One of Alfred Hitchcock’s great films of the 1930s, The Lady Vanishes, significantly involves cricket. Before this year similarly vanishes—along with The Lady—we call your attention to a super deal. “While supplies last,” as the pitchmen (not pitchers) say, our publisher, Paul Dry Books, is offering Right Off the Bat, all 208 pages of it, for the holiday-gift price of $5. That’s three quid! Click here for this extra-special offer. And know there is an adage in book publishing: Buy two—one to keep; the second to give away (as the perfect stocking stuffer). We are shameless. Go for it, Mate! (Here come Bouvard et Pécuchet-like Basil Redford and Naunton Wayne with more on the subject.)
For the first time in 28 years, England has managed to win a Test cricket series in India, a task that has eluded many great sides over the years, and which nobody gave this one a prayer of doing when they started the four-match series six weeks ago. When England lost the first Test match by a country mile in Ahmedabad, it seemed as though any hopes England might have of winning were ended. But England came back, won the next two games, and then managed to hold on for a monumentally boring draw, to win 2–1.
It’s hard to underestimate the turnaround in England’s fortunes since being whipped by Pakistan in January/February, and dismantled by South Africa in the Summer. Coming into the series, there was meant to be dissension in the team and the Indians were ready to return the favor having been thrashed 4–0 by England in 2010. That this didn’t happen has everything to do with England’s phlegmatic captain, Alastair Cook, and his expert marshalling of his bowlers, and the aging of India’s superstars. We’ll no doubt have more to say about the latter as the consequences of this humiliation for India shake out. But, right now, England are ending the year with a bang and not the whimper that was once feared.
They’re overpaid, over the hill, prone to injuries, and move about the infield and outfield with all the grace and speed of arthritic tortoises. They make elementary errors and they’re just not hitting the ball cleanly and racking up the runs. No, I (Martin) am not talking about the New York Yankees, but the Indians—the cricketing sort rather than the Cleveland kind.
In fact, the similarities between the Indian side (which just went 2–0 down with one Test to play against the English, the first time India has lost two consecutive Test matches in India since the last century) and the Yankees are striking. Like the Bronx Bombers, the Indian side is packed with superstars with hall-of-fame-worthy records. Both sides have been big box office for a long time and their players have commanded salaries and sponsorship deals stemming in part from the fact their team’s television/franchise revenue dwarfs other teams. Like the Bombers, however, the Indian superstars’ bats, while they’ve done OK in the meaningless games that pepper the schedule, have not caught fire when it mattered: the big competitions that crown a season and career. And here’s another similarity. After yet another failure, the media blame both teams for erratic management and call for wholesale changes. “Bring in the new blood,” they cry. “Fire the boss.”
We’ll see what happens for some of the old-timers of either side. If nothing does, both sides will continue to suffer from management’s tendency to allow box-office and their players’ reputation to trump the effectiveness and coherence of a perhaps less sexy but winning team. In the case of Sachin Tendulkar and Alex Rodriguez that might be a tough call. But, hey, A-Rod’s injured, and Sachin will be 40 soon. Neither has anything left to prove. Time to move on for both?
I (Evander) find myself addicted to old television programs, like the whimsical yet sophisticated “What’s My Line,” which, in the “Mystery Challenger” portions can be found on YouTube by calling up almost any famous person, especially from the entertainment world, from the period of its (U.S.-network-TV record) run: 1950-67. Here is one of the best. “Mystery Challenger” Ted Williams always said he wanted fathers to point him out on the street and say: “Son, there goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Check out this broadcast from 1954. Nota: It is Random House founder and publisher Bennett Cerf who puts all the clues and pieces together as the Boston Red Sox had come from behind earlier in the day to beat the hometown New York Yankees by a score of 10-9.
Former Australian captain and all-time great Ricky Ponting, a.k.a. “Punter,” has announced his retirement from international cricket, having amassed nearly 27,500 runs and 71 centuries at a very, very healthy average. Ponting was a hard man to warm to: he was driven and extremely competitive and that didn’t make him beloved by fans. But then he had to be tough, given that he took over the captaincy with Australia in the ascendant. He was the first man ever to be in a side that won over 100 Test matches, which is an astonishing record (it also shows how much cricket is played these days).
For all his brashness, Ponting’s record is unassailable and his commitment to his team and country beyond question. In 2005 and 2009, when Australia toured England and lost the Ashes twice, he was treated abominably by the England fans. If the eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched that much more, who could blame him? In his day, he was a peerless master of batting, and in his honor, here is one of his signature shots: the pull. It requires incredible balance and lightning quick reactions. It was because he was losing both that he decided to retire before he was pushed out, which gives a glimpse of his formidable discipline and relentless professionalism.
