If the tattoo sleeve doesn't scare batsmen, some gentle ribbing will © Getty Images

I promised in the last Confectionery Stall to share some of the cricket-related questions that have been occupying me of late. Arguably, there have been too many cricket-related questions occupying me of late (and by “of late”, I mean “since the age of six”), but if they perform the useful function of helping me not think about, for example, the state of the global economy, the international response to the Syrian crisis, how my parenting skills are likely to fare when my children are teenagers, or the future of Test matches, then so be it.

Here they are. Write your answers on a piece of parchment, and bury them in your garden to confuse future archaeologists.

● Kevin Pietersen’s ODI hundreds are like London buses – you wait three years and three months for one, and then two turn up in the space of four days. (I admit that I did the empirical research for this joke years ago, waiting at a bus stop in La Paz, Bolivia.) (And that the two that eventually turned up were in fact not London buses, but my parents asking me to come back home.) (But the point stands.) Why the delay? (a) essential maintenance work; (b) Pietersen had been batting in the wrong position, at 3 or 4, for too long – most of his best ODI innings have now been played either early in his career at 5 or 6, coming to the wicket when his run-scoring task was quite clear, or, more recently, opening, when he can shape England’s innings from the start; (c) Fate; (d) rogue planetary alignments; (e) Pietersen wanted to disprove the fears expressed when he was appointed England skipper that the captaincy would affect his batting, by not scoring an ODI hundred for three years and two months after having the captaincy taken from him; (f) a combination of luck, form, injury, technical glitches and the opposition insisting on getting him out; or (g) I don’t know.

● Why does a team lose a DRS referral when the replay returns an “Umpire’s Call” verdict, proving that the referring team was either essentially right, or only infinitesimally wrong, to refer it, but either not quite right enough to overturn the decision, or wrong by a sufficiently small margin as to raise the very real possibility that the ball shown to be shaving the stump by a millimetre might not have actually knocked the bail off? Does this not penalise them twice?

● And, whilst we are on the subject of the DRS, why do teams only receive one referral in an ODI innings, despite the fact that they are allowed to lose the same number of wickets as in a Test innings? Does this suggest that the entire system, far from aiming to eliminate umpiring “howlers”, is in fact designed simply to make them even more annoying?

● Was Dr Faustus employed by the BCCI as part of their secret How To Win The World Cup panel? If so, does India now regret having implemented the naughty Doctor’s plan to trade World Cup glory for Test meltdown?

● If Jade Dernbach bowls more than 50% of his deliveries as slower balls, will he be officially be reclassified as a spinner? Albeit a spinner with a useful much-quicker ball?

● Is the success of Dernbach’s seemingly unfathomable and recently match-winning slower ball due to the fact that, when his heavily-inked arm rotates at the required velocity to deliver it, an optical illusion is created whereby the tattoos blend to create an animation of WG Grace biting the head off a squirrel, thus distracting the batsman?

● Given that Saeed Ajmal took 39 wickets at an average of 15.9 in the Tests, ODIs and T20s against England, and that amidst that run of scheming tweak wizardry, he took 0 for 32 in an ODI against Afghanistan, should England be sending their players to spend a year in Afghanistan to work on their techniques against mystery spin?

● Does Eoin Morgan realise that a batsman having a pronounced duck amongst his trigger movements could be risking bad karma?

● When, why and how did Shahid Afridi persuade himself that he couldn’t bat properly anymore, despite considerable evidence to the contrary? He was praised for his “maturity” in scoring a fine half-century in the third ODI – when he was an immature, hot-headed 18-year-old, he scored an ultimately match-winning five-hour 141 when opening the batting in a low-scoring Test match in Chennai. If only Pakistan had selected him at the age of six, he could have been one of the most immovable grinders of the modern age.

● What does Azhar Ali ‒ of whom this column is an unashamed admirer as a Test player but who had only played four List A one-day matches anywhere in the world in the
22 months before his recall to the green pyjamas ‒ think when he goes out to bat in a one-day international? Is it the same as what prominent miserablist songsmith Leonard Cohen would think if forced to take part in a World Heavyweight title fight, i.e.: “I am good at what I do, but I am seriously out of my comfort zone”?

● How good will Steven Finn prove to be? In the recent ODI series, he has looked as if he could become one of England’s best since Freddie Trueman. If he can get into the Test side. And not get injured. And keep bowling at an out-of-form Mohammad Hafeez. His 13 wickets for 134 runs (at an average of 10.3, the best by an England bowler with 10 or more wickets in an ODI series or tournament), mean that he has taken 20 wickets at 16, with an economy rate of 3.8, in his last seven ODIs. In his first eight ODIs, he took eight wickets at 50 and went for 5.5 per over. In his 12 Tests to date, he has 50 wickets at 26.9. If he can directly replicate his proportional ODI improvement in the Test arena, then, in his next 10½ Tests, he will take 125 wickets at 8.6. That will not happen, but, if it does, which it won’t, it will be worth watching. As will fast bowling in general in the next few years, if the last six months have not been an elaborate hoax.

