Man versus rhododendron

The rhododendrons breathe a sigh of relief as the axeman turns away from them briefly © Getty Images

Of all the World Cup matches I have attended, my favourite remains the first. Admittedly, my first World Cup match also remains my only World Cup match. But, equally admittedly, even if I had been to every single World Cup match since, it would still be high up the list. Tunbridge Wells, 1983, India v Zimbabwe. Kapil Dev’s unmatched masterclass in How To Rescue Your Team From A Perilous 17 for 5.

The first top-level cricket I ever saw was the cream of Indian batsmanship being obliterated. Followed by one of the greatest innings in the history of the game. My cricket-watching career may have peaked too soon. Kapil came to the crease at 9 for 4, eight runs later watched Yashpal Sharma trudge back to the pavilion, looked at the scoreboard, and thought to himself, “1, 7 and 5. That’s a nice collection of numbers. I wonder if I can make them appear together on the scoreboard again. Hmm, let me think about that. Yes, I’ve worked it out, I can. I’ll take 1 for 75. No, no, scratch that, I’ve got an even better idea.” A couple of hours later, Kapil left the field to thunderous and ecstatic applause – as thunderous and ecstatic as people are legally allowed to be in Kent, at any rate - with 175 not out to his name, and a place in the World Cup pantheon his for all time.

A small Andy Zaltzman was there to see it, a boy already captured by cricket, entranced by its heroes and numerical intricacies, attending his first game of professional cricket. Few of my school contemporaries at the time were as well-versed in Derek Randall’s Test batting average as I was. Fewer still had a reasonable working knowledge of Mansoor Akhtar’s performances for Pakistan. When ace 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that “knowledge is power”, he clearly did not have the same type of knowledge that I possessed as a small boy. Knowledge that proved of little heft in the school playground. (But then again, Bacon himself ultimately died as a result of trying to stuff snow up a dead chicken’s posterior, so his “knowledge” was clearly vulnerable to the onset of over-excited but poorly planned experimentation.)

Somehow, and to this day it has never been satisfactorily explained, my father had managed to acquire a pair of tickets to sit in the pavilion, just a few feet from the players’ dressing rooms. This was an unmissable autograph-hunting opportunity. The only autographs I had successfully hunted up to that point in my life were that of Geoff Capes, the British strongman and beard enthusiast, who had been a guest at a prize-giving at my school, and the opening batsman from the local village cricket team. I nervously approached this titan of a man, as he slumped into a deckchair with a cigarette after a brief and unsuccessful innings, and politely requested him to sign my notebook. He looked at me with a mixture of surprise, confusion and nervousness, as if he suspected I might be trying to trick him into buying something that he didn’t want, as if the last time he had signed an autograph he had returned home to find a few set of automatic remote-controlled curtains and a bill for £3000. Little did I know at the time that village cricketers are unused to fielding autograph requests.

So, as World Cup history unfolded, I gradually filled the India and Zimbabwe pages of my World Cup magazine with the scrawls of some cricketing legends – India’s Dilip Vengsarkar, Mohinder Amarnath, Syed Kirmani, as well as young Zimbabwean squad player Graeme Hick, never-dropped-from-a-Test-match-in-23-years spinner John Traicos, and future Ashes-winning coach Duncan Fletcher. Plus Gerald Peckover, the non-bowling No. 9 batsman who scored a vain 14 in the second of his three one-day internationals, a footnote in cricketing history, but an eternal demi-god in my small eyes as he signed my magazine. Not enough of a demi-god for my father not to whisk me home in time for dinner before he made those 14 runs, as Zimbabwe’s brave chase fell 31 runs short, but a demi-god nonetheless.

Missing from my autograph collection are the two biggest stars playing that day – Gavaskar, who, having been dismissed for nought to the second ball of the match, bore an expression of such extreme grumpiness that the eight-year-old Zaltzman was too scared to look into his eyes, let alone waggle a pen in his face and ask for an autograph; and Kapil, who was busy trying to knock down the Nevill Ground’s renowned rhododendrons. Quite why the great allrounder felt so hostile towards brightly flowering plants remains a mystery, but he seemed on a mission to obliterate the pink abominations, blasting ball after ball towards the quivering shrubs. Kapil scored 175 for 0 off 23 overs. The rest of India managed 79 for 8 off 37. Even the most indecisive of waverers could have made a decent stab at the Man-of-the-Match adjudication that day.

