Eye on the Ashes
Dogs of Warr
It is a bad sign when a bowler’s presence reminds you of another’s absence, as Anderson’s does Simon Jones with every innocuous over
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
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When twenty-three-year-old Cambridge fast bowler John Warr arrived in Sydney with Freddie Brown’s MCC side of 1950-51, a Sydney wharf labourer hailed him. ‘Hey Warr, he shouted, ‘you’ve got as much chance of taking a test wicket on this tour as I have of pushing a pound of butter up a parrot's arse with a hot needle.' The labourer was wrong. Warr took exactly one, for 281 runs. Mind you, it was a close run thing: the umpire looked like giving Ian Johnson not out when he nicked to Godfrey Evans at Adelaide Oval, before Johnson decided he could not ignore the pitiable sag of Warr’s shoulders.
This summer, the parrot and butter standard faces another test, from Jimmy Anderson. His figures were one for 280 today when he managed to dismiss Glenn McGrath, and halve his average. The haircut is the same as four years ago; perhaps in recuperating from he stress fractures that kept him out of the last English season, he has lost the whip that gave him pace and away swing. Pitches with bounce but without pace have led him to bowl too short – a costly error. He is in danger of becoming a cipher in this series, if indeed he bowls again. It is a bad sign when a bowler’s presence reminds you of another’s absence, as Anderson’s does Simon Jones with every innocuous over.
Warr famously never had difficulty recalling his Test figures, able to rely on his memory of Hymn #281: ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid/Art thou sore distressed?/
“Come to Me,” saith One/“And coming, Be at rest”.’ Anderson can draw inspiration at the moment of Hymn #140: ‘Great is thy faithfulness.’ He’s going to need it.
Full postThe Anti-Hick
The worst thing about Michael Hussey is his nickname
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
The worst thing about Michael Hussey is his nickname. Mr Cricket. A cricketer keen on cricket: who’d a thunk it? It would be worth remarking were he Mr Stamps, or Mr Fossils. But Mr Cricket? Gimme a break. Almost everything else about him, however, is designed to please the purist. His technique is as simple as simple as a join-the-dots puzzle, as hard to break as Enigma. He performs the basics, of manipulating strike and running between wickets, with alacrity. He gives off an air of such pent-up enthusiasm about playing for Australia that it is as though he has been let in on an exciting secret he is bursting to share. And no wonder: his Test average of 77.4 is still to converge with his first-class average of 53.9. Here is a player rising to meet the challenge of the top level rather than being dragged down by it. You could call him the anti-Hick.
Ricky Ponting did not begin his innings today with his usual fluency. The burden of being the go-to guy in Test after Test may have daunted him momentarily. His pull shot to pick out Ashley Giles was a shot both cavalier and careworn. Any suspicion of lack of control, however, disappeared with Hussey’s arrival, and the resting of England’s first-string bowlers: a fifth bowler is generally a useful adjunct to an attack, but not when that fifth is either Steve Harmison or Jimmy Anderson, with two for 467 between them so far this summer. It is one thing to be a great player, but Hussey is also a great partner.
Full postWhose line is it anyway?
Leg-theory in Adelaide almost triggered a riot seventy-three years ago
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
Leg-theory in Adelaide almost triggered a riot seventy-three years ago. Today it brought a Test match almost to a standstill. You’d have gotten tasty odds before this game on the likelihood of the first English double hundred since Walter Hammond, or of England setting a new Ashes partnership record at this ground. But not perhaps as enticing as those on Shane Warne auditioning for the role of Australian wheelie-bin, with over upon over outside leg stump, not in search of rough, but of respite.
On the day that 'The Australian's trenchant Malcolm Conn announced that England had ‘unveiled its latest secret weapon to retain the Ashes – boredom’, Australia demonstrated that it is a game two can play. It is fair to say that England had the better of the détente that ensued. It isn't unfair to say that, although a draw looms as the likeliest outcome, and Australia has the batting to kill the game off, only one side can win this game: odds on that team being England would only two days ago have been astronomical.