● Ravi Bopara scored two half-centuries in two innings in the ODI series, but could, and probably should, have been out for 1 three times in those two innings, reprieved by a missed stumping, a botched lbw decision and a blooped run-out. So, for any philosophers out there, was Bopara batting well or badly?

● Why is it so hard to find decent statues of umpire Daryl Harper these days? My garden feels empty without one.

Comments (12) | England

Is the ghost of Don Bradman interfering in his quest for the 100th? ©Getty Images

Amongst all the cricket-related questions that fire themselves into my brain during quiet moments, of which there are disturbingly many for a supposedly grown-up father of two and alleged political satirist, the one that has put its hand up and asked itself most frequently of late has been: How can you tell when a cricketer is in terminal career decline? (I will share some of the other questions in another blog later in the week.)

There is no formula for judging when a blip in form becomes the harbinger of inevitable retirement, or when those proposing the adage “form is temporary, class is permanent”, start to add the words “but Father Time can be a cantankerous old bastard when he wants to be”.

It will not have escaped the notice of the more eagle-eyed cricket followers that Sachin Tendulkar, the cricketing icon of his age and one of the greatest players in the history of the game, is still awaiting his 100th international hundred. All seven billion people currently at large in the world have not scored 100 international hundreds, and for the moment Tendulkar is still one of the them. All their forebears also failed to reach that milestone, and given the changing schedule and nature of modern cricket, it seems likely that all their descendants will fail to reach it as well.

So it is perhaps understandable that, in a game obsessed with milestones, this megamilestone is causing rather more fretting than, objectively, it should. Reaching it is not going to make Tendulkar a greater player, and failing to reach it would not make him a lesser one - though it would be quite annoying for him, and for cricket. If Neil Armstrong had landed his magic rocket on the moon, taken one look outside, decided it looked a bit chilly for a walk, and blasted himself and his buddies straight back to Earth, it would still have been a hugely impressive voyage. Having journeyed so far, obviously the symbolic moment of placing the flag on the moon was important – but the overall achievements of the space programme, and the broader technological miracle of being able to fire people 250,000 miles in a souped-up tin can and get them home again afterwards were, ultimately, of more significance.

It is now 29 innings since Tendulkar scored his 99th international hundred. It is his second longest sequence of innings without a century in his unfathomably massive international career (there was a 34-innings hiatus between hundred No. 78 and hundred No. 79, in 2007).

It is worth thinking back to that 99th hundred, his second century of a triumphant World Cup, both of them innings of peerless brilliance, in which his technique, judgement and boldness were close to flawless; a master in total control of his craft. At that point he had scored 11 hundreds for India in 14 months, at a rate of one every three innings, including eight in 15 Tests, and the first-ever ODI double-century. Statistically he had never been as good.

Since then, there have been 11 months and 29 innings of finely crafted near-misses, sawn-off cameos and failures, a cocktail of uncompleted brilliance and uncharacteristic uncertainty.

Why?

Has the pressure of reaching a milestone, to which no other player has ever, or is ever likely to, come close, affected the mind of the master? Have his 38 years and ten months on the planet, and more particularly his 22 years and three months of international cricket, finally caught up with him? Has his luck simply changed? Is he tired? Is he bored of watching a small, hard, red round thing fly towards him whilst hundreds of millions of people watch to see if he can hit it with a plank of wood? When you have done so 50,000 times, the novelty must wear off. Is he simply sated of milestones, after snaring his 200th international wicket in the Cape Town Test just over a year ago (for which, incidentally, there had been a 34-match, 15-month wait after wicket No. 199)? Or has the ghost of Donald Bradman been interfering, trying to ensure that his closest modern equivalent ends up like him, stranded on 99?

Answers by carrier pigeon to PO Box 100, Cricketville, please. Even the most ardent of Tendulkar fans would admit that the Mumbai Methuselah is closer to the end of his career than the beginning, but recent cricket history is laden with wild fluctuations of form – as dumped-from-the-ODI-side-shortly-after-two-massive-Test-hundreds Ricky Ponting will testify. As will the whole of the England and Pakistan teams. And most other cricketers. Except perhaps Glenn McGrath, who posted a Test average between 15 and 23 in ten out of 11 years from 1995 to 2005 (and only played four Tests in 2003, his one rogue year, when he averaged 35).

