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“Go back to Durham and bowl.” Do we owe Harmison an apology?
By Will last year, at the end of September, 2 Comments »
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Six months. That is the brief time that it has taken Steve Harmison to return to his best form: “career-best form,” Justin Langer said recently. And in taking the final wicket of Martin Saggers, Durham beat Kent to clinch their first Championship title. They were made to wait - Nottinghamshire were chasing something vast against Hampshire - but the celebrations are well and truly underway. Much of their success is owed to Harmison’s return to form: his return from New Zealand, six months ago, to bowl and bowl and bowl for Durham. He’s taken wickets in all formats of the game, at vital times, and has been their matchwinner.
As Rob Steen says, “tucking into humble pie is part of a journalist’s lot,” and although most humble pie is generally accepted to be acrid in taste, this particular bowl-full is delicious. We castigated his character, derided his perceived lack of motivation, laughed, pitied and shamed him. And to an extent, everyone bar the man himself, now has egg on their face to an extent. But so what? We’ve got we wanted all along: the fast bowler we knew he was capable of being, even if that meant he needed miles in his legs. I can comfortably stomach humble pie and egg so long as he continues in this manner.
He has taken 60 Championship wickets at 22.35 this season. Only James Tomlinson (67) and Adil Rashid (62. Err, hello?) have snaffled more, while his strike-rate of 41.5 suggests Langer was probably spot on. He is back to his best.
And yet, I’m bitter and cynical enough to wonder how long this new-found form and spirit and venom will last. And it’s no wonder, too, given his history. Is this a breakthrough or a respite from his normal self?
Somehow, in spite of all that has gone before, I sense a bowler now in tune with his own needs and those of his team. Munch away on that pie, and long may it last.
2 Comments »Middlesex’s woes
By Will last year, at the start of September, 2 Comments »
I don’t know what’s going on at Middlesex. One minute they’re winning the Twenty20 Cup and heading to India for the Champions League. The next, they’re trying to tempt South Africa’s Mickey Arthur into a new post of managing director (though Angus Fraser is the current front-runner). For a brief few weeks, Middlesex re-tasted glory - the glory that is rightfully theirs, having nobly sacrificed their own form for the past 17 years to allow the other prissy teams (Lancashire, Sussex, Warwickshire - all those tramps) some success. They want this glory back. It is theirs, they play at the home of cricket, and justice will be done.
Well, it turns out that justice will not be served just yet. News comes through that Ed Joyce has turned down the captaincy; Shaun Udal has accepted the captaincy; Dawid Malan, the club’s brightest prospect since Owais Shah, might be off to Warwickshire. And poor old Nick Compton’s had enough and might be splitting to Somerset.
It nearly makes me want to support Durham on a full-time basis. And perhaps I will if we lose Malan.
2 Comments »A fan’s-eye view of the EPL
By Jonathan Liew last year, mid-July, 3 Comments »
On hearing a new initiative, my first instinct has generally been the most reliable one. “A shorter World Cup? Great!” “$10 million, winner-takes-all? What is this, a game show?” But I’m less certain about the contented feeling I got in the pit of my stomach immediately after reading about the impending EPL. On reflection, I wonder where it’s going to leave the casual fan.
Twenty20 cricket is the most expensive form of domestic cricket to watch, and with huge pressure on the ECB to match or even surpass the level of revenue generated by the IPL, it’s easy to envisage a future in which tickets to a Twenty20 game hit the £30 or even £40 mark. And it’s wishful thinking to expect a terrestrial broadcaster to show interest, especially when you consider the sheer number of games involved and the prime Friday-night slot most of them would fill.
What the EPL vision reminds me of most is not its Indian counterpart, but its footballing equivalent: the bloated, joyless Premiership. A middle-class preserve, a place where corporate fools will go to show how ‘down with it’ they are, the domain of Sky or Setanta subscribers alone. We will be told, patronisingly, that this is the price you pay for higher standards.
So a few suggestions, just in case Giles Clarke reads this blog:
1) Include free admission to a Championship game with every Twenty20 ticket. Championship cricket will all but disappear from summer weekends, and it needs all the help it can get.
2) Ticket prices will need some form of regulation. The ‘Iron Law’ of cricket spectating goes something like this: the less you’ve paid to watch a game, the more fun you’ll have. World Twenty20 in South Africa: fun. World Cup in the Caribbean: not fun. 50 rupees to watch the world’s best in the IPL: very fun. £60 to watch Neil Mackenzie trickle along at two an over: really, not fun at all.
3) If you want to sell the rights to the SuperMegaEnglishTwenty20FlyingCircus to Sky for such an astronomically high sum that anyone wanting to watch it will need to buy a new dish, we won’t kick up a fuss. As long as we can have Test matches back on terrestrial.
4) Oh, and thanks for ditching the Pro40.