Soon enough, those autographs had mutated into the autographs of World Cup winners. The Indian side who I had seen disintegrate in the face of the unstoppable Kevin Curran and Peter Rawson (who dismissed Gavaskar, Amarnath and Yashpal in his opening spell – 25% of all the wickets he took in his international career) went on to conquer the seemingly unconquerable West Indies. And the match and Kapil’s innings had passed into legend, unrecorded by television, eternalised only in startling numbers on a scorecard, and burned into the brains of a few thousand people in tents and deckchairs, including one giddy boy who dreamt of one day playing on the same holy turf of Tunbridge Wells.

That dream came true. About 15 years later, I played on the Nevill Ground for my village team, the mighty Penshurst Park, against Tunbridge Wells Cricket Club 2nd XI. I was thinking of Kapil Dev as I walked out to bat. I batted like a sickly left-handed Chris Tavare, before being bowled middle stump. Playing no stroke. An error of judgement, in hindsight, I thought, as I returned to the pavilion, grumpy as a Gavaskar and similarly reluctant to sign autographs (in the face of limited demand). Those rhododendrons seemed to be an extremely long way away when I was batting.

Little did I think that it would be: (a) the last time Peter Rawson dismissed Gavaskar, Amarnath and Yashpal Sharma in a single innings – I assumed it was the kind of thing he did all the time; (b) the last time a World Cup match would be played at Tunbridge Wells (Kolkata rearrangement permitting) - World Cups at that stage were Always In England, and Tunbridge Wells, as far as I was concerned, was second only to Lord’s in the great cricket stadiums of the world stakes; (c) the last time I would see a live World Cup match for 28 years – in 1999, the only England-hosted World Cup since, I was a novice stand-up comedian with as much disposable income as legendary New Zealand rabbit Chris Martin has run-scoring options.

I will rectify that in Bangladesh next month, as the Confectionery Stall embarks on its 2011 World Cup Tour. I will be writing or podcasting daily from the great cricketing centres of the subcontinent and/or wherever the organisers can find a finished stadium for a quick knockabout. I cannot realistically complete this paragraph without using the words, “Dream Gig”, so I will not attempt to do so. It is a Dream Gig.

It is unlikely, though, that anyone will play an innings that leapfrogs Kapil’s in the Greatest World Cup Innings Andy Zaltzman Has Seen In The Flesh list - the innings that jet-propelled India’s stuttering campaign towards their momentous final victory, uncorking an unending Jeroboam of one-day international cricket in India and around the world, paving the way for the Twenty20 revolution and utterly transforming the sport. None of which seemed likely as Kapil marched out of the Tunbridge Wells pavilion, past a disconsolate Sandeep Patil (c Houghton b Curran 1) and an awestruck Andy Zaltzman (DNB), with the scoreboard shuddering at 9 for 4 and the course of cricket history about to be clouted decisively on the head, lifted back on its feet, and ushered off in a new direction.

A quick footnote: although that hazily-remembered day in 1983 remains my most prolific day of autograph-hunting, my biggest autograph coup came some years later, also in Tunbridge Wells, and completely inadvertently. Whilst most teenage boys spent the majority of their time and money in pursuit of love, or at least a fumbling approximation thereof, I devoted mine to the acquisition of cricket books from second-hand shops. (The two pursuits are not mutually compatible – there are too few women in the world who are likely to be seduced by an offer to have a look at Bill Bowes’ autobiography. As my miniscule list of ex-girlfriends can testify.)

In one of my regular trips to Hall’s in Tunbridge Wells, I found a pictorial history of the Ashes. It had a picture of Victor Trumper in it. It cost £3. Deal. No haggling. I handed over my £3, and hurried home for a more detailed perusal. Perhaps there would be a nice action shot of Archie MacLaren in it as well, I thought to myself excitedly, as I scuttled past my mother, who looked on with resigned acknowledgement that her son was more interested in dead cricketers than alive family members.