Tendulkar has had to face cricketing mortality before, when his elbow injury significantly reduced him as a player and the statistics suggested that he would never touch his previous heights again. From December 2002 to November 2007, he averaged 46 in Tests; 38 if you exclude four Tests and plenty of runs against Bangladesh; 29 if you also remove a two-game spike in Sydney and Multan early in 2004, in which he harvested 495 unbeaten runs in three innings (and which interrupted a sequence of 15 single-figure scores in 21 Test innings). Obviously, if you remove massive unbeaten centuries from anyone’s career, their average will drop, but it nevertheless shows how Tendulkar’s base level of performance sank during his Elbow Years, and the extraordinary powers of recovery he showed to recapture his greatness.

Others have done likewise. Jacques Kallis appeared to be in decline in 2008. From February to November of that year, he batted 17 times in 11 Tests, passed 25 only three times, and averaged 24, despite having played four of those Tests against Bangladesh, and also struggled in the ODI series in England. He then had an adequate but unspectacular series in Australia.

At that point, with 13 years of multi-format all-round exertions on his cricketing milometer, it was not unreasonable to assume that he was on an irretrievable slide towards his cricketing dotage. He promptly embarked on a run of 17 Tests over two years in which he scored ten centuries, averaged 78, and played with a majestic freedom he had largely kept hidden from public view. He also averaged 52 in 20 ODIs, with a strike rate of 86. The pipe and slippers could wait.

What of Ponting’s recent resurgence and/or collapse in form? From early 2002 to late 2006, he averaged 75 in 53 Tests, with 24 centuries, perhaps the closest anyone has come to matching Bradman over an elongated period. In 25 matches from the third Ashes Test of 2006 until the first of 2009, he averaged 44. In 26 Tests from then until the defeat to New Zealand in Hobart in December, he averaged 33, with one century (and that facilitated a sub-schoolboy drop when he was on 0). Ponting’s decline was prolonged and provable. He then clouted India for 544 runs in five completed innings. And was then dismissed in single figures in five successive ODI innings. Was Ponting’s literal and metaphorical Indian summer, in economic parlance, a “dead-cat bounce” (when a plummeting share price briefly recovers before thudding back down to earth), against bowling and fielding that often seemed to have been inspired by a dead cat? Or is he now set for his late-career revival, as proved to be the case for Kallis and Tendulkar (and Lara)?

Few players depart the international stage quite as gloriously as their careers deserve. Gilchrist, who in his first 68 Tests had averaged 55 and established himself as without question the greatest wicketkeeper-batsman ever to pick up a bat and some gloves, finished by averaging 30 in his last 28 Tests, during which time he was statistically only the sixth-best wicketkeeper-batsman in the world, a little behind Prasanna Jayawardene, and a long way behind Kamran Akmal. Herbert Sutcliffe scored 16 centuries in his first 40 Tests, but none in his final 14. Graham Gooch was a decent Test batsman for many years, then a great one for four years in his late 30s, then, when he could have retired, played on. He scored a double-hundred at Lord’s. Then passed 50 just once in his final ten Tests. Ian Botham, who had begun his career as one of the most spectacular and high-impact cricketers of all time, was almost completely ineffective for his last 23 Tests over more than six years, as if Beethoven had wound down his hall-of-fame musical writing career penning advertising ditties for kids’ toothpaste. Viv Richards averaged mid-70s in his dazzling pomp from 1976 to 1981, mid-40s from 1981 to 1989, and mid-30s in his final couple of years in Tests. Jason Gillespie scored a double-century in his final Test innings. If there is a god, he is no respecter of batting legends.

Comments (125) | Tendulkar

Andy Zaltzman and Daniel Norcross talk about Pakistan's abject and deceitful performance in the UAE, Saeed Ajmal's beautiful hair, how World War Two ruined batting techniques, and which animal will make the best wicketkeeper

Download the podcast here (mp3, 29MB, right-click to save).

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”What do you mean, no backbone?” © Getty Images

A few quick thoughts and numbers arising from the Pakistan v England series (I will do a full review of it in next week’s World Cricket Podcast). Some people are outlandishly claiming that the series ended in a 3-0 whitewash of the Universe’s Number One-Ranked Cricket Machine by a side that recently was not merely plumbing depths of on-pitch ineptitude and off-pitch naughtiness, but was fitting a basin, bath and power shower in those depths. This story is so far-fetched that it must be discounted. It cannot have happened. It cannot have happened. It simply cannot have happened. I checked the rankings this morning. England are still the Universe’s Number One-Ranked Cricket Machine. It must have been a hoax.

