Nicholas Hogg
What is defined as bullying on a sporting field?
Standing up to an intimidating opposition rather than complaining about them might be an old-school attitude, but it's still relevant
Nicholas Hogg
16-Oct-2014
Bullying has been bandied about in the press so frequently this week that I needed to check the definition: a person who uses strength or influence to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.
Okay, by this decree I'd argue that many a manager, coach or captain in any sport could be accused of bullying. But how to deal with it and how to define it, despite this Oxford dictionary entry, depends on the individual.
My early morals were formed by peers, parents, and sports team cultures, rather than religion or schooling. In the working-class town I was brought up in it was taboo to "tell" on another. Standing up for yourself meant fighting your own battles, not getting teachers or parents to thwart the bullies.
Full postWhat sort of batting partner do you like?
Should it be someone similar to yourself? Or do opposites attract?
Nicholas Hogg
26-Sep-2014
In a team sport of individual performances, the batting partnership is possibly the closest relationship in the game. Yes, the swing bowler relies on his slips to hold their catches, and the spinner needs his keeper to whip off the bails when he has drawn his prey from the crease (picture Shane Warne with Adam Gilchrist, both chirping at a batsman scrabbling around for survival), and bowling well in tandem with your partner can keep the pressure on both ends, and thus force mistakes at either.
For the batsman, the wicket is a lonely stage when 11 of your fellow actors don't want you to be there, and the umpire is only a cold arbiter waiting to dismiss you from play.
But fear not, you have a companion.
Full postMissing cricket? Don't stop playing
For several retired pros, life after cricket has meant more cricket. Permanently shutting out the game is harder than it looks
Nicholas Hogg
11-Sep-2014
The world of pro-am cricket comes with its own particular etiquettes. On Monday, in a match to raise money for the Sick Children's Trust, the Authors Cricket Club, the writers' team I vice-captain, took on a Mark Ramprakash XI featuring Min Patel, Alex Tudor, Steve Marsh and Matthew Hoggard. With several hundred punters sneaking off from work on a sunny afternoon to watch, a curious pressure built on the former pros to perform. Anything but fireworks from the superstars would be failure. In this same fixture last year, Ramprakash, who had been genial before the game, charming both the sponsors and the amateur opposition who were awed to be sharing the field with him, snicked one to first slip and was dropped - off my bowling, and yes, that's another story. Suddenly the chatty and joking celebrity was banished. It was the Mark Ramprakash of old, intense and focused, only speaking when he needed to swear - the batter who destroyed county attacks across the country.
This year the dark star wasn't needed. Beneath a cloudless sky he stroked a classy ton that had sponsors and spectators purring. It was what we all wanted to see. Even the suffering bowlers, watching Ramps fire red tracer bullets through the covers and scattering the beer tent, could admire the batsman who was taking them to pieces. True, we'd have an indelible anecdote if one of us bagged his wicket, but WG Grace defined the pro-am protocol long ago when he said, "They've come to see me bat, not you bowl."
And the crowd did see Ramps bat, until he retired on 120-something, finally bored by hitting boundaries off every delivery.
Full postWhat cricketing memories remain locked in your archive for eternity?
Your first six? A last-ball victory? The legendary and the quiet moments of your favourite players?
Nicholas Hogg
31-Aug-2014
Closing in all too soon on another English cricket season, I begin to wonder which shots, catches and wickets will resonate over time. Whether moments from the professional arena, via stadium seat, camera lens or radio commentary, or the on-field antics of my own games on park pitches and village greens, certain memories will fade, while others will gleam across the years.
My psychology degree thesis was on first-time memories - whether a positive experience is more likely to be remembered than a negative episode. I interviewed volunteers about their first driving lesson, cigarette, plane ride, day at school, and romantic kiss. Evidence suggests that emotionally positive experiences outlast negative, and that those with high self-esteem will encode positive episodes more effectively. Hopefully, when I'm sitting by the fire with my feet up I'll have erased those golden ducks, and only the glorious, match-winning innings, along with bowling spells where wickets tumbled like matchsticks, will exist.
Could I have applied first-time memory questions to cricketing experience? I have vague, grainy archives of my father adjusting my grip in the back garden, along with stepping out to play my first formal game wearing a pair of blue trainers. Alas, despite the millions of balls I've bowled and faced in nearly 30 years of cricket, it's only a sharply edited highlights montage that survives: my first six with a proper ball, clipping one off my legs and smacking the brick pavilion; walking out to bat on my men's cricket debut and sweeping a four; having Leicestershire, Warwickshire and England player, Darren Maddy, caught behind at a county trial; trapping Chris Broad plumb lbw at Grace Road, only for the umpire to whisper he couldn't give him out first ball of an exhibition game.
