The familiar warmth

Hello and welcome back to my blog

SPRING is very much upon us in the southern hemisphere; September melts into October, the English season concludes and the Champions League finishes with, perhaps, a statement of intent that to me feels more like a threat (but more about that in a moment). My (hopefully 'our') focus now shifts away from the GMT time zone to the subcontinent as the Border-Gavaskar Trophy and the Black Caps tour of Bangladesh loom as a challenging start to what promises to be a long summer of cricket (though little of it will be in New Zealand sadly - possibly less than we think if Pakistan are banned)
It doesn't take the most astute of cricket fans to suffer a bout of deja vu at this point - Aus in India and NZ in Bangladesh? Didn't this happen recently? Yes in fact these same tours occurred in 2008. It would appear that India has positioned itself to play Australia almost every year (they played ODIs in 2009) and with The Ashes occurring twice in a 4-year period there is some evidence that the top teams are manufacturing a top-tier for themselves. Mind you this attitude was clear several years ago when India quite openly stated an intention to create a relationship similar to ENG v AUS (at the time it was at the expense of a scheduled Indian tour of NZ which is why I remember). Meanwhile NZC has contented itself with series-after-series against Bangladesh - helpful for the stats (although not as much as it should be for some players) but not the key to improving our ranking. Don't be surprised if this occurs with Zimbabwe... oh wait maybe this has already begun (see end of NEWS segment below)
However I digress, there will be plenty of time to rant about this situation as the new season progresses, first there a couple of quick points to be made in order to close off the 2010 winter (as much as it can be given the match fixing issue). The Champions League finished last night with Chennai Super Kings victorious over the SA-based Warriors in as clinical a beating as stands in recent memory. This result underlines the main talking point from this forgettable event (especially from a NZ point of view) and that is the obvious and inevitable dominance of the IPL teams because of their 'first-pick' of players from other domestic teams. Although Ross Taylor did nothing for Bangalore the question remains as to how the NZ and Sri Lankan teams will get anywhere without their best players; it becomes a catch-22 situation where by a domestic team aims to win their own tournament by signing and producing better players but the same players are then snatched up by the IPL and thus unavailable for the League that they were developed for in the first place. Depth saved the other non-IPL teams from embarrassment if not from ultimate defeat but the one-sided final conveyed a BCCI intention of double dipping. The other question will be: there are plenty of domestic teams around the world to fill the IPL ranks, why do they need one from New Zealand? We only produce a few world-class players per generation they grab the current ones then use our dreadful League record to drop us for a few years like some kind of generational orchid

On a lighter note, my favourite county team Nottinghamshire have won the County Championship and former NZ player Andre Adams figured prominently as the highest wicket taker for the season (68 wickets @ 22.17). Here are the stats for the other kiwi players for the county season:
Hamish Marshall (First class and List A)
884 runs @ 35.36 with 7 fifties
333 runs @ 33.30 with 2 fifties
James Franklin (First class, List A and 2020)
862 runs @ 33.15 with 1 century and 4 fifties
466 runs @ 66.57 with 2 centuries and 2 fifties (SR: 86)
470 runs @ 130 SR with 2 fifties
46 wickets @ 23.54 with 1 5WH (First class)
Scott Styris (2020 only)
392 runs @ 162 SR with 1 century and 1 fifty
Ross Taylor (2020 only)
315 runs @ 173 SR with 2 fifties

NEWS

• Chris Moller will soon replace Alan Isaac as the Chairman for NZC
• Daniel Vettori received an honorary Masters in Science (sport and exercise science) from WINTEC in Hamilton
• Michael Sharpe will manage the Black Caps tour of Bangladesh after being manager of the NZ A team, Emerging Players team and the Under-19 team
• Justin Vaughan believes that NZ won’t be omitted from the Champions League next year and the IPL-first-pick rule won’t be changed.
• Chris Harris has applied to become the coach of the ZIM Under-19 team in a growing interest by NZC in ZIM cricket which I find to be opportunism at its worst.

