Alastair Cook: from the rare species of English batsmen who make housewives gush instead of groan © AFP

England announced their squad to ruthlessly demolish the quivering Australians amidst some razzmatazz last week, whilst the all-but-already-defeated Ricky Ponting and his about-to-be-thrashed bundle of inferior cricketing specimens were warming up for their warm-up series in India, desperately trying to enjoy a few days of nice, friendly cricket before their ritual humiliation inevitably begins in Brisbane late in November.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. England announced their squad to be ruthlessly exposed yet again in Australian conditions, as Ricky Ponting and his vengeance-hungry troops prepare to pull their baggy-green caps especially determinedly down over their wrinkly green foreheads and reassert their traditional superiority over their old enemy and greatest adversary, India, in what promises to be an intense if stupidly brief series. They will then head home to exert home advantage over an England side, none of whose players have ever not lost a Test in Australia.

Or it might be a closely matched series between two decent but flawed teams. At least it will be the first time since I was still a boy that England have sailed off to an Ashes series without expecting to be beaten like a naughty egg white, and without the summit of their hopes being the partial retention of their cricketing dignity. (Do they still sail to the Ashes? I’m a little bit out of the loop on that one.)

On paper – by which I mean, on the bit of paper on which I’ve written down some statistics − these are two very closely matched teams. In the ICC Test rankings, for what they are worth, Australia are officially the fourth best Test team in the solar system, and England the fifth best, with respective ranking points of 113 and 112. If you add up the individual rankings of the likely starting XIs, there is almost no difference between the two teams’ batting (England 5517, Australia 5466) or pace bowling (England 1878, Australia 1906). Only in Swann’s superiority over Hauritz (858-498) does one side have a clear advantage.

Nevertheless, the English press have been bullish about the team’s prospects – in some cases, as bullish as the streets of Pamplona during idiot season. (And that, readers, I believe to be perhaps the first running-of-the-bulls joke in a cricket blog).

Since the end of the last Ashes in Australia in 2006-07 (I forget what happened in that series, the last thing I can remember of it is Collingwood and Pietersen smashing the Aussies all over the Adelaide Oval, so I assume it all worked out fine), the new, post-Warne-and-McGrath-and-the-rest-of-that-annoyingly-brilliant-side Australia have won 20 Tests and lost nine (with seven draws). The gradually-and-belatedly-emerging-into-the-post-2005-era England have won 20 and lost 10 (with 16 draws).

There now follows a two-part statistical run-down of the England team. Firstly, a look at the England team that will definitely, without any question, and barely even having to break sweat, spank Australia into the cricketing stratosphere. On Thursday or Friday, I will post a statistical run-down of the England team that obviously will be swept aside by the rampant Aussies in a fug of all-too-familiar English ineptitude. And when the Australians have finished their two-Test series in India, I will have a similar crack at their statistics. And then we can all kick back, relax, and get on with the rest of our lives.

THE ASHES-WINNING ENGLAND XI, 2010-11

Strauss
Already joint seventh on the all-time England run-scoring chart after little over six years in Test cricket, the Middlesex magus is the fifth highest run-scorer in world cricket since January 2008. With a square cut like a Victorian headmaster punishing a boy who sniggered at hymn practice, Strauss has three Ashes centuries already under his much-decorated belt, and skippered the team to victory in 2009 with a Man-of-The-Series-winning performance that many consider the greatest deed by an Englishman since Shakespeare wrote those rather overlong skits of his.

Cook
The youngest Englishman − and second-youngest person in the history of the universe, male, female or otherwise − to reach 4000 Test runs. Cook, despite sometimes batting as if he’s trying to sell advertising space on the outside edge of his bat, has scored four centuries in his last 11 Tests, including his two best England innings since his stellar debut, in Durban and at The Oval. Housewives’ favourite – if those housewives like players who accumulate steadily with plenty of nudges into the leg side.

Trott
Scored a supernaturally calm Ashes-confirming century on debut at The Oval in 2009, produced another masterpiece to help clinch this summer’s Pakistan series, and has a Test average of 55. Bats like a cross between Jacques Kallis and an anxiously fidgeting death row inmate waiting for news from his lawyer.

Pietersen
Match-changing dominator with the capacity to dismantle a bowling attack as if it were a £2 carriage clock. More shots in his locker than Allen Stanford has skeletons in his. KP averages 50 against Australia, the fourth-best such figure in world cricket this millennium, and the best by a non-Indian (qualification: at least five Tests).

