REJOICE!

Rejoice indeed, for not only is that whole, horrible series now over, there's a new kid in town. Scott Borthwick has done the impossible. He has grown up bowling leg-spin in England and despite this has actually managed to bowl it in a Test for England. That does not happen every day. Over the last few decades it has hardly happened at all. Monday 11th December 2000 can now be stricken from the record books as the last time a leg-break bowler turned his arm over in Test cricket for England, Ian Salisbury bowling 3 wicketless overs on the final day of that famous Karachi Test after enduring a pretty awful tour.

The English leg-spinner really has become the Himalayan Snow Leopard of Test cricket, rarely seen and seemingly extinct until a small colony is miraculously unearthed every now and then. An Englishman undoubtedly invented the leg-break, since it is pretty much as old as cricket itself, albeit that it started as an underarm delivery. An English underarm bowler - George Simpson-Hayward - should probably take the credit for having invented the flipper action, and of course it was Bernard Bosanquet who introduced the world to the Googly, still often named as the Bosey in Australia in his honour. There were no end of English leg-spinners in the inter-war years such as Titch Freeman, Doug Wright and Eric Hollies, the latter two continuing after the war, but since then the number of leg-spinners playing for England has dwindled dramatically. 

Season reflections, part 1

Looking back on the 2011 season, what will I remember best in 20 years time? I suppose taking my first wicket will be prominent, as will the car crash that was the game before. However, I'll leave all that for another post, and keep this post to my memories of following cricket rather than playing.

It's been a momentous year, that's for sure. England came back from a memorable winter during which they retained the Ashes for the first time in my memory, and off they went to the World Cup, where they avoided the kind of drubbings they have suffered in recent tournaments, but never really played their best. Somehow we managed to beat South Africa, tie with eventual winners India, and lose to Ireland. It really was rather a peculiar performance overall.

Sheer joy!

I was going to write a post utterly jam-packed full of bitterness at the way that, yet again, my captain didn't pick me on Saturday and gave me no explanation as to why, but I can't. Not today. Headquarters is a-buzz and packed to capacity, England have a very good chance of taking first blood against the best side in the world, and Tendulkar is at the crease hoping to make his century of centuries. The 2,000th Test is proving to be worthy of the title and my heart rejoices at just how magnificent it is to be a lover of cricket on a July day such as this. Test Match Special is blaring out of everything in the house capable of producing sound, if the atmosphere at Lord's is even 10% as good as it sounds it must be mightily impressive, and I'm making some pretty large sounds of my own every time an appeal goes up! It's lunch, we're six wickets from the win and we've got the best bowling attack on the planet. There's simply no way I could be in a bad mood today.

At least my inconsistency is consistent

Apologies for the lack of updates lately, I missed nets last week as my dad turned 60 and we had a family day. I've finally finished the post on nets the week before last, and that's below this one. As for nets today, rather frustratingly while my batting was much better than last week, my bowling took a dip. Why I can't get them both to improve simultaneously God only knows, and it's rather a pain.

So first, the bowling. I suppose I'm being hard on myself, as I was bowling a reasonable length from the start and feeling fairly rhythmical, but the end result somehow failed to satisfy. Again, I was lacking spin and not feeling that "flick", something I'm becoming increasingly concerned about as I'm simply not turning the ball as much as I could last year. My top-spinners do dip and my zooters do float, but I'm not detecting any drift from my leggies. For once I was disciplined enough not to venture outside these three variations, but the batsmen didn't seem to be in any way uncomfortable. At least my mental field settings seem to be fundamentally sound, and in the middle it probably wouldn't have been anything like the run-fest it looked like.

In Affectionate Remembrance of Australian Cricket...

...which was mercilessly put to the sword by England at the Adelaide Oval.

England have beaten Australia, in Australia, in a match that actually counts, by an innings and 71 runs, and we have a 1-0 lead in the series. Now re-read that sentence. I know. I can't quite believe it either.