I opened the front cover. Inside was a small piece of white card, stuck down by the previous owner with some blu-tac. On it was an autograph. Clearly written, and unmistakeable. Don Bradman. I exploded with excitement. “That’s nice, dear,” said my mother, trying half-heartedly to look like she knew or cared who Don Bradman was, and wondering what she had done wrong in my formative early years. “Foolish mother,” I retorted internally. “You should be proud. How many mothers have spawned a son who can claim to have both Don Bradman and Gerald Peckover in their autograph collections? Not many. Not many at all.”

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Graeme Smith tries to calm his troops and remind them that choking now is better than choking in the World Cup semis © AFP

England’s flawless tour of Australia has continued impressively with two superbly constructed defeats in the opening two one-day internationals, confirming that the England management will leave nothing to chance in their pursuit of ultimate success.

The immaculate, all-encompassing preparation that helped secure the Ashes (where every detail, from sweatiness of fielders’ hands, via Alastair Cook’s four-year undercover operation as a middling Test opener, to injecting psychotropic substances into the Australian selectors’ breakfast sausages) is now being applied to the World Cup campaign. Strauss and his team, well aware that they could not sustain their Ashes form until April 2, have tactically dipped at just the right time. They will be looking to endure at least a 6-1 drubbing in the Commonwealth Bank series, before slowly finding their game again during the month-long group stage of the World Cup, then exploding into form for the crucial quarter-semi-final week at the end of March.

England proved their mastery of the well-timed Test match defeat in Leeds in 2009 and in Perth in December, brilliantly allowing Australia to believe that everything was just fine, that England’s brief and uncharacteristic dalliance with excellence was over, and that normal service had been thoroughly resumed. Then, with the Baggy Greens still high-fiving themselves in delight, they burst out of their tactical Trojan horse like the modern-day Odysseuses they are, and skewered Australia like a cheap kebab.

For their part, Australia will be delighted that, having underperformed with such determined persistence in the Ashes - or, as Cricket Australia has now officially rebranded them, “The Commonwealth Bank Series Official Six-Week Curtain-Raiser” - they are now proving that, at the business end of their international summer, they can still perform like the Australians of old. They too still have plenty of players nicely out of form two months away from the key games, as well as players in form who have not been selected for the World Cup, so whose inevitable drop-off will not affect the team as they push for a fourth consecutive trophy.

India and South Africa are also not quite bubbling under nicely. Both will be happy with not taking a decisive lead in the ODI series, and be hoping that rain in Centurion tomorrow removes the possibility of either of them winning. A notable victory against a strong opponent at this stage is likely to prove fatal for their World Cup hopes.

Both teams also took every available precaution to make sure they did not win the final Test of the three-match series recently concluded, avoiding the EPM (excessive premature momentum) that all coaches fear. (It was a disappointing end to a compelling series akin to Shakespeare writing Act V of Hamlet as a single scene in which Hamlet does a crossword, eats a packet of nachos, and twangs a ruler on his desk, or Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier concluding the Thriller In Manila by spending rounds 14 and 15 filling in their tax returns and phoning their accountants to check what they were allowed to claim as expenses.)

India’s glut of injuries also bodes very well for the tournament favourites. Those players should be in peak condition come March 23.

New Zealand’s win over Pakistan in Wellington (described as “worryingly comprehensive at this stage of our preparations” by Daniel Vettori) should not detract from their expertly crafted 11-match losing streak that preceded it, whilst their opponents know that, such is the fluctuating nature of their cricket, how they are playing now bears no relation to how they will play in late March (indeed, how they play in late March will have no impact on how they play five minutes later in March).

Sri Lanka and West Indies are no doubt practising half-heartedly to make sure they do not hit the ground running in their three-match ODI series beginning on January 31, whilst Bangladesh are keeping a low profile after whitewashing of New Zealand, desperately hoping they will not take that form into the early stages of the World Cup. All in all, the tournament is still anyone’s.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of Baggy Green Selectors, Andrew Hilditch has, after an investigation lasting two weeks, issued the Official Cricket Australia List Of Positives To Be Taken From The 2010-11 Ashes. It reads as follows:

1. Selectors seek consistency from their players. Many of the team provided us with admirably, almost unprecedentedly, consistent performance levels. The captain, as so often, led the way, churning out a series of scores that were so consistent as to be barely discernible from each other. He was ably supported in this by his vice-captain, whilst Ben Hilfenhaus set new standards for reliable, guaranteed consistency with the ball.

