that England might show some fight, and we dreamed of that great Headingley match of 1981 when lagging behind on first innings by a substantial margin, Ian Botham and Graham Dilley launched an assault on the Australian bowlers which carried England to a lead of not very many. Then Bob Willis tore in down the hill like a man possessed (TV pictures of the time show him as a man so focused as not to be really there) and blew the dazed Australian batsmen away so that England won by 18 runs. It was a dizzy, dazzling afternoon of obscure improbabilities. But by the close of day two at Headlingley 2009 five English batsmen had walked purposefully to the middle before trudging back again. There was to be no miracle this time.

Close of day 2: England 102 and 82 for 5 Australia 445

Hindsight

The Headingley pitch has a reputation for producing exciting cricket. Why the grass and weather should interact there as nowhere else has never exactly been explained. But when there’s cloud cover or a sultry atmosphere, batting often seems unusually difficult in Leeds. And then, once the weather’s set fair, as it was for most of the recent match, everything is suddenly so much easier in the batsmen’s world: there’s immediately very little margin for error in the bowlers’ length. The ball ‘comes on’ to the bat when it’s pitched full, which with a speedy outfield and a compact ground means a lot of boundaries. And if pitched too short, the ball sits up and asks to be spanked away. So in one way it wasn’t surprising that the Fourth Test went no further than two and a half days, and given the momentum of the previous game I suppose we should have expected that Australia, not England, would be the winners. But what if England had chosen to ask Australia to bat? What then? The question may be one that haunts Andrew Strauss for the rest of his career because that decision, and what followed on the first morning, may have lost England the Ashes.

Two things bother me. One was the confusion which followed wicketkeeper Prior’s ‘ricked back’ which came on as a result of the pre-game kick about. Like others I can’t conceive why it’s thought a good idea to warm up for a game of cricket by playing soccer. The history of injuries sustained in this way is now a growing one. Anderson suffered in New Zealand. And so has Vaughan. And in this case, did the injury to Prior mean that Strauss was reluctant to field first, because Prior needed time to recover? If so that was an extremely expensive coaching mistake, rather than a captain’s misjudgement of atmospheric conditions, and much less easy to forgive. In the event, the ball swung and seamed throughout the first day, although England’s woefully slack batting was collusive, and 102 all out somewhere around two o’clock on the first afternoon meant that the game was as good as lost in the first three hours. Let’s pass quickly over the fact that Strauss also had to give three media interviews after tossing with Ponting, and before going out to open the batting. It’s one thing to be interviewed after you’ve come off the pitch at the end of a game, or at the end of two hours driving round a Grand Prix motor racing circuit – and even then the stars make a deal out of what a chore it is – but quite another for journalists and so-called lovers of the game to go seeking soundbytes when sports men and women should be focusing for a game or event. The tail’s wagging the dog. Perhaps we should have done things differently there, was the gist of coach Andy Flower’s response. You think?

The second thing is the omission of Flintoff. This series was always going to be about ‘Fred’ and ‘Kev’in their presence or absence. But the team selection here was mystifying. Flintoff thought he was fit. The coaching team decided otherwise. But clearly there was enough heat in the disagreement, that the big man was noticeably absent from the dressing room, at a time when you’d have thought he’d have been in there motivating, praising, cajoling. After all, he’s the one who’s supposed to make so much difference to the morale of the team. Perhaps he just couldn’t bear to look during those first catastrophic hours. And indeed what could he have said that was helpful to his erstwhile team-mates later on the second day? In his place they picked Harmison – supported it has to be said by a large proportion of the press – but not by Geoffrey Boycott, who in this matter for once talked more common sense than anyone else. Sidebottom was his pick, and surely this was right. A change of angle from a left-armer, who has a good grasp of swing and knows the ground – wouldn’t that have been a far better bet than someone whose weapon are speed, bounce, and intimidation? And, excellent cricketer that he is, why pick Swann and then bowl him for just sixteen overs while the Australians compile 445? A batsman would have been more useful, and Collingwood might have done an equally good job with the ball on this occasion. He certainly wouldn’t have bowled worse than the other England seamers.

Hindsight is all very well. And yes, after wars, particularly wars whose outcomes have been mixed (and maybe that’s all wars) we need a public enquiry so that we know better what to do next time, or so there isn’t a ‘next time’. But cricket is sport, and the kind of ruminations in which I’ve just indulged are all part of the fun. Sorry, Bill Shankly, but nobody died. What did or did not occur may be fascinating but it just isn’t that important. Except…

These days there’s so much money sloshing around in sport, that there will be enquiries, even if you and I as humble spectators have no right of attendance. Apart from anything else this was a cricket match which only lasted half as long as it should have done, and that will have financial consequences. And you’d think that, knowing that, cock-ups like the one which took place at Headingley on Friday morning would be very infrequent, that planning would be meticulous against all possibilities. Remember then one-time British premier Harold Macmillan’s muttered aside when things had gone wrong, ‘Events, dear boy, events…’

It’s inevitably going to be the one thing you haven't thought about which kills you.