You’d have had to be particularly partisan not to rejoice in the West Indies’ cricket team’s unlikely and much-celebrated victory at this year’s World T20 championship. In the last 25 years of the twentieth century, the West Indies produced some of the greatest and most exciting cricketers in the history of the game. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the once-proud team has fallen from its giddy heights to languish near the bottom of Test, one-day, and T20 tables.
Until now. Under the leadership of Darren Sammy—a man who probably wouldn’t be in the team if he wasn’t such a clearly inspiring and infectiously enthusiastic captain—the West Indies are clawing their way up the tables. One reason is the reintegration of the charismatic and potentially game-changing Chris Gayle. Another reason is the sudden emergence of the ebulliant and fiery bowler Tino Best. Yet another is the continued dogged brilliance of the stalwart Shivnarine Chanderpaul. But the man of 2012 for the West Indies has to be Marlon Samuels, cousin of the legendary Brian Lara.
For years, Samuels had been expected to don Lara’s mantle and take the West Indies to new heights. It didn’t happen: he got injured, he was immature, etc. etc. Well, this year Samuels has come into his own, not only scoring big centuries but sharpening his bowling abilities. What’s more, he’s done it without breaking a sweat. In a team that has had plenty of very cool customers over the years, Samuels is Mr. Phlegmatic. In fact, he makes Chris Gayle, one of the most laid-back individuals in world cricket, look like Yosemite Sam in comparison.
But that’s during the match. Who wouldn’t want a little bit more of what they do when they win?
One of the reasons why Australia is back in contention as the best Test cricket team in the world is because of their captain, Michael Clarke, who in the match just completed achieved what no other batsmen—even the great Sir Donald Bradman—had ever done: to score four (count them: four) double centuries in one calendar year. It’s worth pausing just to think about this feat: one would consider oneself a moderately useful cricketer if one scored 50+ runs four times in a year at the highest level. To score 100+ four times in Test matches would mean that one was pretty damn good. To score 150+ would get you noticed as belonging in the highest echelons of the contemporary game. To score 200+ four times is, well, unprecedented. And to do it while carrying the burden of captaincy makes it even more special.
But Clarke is a man apart. Unlike English captain Alastair Cook, who looks permanently disappointed in himself (even though he’s no reason to be), and Indian captain M. S. Dhoni, who never cracks a smile (in recent years, he’s had every reason to be annoyed with his players), Clarke—still boyish and enthusiastic at the age of nearly 32 (thus the nickname “pup”)—actively seems to enjoy the game. He’s always smiling and laughing, which is not just rare in a cricketer, but very rare in an Australian one, and especially Australian captains, who over the years have appeared to pride themselves on their grizzled-featured, gimlet-eyed, and no-prisoners ability to psych out their opposing number.
Of course, when a beaming Clarke is dancing down the pitch to hammer you all over the field, joie de vivre may be even more soul-destroying than grim-faced determination. Here’s Clarke taking the Indians for 329 not out, earlier this year.
One of the main complaints cricket lovers receive about their game is how it can go on for five days and yet no-one wins. What’s the point? is the cry. Evander and I talk about this in our book, Right Off the Bat, but we hope a little case study might make our argument for us. Australia and South Africa are currently battling it out over who will be the Number One Test team in the world. South Africa hold the title at the moment and Australia are third, hoping to leapfrog England and assume what they deem to be their rightful position at the top.
Australia have had a pretty good year so far, and South Africa’s touring side has been plagued with injuries. So when Australia dominated the second Test match in Brisbane, it didn’t come as a huge shock—even though Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith did their mighty best to stop the slide. All looked in vain at the opening of the fifth day, when South Africa were 77 for 4 wickets, requiring a world-record-430 to beat Australia. Australia, on the other hand, would only need six wickets to win: six balls out of a minimum of 540 in the day’s play. It seemed merely a matter of time before Australia would seal the deal and go 1–0 up in the series.
Here’s where the glory that is the non-result result comes in. South Africa faced a choice: they could either try and get the remaining 353 runs—not an insuperable task, although pretty damn close—and risk losing the match by playing loose shots; or they could knuckle down and try not to lose all six wickets in the allotted number of balls remaining—almost just as hard. The latter would require almost superhuman concentration, given that each ball of the 540 would be freighted with maximal pressure. Could South Africa save the game and live to fight another day?