Michael Atherton said that this was the best performance by an England team in 30 years, which since I'm not yet 29 makes this the best in my entire lifetime. Having watched most of it, I can easily believe that. We comprehensively thrashed them on four out of the five days, and if it hadn't been for the rain we could have wrapped this up with Monday off. From start to finish, our batting, bowling and fielding were an order of magnitude better than Australia's. There's only one word for it, this was a ROUT.

I was going to write a post a couple of weeks ago appealing for everyone to stop being so bloody English, stop thinking this series was going to be close and realise that actually we have the better individuals and the better team all round. I couldn't quite bring myself to write it, as I guess I was being too bloody English! If we can maintain our current form, this is the promised land for us. Our performance in Adelaide was so good, so ruthless, so utterly flawless in every department that we can with some justification look forward to challenging not just for the odd series but for nothing less than World dominance in the Test arena. In recent years we've beaten the West Indies, Australia, Bangladesh and Pakistan at home, beaten Bangladesh away and drawn with South Africa. Next year we face India and Sri Lanka at home and if we can win against them we will be right up there. Good times!

In the meantime, the nature of Australia's performances so far - and don't forget that our second innings at Brisbane is still going at 1137 for 6 - allied to the lack of any clear way back for them, leads one to think that it's not a matter of if England retain the Ashes, so much as a case of how much we win the series by. Right now, a cricket match between England and Australia is like a battle of the bands between Led Zepplin and McFly...

Overthrows

The England vs Pakistan series seems a long time ago now, but it's worth returning to one particular match, and one particular moment.

Let's go back to the Oval. England were two-nil up in the four match series, but while our bowlers had proven adept at skittling Pakistani batsmen cheaply, many of our own batsmen were also struggling for form. Only Morgan and Prior had scored centuries, and of all England's batsmen Cook was looking particularly uncertain. Never mind what had happened on the far-away winter tours, no matter that he had competently understudied as captain in Bangladesh, in the English summer season he had posted scores of 7, 23, 29, 8, 12, 17 and 4 prior to the Oval Test, where in the first innings he had again succumbed for just 6. Even against some clearly highly capable bowling, for an opening bat this was simply not good enough. At that point, frankly, he was for the high jump.

So in the second innings, Cook was under serious pressure. It showed. His innings was not one of those where you very quickly see that a big score is coming, it was one of those where every ball survived seems a decided bonus. He hadn't come in to form, he just seemed to be riding a rare flush of good luck. Somehow, he rode this luck all the way to 96, but there was nothing certain about his transition to three figures until another generous dollop of good luck came his way. He blocked a ball back to bowler Asif who, frustrated by Cook and Trott's continued presence, pick the ball up and shied at the stumps with a throw so wayward it went directly over the keeper's head, and on over the boundary to give Cook his first and only century of the summer. Cook's ticket to Australia was finally booked.

That overthrow has so far cost Australia 438 runs...

Waugh's declared...

"I am speaking to you from the Long Room at Lord's Cricket Ground. This morning the England Cricket Board's representative in Australia handed the Australian Cricket Board a final note stating that, unless we hear from them by 11 o'clock this evening that they were prepared at once to concede that we are the superior cricketing nation, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country's cricket team is at war with Australia."

Latest scores

Watson (NSW) ..............................6

Katich (NSW) ................................1

Ponting (Tas) .................................7

Clarke (NSW) ........................Injured

Hussey (WA) ................................0

North (WA) ..................................17

Haddin (NSW) .............................10

Johnson (WA) ...........................121*

Hauritz (NSW) ...............................0

Hilfenhaus (Tas) ....................Rested

Bollinger (NSW) .............................0

Meanwhile, in Tasmania:

