Star, style and substance

Hello and welcome back to my blog

Alastair Cook’s second innings century at Lords was a remarkable achievement for a man under enormous pressure.  It reminds me of innings like Ricky Ponting at Old Trafford 10 years ago or Michael Clarke at the Basin Reserve 5 years ago.  It is one thing to turn good form into an innings of substance but to expel the many off-field dramas from your mind and achieve something meaningful for your team is one of cricket’s oldest and finest challenges.  In the wake of England’s unlikely victory we may find it easy to forget that the principal drama leading up to the Lords test match was whether or not Kevin Pietersen would return to the team or not; does a player’s star power trump the power of that same star to disrupt the entire team?

Kevin Pietersen is the most dynamic and destructive player that England have produced since Ian Botham (ignoring for the moment that he was born in South Africa).  His ability to turn a test match in a session, on any surface, against any attack (that doesn’t include a slow left-arm orthodox) is undeniable.  He induces fear in the same way that the swinging blade of Adam Gilchrist or the threatening swagger of Viv Richards did in years past.  You would think that any team would die to have him?  But he is also the player who publicly criticized his own coach when he was captain, undermined his own captain (Strauss), and wrote a book criticizing several current players after he was dropped.  He is a star and everything that comes with that label.  The difficulty is balancing his contribution to the team; positive and negative.  I do not wish to dwell too much on his situation specifically, I will only say that the real culprit is the ECB who have managed to mismanage Kevin Pietersen for years.  However I really want to look at the star vs. the team question because cricket provides a fascinating arena in which this battle can take place.

A star player in cricket is slightly different than in many other sports because each player is, at one point or another, forced to fend for themselves in the spotlight.  Whether this is a batsman facing the fastest bowler in the world, a bowler delivering the crucial final over of a match or indeed the captain facing his critics; cricket does not allow your moment to be short or hidden behind teammates – the focus is entirely on you.  The brutal nature of these moments often requires an equally bombastic and ego-driven character to counter them.  This is why so many of the public darlings like Pietersen, Warne, Gayle and Kohli can be both effective and arrogant in the same breath; they would not achieve star-status without this trait.  If only it could be contained to the playing field, we would not need to have this discussion in the first place.

Strong teams are fostered by a strong culture that allows anyone passing through to benefit and perform and this is only achieved by total buy-in by the players.  Star players on the cricket field often find this difficult to adhere to; they develop an arrogance about their successes and skills that leads to inevitable questioning of the regime - 'I'm the best player on the field and I know best off it'.  This need not be an obvious challenge but conveyed with subtlety to individual teammates in muted conversation, or it can be blatant like texting insults about your captain to opposition players.  In between you have the annoying trend of players making public pronouncements about team culture and policy – Ian Bell recently for example – which is dangerous because of the situations it traps captain and coach in but in particular how innocent it appears.  It’s not necessarily about being personal or being disruptive on purpose – although in the Kevin Pietersen scenario this does appear to be the case – but the disruption is palpable.  KP himself may agree although he would argue the stars in question are the bowlers and wicket keeper named in his book rather than himself.

At the end of the day the sport still requires 11 players and this can’t be sacrificed for 1 player’s ego.  As to my original question about whether the star comes first, the manager within me says no, while the fan in me says yes but the latter is not accountable to the rest of the team and the hierarchy of players in a country.  This is likely to be an ongoing battle as long as the game exists but ponder this: If you begin making concessions for a player when does it end?  Chanderpaul has been dropped from the West Indies team recently and an unhelpful succession of former-players have lined up to undermine the decision, ignoring the fact that he has averaged 16 across his last 10 innings – from a player who was a model of consistency this is will have been a major concern for the team.  The danger is that you trap yourself by sacrificing the team dynamic for a dynamic player.  If you choose the player then this is the risk you run.

Just a few thoughts about the Lords Test (admission: this section was written during Day 1 of the Headingly Test)

Much has been said about the first test between England and New Zealand – how a team who scored over 750 runs and took 20 wickets in the match could lose on the final day appears to be a common question – and my own thoughts have swung from outrage to confusion across the previous week.  While I believe that the Black Caps dominated about 60% of the match and really only gave it away in a handful of key moments, the result serves as a faint warning in my mind.

The team takes an aggressive approach to test cricket and while I admire and enjoy this I also understand the inherent dangers.  The main concern I have would be the sacrifice of substance for style; it is one thing to take advantage of a situation and aggressively ram home the initiative but it is quite another to think you can rewrite the rules of test cricket.  I have just witnessed the New Zealand captain attempt to smash the first ball after Tea over cover and instead chip the ball tamely to mid-off.  This is disgraceful from the leader of the team and should stand as a reminder about the boundaries of the team approach – there is another team playing out there and they and the conventions of the game must be respected.  Also, the bowling unit looked particularly underdone – something I feared as per my previous blog post – and struggled to maintain their composure while trying to sustain the aggression against the English middle order in both innings.  Although I did notice that Williamson (fresh from the IPL) scored 150 runs in the match while Taylor (played all tour games thus far) struggled in both innings.

There has to be substance with the style and the team must not allow itself to be blinded to the match situation if a draw is in the offering.  The team’s two remarkable performances at the Basin Reserve (against India and Sri Lanka) were built as much on stubbornness and application as aggression and they would do well to remember this when touring as well.

