Wednesday, 6 May 2009

Clouds, cuckoos and ducks

5th May

Tomorrow a little piece of history is made. Never before has a Test Match begun as early in the English season as May 6th. And it must be a long time since one has begun on a Wednesday either, if ever, although doubtless someone will immediately remind me it happened just last year - usually they begin their five day span on a Thursday.

What’s so good about a Thursday then? Forty or fifty years ago, in a gentler, more amateur, maybe less secular, certainly less commercial age, Sunday was literally a day of rest for cricketers. So, the routine for a Test was to play three days, have a break and then finish the match on the Monday and Tuesday. What’s slightly puzzling is that if this match is over in three days (unlikely on recent experience at London’s Lord’s ground) the two most celebratory, financially satisfactory weekend days will be blank.

Who will face the West Indies this morning in St. John’s Wood? It looks likely there’ll be two new players for England, both of them quick-ish bowlers from the north. The Yorkshireman Tim Bresnan seems to have been around the county scene for a long time, but he’s still the younger of the two, a very solidly built young man. His stats in county cricket haven’t been headline-grabbing: the suspicion must be that he’s been picked because he ‘won’t let anyone down’, and can bat nicely. Maybe I’ve been unlucky, but every time I’ve seen him (only on the television) he’s provided easy pickings. He has no great pace, and although he swings the ball in the air both into and away from the batsman, it starts to swing early in its trajectory, which is far less dangerous than swinging it less extravagantly but late. I’m more interested in Graham Onions, the other debutant. He has a whippy, more explosive action, and unlike some other English bowlers at the moment, he seems to have a good idea what makes batsmen uncomfortable. In recent years the Lord’s pitch has broken bowlers hearts. Maybe there’ll be enough early season juice in the grass to change that pattern.

There’s a lack of depth to the English batting. They’ve decided to go with the future and pick Bopara at number three in the order. No Vaughan (who has had an unfortunate start to the season, including hurting his ankle playing a warm-up game of football – duh!), no Bell, no Shah. After Bopara come two players in Pietersen and Collingwood who, like the West Indian captain Chris Gayle, are just off the plane from the Indian league in South Africa. How long will it take them to adjust to different climatic conditions, and a different kind of cricketing challenge? These things often don’t work out quite the way you expect. Sometimes everything seems ridiculously easy the first time out in a different situation: it’s only later that the mind plays tricks. After that in the order comes the wicketkeeper Matthew Prior, carrying too much responsibility for my liking, and then the bowlers who bat a bit – Broad, Bresnan and Swann, and then finally two men with no pretensions to batting at all – Anderson and Onions. This is thin stuff for an international side, but they may get away with it if the pitch is benign and against a West Indian bowling attack which probably won’t enjoy the likely chilly conditions.

So then, cloud cover, a Test match earlier than the first call of a cuckoo, and as for ducks – well, colloquially getting a duck in cricket means you return to the pavilion having scored no runs. The idea is that a zero resembles the shape of a duck’s egg. I don’t think the pitch at Lord’s will be fast enough to have the batsmen ducking and weaving.

And perhaps the sport’s administrators are living in cloud-cuckoo land if they think the amount of cricket played around the world can be endlessly expanded without causing damage to its quality or the enjoyment of the spectators. This particular game feels wrong at this particular moment. Too little anticipation from either the players or the watchers. Lords won’t be full tomorrow.