Panesar ......................................13

Sit Rep

From: A. Flower, CiC, Ashes Expeditionary Force

To: ECB Command HQ, Lord's

08/11/10 09:10 GMT

TOP SECRET
Overall our first few days behind enemy lines have gone to plan, and we have encountered surprisingly little hostile resistance of the sort we have experienced on previous missions.
We did engage a localised force on 05/11/10 and I am pleased to inform you that after a dramatic breakthrough yesterday morning our first skirmish resulted in a notable success. Cpt Strauss excelled himself, 2Lt Pieterson seems to be back to his former self, and Cpl Broad and Sgt Swann did well to capitalise on some inspired work from young LCpl Finn. There are however still some concerns about Lt Cook and other middle-ranking members of the raiding party, but overall confidence remains high.
We have obtained a document detailing the morale of the enemy populace, and it makes for extremely encouraging reading. It appears that a majority of the locals are convinced that we shall ultimately prevail, and in addition there seems to be considerable mutinous intent both within the populace at large and within the enemy's elite force itself, and we will obviously be aiming to exploit this as much as possible. The enemy have suffered a run of setbacks on a number of fronts of late and seem to be suffering from a certain amount of mental disintegration. Nevertheless I am taking steps to ensure we do not become complacent.
We have now moved camp to Adelaide where preparations will continue.
God Save The Queen.
ENDS

Shane Warne's nightmare

A solid start

So far, so good...

England wrapped up a good win against Western Australia this morning, and I'm pretty sure that's the first time we've won a First-Class match down under since the 2002/03 tour! We won by 6 wickets after some great bowling by Broad and Swann created a WA collapse and set us up to chase down 243 with just over 50 overs in which to do it.

Good old Captain Fantastic made 120 not out, great to see he's in good nick as his runs have been key for us for a couple of years now. Disappointingly Cook only scored 9 to add to his 4 in the first innings, but Pietersen seemed back to some form with 35. Hard to know how to judge the middle order as we needed to score at a one-day pace, but the main thing is we've started our tour with a win and can build from here.

The Eagle has landed

From: A. Flower, CiC, Ashes Expeditionary Force

To: ECB Command HQ, Lord's

30/11/10 09:10 GMT

TOP SECRET

All sixteen members of the raiding party have successfully landed behind enemy lines. So far everything is going to plan. Will proceed to acclimatise and prepare before the raid commences on November 25th.

God save the Queen.

ENDS

You've gotta love the Aussies...

A word of caution

So today Australia lost to India again, losing the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2-0 in a series which was all you could ever hope for apart from being at least one match too short. Today was crushing for Australia, as India cruised to victory with not much undue fuss, leaving the Aussies languishing below England in the Test rankings for the very first time. Australia's tail was mopped up in under an hour, and they only managed to get three Indian wickets with some poor bowling, poor fielding, poor keeping and poor captaincy all playing a part. Truly I have never seen an Australian team, whatever the situation, look quite so adrift on a cricket pitch.

So the Ashes should be a piece of cake now, right? Well, no.

That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger

At last it's over. We can say goodbye to Pakistan and pretend the whole sorry saga never happened.

But we shouldn't, because in the midst of all that's gone on England have been genuinely impressive. It's not so much their actual cricketing skill that has impressed, although they have on the whole played very good cricket. It's more to do with the way they've coped with being innocent bystanders in one of the most toxic scandals ever to hit any sport, let alone cricket.

Preparing for an Ashes winter

Well obviously the only preparation I really have to do for the winter now that the Club have put the nets out of use (dammit!) is put my kitbag in the loft, but I haven't the heart to yet so I thought I'd give the blog a thorough tidy-up. As you'll have noticed, the scoreboard and bowling figures have gone. Not much point having them on display all winter, not least for my own sanity as I'm sick of that big fat zero, so instead I've totted up my season's figures. They make for pretty bleak reading it has to be said... The next thing you'll notice is my Twitter feed. I know Twitter can be pretty inane at times (trust me, I've seen the conversations between Anderson, Finn and Swann...) but I thought that when the Ashes are on this would be a better way of communicating my reactions to the world than clogging the blog up with comments like "Pietersen you muppet, you needn't fish at that one!"

