Saeed Ajmal does a double-take when he hears Ian Bell cussing in Afrikaans © Getty Images

The English media have never been especially adept at responding to national defeats with calm rationality. No sooner had King Harold picked up his career-ending eye injury at the Battle of Hastings than the critics were busy weaving tapestries slamming his technique against the moving arrow, whilst armchair minstrels were composing ballads suggesting that the young Earl Of Mercia should be given a chance to fight the Normans, even if his form on the county battle circuit had been none too impressive and he had recently been shown up by the Vikings as not quite ready for the top level.

The Ashes were born in 1882 when the media lambasted England for collapsing on a difficult pitch against top-class bowling in a low-scoring match. How times change. As the pressure mounted, Lucas and Lyttleton went into their shells, and, from 53 for 4, scored just 13 runs in 50 minutes. How times change. A wicket fell, and then the tail subsided in a quickfire flurry of wickets. How times change.

Losing skipper Albert “Monkey” Hornby must have thanked his lucky stars that the widespread use of social media remained 120 years in the future. The supporters would have tweeted their fury: “Hey @WGGrace, you’re being picked on reputation. Shave the beard it looks cocky when you lose. #engvaus”… “Gutted. Fair play to Aus, @DemonSpofforth bowled great, but we were R-U-B-B-I-S-H”… “Oi Lucas you loser what u doing scoring 5 off 55 balls learn 2 hit the ball u overrated waste of space”… “Wats @ANHornby even in the team 4 let alone captin?! Hes totly usless!! A real monkey wud be beter #dropthehorn”… “ha ha england u not so good now r u wen ball swings we ausies got r veng 4 1880 ha ha go oz go. PS ulyett sucks big time”… “I ate my umbrella and now I feel sick. #greatgame”.

I wrote in my last blog about how Andrew Strauss’ England have lost rarely but spectacularly, and had always bounced back strongly in their next Test. In Abu Dhabi, they managed both to bounce back strongly from their Dubai debacle, and to lose spectacularly anyway. A high-tariff manoeuvre, which they pulled off with rare aplomb. They played three-quarters of a very good match, and one-quarter of a statistics-meltingly terrible one. Pakistan’s tweakers took advantage with surgical brilliance. The cricket was utterly gripping – less than two runs per over on the final day, with only nine boundaries, yet remorselessly exciting.

England, who had been in control throughout the game, without ever hatching that egg of control into a condor of dominance, were rapidly overturned, like a chef who has carefully chopped all his vegetables and followed his recipe, only to suddenly find himself inside a giant wok, being aggressively flambéd.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of English pundits’ and fans’ teeth. We had all waited generations to be able to say that we had the universe’s leading cricket team, a perfectly balanced and multi-faceted unit, and then, just a couple of games later, they were prodding around like a slow-motion version of their mid-1980s predecessors against West Indies. It is perhaps understandable that some of the reaction has been so high-pitched.

England’s second innings generated more statistics than runs. In Tests where balls faced have been recorded, no team had ever lost its last five wickets more quickly than England’s 11-ball hyper-implosion. Those last five wickets fell for four runs – England’s third worst end to a Test innings, and the joint 10th worst by any team. It was the 11th time that a team’s Nos. 7 to 11 had all batted but managed less than three runs between them, and the 10th time that seven players in a Test team had batted and failed to reach 2. (The previous occasion was the first match in the Flower-Strauss epoch in Jamaica in 2009, when England had also collapsed faster than a sticky-faced child’s alibi in a who-ate-all-the-jam-tarts investigation.) And it was the joint third biggest defeat by a team chasing under 200 to win.

Have a sip of water, stats fans, I’m not quite done yet.

Ready? Back on the horse. Giddy up.