3 Comments »Middlesex remain unbeaten
By Will last year, mid-June, 4 Comments »
Mighty, mighty Middlesex. For the past five seasons, only Durham had a worse record than Middlesex in Twenty20s, but not so now: they’ve won all five of their matches this season, the only team to do so. Outstanding, tear-jerking performance by perhaps the greatest club in the entire world.
(Allow me the hyperbole. My enthusiasm, and Middlesex’s, will not last for long)
4 Comments »Mighty, mighty Middlesex
By Will last year, mid-June, 2 Comments »
It’s been mostly bad times as a Middlesex supporter for the past, well, decade. Good times have fallen on us over recent weeks however, and we’re now on a bit of a roll.
I’m just recording this for posterity, before normality returns. It is nice to beat Essex, though, especially as three of my mates - one of whom pretends to work for The Times - support the chavs.
2 Comments »Early summer dupes the batsmen
By Will last year, at the start of May, 2 Comments »
It’s a glorious summer’s day in SW London here but, judging by the county scorecards, the batsmen aren’t yet enjoying it. Wickets have clattered and shattered all over the place. Kent, for example, bowled out Nottinghamshire for 202 but are now 16 for 4. Sidebottom has 3 for 2 from 4.
Lancashire slipped to 143 with Mark Davies storming through them with 7 for 33. In reply, Durham are 97 for 8. But the pick of the destroyers is Hampshire’s James Tomlinson who took 8 for 46 on the normally concrete Taunton pitch. Kevin Pietersen then made good Hampshire’s bowling performance with an even hundred.
I don’t really know why I’m telling you all this - you can look for yourselves.
2 Comments »Chris Lewis reaches half-century on comeback
By Will last year, mid-April, 4 Comments »
Chris Lewis, the former England, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Surrey allrounder, is 40-years-young and back with his old London club on a pay-as-you-play contract. He made his comeback today against mighty mighty Middlesex at The Oval and has reached fifty…but not with the bat. His six overs cost 51. Andrew Strauss went a bit bonkers with 163 from 130.
Lewis was one of a clutch of allrounders they tried in the 1990s. Ridiculously gifted, but a little bit wayward. Remember when he shaved his head and subsequently got sunstroke? No fear of that in London today, mind.
4 Comments »Do we need counties?
By Jonathan Liew last year, mid-April, 22 Comments »
There are 18 counties playing first-class cricket. That’s quite a lot. There are more domestic teams in England than in any other country. Yet they’re not evenly spread around - London and its environs has an embarrassment of teams, while parts such as the south west, the far north and most of Eastern England have none at all.
Now partly, that’s due to population: cricket teams are concentrated around the biggest cities. And yet, we persist in clinging to the county apparatus, a hotchpotch of hazily-defined localities that has very little relevance to the social geography of today. Counties don’t really exist in any meaningful sense any more; in fact, for four of the 18 counties, that’s literally true. The county system is rooted in a long gone past, and it hasn’t changed, even though everything around it has. Does the idea of ‘Warwickshire’ mean anything to anyone any more? Certainly not for someone like Ian Bell, who was born in Coventry - which since 1974 has been part of the West Midlands.
If it were only a quibble about names and boundaries, we could probably let it go. But this archaic system has a more serious effect on the domestic game. With large shifts in population and wealth away from rural England and towards the towns, some counties clearly have an inherent advantage over others. A county like Lancashire, with a catchment area of Liverpool and Manchester, the surrounding towns, Cheshire and Cumbria, have far more resource to draw on than the likes of Leicestershire, which has one medium sized town and four rival cricketing counties on its borders. It may always have been this way to an extent - pre-reform Yorkshire was bloody huge - but that doesn’t necessarily make it fair.
As a result, prosperity - and thus success - is distorted by the fact that some counties will always be struggling to prosper, regardless of cricketing merit, and some will always be comfortable. Test grounds - a major source of potential revenue - are concentrated almost exclusively around big cities. Look at the list of county champions: the top four are Yorkshire, Surrey, Middlesex and Lancashire - areas with high populations and a Test ground. Then look at who has come bottom most often: Derbyshire, Somerset, Northamptonshire, Glamorgan. When Leicestershire can’t hang on to a player like Stuart Broad, who was born in the county and has played all his cricket there, it’s clear the playing field is not level. The influx of Kolpak players have counteracted population factors to an extent - but they still need to be paid, and the biggest counties will always jostle their way to the front in this respect.
It’s possible teams like Leicestershire and Derbyshire will never again reach the pinnacle of English cricket. The best they can hope for is the odd promotion or a dart at a one-day trophy here and there, but it’s equally likely they’ll wane and recede slowly into the background. That is, unless something is done about it.