Collingwood
Scored a superb double-hundred in Adelaide four years ago, and averages almost 48 in away Tests (and over 40 in eight of his last nine away series). The kind of defiant, unflappable cricketer who would have swum to Dunkirk in his pads and evacuated some troops on his bat.

Bell
Stylist who can make batting look as simple as staring at an egg. Averages 61 in Tests since making a crucial if oft-forgotten 71 in the decisive Oval Test of 2009, and has scored six half-centuries in his last eight Ashes Tests, including four in five in Australia four years ago. Now officially renamed by the ECB as “The Flamethrower Of Eternal Justice” to make him sound more intimidating.

Prior
With a Test average of 42, he is England’s second-highest averaging wicketkeeper ever (after Les Ames, who was unavailable for selection after a fitness test confirmed his failure to recover from his death at age 84 in 1990). Prior also has the fourth-highest batting average in human history of any wicketkeeper who has played more than 10 Test innings (behind Andy Flower, Gilchrist and Ames). His glovework, once regarded with such suspicion that it was arrested and interrogated by MI5, is now excellent.

Swann
Transforming from a county also-ran into a modern England great like a forgetful larva suddenly remembering it was supposed to be a prize-winning butterfly, Swann has taken a phenomenal 113 wickets at 26 in his 24 Tests since his debut two years ago, including nine five-wicket hauls. This makes him, by a vast margin, England’s best spinner since Derek Underwood. Ranked as the second-best bowler in the world, he is the world’s leading wicket-taker over the past two years, and the world’s top spinner by an almost embarrassing margin. Excellent natural smiter of a cricket ball, who scored 250 critical and quick lower-order runs in 2009 Ashes.

Broad
In between repeated tellings-off by match referees for being a little bit naughty, Broad has taken 45 wickets at 27 in his last 12 Tests, and has produced series-winning performances in the final Tests of both 2009 and 2010 – his career-defining spell at The Oval to decide the Ashes in 2009, and his 169 at Lord’s against Pakistan, the second-highest Test innings ever by a No. 9, and ending once and for all the debate over whether he is a better No. 9 batsman than previous England incumbents Matthew Hoggard, Alan Mullally, and Neil Mallender.

Anderson
The planet’s No. 4 bowler according to current rankings, Anderson has taken 118 wickets at 27 in his last 30 Tests. He always has the ability to make the ball talk. On occasions, it has said: “What in God’s name are you doing, Jimmy? That bat hurts when it smashes me for four.” This summer, it said: “I’m going to get you out.” And it meant it.

Finn
A strong start to his Test career, with 32 wickets at 23 in eight tests. Twenty-six of his victims have been top seven batsmen. Finn is tall. Curtly Ambrose was tall. He once bowled a spell of 7 for 1 in Perth. Logically, therefore, Finn will definitely do the same.

BACK-UP PLAYERS

Morgan A brilliant strokemaker with four international centuries this year already, including one against Australia in an ODI, and a maiden Test 100 under pressure against Pakistan. Ireland must be regretting fighting for independence from the UK. If they had stuck it out, they could be enjoying his England successes as their own.

Davies has a first-class average over 40, and a couple of promisingly potent ODI innings against Pakistan. Left-handed, aggressive, a wicketkeeper – he clearly must be the new Adam Gilchrist, but more so, and better.

Bresnan is whole-hearted and improving with the ball, reminiscent of a young Flintoff as he increases his repertoire of deliveries; averages 46 in 12 ODI innings against Australia. Has displayed excellent swearing skills on Twitter, could prove useful as a 12th man/specialist sledger.

Panesar is a proven Test wicket-taker, still young for a spinner but with 126 Test victims and eight five-wicket hauls already in his cellar. Possesses an elegant, stylish off drive. Seldom hits the ball with it, but it looks great.

Tremlett had a creditable Test debut series in 2007 against a strong Indian batting line-up, and has a solid first-class record. Tremlett is tall. Joel Garner was tall. Garner took 89 Australia Test wickets at an average of 20. Logically, therefore, Tremlett will definitely do the same.

Part two, the Ashes-losing England XI, 2010-11, will follow in Friday

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”Watch closely children, this is how you manufacture an allegation out of thin air” © AFP

Finally, after weeks catching snippets of cricket on highlights programmes, intermittent blasts of radio commentary, morsels of Cricinfo’s text commentaries, and infinitely more news bulletins than would have been ideal, I actually sat down to watch a cricket match, live, on a television. During that accursed cricketless time, I have conclusively proved that work and family commitments can seriously impinge on a man’s fundamental human right to watch more televised cricket than is medically advisable, and that seven weeks without live cricket is more than flesh and blood can stand.