Day 1 : England 102. Australia 196 for 4

Freeze frame

The weather was always likely to have the final say in the Third Test at Edgbaston: from the outset only the most optimistic or partisan watcher would have thought a result likely. That we came as close as we did is a tribute to the efficiency of contemporary anti-rain measures, and the intensity with which both these sides play their cricket. Sadly, the forecast isn’t promising for Headingley either: tomorrow’s first day looks at the moment as if it could be a wash-out too.

When cricket was played at Edgbaston, it was compelling enough, until mid-afternoon on the last day when it became apparent the English bowlers didn’t have the firepower on a still docile pitch to pull the Australian batting apart a second time. And throughout the match there were images to sustain the imagination.

Firstly of course there was the dramatic call-up of reserve wicketkeeper Manou to the Australian team, minutes before the start of the game, and at a point where if Strauss had so chosen, the suggestion that he play in Haddin’s place could have been refused. Haddin had broken a finger in the warm-up – a potentially disastrous moment for the Aussies, because he’s so often proved his value to them with the bat over the last twelve months. There was much discussion in the press about Strauss’s chivalrous action: the informal rules about where ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour begins and ends in cricket are as vague as territorial claims to the Antarctic. There seemed to be general agreement that what Strauss did was A Very Good Thing. But it seemed to me the journalists were leaving room that if Manou scored a hundred on debut, and pouched ten catches, they’d hold the English skipper out to dry. ‘Weak England captain puts Ashes in jeopardy’. In the event, the debutant got an extremely good ball from Anderson which cleaned up his stumps, batted out some time in the second knock, and kept wicket competently, taking just three catches without fuss. The image which remains is of him joyfully receiving his baggy green cap from Ricky Ponting on the second morning. There hadn’t been time for the ceremony on the first. Manou may be lucky to play in a Test for Australia again.

The second thing I shall remember is Watson’s first morning innings. We English had high hopes of the new Shane: we were salivating at the prospect of this one-time all-rounder, now makeshift opening bat, being turned inside out by Freddie’s pace. In the event, Freddie went through the match wicketless, and it was Watson who probably prevented England winning by scoring half-centuries in both innings and being top-scorer first time round. To be fair, during England’s purple patch on the Friday morning when the humid conditions were at their juiciest and most helpful for England’s swing bowling, he lasted one ball – the first ball of the morning – but by then he’d done just enough to take Australia to security. Half an hour into play on the first day, he squirted a boundary to third man, Flintoff bowled him a bouncer and gave him the stare. Flintoff’s stare is meaningful without real menace. Everyone knows he’s much too nice a guy for murder and mayhem, even when less than sober. There’ve been Australian bowlers in the past about whom one would have been less sure. When Dennis Lillee stared, anything seemed possible. And when South African Allan Donald utterly lost his cool in the face of Mike Atherton’s stubborn provocation a few years ago, for all that both sides laughed it off subsequently, there was a real frisson of danger. Anyway, the point is Watson just smiled while Fred glared: an apparently genuine, amused smile. If he was acting, he played the part very well. Flintoff enjoyed batting on this pitch, but he got little reward for his energetic bowling.

On that second morning Onions and Anderson were destructive, swinging the ball at a good pace, and taking out seven Australian wickets for 77 at one point before the tail-enders restored a little respectability. Sweet for Onions. He’d been on the end of some rubbishing from Australian commentators, quick to try and get Steve Harmison into the England team on pitches which wouldn’t have suited him, and where they could have got thoroughly into the big man’s head. You’ve got to wonder whether all along they haven’t been more concerned about the focus of the younger, hungrier bowler. Onions has good pace, and a clever bouncer, which did for Ponting in the first innings. The previous ball had also been short, but slightly slower. The next was quicker, and deceived the Australian captain for pace. The Australian captain didn’t have a great game. In the second innings he was out-thought by Graeme Swann and clean bowled at the end of a very testing over: perhaps the most absorbing six balls of the match.

Flintoff turned back the clock with an innings of the sort he used to play more regularly for England. In Prior he found a good foil, but just when it looked as if their rapid rate of scoring would take England to a point of real strength, he got an oddity of a ball from Hauritz which unlike any other in the match bit into the rough outside his off-stump and hit his gloves to offer an easy catch to slip. An hour more and England might have had a lead sufficient to really intimidate the Australians.

As it was Clarke’s broad bat snuffed out the chance of a win. He seems to be hitting most balls in the sweet spot at present. His driving through extra cover and straight was classically elegant: lovely to watch. There actually never seemed any likelihood that he and North wouldn't save the game.

A final thought. Had this match gone to a sixth day, England would have been the team struggling to survive.

On to Leeds, with pleas for civility from the watching crowd. Which will undoubtedly be ignored.

Australia 263 and 375 for 5 England 376

Freddie

The greatest sporting stars have a habit of writing their own scripts. In the end they’re who they are because they can turn on the magic when it matters – at least when it matters to them. So it was that inevitably, having announced his retirement from the long form of the game, Flintoff bowled England to victory in the Second Test, chest puffed out, fists clenched.