If domestic cricket is ever to make proper money - and, who knows, provide a higher standard? - it needs to brand itself in more familiar terms. In short, we need fewer teams, more fairly distributed. The quickest way of doing this would be to merge counties; in short, persuading them to vote themselves out of business. That’s not going to happen. Instead, reorganisation of domestic cricket could be craftily disguised as a PR exercise.
Ironically, the IPL might be able to teach English cricket a thing or two in this respect. Moneyed franchises they may be, but the teams in the League are based in - and upon - very real localities. The players may not be sourced locally, but that will come in time. What’s important is that a bond is being forged betwen a cricket team and a town. In England, those bonds already exist in large part: Gloucestershire is by and large a Bristol team, Hampshire a Southampton-based club, Warwickshire is a Birmingham team, and so on. Towns have a far greater emotional and economic pull than counties these days, and are far more relevant in today’s society.
The idea, then, is this, although the details are less important than the diagnosis behind them. Cut the number of teams to, say, 12, and base each one around a large town. Let’s call them, for sake of argument: Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Southampton, Birmingham, Nottingham, North London, South London, East London, Cardiff and Brighton. The South East has a quarter of England’s population, so it should have a quarter of the teams. The names, as I say, are largely irrelevant.
What English cricket would then have, essentially, is the Australian system in all but name. Teams would be able to draw on the emotional and financial clout of the major town, but talent-wise the spread would be far wider - and far fairer. It provides the best balance between levelling the playing field and preserving some semblance of geographical integrity. And the standard would improve.
Anyway, well done for getting through all that - any thoughts?
22 Comments »County cockroach here to stay
By Will last year, mid-April, 2 Comments »
Some interesting pieces in the papers the last couple of days. Steve James in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.
2 Comments »It is balderdash. There will be changes and rightly so, but the County Championship will survive. It always has done so and always will. It is a sporting cockroach. It’s small and ugly, and many a county chief executive considers it a pest and an impediment to financial progress. But stamp on it as much as you like, it will keep coming back for more.
For decades championship crowds have been declining and media space dwindling. But the standard of late has actually improved. Players elevated to Test cricket have often thrived immediately. One-day cricket has, of course, been a different matter.
[...]
It is still watched by far more spectators than equivalent domestic competitions anywhere else in the world. It is not always appreciated how fortunate we are in that regard. Even domestic one-day cricket is often ignored elsewhere. Walking into New Zealand’s state one-day final between Auckland and Otago, complete with their internationals, at Eden Park’s Outer Oval last winter was like stumbling upon a poorly attended benefit match. Only a few hundred spectators were there to witness an electric 170 from Otago’s Brendon McCullum. That was on a Sunday, too.
Another season
By Will last year, mid-April, 3 Comments »
Hands up all those who are really very excited that the new season is here? Come on. I can still see a few lingering losers at the back. OK, so it’s only the curtain-raiser - MCC versus the champions, Sussex - but it’s the beginning of another monstrous season, and it signals the end of what has felt like an interminably arduous winter.
I say “only” the MCC, but tomorrow’s game has so much going for it. Sussex will doubtless be bounding out of the Long Room to defend their title, and MCC are comprised of a mixture of the tried and tested and the young and hopeful. Ed Joyce is captain and one of four with international experience - Ravi Bopara, Owais Shah and James Foster are the other three - but, most intriugingly of all, it’s the inclusion of a couple of young bucks which really tickles our interest.
We know all about Adil Rashid, a precociously talented legspinning allrounder; rather less is known about Steven Finn, the Middlesex fast bowler who towers above nearly everyone in the county game at 6ft 8in. I had a decent chat with him the other day - he’s a thoughtful, serious young cricketer and has a very clear idea of his path to the top. Have a read at Cricinfo tomorrow.
All to play for, then, if not in the immediate sense - this match is first-class but counts for little else - then certainly for the future. Charge your Thermos flasks and head to Lord’s.
3 Comments »Udal lured out of retirement
By Will 2 years ago, at the start of December, 6 Comments »
Jamie Dalrymple, the England allrounder, left Middlesex for Glamorgan two weeks ago. You might think that Middlesex would have cast their net to scoop a like-for-like. Instead they’ve persuaded (persistently) Shaun Udal, the 38-year-old former England and Hampshire offspinner, to join them. For two years.
Yes, quite.
6 Comments »Notes from the pavilion for October 27th
By Will 2 years ago, at the end of October, 2 Comments »
- Andrew Flintoff ‘drink disgrace’ on tour - Fletcher’s book is going to be fascinating reading for sure…
- Murali is last hope for Wallaby wannabe - A terrific piece - read it
- Rudolph considers England future - Another South African threatens to split…
- Warne says the county game is a source of England strength -
Recall for Ramps?
By Jonathan Liew 2 years ago, mid-October, 2 Comments »
There’s an interesting claim by Mike Selvey in this morning’s Guardian: apparently Mark Ramprakash is on the verge of an England recall.