The media outrage has continued. Earlier this week I heard a radio sport commentator who specialises in boxing and athletics bemoaning the fact that, due to the alleged spot-fixing, the action on the international cricket field was no longer believable. He may be right, at least partially, but to hear a boxing and athletics commentator make this complaint was rather like listening to famous flamboyant cooking starlet Heston Blumenthal whinge about overcomplicated recipes, or paint-splattering art wiz Jackson Pollock grumble at a picture not being realistic enough.

The Lord’s game yesterday began under the now-traditional shadow of match-fixing allegations, as England responded to the latest inane witterings of PCB Chairman Ijaz Butt with furious threats of legal action, damnation and teeth-gritting. A slowly extended middle finger would probably have done the job more promptly and equally effectively.

Butt, a man who has evidently not fully mastered the delicate arts of diplomacy, claims that he merely claimed that he had heard some bookmakers claiming that England threw the Oval game. This claim about claims that may or may not have been claimed in itself raises a number of questions:

1) Why was Butt talking to bookmakers? At this time, of all times, you would have thought he might have made an excuse for not talking to them – dinner with the wife, or polishing his new Kawasaki 750cc motorbike, or translating The Iliad into Australian. Let us cut him some slack – perhaps he was eavesdropping like the ace private detective he has always dreamed of being.

2) Does Butt think every England collapse in history has been prompted by bookmakers? If so, he must imagine that all England cricketers of the mid-80s to late-90s live on enormous yachts and smoke gold-plated cigars.

3) Is Butt trying to start a rumour in the hope that, in accordance with the rules of the modern media, if that rumour is repeated in more than four newspapers, and/or printed in unusually big letters on a front or back page, it becomes a fact?

And 4) Is Butt unaware that attempting to play the “no smoke without fire” card is less convincing when you are obviously holding and operating a smoke machine?

It was, therefore, in the circumstances, a delight to watch an excellent cricket match break out amidst the morass of allegations, counter-allegations, garbage, counter-garbage, assorted bickerings and the general sensation that cricket is not merely going to the dogs but actually arrived at the dogs some time ago, and is now operating undercover as a dog.

Both teams played intermittently well and not well, which is often the recipe for an exciting game, and Pakistan won largely thanks to Abdul Razzaq catablasting 40 from 10 balls in the last two overs of his team’s innings, and Jimmy Anderson failing to do the same for England.

Both teams are potential World Cup winners, if only by virtue of the fact that they might win three games in a row against other teams of roughly equal ability, which is, in essence, what will be required to triumph in Mumbai in April. The final 10 days of the six-week tournament should be thrilling – all of the top eight-ranked teams have displayed potentially fatal flaws, and all possess the capacity to lose at least one of those three matches.

With a longer group phase, it is likely that at least seven of those eight will progress, and a three-game hot streak from a couple of key players, or even a three-game lukewarm-streak of not doing anything idiotic, could be enough to win it, or at least not lose it. Who knows what the format will be next time – probably something at least a bit silly – or whether Australia will have recovered their previous dominance; 2011 offers a golden chance for a team from outside the Big One of 50-over cricket to win the trophy.

The series, and this most bizarre of English cricket summers, reaches an unexpectedly exciting climax at the Rose Bowl on Wednesday. Whatever happens will always be a footnote in a cricket season that will, sadly, not be remembered for cricket. Even if Tim Bresnan rips through the Pakistan batting to take 9 for 13 in a spell of fast bowling unmatched since the halcyon days of Alan Igglesden, even if Mohammad Hafeez follows up his second ODI fifty in seven years and 42 matches with a blazing match-winning 65-ball double-century reminiscent of a young Asif Mujtaba in his non-existent pomp, even if a spaceship lands on the outfield and deposits a fully padded-up WG Grace to smash England to victory with his magic beard, the cricket will always be a footnote.

This is, to everyone apart from inveterate cricket-haters or lifelong lovers of the impact of illegal gambling, a great shame. It has been among the lowest-scoring English summers since 2000, and the fourth-lowest in the last 50 years. After a decade in which bowlers have been increasingly reduced to jelly, this was (even allowing for the landmark ineptitude of Pakistan’s batting) a refreshing change.