I'm not sure yet how I'll follow the Ashes this year, last time round I tuned into Test Match Special but this time I'm tempted to get a Sky subscription on my computer. It's not cheap though and having tried it out for a month I found that my computer was inexplicably changing its identity, meaning that after a while Sky thought it was five different computers and cut me off. At least I got to see the Trott-Broad partnership at Lord's though. The TMS route is a pretty old-school option, although it has to be said cricket on the radio can be remarkably gripping.

In other news I've decided it's about time I nail a County's colours to my mast and I've decided it's Warwickshire for me. I took a few days agonising over it, since in Staffordshire there's no obvious choice. I looked at all the neighbouring counties - Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Worcestershire - plus Lancashire and Yorkshire. I had a big soft spot for Yorkshire because so many of my favourite players seem to have come from there, Hoggard, Vaughan and Rashid being the obvious examples, but in the end I decided Headingley was just too damn far away. I ruled out most of the neighbouring counties for one reason or another (I think I've only actually set foot in Notts once, for example), so I was left with either Lancashire or Warwickshire. What ultimately tipped the balance was the leg-spin connection, with a whole stand at Edgbaston named after Bradman's famous party-pooper Eric Hollies. Added to that we have Imran Tahir's match-winning spell in the CB40 final yesterday, and the fact that Edgbaston's a reasonable distance away, and it all fits snugly into place. Also a Liverpool fan such as myself can never think of Old Trafford with too much warmth!

A magnificent England performance - allegedly

The spot-fixing allegations hanging over the fourth test have left me feeling all sorts of emotions one should never have to feel in connection with a Test Match. I have to express them somehow and here's as good a place as any...

To play in a Test Match is the greatest honour a cricketer can have bestowed upon him. He has the chance to measure himself against the very best of his contemporaries, and these measurements are precisely chronicled in order that that cricketer can be evaluated alongside the rest of the chosen few who have reached this elevated status since the very first Test Match took place in 1877. A Test Match is just that: the ultimate test of a cricketer's ability. You owe it to yourself, and to the great game of cricket, to channel every fibre of your being into giving the very best performance you can at all times. But for some people, who were born with natural ability and have worked hard to hone their skills to the fullest extent, it seems like being a Test cricketer becomes an entitlement. This is understandable, but what is inexcusable is when they get to the point where they see it as their own plaything, to be played around with as they see fit.

Playing tomorrow

It looks like I'm in the team for tomorrow's game with Oldfields Cheadle 2nds, against whom I played earlier in the season, picking up my first ever golden duck as we won by 7 runs in an exciting, high-scoring game. Looking at it today there's nothing like an England middle-order collapse comprising one golden, one silver and two bronze ducks to make me feel better about my own performances with the bat... I'll probably be available for the match next week as well, but can't be sure I'll play so I'm approaching tomorrow as if it's my last match, hoping to end the season on a high with a solid all-round performance so that I can go into next season looking back on how much I've learned and developed this year.

Game on

I try not to spend too much time talking about "serious" cricket on this blog, but you have to say today's play at the Oval has been remarkable.

Take it easy, fellas!

Pakistan 37 for 6 at lunch on the first day at Edgebaston. I do wish our bowlers would take it easy - I've got tickets for Sunday and at this rate I'm wondering whether the match will still be in play...

UPDATE: This is just silly now. England have missed out on two wickets, the first a dropped catch and the second an LBW overturned by the DRS, and both times I've initially reacted with frustration, followed immediately by relief. At this rate I'm in danger of failing Norman Tebbit's Britishness test!
(Norman Tebbit said the test of Britishness for second generation Indian and Pakistani immigrants was who they supported when they played England at cricket) 

UPDATE: Pakistan all out for 72. Bollocks Oh good...