Full postWhat other sports can enhance the cricketer?
Baseball may be cricket's closest relative, but it's boxing that actually offers most to the cricketer
Nicholas Hogg
14-Aug-2014
One of the many great things about living in Japan is baseball. Not the sport itself, the endless full tosses and the leather mitts required to field a ball softer and lighter than a cricket ball, but the ubiquitous "batting centres" located in every city. More like a golf range than a cricket net. For a few yen, batters can stand on a plate facing a virtual pitcher - a bowling machine hidden behind a screen, often timed with video images of star players - and hammer two dozen full bungers into the roofing. With the touch of a button, pace can be upped to 160kph and pitches equipped with Mitchell Johnson afterburn. However, helmets, gloves and boxes are unnecessary. Precision Japanese engineering means that every missile zings along exactly the same course, and it doesn't take long to adapt and intercept, smiting it back to where it came from.
Writing in the Guardian earlier this year, Andy Bull reported on the progress of the South Korean T20 team, a squad of mostly ex-baseball players managed by British baseball player and specialist cricket fielding coach, Julien Fountain. "It's monstrous," says Fountain of his batters. "They just hit." While Bull is dubious about the transitional nature of baseball skills into cricket, Fountain is more sure. "Show me a beginner cricketer who can hit the ball 110 metres."
So what other sports can enhance the cricketer?
Full postLosing to India
An Englishman discovers cricket fervour in India, and realises he can't quite win a game against Indians back home either
Nicholas Hogg
25-Jul-2014
It was a perfect English afternoon for cricket. There was rhubarb crumble cooling on the tea table in the pavilion, the green hills of Chalke Valley blazed under a cloudless sky, and a local enthusiast had parked his convertible by the boundary edge and turned up Test Match Special so we could follow the final day at Lord's.
Alas, as we heard on the airwaves of the England wickets falling, so did the Authors wickets tumble in our game against Osians, a touring team from Mumbai who were also experiencing the joy of beating Englishmen on English soil.
The Wiltshire track wasn't quite pacy enough for us to regularly hook to the midwicket fielders, but the Indian visitors soon discovered that our inability to move out of the crease without missing the ball was our Achilles heel - unlike the national side, whose Achilles heel was actually Matt Prior's heel. We stuttered and spluttered before setting a measly total, and shortly after demolishing that rhubarb crumble the Osians' batsmen demolished our target.
Full postAre you born to captain?
Are some people just made to lead and the rest to follow? Let's examine the case of the two Captains Cook
Nicholas Hogg
11-Jul-2014
"The role of leadership is more significant in cricket than in any other sport," begins Mike Brearley in his 1985 introduction to The Art of Captaincy. And Brearley, a batsman of dubious Test mettle who inspired the quote from Australian Kim Hughes that he "had nothing going for him except his intelligence" was arguably the last England captain to be selected for his cerebral qualities rather than his playing ability.
On the last day of the second Test against Sri Lanka, Geoff Boycott revolved the cliché that captains "are born and not made" when he wondered what books Peter Moores would put on Alastair Cook's reading list. After a series loss in which Cook's tactics ("They seem to have a plan A and plan B is nearly non-existent" - Glenn McGrath) and ability as a motivator ("Fear of failure" - thanks, Pietersen) were called into question, Boycott and others have wondered if Cook, "a lovely lad", as Boycs kept repeating, was the right man for the job.
So is Professor Boycott correct? Is there a genetic trait for leadership?
Full postThe dreaded run-out
No matter how elegant your strokeplay, the clumsy dive into the crease that fails to save your bacon is forever graceless
Nicholas Hogg
21-Jun-2014
Forget the raised finger for the ball you did not feather, or the missing off stump where your cover drive should have been. There is no worse dismissal than a run-out. After a decade away from playing the game I love (blame a globetrotting romance) I stepped back onto a cricket pitch, donning new pads, gloves and an unblemished bat. Without facing a ball, I immediately returned to the pavilion, hoping their skipper might call me back after the bowler had kicked a straight drive onto the stumps and run me out. Alas, he was too busy high-fiving to see my forlorn expression.