Mohammad Amir should have been the unquestioned star of 2010 – 30 wickets in six Tests at 19.80 gave him the biggest haul ever by a left-arm fast bowler in an English Test summer. No teenager had previously taken more than nine wickets in an English season, and of bowlers under the age of 22, Amir’s total was second only to Alf Valentine’s 1950 record of 33 scalps. Cricket is full of stories of unfulfilled promise, careers cut short by injury, politics, war, underachievement, or the misfortune of having been born before cricket was invented (how good at cricket might Shakespeare or Joan of Arc or Jesus have been?). If Amir’s career is ended, or severely curtailed, by his being caught up in a piddling if highly illegal little no-ball scam, it would rank amongst cricket’s stupidest wastes.

I had the unquestionable pleasure of watching the first half of yesterday’s match in the company of the fine, cricketous gentlemen of TestMatchSofa.com, a noble battalion of cricket nuts who seem to have, rightly, decided to devote their lives to watching, commentating on and talking about cricket and related subjects, such as, for example, life and more cricket. Whilst sitting on a sofa. And intermittently complaining about a lack of beer. Heroes. I commend their highly entertaining live commentaries to you.

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Giles Clarke: clearly a stranger to the concept of irony © Getty Images

Hello Confectionery Stallers. I have been tied up for the last few weeks attempting to entertain the masses at the Edinburgh Fringe festival (if you will excuse a numerically inappropriate use of the word “masses”), and latterly with unexpected family commitments, and to be honest I could not have chosen a better time in which to be almost fully distracted from cricket.

Cricket has itself been fully distracted from cricket, buffeted about in an inevitable typhoon of outrage and sanctimony, as the latest unfolding gambling farrago batters the sport like a cheap sausage, all amidst the queasily sinking suspicion that this particular Titanic has not quite finished ramming into what may be a distressingly large iceberg.

Here are the official Confectionery Stall thoughts on the most cricketingly depressing story of recent years.

1. It was slightly odd to see ECB chairman Giles Clarke being so affronted by Mohammad Amir that he simply could not bring himself to look at the bowler when presenting him with the Man Of The Series Award after the Lord’s Test-match-cum-debacle. Whilst all cricket fans are, without doubt, disgusted by the alleged spot-fixing, and saddened that it should have involved the most exciting young player in the game, it should be remembered that Clarke himself has not proved immune to the allure of taking easy money from dubious sources.

Just two years ago Clarke and the ECB prostituted the England cricket team to Texan billionaire and current resident of the Federal Detention Centre, Houston, USA, Allen Stanford, who pitched up at Lord’s in a fake helicopter with 20 fake million dollars in mostly fake dollars bills.

Merely hearing the words “Texan tycoon” and “cricket” in the same sentence should have set alarm bells twanging. The helicopter and Perspex-coated wodge of cash should have made them go off like a hungry-monkey enclosure at a slightly delayed feeding time. But the ECB willingly bent over and pimped out the national cricket team to such an extent that they might as well have made them all go out to bat up in fishnet stockings and push-up bras, whilst a threatening-looking gangster stood by the scorebox taking 90% of their runs away and counting them for himself.

Months later, after one toe-curlingly awkward and flirtatious cricket match, Stanford was accused by no less an authority than the United States Securities and Exchange Commission of one of the biggest frauds in human history, and the ECB emerged from the whole humiliating episode with egg not just on its face but stuck in its hair, caked all over its once-woolly jumper, and dribbling apologetically down its cash-stained trousers, a walking omelette of a sporting organisation.

For Clarke, the man who sold his nation’s cricket team to be a tycoon’s plaything, to refuse to shake hands with someone accused of accepting cash from someone dodgy for doing something he patently should not be doing, perhaps shows the lack of self-awareness required to be a successful businessman and sports administrator.

Clarke is not alone. One cursory glance at the ICC international schedule reveals that organisation’s pathological inability to say “No, thanks” to money, its steadfast refusal to protect the soul of cricket from commercial interference.

None of this is intended to justify the alleged actions of the accused players, but to highlight the fact that few at the highest level in cricket have shown much ability, willingness or effort to spurn the attractions of money and place the integrity and welfare of the game ahead of financial acquisitiveness.

2. Nevertheless Clarke deserves credit for calling for a proper, communal effort to aid Pakistani cricket in its seemingly endless Hour Of Need, an hour which has now stretched some way beyond the standard 60 minutes, and which, for various reasons, shows no signs of being interested in taking a breather and being at least temporarily replaced with an Hour Of Stability, or a Few Minutes Of Hope, or even a Quick Tea-And-Biscuit Break of Normality.