RECENT RESULTS

• ENG beat PAK in the final ODI to take the series 3-2 - sadly this will be quickly forgotten in the wake of the controversies that dogged the entire tour

Well that's it from here and I hope you join me again
It's good bye for now

Just get it over with

Hello and welcome back to my blog

I might make it a rule from now on not to post my blog until AFTER an England vs Pakistan cricket match - just to be sure I don't miss something. If I had posted on Monday I would have missed the Ian Botham rant about Pakistan being a cancer on cricket and dealt with accordingly. One would have thought he would have learnt his lesson in the 1980s (when he played) about jumping to extreme positions when these two foes face each other (see Mike Gatting vs the Pakistan umpires etc). His words might have formed the ghost of an argument if they weren't a petty and obvious retort to Ijaz Butt of the PCB who passed on feelings in bookie circles that England had thrown the 3rd ODI of the current series
WHAT you might say, aren't Butt's comments just as ridiculous? Most definitely. First of all, I missed the chapter in the cricket manual where it says 'book makers are an acceptable source for accusations against other teams' and second, WHAT was the PCB Head doing talking to and then admitting to talking to book makers?
The whole business reeks of children throwing mud back and forth in a river bed of some kind with one team reacting, without thought of consequence, after a slight from the other; if I hear either board saying 'they started it...' It's hard to see who is keeping their head any more as even the players have chucked the dirt clods down and adopted simple physical aggression (Trott) instead. I hope that readers and the public in general are as sick of this as I am so in the interest of speeding up the descent to the bottom (so that the climb back to civility can begin) I present the following headlines/sound-bites:

The Don - Bradman or Corleone?
...accusations of match fixing have extended back to the 1940s now as new questions are asked of Donald Bradman's last innings (0) when just 4 runs would have given him a magical 100 average. Although Eric Hollies seems in the clear, the famously money-conscious/savvy Bradman faces renewed criticism from Catholic players...

Benaud and Worrell - the venture that went sour
There have been only TWO tied tests and the first one has come under increasing scrutiny (and the series in which it was played: 1960-61) as whistle-blowing bookmaker B*** L****, in an audio tape adjusted with a Victorian-nasal twang suggested that the two captains colluded to keep the match and the series exciting... ...involvement by Don Bradman has also been looked at but no clear evidence has come forward yet... ...one has to ask: did Worrell really die from leukemia or by more nefarious methods?

I could keep going but the sour taste in my mouth in concert with a retching sensation at the thought has stayed my pen. This is the bottom of the spiral that cricket finds itself in, so now it can begin the task of returning to respectability

Well that's it from here and I hope you join me again
It's good bye for now

Notice

Just to let people know that my post this week is delayed by 24 hours so that I may watch the 4th ODI between ENG and PAK (just in case). So check out this space from Wednesday morning

Better late than never

Hello and welcome back to my blog

The recent atmosphere in cricket circles has tended to leave a sour taste in the mouth so I thought I might try to highlight some positive elements this week. The first being the obvious improvement in fortunes for England's limited overs team. Their efforts in the 2007 World Cup conveyed a sense of disinterest by the management and players in the team but now they hold the 2020 trophy, they beat Australia and most importantly they have acquired a sense of confidence in their own game. The entry of players like Broad, Swann and Morgan plus the maturing of Strauss and Anderson as senior players has built a very balanced and aggressive team capable of performing against more opponents and in more conditions. You could have made this conclusion at the beginning of this season but the more recent development is the production of younger, aggressive and hungry players. As an example I will single out the keeper-batsman Davies who plays very much in the Adam Gilchrist style and with almost equal ability in my opinion. His contempt for the old school of English ODI cricket is both refreshing and a symbol of the current team attitude. With Trott set to become a solid no.3, this team can finally challenge the top ranks and shake off the depression set in by those two Wasim Akram deliveries in 1992 (see World Cup Final dismissals of Lamb and Lewis)

NEWS

• The Black Caps team for the Bangladesh tour has been announced (remember that it is made up of just 2020s and ODIs with the test moved to April next year) and with two important notes: Jesse Ryder returns after injury and Martin Guptill has been given a break from the top team (in the A team for Zimbabwe) in order to find some form again

RECENT RESULTS

• Although ENG were victorious in their first ODI against PAK the other night, it was clear that the visitors are moving past their recent troubles and they put up a lot more fight (as I type this they just posted over 290 in the second match)

ARTICLE OF INTEREST
http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/476079.html
This is from Peter Roebuck who is quickly becoming my favourite writer on cricket (just don't get him to write a coaching manual or you may find the words 'corporal punishment' appearing a little too often and in a little too positive light). Here he rightly says that the whole match fixing problem will come down to the players simply saying no. The piece doesn't focus as much on the negative and I found it a nice book-end to the beginning of this mess

OH and for anyone who ever wondered where Rudi Koertzen's 'slow death' raising of the finger came from:
"When I started to umpire, I used to stand with my hands in front of me. I remember my wife was watching a TV game one day where I was officiating and she said to me, "Take your hands away from your front and put them behind your back." I started doing that, but then I started to fiddle around with my hands - it's in my pocket, then it's on my side - so I decided to grip my left wrist with my right hand and hold it there so I couldn't move it around. Because I would hang on to it, it just came naturally that I would count one, two, three, think where the ball was going, and then have a slow release and start lifting it. It just stayed with me - I don't think it was something deliberate. I gave Daryll Cullinan out at the Wanderers one day and he gave me the name Slow Death. He said, "Why do you make me suffer and wait for that slow-death decision?" It just stayed with me. I had to laugh at one of the producers one day. They said, "Can't you just speed it up a little bit, because we struggle to fit it into the super slow-mo replays."

VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDgIhvmnN6k
...and if you can't watch that with a smile you're not a NZ fan (just ignore the Mark Richardson commentary)

Cricket has to be able to move on from the current problems and threats that it faces - and they are real and serious - I think being reminded of its best qualities helps the fight

Well that's it from here and I hope you join me again
It's good bye for now

Acting the function of the rear end of a male cow

Hello and welcome back to my blog

The pace of cricket news slowed slightly this week (unless your an England player on Twitter) while investigations were completed and allegations verified, giving people pause to ask questions, not about the future of cricket (and Pakistan in particular) which is uncertain for the moment, but about the past and to what extent spot-fixing and match fixing was really in play.

In New Zealand Martin Crowe wrote about the second test in Wellington between the Black Caps and Pakistan last year and the SEVEN chances that went down in the home side’s second innings (263 seemed an improvement over the 99 first time round but maybe not) and admitted that Mark Nicholas (of Channel 9) rang him regarding the Sydney Test this year and how remarkable it was to see a team’s effort ebb and flow to such a degree. Commentary boxes on either side of the Tasman debated on-air the dreadful nature of the Pakistan fielding and often concluded that there wasn’t the right attitude to being in the field, apparently off-air their concerns were more like suspicions and when Ramiz Raja commented last night (during the 2020 between England and Pakistan) that the players don’t seem to have the right attitude in the field, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is how commentators will refer to the real issue and thereby dilute its importance

To a certain degree I have waited for a writer to try and link the match and spot fixing issue to the perceived 2020 greed and Paul Lewis of the New Zealand Herald obliged:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cricket/news/article.cfm?c_id=29&objectid=10671225
I agree with the words but not the tone of his very first sentence, that cricket has itself to blame. Lewis suggests that given the IPL, Stanford and even the new NZC player contracts the need for more money fuels the match fixing and spot fixing market, a connection that will hopefully be treated with the contempt and derisive laughter it deserves. That anyone could look at professional players and sporting bodies in a sport this size, trying to gain value for their trade (to even get close to Football or Rugby) and say that this match fixing is part of it is baffling. First, match fixing has been around far longer than 2020 cricket and likely exited when it was still a gentleman’s game (a nickname only ironically used by cricket fans - something Lewis is clearly not) and second, I hope that in any future effort to get a pay rise, this journalist won’t see fabricating/manipulating the news as a natural step. The only way I agree with his initial statement is in the very lugubrious sense that because cricket is such a diverse sport that is played over a long time with multiple facets and ever changing conditions that within its depths there is potential for such corruption
Also, Lewis states that diarrhoea is a viable alternative to watching the IPL but then gets off the toilet long enough to enjoy the NZ domestic 2020; again the slightly racist/partisan element appears – they are the problem but when we do it that’s fine. This ugly feature also appears in Mark Richardson’s piece below (why does NZ Herald collect these people) where his experience of the team ethic in the New Zealand teams precludes any corruption. OK but does that mean that Pakistan teams (and by extension the players in them) lack this ethic?

Lastly I will just draw attention to a couple exasperating articles:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cricket/news/article.cfm?c_id=29&objectid=10671170
“...banning Pakistan would be a regrettable knee-jerk response. World cricket needs Pakistan; they have some very good players”. I think this conclusion says more about Mark Richardson than I could in a thousand words. I would only ask, what if Bangladesh were in Pakistan’s place (historians can chuckle here), would banning be acceptable then? Or what if it was New Zealand and Richardson’s ‘team ethic’ wasn’t enough to prevent corruption?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cricket/news/article.cfm?c_id=29&objectid=10671450
Former batsmen Bryan Young states that he would be fine with the 1994 test being erased from records even though it includes his first test century. I wonder if a player whose second century wasn’t 267 would be at such ease to go diving into the records books

(Please note that Richardson and Young are only guilty of simplistic analysis; Lewis on the other hand should know better)

Well that’s it from here and I hope you join me again
It’s good bye for now