After two Tests of this series, England have their lowest team batting average (18.0) since the disastrous white-washed 1986 of the West Indies, and their fourth worst in any series since 1890. Pakistan’s spinners have taken 34 England wickets in the two matches in this series, at an average of 14.1 ‒ making this, currently, England’s worst ever series against spin, and Pakistan’s spinners’ best series against anyone other than Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. (Admittedly, this does not take into account the fact that Statsguru’s classification of these bowlers as ”mixed/unknown” might slightly skew these statistics, but if you think that I have the time, for example, to ring up 70-year-old ex-Pakistan allrounder Nasim-ul-Ghani and ask him which of his 52 Test wickets he took bowling spin and which he took bowling medium-pace, then you are probably mistaken.)

So, to cut a long question short: what the hell has happened? It has been a long time since England played Tests in Asia, and a long time since they faced top-class spinners, in form, on helpful surfaces. Even so, regardless of the excellence of both Saeed Ajmal and the insufficiently-credited Abdur Rehman, for England’s recently-record-breaking batting line-up to capitulate so cluelessly and passively is a little baffling. They have routinely annihilated medium-class spinners, out of form, on unhelpful surfaces – from July 2008 until this series, the world’s spinners had averaged 51 against England, collectively hauling in fewer than four wickets per Test. And, although Eoin Morgan is playing his first overseas Tests, Strauss, Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell have all had Test successes against high-quality spin and in the subcontinent.

Pietersen, as is generally the case, has been the recipient of the most strident criticisms, particularly for his second innings in the first Test in Dubai, which culminated – if something that only lasts five minutes can in fact culminate, without being a boiled egg – in a rather stupid hook shot straight to a fielder positioned specifically to catch any rather stupid hook shots. But the South-African-born batting whizz seems to have received far more brickbats than any of the slightly-less-South-African-born batting whizzes who have also failed.

To read some of the attacks on Pietersen, you would think that Bell missed a straight ball in Dubai moments after Pietersen was out because he was distracted by thinking about Kevin Pietersen. Or that Cook had plinked his schoolboy hook-flap to the wicketkeeper because he was wearing a What-Would-Kevin-Pietersen-Do wristband. Or that Strauss’ poor form is patently a result of his being discombobulated by concern over what Kevin Pietersen thinks of the recently released Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady.

Such is Pietersen’s lot. He is one of the most compelling cricketers of the modern age, a cocktail of brilliance and fragility, whose batting has often veered between calculated strategic mastery and idiotic bloopers. He played dazzling innings against both Warne and Murali early in his England career (perhaps, with hindsight, they would have tried bowling some left-arm tweakers at him), and scored Test hundreds in both Pakistan and India. Now, after two Tests in the UAE, he has the joint sixth worst series average ever by a specialist England batsman, and second worst since World War II.

Many of his best innings have been played at critical junctures in matches and series, yet he is widely viewed as an individualist. He was heavily berated in the first Ashes Test in 2009 for playing a supposedly over-aggressive, egotistical and irresponsible shot – an attempt to dab-sweep Nathan Hauritz for a single. If anything, he was under-aggressive, ego-suppressing, and overly responsible. As he perhaps was before lunch on the last day at The Oval in 2005, when he could have been out defending three times or more. After lunch, he unleashed the aggression, the ego/confidence and the irresponsibility/calculated-risk, and he won England the Ashes.

Pietersen should not be dropped, and I imagine he will not be dropped in the near future. He has played several important innings in the last 15 months, and England have in recent years tended to stick with players during troughs of failure and plateaus of adequacy. They are, rightly, unlikely to change any significant parts of what was until very recently a winning formula. At his best, Pietersen has been a calculating aggressor with a decisive gameplan, whose speed of thought and action compensated for the unorthodoxies and glitches in his technique. The challenge for Pietersen and his coaches is for him to become that player again in on turning pitches in the fascinatingly testing year ahead.

EXTRAS

● Much was made of England’s passivity in that final innings, yet the game turned on a two-runs-per-over partnership by Azhar Ali and Asad Shafiq, who, with Pakistan one more wicket away from almost certain defeat, slowly turned a losing situation into one in which victory was a live possibility. They played with purposeful caution. England seemed to play with uncertain negativity. Perhaps that is interpreting events through the prism of hindsight. Most strategies seem wrong if they fail, and right if they succeed. England’s top seven have scored at a slower rate than in any series since the winter of 2000-01. When they won in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In Abu Dhabi Pakistan’s caution was more skilfully executed, and less cautious, than England’s.