As they have proved again this summer, Pakistan’s cricket team is generally the most fascinating, irritating, compelling and frustrating in world cricket. Their bowlers, in particular Amir and Mohammad Asif, have regularly made budget porcelain mugs of both England and Australia’s batting line-ups, whilst their batsmen have made a strong, prolonged and resolutely determined statistical case for being the most inept to have visited England in more than 50 years.

Cricket needs Pakistan, and whilst it is true that Pakistan cricket has not traditionally been the most reliable friend to itself, the world of cricket must set aside its various vested interests and strive to ensure that Pakistan cricket remains alive in the international arena.

3. Human history shows that, in general:

• many humans throughout history have found easy money far more attractive than hard money (for examples, see, for example, the recent history and current state of the global economy, the MPs’ expenses scandal in Britain, the existence of the Cayman Islands, the IPL);
• financial inequality leads to wrongdoing (it must be much easier to spurn the offer of a few thousand pounds if you are already earning a few hundred thousand);
• where gambling is legal, legal gambling thrives; where gambling is illegal, illegal gambling thrives; where illegal gambling thrives, people become aggressively naughty; people like gambling (witness the popularity of religion – what greater punt can there be in life than betting for or against an afterlife?);
• teenagers thrust rapidly into the public spotlight frequently balls things up; and
• when a British tabloid newspaper starts taking the moral high ground, you know things have gone very, very badly wrong.

4. The ICC has, evidently, not adequately decapitated the particularly snakey Medusa of cricket corruption. ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat, has, however, stated unequivocally: “We will not tolerate corruption in this great game.”

It is reassuring to know that there is at least one thing in the universe that the ICC will not tolerate. Amongst the things it will tolerate are:

• the potentially terminal decline of cricket in some once-great Test playing nations;
• the premature elevation to Test status of nations due to political and commercial vested interests;
• large amounts of money from TV companies in return for artificially and soullessly elongating one-day tournaments;
• shamelessly pricing local cricket fans out of attending said tournaments, leading to embarrassingly sparse attendance at showpiece events;
• international schedules, pitches and regulations designed to break bowlers;
• infantilically draconian restrictions on what paying spectators are allowed to wear or consume inside cricket grounds;
• being held to ransom by various other organisations with three- or four-letter acronyms;
• needlessly snoozy over-rates;
• umpires leading players off for bad light whenever they get a bit peckish;
• idiotic implementation of an untested and patently-unready TV umpiring system;
• Daryl Harper being allowed control of said system;
• sundry other bloopers.

Still, it is nice to know that the ICC will draw the line somewhere. And that line is at corruption (of the on-the-field variety, at least).

5. Amir, if found guilty, deserves another chance. Who knows what pressures he was under and from whom? If he was being urged by some or all of his captain, team-mates, his agent, gambling gangsters, the Pope, and/or the FBI to bowl no-balls and he caved in to those demands, with minimal impact on the game, whilst simultaneously obliterating England’s batting in one of the finest displays of bowling seen at Lord’s in years, is that surprising? His brilliance with the ball and determination with the bat were not indicative of a man unconcerned by the performance of his team.

If and when the full story emerges, it may be that Amir is seen to be a naive pawn in a game beyond his control. It may emerge that he was a fully willing participant. Either way he deserves both an appropriate period of punishment and a second opportunity. And it will help, if and when he is afforded that second chance, if the PCB does more to prevent the tentacles of temptation winding their way into the dressing room. Its tactic of sticking its fingers in its ears and singing 1980s rock ballads at the top of its voice does not seem to have worked.

6. Spot-fixing is a curious beast. The fraud of the kind and scale that seems to have taken place at Lord’s has far less influence on the game than, for example, the widening gulf in finance and facilities between different Test-playing nations, batsmen not walking, incompetent umpiring, or poor pitches. As Amir’s performances have shown, it is possible to be fully committed to helping your team win and to break cardinal rules of sporting fairness and honesty at the same time.

If spot-fixing ever migrates into stand-up comedy, I and my fellow comedians will be permanently under the spotlight. Was that joke about the International Monetary Fund simply not funny or did I deliberately flunk the punchline? It would be almost impossible to tell. I have had gigs during my career in which audiences seemed to think I had purposefully tanked every single joke in my set.

7. Until scientists stop piddling around trying to find out why dogs bark at cats, and what happens if you feed nothing but pastrami and gherkin bagels to a laboratory orangutan, and instead focus on developing a cure for people with an unquenchable urge to bet on when no-balls are bowled in cricket matches, these controversies will continue to occur.

Meanwhile, in the cricket, England are playing well in a series of training matches.

Comments (91) | Match-fixing