It’s a strangely fascinating thing – to watch the career trajectory of a cricketer: a little intimation of mortality, because their rise and fall reminds us of the shortness of our own human life. I’m old enough to remember the excitement of first noting in the newspapers the presence of ‘Underwood’ as a name in the previous day’s cricket scores whenever Kent played. It started to crop up increasingly regularly. Who was this Underwood? What was causing batsmen to succumb so frequently to his wiles? ‘Deadly’ subsequently became a fixture in the England side, and took many wickets with his uncompromising accuracy and subtle variation. But Derek Underwood is now long retired: a distant memory re-activated by occasional replays of black and white footage, although I carry his approach to the wicket forever in my head, a model of repeatability.

I first remember Andrew Flintoff as an anecdote told during a rain delay on television by David Lloyd, one-time England player, umpire, pundit, after-dinner speaker. Something to do with a bucket of water and a ball which had caught the young Lancastrian where it might have hurt him the most. Standard cricket fayre. ‘Lovely lad’, said Lloyd. ‘Promising cricketer.’

Then before long, after rave notices in the press, he’d been promoted to the England team, as a hard-hitting batsman who could bowl a bit. When he first arrived on the international stage he looked gauche, and frankly a little out of his depth. There was poor shot selection, a touch of the blacksmith. But England persevered and he grew in stature, and was encouraged in his bowling. The action was unorthodox, and put a great deal of stress on a heavy frame. As they tended to say at the time, he was a ‘big unit’. But he could bowl really fast, and even if there was little subtlety of cut and swing, batsmen found the bounce he generated intimidating. He got wickets for other bowlers too as batsmen relaxed, glad to be away from Flintoff’s end. And his batting improved to the point that I think he once passed fifty in eight successive England innings, although he increasingly struggled to repeat that consistency. Boy, could he hit the ball hard. He was a vital factor as England won the Ashes in 2005: he may yet see the trick repeated in 2009. He’s at times been a complete idiot off the field, but on it, he’s always given of his best. He remains an enigma. There’s a belief that he makes those around him perform. Yet we seem to win as many Test matches without him.

Where will he stand in the pantheon? Talking only of Test cricket his record looks modest when compared with the greatest England all-rounder of my lifetime, (Sir) Ian Botham. Botham managed nearly four wickets a Test, Flintoff just two and a half. That’s a statistically very significant difference, and Botham’s batting average was better too, on less good pitches and arguably against generally better bowling. They were both extraordinary catchers of a cricket ball, but personally I think Botham just shaded it. Flintoff has lived by instinct and brutal strength. Botham too was at times hot-headed and ill-advised, but say it quietly, he was a cricketer who thought a great deal about the game, particularly his bowling. He’d try anything to get a wicket, and often did, but there was a plan. More often than not.

The other near-all-rounder who could perhaps be bracketed with these two was Ted Dexter, now in his mid-seventies. Dexter was a toff, and a noted eccentric. He could have made a career at golf, if he’d had a mind to – he was an exceptionally fine amateur player. These days there might have been a hard decision to make, in view of the money available in the two sports. Dexter was a far more accomplished batsman than either Flintoff or Botham, and the figures show it. He averaged 47 per innings over 62 Tests, and today that figure might easily be inflated by 5 or 6 because of the nature of the pitches. He had a square cut like no other. His combination of strength and timing simply lashed the ball to the boundary as Jessup must have done half a century earlier. It was perhaps the most telling shot of any cricketer I’ve seen, utterly and ultimately authoritative. His bowling appears not to stand comparison with the other two, and yet…He’s sometimes described as medium-paced, but I suspect he would have registered in the mid-eighties miles per hour on his day. Although he took more than four hundred first class wickets for his county, Sussex, he managed only 66 for England. They underused him, and it may be, although I have no clear memory of this, that the mechanics of his whole-hearted, jerky action, rather like that of Craig White in more modern times, rendered him susceptible to injury. Little footage of Dexter seems to survive, or at least get played. That’s a pity.

They’re saying at the moment that the day of the all-rounder is over. Too much strain on the body. Nonsense. Every team ideally needs someone who can contribute with both bat and ball. There’ll be great all-rounders again, but the truth is they don’t come often. Each country may see one in a generation. Enjoy Freddy while you can.

England 425 and 311 for 6 declared. Australia 215 and 406 all out

The Fickle Finger of Fate

Umpiring any cricket match is hard: the concentration, the fineness of discrimination, the possibilities of blame. Umpiring an international cricket match must be a definition of pressure. But just put me in that white coat baby - and rush me some of it!

I guess even the most exalted cricketers still get the chance to umpire at a junior level. Nevertheless most of them seem to forget what it felt like as soon as they’re given out (as they will swear blind) wrongly. As England batter Mark Ramprakash was once alleged to have said to an offending umpire ‘you’re messing with my career’.

To be entirely impartial, to have the required intense self-inspection before giving the decision, to trust one’s eyes and ears – Solomon, thou shouldst have been born for this hour. I once found myself umpiring in a local league match as the umpire supplied by the team I sometimes played for. Northampton Town League Division Three. Kingsthorpe Recreation Ground. Weather: overcast. Number of spectators: zero. (The previous weekend I’d attempted one of my periodic comebacks from retirement, and my Achilles was giving me gyp. Just like Kevin Pietersen.) Anyway, the pitch was wet and slow, and our opening bowler was bowling extremely straight and well from my end. A succession of opposition batsmen allowed the low-bouncing ball to hit their pads in front of the stumps, feet immobile in the crease. With increasing anxiety I raised the finger to give the first three out leg before wicket and then gave up. At least a couple more could have quickly gone the same way – perhaps all ten might have done - but it didn’t seem worth creating a world record only to end up in hospital. Bias, you see, doesn’t always work the way you might think it should. Don’t apply for a job within your own organisation.