● England’s bowling and fielding continued to be outstanding. They have conceded totals of 350 or more just three times in their last 19 Tests since June 2010 – in their previous 20 Tests, dating back to Chennai late in 2008, they had conceded over 350 on 15 occasions.

● For fans of even-more-utterly meaningless statistics, Abu Dhabi also provided only the second instance in Test history of a team batting in the fourth innings losing a Test by the margin of its score in that innings – England were all out for 72, and lost by 72. The previous instance was when England were bowled out for 166 to lose by 166 in Brisbane in 1974-75. And it was the first ever Test in which left-arm bowlers have taken six wickets in both teams’ second innings. No further stats. Your witness.

Comments (1) | England in UAE 2011-12

“Everyone contributed to that loss, and I’m proud of you all” © Getty Images

England do not lose too many Test matches these days. But when they do lose, they lose properly. They go down hard, they go down fast, and they go down in a blaze of statistical ignominy. Since the Flower-Strauss era began, with an almost mathematics-defying innings defeat after collapsing to 51 all out in Jamaica three years ago, England have lost only five more Tests (which, to put their current travails in perspective, is as many as they lost in six weeks in Australia in 2006-07, or in two months against the West Indies whenever they played them in the mid-1980s). They have won 20, drawn 11, and risen to the top of the world rankings. But when they fail, they do not mess about with half-measures. They take a treble measure of neat cricketing vodka, and wash it down with a meths chaser.

The ten-wicket Dubai splattering by a resurgent, skilful and determined Pakistan followed in the pattern of the 267-run clouting in Perth in last winter’s Ashes (do not let Australians persuade you that was in fact “last summer’s Ashes”, it was not; it was in the winter; after watching it, I went outside and had to put a woolly hat on; therefore it was winter; the Australians play cricket in winter; that is a fact). The sequence was partially interrupted by a fluctuating four-wicket loss to Pakistan at The Oval, a close game but one that nevertheless featured some historically inept batting by England. Prior to that, England had been clobbered by an innings by South Africa in Johannesburg, and by Australia at Headingley.

All of these defeats have featured collapses of 1929 stock market proportions - displays of landmark batting uselessness in an era notable for its unusually persistent and increasingly dominant successes, and also for its dogged, match-saving rearguards. The Jamaica debacle was England’s third-lowest Test score of all time, and only the fifth time that ten Englishmen have failed to reach double figures in a Test innings; at Headingley, England had eight players dismissed for 3 or fewer in a Test innings for the first time in their history, registered 13 dismissals for less than five runs for the second time ever (the first was another 1880s scorebook-burning classic), and were dismissed in under 34 overs in an Ashes Test innings for the second time in 105 years; in Johannesburg, England failed to last 550 balls in their two innings combined for just the third time in over 100 years; at The Oval, all of England’s top six were dismissed for 17 or fewer in the first innings of a Test for the first time since 1887, none of England’s bottom six scored more than 6 runs in the second innings of a Test for only the seventh time in their history, and England lost their last seven wickets for less than 30 runs for the first time in over a decade; in Perth, they failed to last 100 overs in the two innings of a Test in Australia for the first time since 1903-04.

Dubai was the latest outbreak of proper, unmitigated batting failure. England slunk to 42 for 4 in the first innings and 35 for 4 in the second ‒ the fifth-worst match performance by England's top four wickets since the First World War. They then subsided to 94 for 7 and 87 for 7 – the first time since 1988 that England have lost their seventh wicket for less than 100 in both innings of a Test, and the sixth-worst match performance by England’s top seven wickets since the treaty of Versailles heralded 21 years of glorious peace for the world. (Those 21 years, of course, followed four years of war – giving Versailles an 84% success rate, and thus making it a better treaty than Bradman was a batsman. Arguably.)