Nevertheless, until the hoax is conclusively proved and accepted by the ICC, we must reflect on what allegedly happened. And what allegedly happened was one of the most extraordinary collective batting failures in cricket history, and one of the finest series wins of recent decades. England averaged below 20 runs per wicket for only the second time since Archduke Franz Ferdinand had his clogs controversially and unhelpfully popped, and registered their lowest team series runs-per-wicket figure since shortly after Tchaikovsky premiered his smash-hit ballet Sleeping Beauty, and shortly before the birth of professional French President and eight-time European Nose Of The Year winner Charles de Gaulle (in 1890 – thank you, Wikipedia).

England’s numbers 4, 5 and 6 (Pietersen, Bell and Morgan, with one innings at 6 by Prior) averaged 11.94, a figure that, since the First World War, has only been out-ineptituded once in a three-Test series ‒ by a motley collection of Indians against New Zealand in 1969-70.

The people I feel most sorry for, with regard to this historic disintegration of England’s stellar batting line-up, are the poor, unfortunate bat sponsors. For the last year they had got their money’s worth. In their previous 13 Tests over three series, England bats had been waggled in celebration on 93 occasions – 54 times on reaching 50, 22 times to mark a century, ten times for 150, six times to celebrate double-centuries, and once by Alistair Cook to mark England’s first 250 since Gooch clomped India all around Lord’s in 1990. These had been unprecedented times for English bat-waggling. But in the three UAE Tests, those same bats remained eerily unwaggly.

The five half-centuries England mustered in the series, none of which was converted into a hundred, represents the fewest times England batsmen have waggled their bats in celebration in a series of three or more Tests since the Ashes of 1888. Only once in that time have they scored fewer than five 50-plus scores – in the 1986 debacle against India, when England’s elite batsmen managed to pass 50 just three times. However, one thing you could not criticise England for in that series was failing to build on good starts. Of those three fifties, one became a century for Gooch and another a 183 for Gatting. It was the other 63 innings England’s batsmen played that were the problem.

This was also only the third series since the First World War in which England have mustered only one score above 75. The two previous occasions were the three-match series with India in 1946, when the third Test was heavily curtailed by rain, and the five-Test 1985-86 series in the West Indies, when England’s batting was heavily curtailed by the West Indian bowlers. Curtailed, and, on occasion, facially rearranged.

As wake-up calls go, for England, after a year in which they touched extraordinary heights against some far too ordinary opposition, this series was the equivalent of being whacked in the face with a live barracuda at 3.30am by a man dressed as a cross between Freddie Krueger and Richie Benaud. Bracing, unexpected, and hopefully not to be repeated.

Extras
● Azhar Ali justified his pre-series selection as The Confectionery Stall’s One To Watch with another innings of throwback craft and an almost medieval determination. Pre-medieval, perhaps. He gave the impression that, had he been a Roman gladiator facing up to a dangerously peckish man-eating lion in the Coliseum, he would have calmly blocked the lion with his sword, and kept blocking the lion with his sword until the lion got bored and tootled off to buy a hot dog from the fast-food stall outside. His partnership with Shafiq turned the Abu Dhabi Test, and his stand with the masterful Younis Khan effectively won the final match in Dubai. Both partnerships began with Pakistan trailing and having already lost second-innings wickets. Ajmal fractured England’s confidence in the first Test, and Abdur Rehman shattered its flimsy remnants in Abu Dhabi, but, in a bowler’s series, Azhar arguably had as much impact on the final scoreline.

● Rehman finished the series with 19 wickets at an average of 16.7, and, by the end of the series, some of the English pundits were even beginning to acknowledge that he is a useful bowler. I heard it said of him during the series that “he is no Derek Underwood”. However, nor has anyone else been, since Derek Underwood, other than Derek Underwood himself, and even he is not the bowler he was. Rehman currently has the best Test average of any left-arm spinner to have taken 30 Test wickets since the Kent Conniver ended his 297-wicket career, and the third best of any left-arm tweakman to have debuted in the last 50 years (behind Underwood and Pervez Sajjad).

● The ICC has rebuffed calls in the British media that they should step in and investigate after Saeed Ajmal appeared to admit in a TV interview that he was a French spy during the Napoleonic Wars. The Pakistan Cricket Board leapt to Ajmal’s defence, saying his comments had been misinterpreted, whilst the ICC confirmed that it had definitively cleared Ajmal of being an early-19th-century secret agent. One British journalist, who did not wish to be named, commented: “Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him in the background of a painting of the Battle of Austerlitz, wearing a distinctly French-looking hat and waving a baguette around. I don’t care what the evidence suggests.”

Comments (12) |