At county and international level there are ‘not-outers’ and ‘outers’. The one-time Leicestershire wicketkeeper Ray Julian was one of the former. The ball had only to strike the pads somewhere in the most approximate vicinity of the wicket for the Julian finger to be raised. Even the non-striker might have been in danger. The most famous umpire of recent times, Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird, was by his own admission mostly a ‘not-outer’. If there’s doubt, the rule is that the batsman gets the benefit, and Dickie invariably had a whole barrowful of doubts. He was an agnostic’s agnostic.

Contemporary television slo-mo replays suggest Bird’s instincts were right. As the police and courts know, what the eye sees is often not what has actually happened. Where formerly run-out decisions might have gone in favour of the batsman, the television replays now often show the batter struggling to make her ground at the point the ball breaks the wicket. Frequently batsmen are shown to have got fine snicks from their bat onto their pads, when they’ve been given out lbw. (There’s a school of thought which says it shouldn’t matter, but that’s a discussion for another day!) Equally well, it’s quite clear that in times past certain spin bowlers in certain Asian countries may have benefited from close ‘catches’ which never remotely saw contact with the bat. At one time the practice was so prevalent that there you’d think an extra law of the game had been written: ‘There shall be two umpires, one for each side’ - which is why now umpires in Test matches are neutral. None of which spares them controversy.

Thus it was that on the fourth day of this Test match, the South African Rudi Koertzen found himself under pressure for alleged inconsistency of practice in referring disputed catches to the third umpire ( the one with the TV screen) or not.

Now from the armchair Rudi isn’t my favourite umpire, and I tend to agree with those who say that he’s made quite a lot of mistakes in his career, but any philosopher, and any scientist worth her salt too, will tell you that the quest for absolute certainty is a vain one, this side of heaven. Sport without the ‘was he or wasn’t he?’ would be so much more dull. We rightly chase the possibilities of equality of opportunity in our political and social life, but sometimes there’ll be injustices in cricket. Get over it.

Close of fourth day’s play: England 425 and 311 for 6 declared Australia 215 and 313 for 5 wickets.

Hill Climbing for Beginners

…was the title of an early seventies album, now a collectable classic, recorded by some good friends of mine, the very excellent Water Into Wine Band. Round of applause, please, for Bill, Trevor, Ray and Pete. But at the close of the third day’s play it looked as if Australia would have a mountain to scale in cricketing terms, not just a hill. Don’t it feel good to say it!

The instances of teams chasing a total of over three hundred in the final innings of a Test match are few and far between. It’s become a guide for captains as an approximate point of safety. Equally well, each country remembers only too painfully the occasions when it’s come out second in such a chase.

An instance at Lords which still stings came in 1984 when the West Indies were the visitors. Through the seventies, eighties and nineties the English team were on the wrong end of a fearful battering by West Indies fast bowling attacks, but in this match they were faced by a slightly more benign prospect, insofar as after the initial spearhead of the terrifyingly skiddy-quick Malcolm Marshall and the towering, remorseless Joel Garner, the backup bowling was merely adequate. Nevertheless a first innings total of 286 by England was below-par, and even for that they owed much to Graeme ‘Foxy’ Fowler’s century. Marshall was the destroyer with six wickets. However the powerful West Indies batting managed only 245 in reply. Ian Botham had one of his great days as an England bowler, taking eight of the ten wickets for a personal cost of 103. Like Flintoff today, captains would turn to Botham for inspiration: he could make things happen from nowhere.

And England were grateful to him for his batting when it was their turn again. He scored 81 quickly in the context of the match, and with Allan Lamb making a century, at the close of the fourth day England were well-poised on 287 for 7 wickets.

Consider for a moment. That means they were already 328 to the good with three wickets in hand. They must have thought themselves quite safe. The pitch was holding together very well, even maybe improving, but no side had scored at much more than three and a half runs an over. However, the England captain, David Gower exercised caution – unnecessary caution in the eyes of some watchers. He batted on a little while on the Tuesday morning, declaring at 300.

It’s not good for morale to dwell on what followed. Gordon Greenidge played one of the more radical innings of Test match cricket, limping throughout. It took the West Indies batsmen just sixty-six overs to reach the target, Greenidge contributing 214 unbeaten runs with twenty nine fours and two sixes. Among England’s shellshocked attack, poor Ian Botham suffered the most, leaking runs at six an over and failing to take a wicket. He wasn’t alone. After Desmond Haynes was dismissed at 57, run out, no further wickets fell. Greenidge and the unsung Larry Gomes, usually considered the one ‘blocker’ in the West Indies team, saw them home.