It is a curiosity that England’s rare failures are so cricketingly catastrophic. They have succeeded through collective excellence with bat and ball. They seem to fail with similarly impressive levels of teamwork.

They have also tended to respond positively to their isolated failures. They may fall off their horse from time to time, but they get straight back on that horse, feed it a sugar lump, and then Knievel it over a row of buses. Each of their last four defeats has been followed by a victory. And a big victory – by and innings and lots in Melbourne in the Ashes, and at Lord’s against Pakistan, by 181 in Chittagong in the first Test after the Johannesburg blooper, and by 197 at The Oval after seeming to be intent on hurling the Ashes away at Leeds. They also followed the 51 all out schemozzle with 566 for 9 in the next Test.

Certainly England were deservedly beaten in Dubai, and they were beaten like a naughty egg white in a 1970s police investigation. On the evidence of the Flower-Strauss years, from that beaten egg white, a deliciously crunchy meringue may grow in the Abu Dhabi Test. However, this admirable Pakistan team, only the second Pakistan Test side to contain (a) seven players over the age of 30 and (b) no one under the age of 25, is unlikely to be quite such compliant assistant dessert chefs as Australia were in Melbourne in 2010-11, or as a very, very different Pakistan team was at Lord’s 18 months ago.

Extras
The more eagle-eyed Confectionery Stall readers among you may have noticed that I did not entirely predict the narrative and outcome of the first Test. My forecast of a one-nil series victory for England is now looking distinctly unlikely. At best. The two players I highlighted as the Ones to Watch did not adorn the match with scintillating brilliance. Azhar Ali adorned it with one solitary run, and Monty Panesar did not adorn it at all, other than by looking on lugubriously from the pavilion, wondering whether, given his glorious undefeated rearguard in his previous Test, in Cardiff in 2009, he might have been able to stem England’s collapses. In my minimal defence, I did write that England’s obviously imminent victory might not happen if they were “scuppered by the wiles of Saeed Ajmal”. At least seven true words out of 1100. That is by no means the worst performance ever by a British journalist. If I can indeed describe myself as a journalist. Which I certifiably cannot.

Some stats: Saeed Ajmal became the first bowler to take ten wickets in a Test against England since Murali (twice) in 2006, and the first Pakistan bowler to do so since Abdul Qadir, who did it three times in 1987. England had lost 16 wickets to specialist spin bowlers in their previous three major series, at an average of 86 runs per wicket. In Dubai, Ajmal and Abdur Rehman took 14 for 186. They bowled very well. England batted very badly. Before the last Test, Ajmal had taken 21 wickets in UAE Tests at an average of 34.

I did promise to write about India’s struggles in this blog. I have not done that. Many other people have done that. I may do it next time. Unless the struggles have been miraculously cured. Or become significantly worse.

Comments (2) |

Azhar Ali, pictured here in Uncharacteristically Unseemly Haste mode © AFP

As I write, Pakistan and England are hours away from resuming a rivalry that has sparked some of our great sport’s most cantankerous cricket and least savoury squabbles. This time, hopefully, tempers will be tempered, and the cricket will not be an incidental curtain raiser to the controversy.

Provided that the Gulf pitches are not unremittingly somnolent ‒ and they have had a tendency to display the spritely vigour of a hypnotised and hibernating walrus ‒ the cricket should be compelling. Pakistan have been stable and steady, if not resurgent, and are unbeaten in six series since the legal blooper at Lord’s, although of those series, only one was against a team ranked in the top five in the world (a not-especially-thrilling nil-nil draw with South Africa in the Gulf late in 2010, the highlights of which have not been challenging the top of the DVD bestseller charts).

England, meanwhile, have had a prolonged Test break after a nine-month period in which they annihilated two of their greatest rivals. For the previous couple of years, England had veered between brilliance and debacle, as if they had read Rudyard Kipling’s smash-hit poem “If”, taken on board his suggestion that they should seek to treat the two impostors Triumph and Disaster just the same, and therefore attempted to spend plenty of quality time with both of them in turn. They then decided that Triumph was the preferable impostor to hang around with, and have since scaled peaks of performance dominance untouched by English cricketers for generations.