Well that’s it from me and I hope you join me again

It’s good bye for now

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail"

Hello and welcome back to my blog

I do not believe I have seen both teams in an upcoming series have their preparation derailed so completely as those of New Zealand and England this month.  They will play two tests, 5 ODIs and a solitary T20 fixture and despite Mike Hesson’s call for more fixtures this is a full tour; although you would be forgiven for thinking that neither side is prepared for such an undertaking.  New Zealand are going to begin the international segment of the tour with frontline players who have played no First Class cricket since the New Zealand summer as well as little encouraging form from the players who have been present for the county matches.  England on the other hand find themselves drawn into a maelstrom of power, authority and ego in their non-selection of Kevin Pietersen that is swallowing up their new Director of Cricket, Test Captain, senior players (those foolish enough to voice their opinion) and – most importantly – their focus on the series that begins on Thursday.  Stuart Broad couldn’t even turn up to the series launch the other day due to anything from illness to hangover depending on whose hastily-deleted-tweets you have read…

Neither side will begin the first test at Lords confident in their preparation – although numerous interviews from now until Day 1 will try to convince us otherwise.  This is insulting to fans and players alike and in my series preview I am forced to focus on these elements.

I won’t beat about the bush here; Brendon McCullum, Kane Williamson, Tim Southee and Trent Boult are – baring injury – going to be named in the XI to play for New Zealand at Lords in just four days.  They will not have played a day of First Class cricket on this tour because they will not physically be on this tour until just three days before the first test.  This is a ridiculous situation because our star players will be underdone in a series that they profess to care very deeply about – one player said that it was their most important tour.  I don’t disagree with the sentiment but I do laugh at the commitment behind it because a situation where your Number 3 batsman (Kane Williamson) is kept IN India as injury cover, despite not having played for his IPL franchise since Round 3 is insane.

I understand all the noise about players making what they can from their cricketing skills which means participation in the IPL even at the detriment of their tour preparation (if not the actual international fixtures of that tour).  That there will be contractual obligations on the players to remain if their franchise wishes and that if New Zealand wishes to play in England they – for the time being – will have to tour in May and June.  I realise these are realities in the current tour-schedule but if New Zealand Cricket is to take all of the goodwill towards the team and the unprecedented level of talent within the it, and establish themselves as a cricket-power instead of the honest merchants of the second-tier, then this insanity needs to be addressed.  How is the team going to build on its 2013-2015 successes if short-cuts are taken now?  Perhaps it means reminding the players that the reason they are picked in the IPL in the first place is because of their international success.  Since the ill-fated tour of South Africa where the players sat down and decided that they would play cricket a certain way, their commitment to the team and tour preparation has been excellent but there is so much more to be achieved and they need to retain their commitment in order to establish the dynasty we all want them to create.

I realise that my argument is not helped by the fact that other linchpins of the team have not achieved the form they would like in the warm-up games – Ross Taylor being the main concern.  Watling, Bracewell and Rutherford have made mentionable contributions but I for one will feel very uncomfortable with the level of readiness in the twin engine rooms of batting and bowling when the first ball is bowled.

That being said, at least New Zealand’s troubles are not structural as England’s World Cup hangover continues after the tour to the West Indies – ideally placed to recover from their ODI troubles – was at best irrelevant and at worst a further step backwards.  They have fired their coach Peter Moores and installed Andrew Strauss to the highly-dubious position of “Director of Cricket”.  The latter’s first decision was to explain to a batsman who had just made 355* for Surrey – the highest county championship score in 13 years I have been told – that he would not be playing for England this summer; this is an extraordinary thing to say to a player and so bizarrely broad as well; was it really necessary to rule out the whole season?  On the other hand the player in question is Kevin Pietersen, a man who sent disparaging messages to opposition players during a live series, about his own captain (who was Strauss, the man now standing between him and the test team) leading to that captain’s resignation and retirement.  Not to mention slagging off various current players in a book published less than a year ago - I believe the Director of English Cricket when he says that it’s a matter of trust with Pietersen.  Once you add into the mix a recently-demoted vice-captain (Ian Bell) letting slip that it is current captain Alastair Cook who doesn’t want the Surrey star in his team and you have a Game-of-Thrones-style power play that must surely end in disaster for all concerned.

I realise that the last paragraph is difficult to follow and I want to assure you that this is deliberate because I could think of no better way to illustrate the nonsense that is the governance of English Cricket at the moment.  I reiterate, there is a month-long series beginning in just four days and the English team is all over the place with no sign of real leadership.  Oh and did I mention there’s an Ashes series right after the New Zealand tour?

People ask me if I side with Pietersen or Strauss in this fight and I honestly sigh in disgust; neither would be my answer.  I would side with every other cricketer in England as they deserve better, I would side with every member of the cricket audience who could rightly turn their back and leave these squabbling ‘men’ to their cesspool.  As Martin Crowe conveyed this week, none of them realise what they’re doing here – they've lost sight of the sport they are supposed to be the custodians of and instead play out these pitiful feuds in full sight of the media and public.  And it will be the sport and its fans who will suffer in the end.

Well that’s it from here and I hope you join me again

It’s good bye for now

*title quote is from Benjamin Franklin