Why are these events so rare? Well, wickets do deteriorate over five days – and that’s part of the fun of the long game. But that knowledge also contributes to the psychology of the business, and perhaps teams are sometimes already on the back foot when they’re faced with a large target. The Australians will have to do better than their West Indian predecessors to get out of this one, but the ambitions of teams are getting greater with every year that passes!

Close of third day’s play: England 425 and 311 for 6 Australia 215

75 years

...is a very long time indeed to wait for an England win against Australia at Lord’s – and get this – the previous win to that was in 1896.

It’s interesting to look at the scorecard of that 1934 match, and realise it was a game pretty much won or lost on the toss of a coin. Australia’s strength was in their batting (somewhat weakened on this occasion by injury to Bill Ponsford) and in their spin bowling. In Grimmett, O’Reilly and Chipperfield they had a real force to be reckoned with. By contrast they opened the bowling with Stan McCabe – principally a gloriously accomplished batter – who as a bowler was a distinctly makeshift and underpowered performer. England’s pace bowling had far more bite with Ken Farnes and Bill Bowes backed up by Hammond’s medium pace. Their batting was strong too – Hendren and Hammond were the ones you’d imagine might get the runs, though it was Maurice Leyland and Les Ames who obliged here - but rather unreliable at times.

England took four sessions and a lot of overs to reach 440 all out by lunchtime on the second day’s play. Australia were strongly placed to match that total at the close on 192 for two wickets, although the great Don Bradman had already been dismissed - for a rapid 36. And then it rained.

In those days the pitches were left uncovered. If it rained, and the sun came out, conditions for batting easily got nasty, with the spin bowlers the main beneficiaries. They could make the ball bounce and turn sharply, and England’s hero on that Monday (no Sunday play in those days!) was the magnificently named Yorkshireman Hedley Verity. In a single day he took fifteen wickets, and bowled out the Australians twice. The grainy TV footage shows the ball spitting from Verity’s immaculate length, and the Australians fending the ball off into the hands of the waiting fielders. In colour, the pitch is scarcely discernible from the outfield. But of course, had the boot been on the other foot, and England the batting side, it’s hard to think Grimmett and O’Reilly would have been any easier to play.

On the second day of the 2009 Test, Australia collapsed again. Would the Englishmen be able to press home their advantage as successfully as Verity did then, we asked?

Neither Hedley Verity or Ken Farnes survived the Second World War, still then five years away, although events in Germany were already ringing the alarm bells. Ten years later cricket at Lords would have a very different flavour to it, as servicemen were occasionally released from their duties to entertain crowds on single golden days snatched during a bitter-sweet summer, even throwing themselves flat on the ground on one occasion for fear of a 'doodle-bug'. There are things more important than a game.

Close of second day’s play: England 425 all out. Australia 156 for 8

In the money

I missed the bulk of the Second Test match celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary in Belgium. The TV in the extremely nice hotel in Leuven gave us BBC1, BBC2 and BBC World but alas no Sky Sports, so I knew few of the exciting details from Lords until our return, although we were able to commiserate with the excellent Tom Watson as he failed to win the British Open at Turnberry. And since we were travelling home on Monday, we were in doubt about the outcome of the Test until our arrival at St. Pancras, where the Evening Standard proclaimed, ‘Aussies smashed by Flintoff’. But since we hadn’t seen men throwing themselves under the hooves of London cabs, I’d already assumed the Australians hadn’t achieved the apparently impossible and won.

It seems the post-university choice for Andrew Strauss was between becoming a pro cricketer or entering the world of City finance. As things have turned out, he made a very wise decision in favour of the former, and of course, the City being what it is, if he should ever fancy a second career, no doubt they’ll welcome him with a seat on a board or two. Good leader. Good at mental arithmetic. He copped a lot of criticism after the narrow squeak of the first match. ‘He’s a nice guy’, was the refrain, ‘but where do nice guys come?’ Apparently he lacked fire in his belly, or the ability to inspire others in the heat of battle. He was tactically weak, and hadn’t contributed sufficiently with the bat. Well, a week later he’s rather effectively nailed a few of those opinions.

What is it about Middlesex and money? I remember another exile from South Africa, well Zambia actually, another Lords favourite too, who went onto a career in the Square Mile. Philippe Edmonds was a man who never quite fulfilled his potential for England. 125 wickets at around 34 apiece isn’t an adequate reflection of his talent, although he was playing at a time when spin bowling maybe wasn’t as tactically valued as it is now. This was one aggressive cricketer. I remember him losing it with some batsman during a Test – words had been swapped – provoking a bouncer off two paces which smashed into the wicketkeeper’s gloves held high over his head twenty three yards away (it was probably the incomparable Alan Knott). And two balls later the medicine was repeated with even more venom. At which point I suspect further words were exchanged – though this time between ‘keeper and bowler.

Anyway, I digress. Strauss showed last Thursday that he’s not one of those captains for whom batting while in charge becomes an impossibility. As surely as Ponting had stamped his authority on the first match, so Strauss did on the second. He was helped it must be admitted, by some atrocious bowling, and a stroke of good luck. Johnson is having a bad time, his wrist position all over the place, and his arm a little lower than when he’s at his best. In the England first innings he suffered the indignity of going for more than six an over. And Strauss was perhaps fortunate to take out Hauritz with a fierce straight drive that at first seemed to have damaged a finger badly enough to have jeopardised his further participation in the match. He was a bowler who might have troubled the England captain. Mostly however, Strauss was left free to accumulate off his legs and punch square through the off-side in the area which is his favourite. Only Hilfenhaus exercised a measure of control.