2. Sportsmen are never more determined than when they set out to “prove the critics wrong”. By garnering for themselves a record number of critics, Australia’s cricketers will be more motivated than ever, and will play for the next 25 years in an almost hypnotic trance of critic-disproving frenzy.

3. The pain of defeat in 2005 and 2009 was exacerbated by the the fact that had one ball happened differently in each series, the result would have been reversed. If Lee had slapped Harmison’s full toss either side of the fielder at Edgbaston in 2005, or if the umpire had given Kasprowicz not out to a marginal caught-behind appeal moments later, and if one of the 35 balls bowled to Panesar in Cardiff in 2009 had, as might reasonably have been expected, cleaned him up, then Australia would have triumphed gloriously. Life is too short for “what ifs”, so, by being obliterated by an innings in three Tests and conceding a record statistical superiority to England, the Australians will now be able to proceed happily with the rest of their lives, unencumbered by nightmares of the ones that got away.

4. Since the retirement of the irreplaceable Shane Warne in 2007, Australia have been trying to replace him, and find a spinner who is indispensably crucial to the side’s success. Over the course of the Ashes, Nathan Hauritz grew into that role.

5. The international game is short of star names. In this series, Australia created a new generation of potential world superstars – Cook, Trott, Bell, Anderson, Tremlett, Bresnan, to name but six.

6. Taking positives from abject defeat is long-established as a method of helping captains avoid breaking down in tears of humiliation at post-match interviews, no matter how spurious and desperate those supposed silver linings dully glistening around the mushroom cloud of defeat may be. Australia helped prove that taking negatives from victory is an equally valid procedure. As Ricky Ponting said in Perth, after leading his team to a thumping victory: “Well, obviously we’re delighted with the win, but let’s not forget we can still take a lot of negatives away from this victory. Our top-order batting was useless, we were bailed out by Hussey yet again, and there is absolutely no way he can do that for five Tests in a row, and only two of our bowlers took any wickets, one of whom blows notoriously hot and cold, the other of whom picks up injuries like Warren Beatty used to pick up women in his prime. So, all in all, whilst we cannot deny that we did win this game, there is still much to be downbeat and pessimistic about, and we’ll focus on that carrying that forward to Melbourne.”

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Alastair Cook: Sure of where his off stump is, what his off stump is, and even what sport his off stump might be involved in © Getty Images

Happy New Year, Confectionery Stallers, and welcome to the first ever edition of this crickoblog to have been composed when the words “England retained the Ashes by obliterating Australia with a phenomenal display of total cricket” could be written without being a rabidly deluded fantasy or a wilfully obscure cryptic crossword clue.

As I write, England, with Cook and Bell grinding the remaining slivers of spirit from the Australian bowling attack, are well placed to ensure their series victory, probably by 3-1 unless Australia’s top order decide to stop batting as if they are trying to raise questions about their nation’s right to Test status.

It has been one of England’s greatest all-round performances, and almost certainly Australia’s worst. Many predicted an England success. No-one predicted a drubbing. Albeit a drubbing that could still, theoretically, end 2-2, and one in which England’s remorselessly determined and scientifically executed demolition of their opponents was punctuated by an oddly feeble capitulation in Perth. Strauss’s men are on course to record England’s biggest ever runs-per-wicket superiority in an Ashes series – so much for the too-close-to-call series almost everyone seemed to expect. This series has been the cricketing equivalent of turning up to see the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, only for one of the crews to be in a jet-propelled speedboat and the other to be in a leaking bath-tub.

Even fewer people than no-one predicted that Alastair Cook would score 750 runs in the series (and even that total may be horribly out of date by the time you read this). Of all the adjectives you could have used to describe Cook before this series, “undismissable” was some way down the list. Particularly if that list was being written by Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif. He has been phenomenally, bafflingly impressive – this is a player who had not averaged over 50 in a series against anyone other than Bangladesh or West Indies for over four years.