Yes! is the extraordinary, astonishing answer—although at the end, South Africa only had two wickets out of six remaining. Several of the South African batsmen put up stiff resistance, but none more so than the previously cavalier and daredevil Faf (François to his mother) du Plessis, who batted in all for almost seven-and-a-half hours for his unbeaten first century. As he dragged himself off the pitch after facing 376 balls, commentators were already calling his performance and the game it took place in the greatest they’d seen in years. Faf was lauded by the notoriously intemperate Australian press, and everyone exhaled with the kind of pleasure that only eight hours of uninterrupted tension can provide. And at the end of it all the only winner was the game of Test cricket!
Having been pummeled in the first Test match in Ahmedabad, England’s cricketers can’t have been too hopeful coming into the second Test match at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. Not only was Kevin Pietersen, England’s most destructive batsman, utterly at sea against India’s spinners, Ravichandran Ashwin and Pragyan Ojha, but M. S. Dhoni, the Indian captain, had asked the groundsman to prepare a dry-and-dusty pitch to suit his spinners, which now included a third artist, the maestro himself, Harbhajan Singh. When Dhoni proceeded to win the toss and opted to bat first, England captain Alastair Cook must have thought that it was all over before a ball had been bowled.
A little time-out for the baseball fans among you who aren’t sure what’s just been said. One of the joys of cricket is that once the ball leaves the bowler’s/pitcher’s hand, it’s allowed to bounce before it reaches the batsman/batter. The distance between where the ball is thrown from and where the batter swings at it is 22 yards and is known as the pitch. It’s a hard patch of earth, and just how baked it is and how much grass is left on the surface by the groundskeeper will more-or-less determine how much the ball will turn off the pitch—even though a delight of cricket is that shaping the pitch to do what you want is an inexact, even completely unpredictable science. When Dhoni asked for a very baked pitch, he was trying to get one that would help spinners—those who rotate the ball through the air and make it bounce and turn off the pitch at about 45–60 m.p.h. As you might imagine, over the course of a game, a dry-and-dusty pitch is likely to wear—crack, slow, and have more uneven bounce, which will help the spinners even more. So, whoever gets to bat first would naturally have a truer pitch to bat on. That’s why when Dhoni won the toss (that’s how who gets to go first is decided in cricket), Cook was crestfallen. End of baseball time-out.
As it turned out, Dhoni’s error was to assume that (a) his batsmen would be able to play England’s spinners—Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar—better than the opposition’s batsmen would play his and (b) that Swann and Panesar would not have the wherewithal to exploit the conditions. He was wrong on both counts—at least partially. Swann and Panesar, bowling faster than the Indian spinning trio, were simply too much for the Indian batsmen, despite the heroics of India’s newest star, Cheteshwar Pujara. When it came for England to bat, most of the team couldn’t deal with the ferocious turn off the pitch, except the redoubtable Alastair Cook—who, unprecedentedly, scored his fourth century in four matches as captain—and Kevin Pietersen, who struck an impossibly magisterial 186. Because of Cook and Pietersen’s endeavors, which took them level with three greats as the leading century-makers in English Test history, England won by 10 wickets, which, given their loss in the first match, was a turnaround of phenomenal proportions.
Pietersen is the Gandalf of international cricket. Everyone knows he possesses magical powers and you emphatically want him on your side. Yet, every now and again, he disappears to fight his demons, and when he comes back you’re not sure whether he’s quite concentrating on the matter in hand. This time he was a changed man. He was as prudent, imperious, and emphatic in this match as he was rash, tentative, and indecisive in the one before. After this summer, when he got into all sorts of trouble with the English cricketing establishment and several of his teammates, the question being asked before this game was whether his skittishness was a consequence of his not being reintegrated into the team. After this performance, as wicketkeeper Matt Prior tweeted after the game, “reintegration” was “complete.”
In the clip below, Pietersen comes out to bat for Middle Earth—or Middle England at least.
It’s been a remarkable week for cricket—one so full of improbable stories, unlikely heroes, and record-breaking achievements that I (Martin) can’t contain them in just one blog. One of the more astonishing facets of the last few days is that, at one point, four Test matches were being played simultaneously around the world: Australia were slugging it out with South Africa in Brisbane; India were being humiliated by England in Mumbai; West Indies were taking Bangladesh to the cleaners in Khulna; and New Zealand’s game with Sri Lanka remains delicately poised in Colombo. The only two top-tier teams that didn’t make it to a ground were Pakistan and Zimbabwe. According to those sage souls over at Test Match Sofa, this is the first time in the history of cricket that four Test matches have taken place simultaneously around the world, which is either crazy planning on behalf of the cricket authorities or a sign that the much-anticipated death of the longest form of the game of cricket has been overhyped. Given the nature of the games, I sure hope it’s the latter.
Right Off the Bat 