Only the undisputed greats of English cricket have scored more hundreds for their country than Strauss has now done, and if for instance one compares him with Michael Atherton, England captain of a generation ago, he comes out very favourably. And at 32 years of age he has, as they say, power to add. Beware the quiet man.

Close of first day's play: England 364 for 6

And God spake...

Clearly I’ve been right all along. Of all the sports in the world it’s cricket that God has chosen for his own. As my wife Sue drily remarked afterwards, when there are so many prayers which need answering, why did this one get the vote? Leaving theology aside – and more than one clergyman has played for England, although none as far as I know for Australia - Panesar and Anderson did indeed end up saving the first Test for England, but they had to survive a full eleven overs to achieve it, and not the five I whimsically suggested yesterday. It was as good an afternoon’s cricket as anyone could have dreamed up, one which will be recalled in years to come, and a timely advertisement that Test cricket can provide more excitement than any other form of the game. Just exercise a bit of patience!

Half way through the day, yesterday’s more pessimistic prediction looked as if it might be nearer the mark. Hilfenhaus and Hauritz set problems from the start. When the ball is hard, spin bowlers can benefit as much as the quicks , and Hauritz’s height and ability to push the ball through meant that he could extract the bounce which Swann had earlier failed to find. Hilfenhaus was the best of the quicker bowlers in the England second innings: he was fulfilling the role which McGrath made his own in previous series – relentless in accuracy, aiming at or just outside the batsman’s off stump. His approach to the wicket and his method – even the moustache and beard – is so reminiscent of the great Ian Botham. Videos of Botham in his 1981 pomp must have been a staple diet of young Ben’s youth. Pietersen succumbed early on to him, clean bowled by a good ball. Strauss misjudged a cut shot at Hauritz because of the bounce, and so did Prior. Prior’s was a particularly ill-advised stroke: most schoolchildren would have been able to tell him why. If the ball is turning into you, it’s extremely hard to control a flat-batted cut, unless the ball is very short (bouncing a long way in front of you) and the bounce is low. England were 70 for 5, it wasn’t yet lunch, and no one was giving much for their chances. The weather, contrary to the forecast, seemed set absolutely fair.

Collingwood throughout was playing very well. He’s the one England batsman with the ability not to worry if he doesn’t score for a period of time. His slower natural tempo has caused him recent problems in one day cricket, but here it was crucial. He set himself to eliminate risk, and as coaches never tire of saying, to play one ball at a time and on its merits. Flintoff helped him add over fifty, although he never looked entirely secure. When finally the Australians managed to get Johnson bowling to Flintoff’s end, and when Johnson managed to locate the right line, moving the ball across the batsman from wide out, the end result was inevitable. Flintoff rather tamely steered a catch to Ponting in the slips. 127 for 6. Johnson has had a poor match, and his figures will flatter him at its end. He’s lacked rhythm and accuracy. Expect a different and more menacing bowler at Lords. He’ll like the extra pace in the pitch there.

Broad stayed a while without looking he belonged at a crease he was ironically reluctant to leave when a quicker, straighter ball for Hauritz had him lbw. It seemed a good decision by the umpire. 169 for 7 at tea. Swann had a bad time against Siddle after the break. The Australians are learning that he deals less effectively with the short ball than some, and he took several heavy and painful blows to the body. Nevertheless he hung in bravely, and there was a moment when it seemed he and Collingwood might do the job on their own. The equation was straightforward. If they could score enough runs to get ahead of the Australians, in terms of time each subsequent run would count double because the Australians themselves would need time to make the runs back and win. But at 221 Swann was the fourth lbw victim of the innings, this time to the excellent Hilfenhaus, and Anderson came out to join Collingwood.

Collingwood now had even more to think about, because whereas Swann and his predecessors could look after themselves, Anderson in theory needed protection and to face as few balls as possible from the most threatening of the bowlers. For seven overs or so, they just about managed to cope, although there was serial confusion as to whether Collingwood preferred Anderson to deal with Johnson (bowling very badly given the situation and spraying a lot of balls wide of the stumps) or Hauritz. A run out seemed on the cards. Maybe it was the added pressure which caused Collingwood to go hard at a short ball from Peter Siddle who’d been reintroduced in Johnson’s place. The ball bounced slightly more than Collingwood expected and caught the top half of the bat. Mortified, he watched the ball fly high to Hussey’s left in the gully. The fielder juggled with the ball, but held on.