In six of those ten series, he averaged below 33. Cook turned up in Australia fresh from a domestic summer in which he breached the 30 barrier just once in ten innings, and then only with some major good fortune, and in which often looked unsure not just of where his off stump was, but unsure of what his off stump was, and even of what sport his off stump might be involved in. He then transformed into a slightly better version of Don Bradman. This constitutes one of the more remarkable individual triumphs in cricket history. Not quite as remarkable as Inzamam-ul-Haq winning the Olympic 100 metres would be, but remarkable nonetheless.

It remains to be seen whether Cook’s mega-series is a spectacular blip in his otherwise largely prosaic career, or the watershed in a potentially great batsman’s development. Either way, he has blasted himself into Ashes immortality.

He has been joined there by Australia’s top four. Who will be rather less chuffed to be there. England fans have of course become accustomed to baggy-green batsmen breaking scoring records in Ashes series. Usually in recent decades, they have been records for high scoring. The 2010-11 baggy-green vintage – a cheap Bulgarian Merlot laced with methylated spirits compared to the Chateau Latours England’s bowlers have faced on previous Ashes tours – have been chiselling themselves into the annals of all-time ineptitude with ruthless determination.

The course of a Test is established in the first innings, and Australia’s upper order have not merely flunked their first-innings exams, they have eaten their exam papers, sworn at the invigilator, and set their pencil cases on fire. Australia’s captain and vice-captain have totalled a reprehensible 71 runs in their nine first-innings efforts. Simon Katich and Phillip Hughes between them totalled 99 in the five Tests, and Shane Watson 150. Usman Khawaja’s determined 37 in Sydney not only saved his two skippers from the ignominy of being Australia’s worst 3-4 first-innings combination in any series since 1890, but also bumped the Aussie top-four first-hit series average up to a still-gob-smackingly dreadful 17.85 – their worst such figure in the Ashes since Lyons, Bannerman, Giffen and Harry Trott struggled to come to terms with English conditions in 1893, and their worst ever in a five-match Ashes series.

Even when Hussey’s sterling resistance at 5 is taken into account, Australia’s first five wickets have averaged just 23 per wicket in their first innings, their second lowest in the Ashes since Queen Victoria popped her massive queenly clogs.

And just to rub it in, England’s top 4 are on course to record the highest-ever series average against Australia. Ouch.

Much of the credit for Australia’s failure obviously goes to England’s bowlers, who, as in 2005, have been persistently threatening. James Anderson, who had little history of overseas success, needs three second-innings wickets to claim the best haul by an England bowler in Australia since John Snow in 1970-71 (and he only needs to take all ten to equal Snow), and the England pace attack have between them take 62 wickets at 28, putting them one more good innings away from the best series by a visiting pace attack in Australia since the West Indians of 1992-93. More on them in a future blog. They have been individually and collectively excellent. But not unplayable.

With the ball, especially with the bat, and in the selection committee, the Australians have been truly, historically dreadful. The Ashes boot is now well and truly on the other foot. The Australians must feel like a carnivore being eaten by a steak.

The unexpected disparity between the teams has made the series less compelling as a sporting spectacle than it could have been. In South Africa, however, after a similarly lop-sided beginning, a blistering series now approaches its endgame. VVS Laxman put in a late bid for innings of the year with his towering 96 in Durban – an innings which instantly rocketed towards the top of the Innings Which Deserved A Century But Did Not Get One chart, perhaps just ahead of Monty Panesar’s 7 not out in Cardiff in 2009.

Jacques Kallis (with his ninth century in his last 15 Tests) and Tendulkar (with his 12th in his last 24) laid down early markers for 2011, two of the greatest players the game has seen tussling for supremacy as others around them struggled.

Ben Hilfenhaus and Harbhajan Singh are the unlikely pace-setters in the Test Match Six Of The Year stakes, the former dispatching Tim Bresnan over midwicket like the 21st century Viv Richards that he isn’t, the latter plonking the world’s greatest current bowler over long on as if he was playing Stick Cricket.

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