Full postPostcards from Adelaide Oval
Operating instructions in the upright urinals beneath the Favell-Dansie Indoor Cricket Centre
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
The Shot That Echoed Round the World: You’d have sworn Monty Panesar was preparing himself for a triumphant return to the colours. He was on the arena before play undertaking a solo fielding routine – with disarming athleticism, what’s more. Word that he had not made the XI reached our overflow eyrie at about 9.30am, when the phone of my Guardian colleague Lawrence Booth delivered itself of a text message from his fiancée in England: ‘I can’t believe they haven’t picked Monty.’ Lawrence harrumphed: ‘How come she knows and we don’t? She’s in Cambridge. And she doesn’t even like cricket.’
The Song That Echoed In My Ears: Cricket Australia may have barred Barmy bugler Billy Cooper from the Test, but what will they do about the manglings of ‘God Save The Queen’ by their chanteuse of choice Amy Pearson, who insists on wringing the Britain’s anthem for bathos, as though she’s belting out ‘The Greatest Love of All’? Heaven knows, it’s probably the B-side for her disco version of ‘Amazing Grace’. But can someone please tell her that it’s an anthem, not a torch song?
Full postSouth Park Conservatives
In all, it is a ground on a scale and of a character a little more congenial to English visitors
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
Adelaide Oval is routinely, if not rather unimaginatively, considered the most picturesque of Australian cricket grounds. Indeed, it takes that status rather for granted, and like a self-regarding beauty queen has been rather letting itself go these past few years. The Eastern Stand has damn all to recommend it; the profusion of canopies apparently inspired by Jean Paul Gaultier’s famous bra – think Madonna, on her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour - don’t do much for the eye either. At least, though, the ground is not hemmed in by the skyscraper stands so popular elsewhere. Its communal benches and grassy verges defy the trend to one-bum, one-seat tyranny, while the 1912-vintage scoreboard provides a pleasing sense of continuity. Cricket in Adelaide, too, will always sound enchanting on radio: with bowlers operating from either the River or the Cathedral Ends, you could almost be listening to a broadcast from England.
In all, it is a ground on a scale and of a character a little more congenial to English visitors. There is something for Andrew Flintoff’s team to build on here, too, even if the conjecture about Glenn McGrath’s injury seemed like something calculated to help the Barmy Army’s morale, rather than seriously to incommode Australia. They had the better of the game against South Australia. The pitch will probably not deteriorate fast enough to deviate significantly for Warne: benign weather in the mid-20s is expected. We’ve even had a little rain, which briefly rinsed the outfield yesterday, the ground staff hastening to protect the pitch and the sponsors’ symbols on the outfield – fortunately in that order.
Full postA little DIY
For a weekend cricketer, a spectacle like Steve Harmison’s travails on the first day at Gabba is always poignant
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
Back in Melbourne for a day, I’m shortly to heft my gear and head for training at the Yarras. Nothing, I find, makes you keener for cricket yourself than a few days watching it. This is actually the first summer I’ve forsaken the pleasure of my weekend game in order to cover a Test series. I even had misgivings about covering the Ashes of 2005, because of the dent it would leave in my pre-season - a period of the year I always love, when hope has not yet been dashed against the rocks of experience.
I can usually justify watching good cricket by what I learn from it. In Brisbane, I was positioned in the media overspill upstairs, at 45 degrees to the action: a superior vantage from which to admire the degree to which Shane Warne varies his speeds and trajectories, and to watch how far forward Kevin Pietersen stretched in playing him. In general, I always come away from watching top-class batsmen resolved to take a longer front foot stride, and bend my front leg more – which, of course, I immediately forget. I also noticed at the Gabba a little ritual of Matthew Hayden’s after letting the ball go, moving rhythmically back and forward from his final position, testing the balance and security of the platform erected by his footwork. Someone at training tonight will probably wonder aloud why I’m doing the Nutbush.
Full postWhat times! What habits!
Australian cricketers are abjectly inoffensive according to a questionaire which includes, among several things, the bad habits of first-class cricketers
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
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A common cry is that professionalism has turned our cricketers into mere automata, similar in many more respects than they are different. Cricket Australia’s compendious media guide provides some empirical support for the complaint, having surveyed each of the country’s first-class players of their heroes, philosophies, recreations, and favourite dishes. If it wasn’t for barbecues, it soon emerges, many Australian cricketers would surely starve.