Panesar and Anderson. Eleven overs to play out. England still a few short of the Australians in terms of runs. It seemed an unlikely proposition. But Hauritz was either tiring or losing his nerve. He seemed unable to apply as much spin to the ball as before, and both batsmen defended well. The occasional ball turned past the bat, but truthfully there weren’t as many dangerous moments as you would have thought. I expected Ponting to bring back Hilfenhaus, but instead he opted for the off-spin of Marcus North, and probably surrendered the chance of victory by so doing. North bowled too wide of the off-stump, even allowing Monty Panesar to chop one ball away to the boundary. Anderson squeezed a couple of balls from Siddle to the ropes as well, and eventually time was played out. Every ball that the two defended was greeted with a huge cheer from the stands. For sheer plastic-cup shredding excitement it was 2005 all over again. If the spectators had been wearing hats, they’d have been thrown in the air, as was the case after the victory which brought England the series win in 1953 at the Oval. How sartorial conventions have changed since then!

The England batting heroes were principally Collingwood and Anderson, although honourable mentions go to Flintoff, Swann and Panesar. Some of the other England team members need to review their part in proceedings. Stuart Broad had a particularly poor game, and will need to come back hard in the next one, or be written off as of dubious temperament. Cook looks out of sorts. Pietersen is still flaky. The Australians say they have the measure of Bopara, although I read that as saying they’re worried about him. The English batting needs to tighten, and their bowling needs to be more positive. The Australian batting looks fiercely competitive again, but their bowling still looks vulnerable, compared to former years.

I imagine Panesar will be omitted from the England team to be announced this afternoon, and the enigmatic quick bowler Steve Harmison will probably replace him. Whether that will turn out to be a good call, I’m unsure. Ironically Swann will perhaps be less effective than Panesar on the quicker pitch at Lords, where the left-armer has had some past success. But who could omit Swann after his courageous performance at Cardiff?

To move from the parochial, there are two other Test matches of significance being played elsewhere in the world. The West Indian team we saw here a couple of months ago has gone on strike. Consequently the West Indian board has sent a young untried team to Bangladesh, and says that unless the recalcitrant players repent it will use the new bunch of lads as the basis of a team for the Champions Trophy in the autumn. The youngsters are just about holding their own against the Bangladeshis, but it will be a steep learning curve for them. And in Colombo, the Sri Lankans are playing the Pakistanis. The civil difficulties in both countries, as so often, put a sunny Sunday afternoon in Cardiff in its proper context. The lengthening shadows of an early evening can be very evocative. We are very lucky.

Playing for a draw?

This first Test is excitingly poised, although there can now only be one winner. It’s something which often puzzles the uninitiated – how there can be a nail-biting draw in sport, but this could be one such match. Soccer now shares this possibility to some extent. In two-leg cup matches, teams not infrequently need only to draw to go through to the next round, and if the match is to be played on foreign soil, it can be a triumph just to hold on despite the partial, heckling support of a totally alien crowd, and a desperate opposition throwing the kitchen sink at you. Down in Cardiff, we can expect the kitchen sink treatment for sure, but the crowd will be almost completely partisan for England. My favourite moment of the fourth day’s play was to hear the punters sing with great gusto ‘God save your gracious Queen’, a pointed and funny reference to Australian republican aspirations. However for England the ‘Barmy Army’ may represent pressure as much as support. England’s performance has been largely unimpressive over the last few days, and the cheers may turn to boos.

But how important for the series it is that England survive the day unbeaten. Their record against Australia at Lords, where the next Test is to be played, is shaming – they haven’t won since 1934, and to go either one down or two down into the last three matches would suggest a bad series loss in the making.

So with eight wickets in hand, England must try their hardest to bat through a day of more than 90 overs – there’ll be time to make up for the play lost to rain yesterday afternoon – on a pitch which as widely forecast is beginning to crumble away. There were moments yesterday when the ball sent up little explosions of dust as it pitched. The height and direction of travel of a ball doing this can be very unpredictable. More worryingly, it’s not only balls which hit the bowlers’ footmarks which are deviating: it’s tending to bounce uncertainly off the main part of the pitch too. The spin bowlers will like it a lot, and the much-maligned Hauritz now has a wonderful opportunity to answer his critics. But Michael Clarke’s occasional left-arm spin may also be a threat. He has a record of embarrassing opponents, notably on slow-spinning pitches in India. His natural spin will take the ball back into the English lefthanders from those footmarks outside their off stump. The English batsmen should just be thankful that Shane Warne is watching from the stands. Were he to be in today’s Australian side, it would undoubtedly be game over.

Not that there won’t be a threat from the Australian quick bowlers as well. A decade or two ago, before the renaissance of late twentieth century spin bowling, it was often said that fast bowlers in this kind of situation could do everything a spin bowler could do, but just do it quicker. There’ve been two crucial things about the fortunes of this match, and one has been that the Australian quick bowlers have outperformed the English. They’ve swung and seamed the ball far more effectively. Was it luck of the draw with the environmental circumstances i.e. were the first day bowling conditions just better than later on? Or was it a variation in the actual cricket balls which made the difference?

Or are they just better?

We’re in danger of talking up the English fast bowling attack. In reality, two of the three on show here aren’t suited to the conditions – Broad and Flintoff. They’re tall men who bang the ball into the pitch, and both have limitations in getting the ball to swing when there’s not much assistance from overhead. The third, Anderson, who I heard one pundit describe as possibly the third best fast bowler in the world today, is a long way from that as far as I can see. He can be very effective, but he has too many days when the force deserts him. In this game both he and Broad have visibly been unable to attack the bowling crease with sustained energy. The same can’t be said of the tireless Flintoff, but even he understandably wilted under the Australian batting pressure. When Collingwood looks the most dangerous bowler, you know England are in deep doo-doo.