This dominance has been founded principally on high-class swing bowling ‒ which will be a less potent force in the billionaires’ sandpit that is Dubai ‒ supported by a batting line-up that has pulled off one of the most startling collective improvements of recent times, feeding off each other’s successes and confidence like lions at an all-you-can-eat zebra buffet.

Some stats: In England’s three major series before last winter’s Ashes (v Australia in 2009, South Africa in 2009-10, and Pakistan in 2010), only Jonathan Trott averaged over 38, with Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen below 30. In England’s three major series after that (Ashes 2010-11, and against Sri Lanka and India last summer), five of England’s regular top seven have averaged over 50, with Cook and Ian Bell close to 100. Were they underachieving wildly before, or are they overachieving wildly now? Probably a little bit of both. This year should provide a reasonably reliable answer, and Pakistan in the UAE should offer a stern challenge for a side that is reaching for greatness.

The official Confectionery Stall series prediction: England to win 1-0, provided they are not distracted by wondering how and why Dubai came to be full of so many empty skyscrapers. Or scuppered by the wiles of Saeed Ajmal. Or neutered by the heat and pitches. Or about to embark on a startling collective dis-improvement. Or possessed by a sudden urge to abandon the seven-batsman-four-bowler strategy that has served them so well. In which case, they will win 2-1. Possibly. Or it might be 1-1. Depending on what happens, and who does what, and when they do it.

One to watch (England): Monty Panesar
He has been out of the England side for so long that it is easy to forget that Panesar was once much more than a bizarrely (and very intermittently) stylish No. 11 batsman, who in effect won the 2009 Ashes single-handedly. He was for a couple of years, against everyone other than India, a bowler of skill and penetration, and England’s most consistently effective spinner since Derek Underwood. He was then surpassed by the new England’s most consistently effective spinner since Derek Underwood, Graeme Swann.

Panesar is 29, with 125 Test and 500 first-class wickets under his specialist belt. With away series in the UAE, Sri Lanka and India, 2012 is a good year for him to be entering his tweaking prime. (Although his record in Tests in Asia is hopeless.) (But those Tests were quite a long time ago now.) (And England might not pick him anyway.) (Predictive punditry is pointless.) (What am I doing with my life?)

One to watch (Pakistan): Azhar Ali
Azhar Ali is a throwback, a one-man war against 21st-century batting fripperies, a defiant protector of the coaching manual. Of the 55 top-seven batsmen who have played ten Tests this decade, Azhar has the second slowest scoring rate, behind only Tharanga Paranavitana. Throughout his 18-Test career, Azhar has shown defiance, patience, and a willingness not to edge the first available outswinger to the slips that some more celebrated batsmen around the world would do well to emulate. He has the classical style and methodical approach of a 1950s cricketer (although it should be noted that his strike rate of 39 runs per 100 balls faced would, by 1950s standards, have made him something of a reckless cavalier). I find him quite fascinating to watch. I would not want all batsmen to play like Azhar Ali, but I do want some batsmen to play like Azhar Ali. Including Azhar Ali.

(Warning for neutral spectators: four of Pakistan’s current top six are in the Eight Slowest Test Batsmen of the Decade list. Whether that is a negative warning or a positive warning is up to you.)

Extras
I will write more about India’s statistically staggering disintegration next time. I have not enjoyed watching this cricketingly-macabre series, for all Australia’s excellence with the ball, and Warner’s thermonuclear innings in Perth. For a man recently viewed as a Twenty20 specialist, he has played two of the best innings of the decade in his first five Tests, which he, the baggy green selectors, and the whole of Baggy Greenland must be quite excited about. Maybe Pakistan should unleash Azhar Ali in their next T20s.