The run-out is the cricket equivalent of being caught with your pants down. Occasionally it is lightning fielding, a thunderbolt arm that strikes down a single stump, or the panther in the covers, sprinting in and pouncing on your waddling rear. But usually it is simply your fault, or more often than not, your partner's. Either way, incompetence and bad judgement are to blame, and no matter how elegant your strokeplay, the flowing whites and gleaming bat, that clumsy dive into the crease that fails to save your bacon is forever graceless.
My own particular fury at being run out stems from the disdain my junior coach, former Yorkshire player Peter Booth, gave this method of dismissal. Proper cricket meant proper running, backing up (watch that line, Jos Buttler) and good communication. Thursday night nets always included shuttle runs with bats sliding over the crease, and nothing would irk coach Booth more than bad calling. Yes, no, wait, two or three were the only words necessary to navigate that perilous 19-yard strip. Bellowing "Go, go, go," is easily misheard as "No, no, no", and that is actually one of the less cryptic calls used by some of my current team-mates.
Full postWho would be a player-umpire?
The pros have to deal with the pressure of high stakes and being shown up by technology, but the village ump's job isn't any easier
Nicholas Hogg
05-Jun-2014
Wearing an ill-fitting white coat, the pockets filled with stones, coins, or even one of those shiny metal counters, the amateur umpire bravely takes the field. Despite the club cricketer preparing himself for the summer toiling in the nets, scouring the sports shops for that magical piece of kit that will transform his season, none of us have read an updated rule book. Or, more importantly, psychologically readied ourselves for the key decisions that can fracture friendships and team unity, and even start family feuds.
Although the word umpire derives from the Old French nompere - "not a peer", and thus able to pass judgement without bias - the village friendly is adjudicated by fellow players. In an Authors CC match last year our opening bat, Richard Beard, was struck in front and the subject of a bellowed appeal. His team-mate and fellow novelist Alex Preston was the judge. Paralysed by the dilemma of either dismissing his colleague or fending off the opposition, he chose debate: "Well," he addressed Richard. "Do you think you were out?" I can't recall if Richard had tucked his bat under his arm before the finger went up, but it was the first time I'd heard an umpire ask a batsman to adjudicate his own leg-before. Alex subsequently won the "Decision of the Season" award at our annual dinner.
I like to think there is a tacit agreement between club players, an unspoken contract that no bowler expects anything less than an utterly plumb leg-before to be judged out by one of his friends. There is nothing that causes more foreboding than a skipper who gets a crick in his neck walking back to the pavilion because he's glaring at the wicket, where you're already lobbying the opposition to support your gross error. "He was plumb, wasn't he?" you whimper. "I couldn't not give that." As your weakening voice trails off, so does your position in the batting order. And even if you're sure he was plumb, without the DRS, the path of a ball is eternally subjective.
Full postThe need for heroes
Can any modern player fill the gargantuan boots of Botham, Viv Richards or Harold Larwood? Glenn Maxwell is making a mighty fist of it
Nicholas Hogg
21-May-2014
In the wet weeks of April, that "cruellest month", as TS Eliot no doubt too waited for the season to begin, I sought cricketing comfort and ordered the ESPN Legends of Cricket DVD box set - 575 minutes of mainline nostalgia. From the sepia-toned stills of Grace and Hobbs, the grainy black-and-white footage of Hutton and Bradman, to the TV classics of my childhood featuring the helmetless Sirs Richards and Botham swatting to the boundary, it is pure indulgence. These bygone heroes still give me goosebumps, and where the archive film lacks quality, the Spidercam and the HD focus of bats bending in crystal-clear slow-mo, we have the reverence of the narrators.
Michael Holding recounts Rodney Hogg hitting Viv on the jaw with a bouncer, and Hogg's shock at watching him take guard again and carry on chewing his gum. Then Hogg makes the mistake of bouncing Viv again and, of course, "It went out of the ground," grins Holding. "And the MCG is a BIG ground."
I can watch replays of Botham and Headingley and relive the awe. Botham hooking into the crowd. Botham ripping through the Aussies then ripping up the stump as a souvenir. And I don't even need to have seen the player in action to idolise the man. As the son of a father from the Nottinghamshire coalfields, I grew up believing Harold Larwood could walk on water. Duncan Hamilton's superlative biography of the miner-cum fast bowler is a Greek tragedy. The warrior Larwood, brave and victorious, hoisted onto the shoulders of a nation and then cast aside by the gods of the MCC. Sir Geoffrey Boycott laments that Larwood's life is "one of the saddest stories in cricket".
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