Which brings us to the kernel of the matter. Where the English batting was all profligacy, with so many batsmen getting a good start only for them to throw their wicket away, the Australians made the most of their opportunities. Four of them got hundreds: Ponting, Katich, North and Haddin, - the first time this has been done in a match between England and Australia - and all of them scored over 120. Clarke added 83 of his own. They gave few chances, and unlike the English they all played with resolve and orthodoxy. Can the English batsmen now redeem their reputations? They'll have to play out of apparent character to do so. Extravagant shots won't save the day, although negative defence may not be enough either. They'll have to be positive as well as watchful, and play straight. Last afternoon Bopara didn't and immediately paid the penalty

Will the weather come to England’s rescue? It doesn’t look likely: there are showers forecast, and I suppose there may be a delayed start after the overnight rain. I don’t expect England to survive beyond the afternoon session, although the dream start to this series would be a determined England fightback which saw Panesar and Anderson bat out the final five overs of the day. I shall now go to church and pray for that.

England 435 and 20 for 2 wickets: Australia 674 for 6 wickets declared

Ball by ball

A lovely chap called Jay Pink is landscaping our garden, completing a design he began a few years ago, and very beautiful it’s going to be too when he’s finished: he’s a clever man with a good eye - a cricket enthusiast as well. Looking at his shoulders and with regard to his occupation, I should think he could give the ball a fair clout.

It turns out Jay and I do the same thing on days like today when the English bowling is ineffective and wickets are hard to come by. We turn off the ball-by-ball radio commentary in the superstitious hope that in our absence a wicket will fall. Somehow it’s our continued observation which is keeping the opposition batsmen from doing the decent thing. For comparison I refer you to the problem of perception in philosophy which famously led Bishop Berkeley to find a purpose for God. If things don’t exist in the absence of anyone to watch over them – well since God is immanent over the whole of creation, he keeps it in existence by his attention. Phew, what a relief!

Jay is fortunate in that his work permits him to keep an eye on things down Cardiff way rather more effectively than mine does. Recording studios are about the most unfriendly places in that respect. Colleagues are apt to grow impatient if I lend my ears to the casually placed radio and ignore their peerless vocals and immaculate drumming. If you’re an American tourist in London one summer, be aware of the following. All those people with earpieces you see, hanging around on street corners in prominent places – they’re not secret service agents dedicated to keeping the capital safe from acts of terrorism – they’re just listening to the cricket. And if they’re sporting shades, they’re still not secret service agents, they’re just pretending to be.

As a student I remember having a Very Big Argument with the officials at the British Museum, whence I’d gone on a vac job, drawing population samples from lists of voters for the benefit of an opinion research organisation. They objected to me taking in a radio plus earpiece so that the tedium of the work could be enlivened by the day’s commentary from Old Trafford, Manchester. In the end they gave in. Clearly a young man with untidily long hair and frayed jeans couldn’t be all bad, if he wanted to listen to the cricket, and it mattered so much to him.

The idea of six or more hours of continuous broadcast commentary on a daily basis for just under a week may boggle the mind of outsiders, but it’s been a regular feature of British life for more than half a century now, and the fact that the coverage is unbroken by commercials is a miracle of public service radio which because it’s perennially under threat from an uncomprehending coalition of accountants and iconoclasts, needs publicity and protection, if you ask me. Historically ‘Test Match Special’ has also functioned as a model for ‘rolling news’ broadcasting, although I’ve never seen this acknowledged.

Since 1957 I’ve listened to ball-by-ball on countless car journeys, heard it through the mists of fever, and intercepted excerpts for surreptitious sharing between the events of family weddings. During family holidays we’ve tried in vain to pick up reception in outlying parts of France, and mourned its absence when in areas of the world where the BBC World Service is the only British broadcasting on offer. The various commentators have continued to provide a rich vein of whimsical British humour, which has proved a bond between individuals from every age and background.

The staggering thing is how they keep it going – all that talk about, well, nothing really. It’s all supremely trivial and unimportant, and yet it makes for an amiable backdrop to the summer scene, a link to an England long gone.

The play yesterday was very one-sided, both sides of the afternoon break for rain. The English bowlers looked utterly bereft of penetration or ideas, and to be honest it’s often looked that way in the past two years. They promise much, and talk a good game, but deliver only fitfully. And there was a moment late in the afternoon which should ring alarm bells amongst the English batsmen. Collingwood came on to bowl a few overs of slow off-cutters and give the front-line attack some respite. He bowled two consecutive balls at the left-hander North both of which turned out of the rough patches outside the batman’s off-stump. One bounced a lot, and the other barely at all. Both went past the wicketkeeper for four byes (runs scored when the batsman hasn’t hit the ball). The pitch is deteriorating quickly and the English have a lot of left-handers who’ll be vulnerable to Hauritz’s bowling. Watch this space, I'm afraid.

England 435 Australia 479 for 5 wickets