Most players and teams eventually decline before finally departing the scene, but few have done so as precipitously as Dhoni’s India. A year ago they had won several Tests by chasing down testing totals with skill and resilience. They had won in England, drawn in South Africa, and beaten Australia twice. They were about to successfully withstand arguably the most-high pressure cricketing campaign of all time. They were a good team, and a tough one. Now they are neither of those. They have responded to adversity in England and Australia by fighting like cornered tigers ‒ but tigers which, once cornered, have been shot at point-blank range and turned into fetching fireside rugs.

At least if India want to seek inspiration from a team that has emerged rapidly from an apparently long-term slump, they need only to knock on the home dressing room door and ask for a cup of tea and a chat.

Comments (95) | Pakistan

Andy Zaltzman and Daniel Norcross discuss the Sri Lankan colossus, the world's greatest living batsman (statistically, of the last five years); propose cricket's newest innovation, for the Olympics - the Super Javelin Over; debate whether Vernon Philander should retire now; and wonder why it took cricket 140-odd years to discover that pitching the ball up nearly always guarantees success.

Download the podcast here (mp3, 38MB, right-click to save).

Comments (3) | World Cricket Podcast

Should have quit 30 runs before © Getty Images

The number of times in the documented history of mankind that a Test team has scored two 250-plus partnerships in the same innings. Until 2012, that total was zero. Now it is one, thanks to some fine batting by Clarke, Ponting and Hussey, and some minimum-intensity cricket by an Indian team that, just a very-long-seeming year ago, was ranked No. 1 in Tests (and about to embark on a victorious World Cup campaign).

All summits must be descended from. Preferably with due care and attention. As a Test team, however, India have tobogganed back to base camp at alarming velocity, like an over-excited Edmund Hillary desperate to get home to tell his mummy about how he had just conquered that really big mountain that she had promised him a new bicycle for climbing.

In their last two away series, in England and Australia, India have been mostly careless and uncertain with the bat, listless with the ball and snoozy in the field. Does their creaking batting line-up of ageing legends have it in them to rouse themselves to greatness again? Can Dhoni bring the toboggan skidding to a controlled halt, turn it around, and cajole his team to start shoving it back uphill? Does the IPL care? As Hussey and Clarke helped themselves to some of the least challenging runs of their long careers on day three, against opponents playing with the fierce and unrelenting intensity of a three-day-old bowl of half-eaten porridge, it was hard to be optimistic.

Also: The number of batsmen who have been left stranded on 299 not out in Tests. That man was Don Bradman (“A useful accumulator of runs” – International Society for Understatements). Clarke, as captain, had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join Bradman by declaring when he was one run short of his triple-hundred, in the ultimate cricketing self-prank. It would have been worth it just to see the look on his team-mates’ faces. Bradman was also the only player before Clarke who had scored a Test triple-hundred when batting at No. 5 or lower – he did so in Leeds in 1934.

Also: The number of (a) pairs and (b) scores of more than 201 that Jacques Kallis has scored in his illustrious Test career. These have come in his last two Tests, meaning that Kallis, the very embodiment of cricketing reliability for a decade and a half, has become the most inconsistent cricketer in the universe. With the possible exception of Clarke, whose last 13 Test innings have been 13, 6, 112, 151, 2, 11, 2, 139, 22, 0, 31, 1 and 329 not out. On current form, he is a good man to dismiss early.

Also: The number of Test teams that have conceded two individual scores of 290 or more within a six-month period. Clarke’s mammoth score followed hot on the heels of Alastair Cook plinking India to distraction with 294 last summer. Incidentally, in case any of you want a stat to impress / distract / annoy / confuse a potential employer at a job interview, there have now been as many 290-plus Test innings in the last four years as there were between 1939 and 1989 – seven (by Virender Sehwag, Younis Khan, Sarwan, Sehwag again, Chris Gayle, Cook and Clarke; between Len Hutton’s 364 in 1938 and Graham Gooch’s 333 in 1990, only Hanif Mohammad, Garry Sobers, Bob Simpson, John Edrich, Bob Cowper, Lawrence Rowe and Viv Richards passed 290).

Comments (73) | Multistats