Yet perhaps the most revelatory dimension of the questionaire involves bad habits, where Australian cricketers reveal themselves as almost abjectly inoffensive. Some are lazy. Some are messy. Justin Langer may leave wet towels on the bathroom floor. His wife tells him he does; he apparently remains unconvinced. Political correctness has made inroads. Metrosexual South Australian rookie Lachlan Oswald-Jacobs chides himself for failing to lift the toilet seat; cerebral New South Welshman Greg Mail confesses to ‘studying maths’. Doesn’t anyone smoke, or drink, or shag any more? Shane Jurgensen owns up to ‘annoying my wife’; the alternative of annoying other people’s wives would surely be far more interesting. While on the subject of wives, Shane Warne’s worst habit is ‘losing things’.
Runaway bestseller among bad habits, and the choice of champions, is nail biting, conceded by the following: Ricky Ponting, Shane Watson, Mitchell Johnson, Michael Bevan, Brad Haddin, Moises Henriques, Tim Lang, Aaron O’Brien, Grant Roden, Craig Philipson, Dan Marsh, Damien Wright, George Bailey, Tim Paine, Michael Klinger, Adam Crosthwaite, Dirk Nannes, Peter Siddle, Jon Holland, Alex Doolan, Grant Baldwin, Matthew Gale, Murray Bragg. Maybe they taught it at the Academy. You could cut the tension in the Victorian dressing room with a knife: it contains no fewer than seven cricketers hard at work gnawing their cuticles. It must be an atmospheric place, too, what with Jason Arnberger’s ‘foot odour’, Matthew Harrison’s ‘flatulence’ and Brad Hodge ‘wiping underarms with towelettes in public places’.
Full postIt never rains...
Rain here was always a phantom of English, and cricketing, imagination
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
Text messages began arriving from friends in England about 6am. Could I stick my hand out the window and check for raindrops? Alas, the curtains parted to reveal a cloudless sky. Weather in Queensland doesn’t have the famous consistency of that experienced in the Pennines, but rain here was always a phantom of English imagination, based more on the electrical storm that curtailed a one-sided Ashes Test eight years ago than on instinctive feeling for local meteorology.
Trusting in the efficacy of a timely rain these days, too, is a little like believing in the Cottingley Fairies. Rain seldom exerts the influence on Tests as of yore. Games unfold so speedily, and so frequently involve mismatches, that even a lost day is insufficient to make avert the inevitable. The last Test verifiably ruined by rain was the knife-edge contest between Australia and India at Chennai just over two years ago. It wasn’t rain that held Australia up at the Oval in 2005 but bad light, thanks to the fixture’s lateness in the summer. Mind you, ‘Is It Cowardly to Pray for Bad Light?’ (2005) wouldn’t have made such an apt title for Rob Smyth’s delicious book.
Full postTime for a Commercial Break
Great concern this summer attended the arrival of the Barmy Army, whose songs, chants and general bonhomie, it was feared, would drown out Australian fans, and render Tests inhospitable – or, at least, interfere with time-honoured parochialism and
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
Great concern this summer attended the arrival of the Barmy Army, whose songs, chants and general bonhomie, it was feared, would drown out Australian fans, and render Tests inhospitable – or, at least, interfere with time-honoured parochialism and partisanship which Aussies regard as the natural state of things.
In fact, both the Army and their antipodean rivals have here been kept well and truly under a pretty coarse thumb by the police, administering the Killjoy Act with the help of CCTV. Only Pat Buchanan is more hostile to the Mexican wave than the potentates of the Gabba. Yet Cricket Australia is poorly placed to be pointing the finger at anyone – it is looming as a far more exasperating noise polluter than any group of fans.
Full postLeading Exponents
The Ashes embodies cricket's most traditional format: five five-day Tests played in white by daylight
Gideon Haigh
25-Feb-2013
The Ashes embodies cricket’s most traditional format: five five-day Tests played in white by daylight. Yet this has been fitted into a decidedly untraditional tour, the most anticipated series of modern times being shoehorned into six weeks, beginning with an unprecedented double header.
For the most part, this has been England’s problem, with only three second-class practice matches to prepare for back-to-back Tests - rather like trying to soup up a Go Kart to compete at the drag racing strip with the addition of some GT stripes. At the Gabba today, it became Australia’s, blessed with a first-innings lead of 445, but burdened with the choice of whether to enforce the follow-on.
Full postMost Read
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