There is a strong rumour doing the rounds that when the England squad to contest the Test series against Sri Lanka is announced tomorrow week, the name of Andrew Strauss will be missing and in its place will be that of Mark Ramprakash. It would, were it to happen, be another stunner in a sporting autumn that already has had more turn-ups than a Savile Row clearance sale.
Only last month, with a strict brief to ensure that selections should anticipate playing a full part in England cricket over the next year, Strauss, already jettisoned from the one-day plans, was awarded a central contract by the chairman of selectors, David Graveney, and the England coach, Peter Moores. Given that in the past year three contracted players in particular - Marcus Trescothick, Ashley Giles and Simon Jones - played little or no cricket for England while receiving sizeable salaries, there would be no shortage of flak heading their way if such an exercise in generosity were to be repeated.
It’s a fascinating suggestion, although personally I don’t think the England selectors will pick him. It’s just not worth their while. If he succeeds, there’ll be the inevitable question of why he wasn’t picked earlier (his excellent Ashes record should have been a factor last year). And the very first time he fails, the critics will come creeping out of the woodwork, accusing England of ‘taking a backwards step’ and ‘holding back’ some promising young batsman or other. And though Ramprakash himself seems less mentally fragile than before, a low score in his first knock might see all those bad memories come flooding back.
If he is picked, it would at least provide us with a definitive verdict on county cricket. If the most prolific county cricketer of his generation couldn’t translate that form into Test success, it might be time to start asking the ECB some probing questions.
2 Comments »Willis: Hick and Ramprakash ‘clogging up county cricket’
By Will 2 years ago, mid-September, 4 Comments »
Bob Willis is never short of opinions. Not all of them are conventional or even particularly thought through, but writing in the latest issue of The Wisden Cricketer he has slammed just about everyone. Ageing players such as Graeme Hick, Mark Ramprakash and Dominic Cork are wasting the money the ECB “create” through their revenue streams, thus impacting on the next generation of England stars.
I don’t have much of an issue with these three, or indeed for any ageing former England player - so long as they perform and contribute to the team. Ramprakash continues to be as prolific a batsman as any - Hick less so, but nevertheless is a reassuring face in a brittle Worcestershire line-up. If their frail frames falter, then goodnight - but so long as they’re producing the goods, their experience is invaluable to younger players.
The Kolpak issue is altogether different, and I suppose I’m contradicting myself if I can allow old English players to play rather than old non-England-qualified Greek/Australian players. But there must be some form of regulation (which, admittedly, comes into force next year) for the selection of third-grade Kolpakians. It’s out of control and impeding the progress of young English talent.
Willis is really off on one, which is always enjoyable to read rather than listen to. Cricinfo has a synopsis and we’ll have the piece up either this weekend or next. Offer your thoughts below.
4 Comments »Positive spin
By Emma 2 years ago, mid-July, 6 Comments »
Only yesterday, at Sky’s only televised County Championship match of the season, David Lloyd was to be found grumbling at the lack of positivity in modern English first-class cricket. Although the Roses match is normally a lure, I’m afraid, Bumble, you were just at the wrong game.
For most teams in the County Championship, it would be fair to say that the days of the sporting declaration have, for the most part, disappeared. This is especially so when the first 5 teams in the top division are within elbows distance of each other. The bonus system, which rewards first innings performances with bat and ball, boosts the meagre four points handed to teams who draw without an over bowled. As such, when Yorkshire were all out this morning for 320, Lancashire merely began their first innings as if there were still days to play.
Shane Warne has brough many things to the County Championship. Yet high on this list must be his forthright version of captaincy. Hampshire are not a team to draw many games, and today was no exception. In a deal that must be applauded, Warne, and Warwickshire counterpart Darren Maddy, arranged a declaration and forfeiture to set up a run chase, which was so closely contested that it took a career best 192* from Michael Carberry to secure the game in the final over for Hampshire.
Does it seem right the Warwickshire are in a worse position for playing a competitive match than either of the Roses teams are after a draw in which the only tension rested in whether Lancashire could make it to their second bowling point before they ran out of overs? Yorkshire’s former captain, Darren Lehmann, was rather vehement on the subject and but two years ago, Warne himself accused David Fulton, then captain of Kent, of handing Nottinghamshire the Championship by refusing to accept such a deal on the last day of the season.
Certainly, the Australian system is far more rewarding of results over ’score draws’, and the whole point of the extention to four day cricket was to avoid games without victors. However impressive the scorecard of Essex’s game against Nottingham these last four days, neither team showed any hunger for the win over inflated career averages and record breaking. Unfortunately for Chris Read, the two overs he bowled in a final session dedicated to over-rate improvement did not yield him his first wicket in all competitions. That, at least, might have been vaguely entertaining.
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