It’s not all about me, me, me (part two)

It was sad to learn, a couple of weeks ago at the Blogging Ashes (for reports see Cricket With Balls, Line and Length and the Village Cricketer) that a fine body of men who have been going to Edgbaston for nigh on 20 years – or maybe even longer – have come up empty-handed when it comes to this year’s Ashes.

Because Warwickshire’s mandarins decided that nobody could buy more than two tickets each for the third Test, the loyal customers from Elstow Cricket Club, in Bedfordshire, have been denied their annual day out.

However, they have not taken it lying down and instead of situating themselves in bands of two around the arena, they have decided to have their own Ashes instead. They will be taking on a select Australian XI, now, I understand, to be captained by J-Rod, over the weekend of July 25 and 26 (when there is no competing Ashes cricket taking place) and are promising two days of food, drink, entertainment, sun and, perhaps most importantly, cricket.

So if you find yourself in that neck of the woods and want to indulge in a bit of Ashes banter, barrack J-Rod about his attempted Reverse Sweeps and see if he really is the worst Australian captain ever, as he claimed after his defeat at the England bloggers’ hands, why not pop in. Admission is free, I understand, but you may have to pay for your drinks.

More info is available at www.elstowcc.co.uk  or you can email them on elstowcricketclub@hotmail.co.uk

You might, if you’re one of those people who gets up in time for it, recognise some of the faces because they’ve apparently already featured on Cricket AM.

It’s not all about me, me, me (although quite a lot of it is to be frank)

Some people from a clothing company of sorts have contacted me – and, it seems, the cricket blogging world in general  – about a distinctive line of attire they are about to produce. Now this seems like a blatant attempt to get free advertising – although no one would advertise here if they knew my viewing statistics – but I don’t mind a bit of blatancy so I have reproduced their press release below

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRICKET
The self-styled ’sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ at
Philosophy Football find quotes from philosophers about football and
slap them on a T-shirt with name and squad number added. This summer
they have launched a their philosophy cricket range with opening bat
CB Fry’s musings on cricket as a philosophy. As a cricketer CB Fry
captained both Sussex and England. A gifted footballer too, he played
professionally for Southampton and Portsmouth, making his England
debut in 1901. For a time he was also holder of the world record for
the long jump. A superbly gifted cricket writer and academic off the
pitch CB politically managed to combine standing unsuccessfully for
Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate with the bizarre idea ideas
that if Germany could be persuaded to play England at test cricket WW2
might be avoided. The T-shirt is available from www.philosophyfootball.com
with the search now on for other cricket quotes for T-shirted
immortalisation.

I’m trying to rack my brains for a few phrases they might be able to use and you might want to as well. I only there’s some commission involved!

Why Paul Collingwood should be at No10 not No5

It’s not going well. My campaign to get Paul Collingwood elected Prime Minister that is. Some people seem opposed to the idea because he is a bit bottom-handed, but at least he is even-handed, unlike most of our elected officials.

So, if you think that the Ginger Genius should be in Whitehall, pop along to facebook and join the group Paul Collingwood for PM. Get the ball rolling, as it were!

Things I like about Test cricket (No 1 of an occasional series)

That a Test can start with all the talk being about the  unorthodox batting of one team’s No1 batsman, and end, five days later, with everyone talking about the orthodox batting of the other team’s No 11.

Ashes chat: Freddie feels the curse of the Reverse

OK, now I’ll admit it. I’m beginning to get a little bit scared. Because a third of four of the astrological predictions forecast for the Ashes by Reverse Sweep looks like it is about to come true.

And to save you scrolling back a few days this is it: 3 Andrew Flintoff’s injury woes continue at St John’s Wood as his chart is “hit by an accident-prone conjunction between Uranus and Mars”. Expect the pedalos in nearby Regent’s Park to get some action.

And indeed, only today we have the following story from cricinfo http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/content/current/story/414084.html confirming his fitness worries.

RS, with the help of the magnificent magus, Mystic Mags, has already succeeded in forecasting the end of Michael Vaughan’s cricket career, as well as warning of Brett Lee’s injury problems: http://sportwriter.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/brett-lee-and-michael-vaughan-reverse-sweeps-mystical-powers-bear-fruit-despite-magazine-cover-up/ and has failed only in one: 1 The lingering effects of the second of four Mercury retrogrades (planet travelling backwards) implies communication problems at Cardiff. Be prepared for an unusual proliferation of run-outs, although he would point out that there were communication problems at Cardiff, mainly in the form of Andrew Strauss’s field-placing policy.

So let us hope that RS’s clairvoyant activities continue to be so accurate, because it could mean Jimmy “in the form of his life” Anderson will live up to his quotation marks and so make prediction No 2 come to pass: 2 He swings it in, he swings it out. But can he swing it for England? Leo Sun James Anderson “can go beyond himself until July 26”. It could signal his first Test ten-for – and at Lord’s

Watch this space!

 

Ashes update, final day, Cardiff: Heaven knows I’m not miserable now

In The Best of Enemies, the book he has co-written with Line and Length supremo Patrick Kidd,  Peter McGuinness dissects the English sporting psyche – and I would suggest he has made a fairly accurate, if withering, job of it.

“Sporting contests for the English,” says the Aussie who as a kid had the misfortune to be cast as Geoffrey Boycott in cricketing contests with his larrickin mates, “are joyless and miserable”, basically because we Poms are miserable and pessimistic by nature.

And because the England cricket team - and othe national sporting representatives – frequently perform so abysmally,we are given a regular opportunity to indulge our favourite pastime of self-flagellation (or, I suppose, flagellation by someone else, if you’re so disposed).

In essence of course, he is right. As I sat in the Guardian offices, nominally working, but basically keeping one eye on the television screen high on the wall to my left, Paul Collingwood prodding valiantly, but no doubt vainly, as all tumbled around him, I began to work myself into something of a lather of indignation.

This defeat, for this is what this match would undoubtedly result in, would not be just about England losing, it would be about England losing it, the link with rationality and common sense that I had always presumed this country to possess, but which, as events in the political and financial sphere, among others, have begun to show, is evaporating fast.

I started to scribble down some notes, for a future blog, in which England’s cricketing failure was merely a microcosm of the many other failings in political and social life that we are becoming so used to: MPs filling their boots; bankers crapping from a great height on the rest of the populace; trying to work out which Tube line will not be working this weekend; trying to understand why the cash and oyster machines that have replaced real human beings at railway stations reject almost three-quarters of the pound coins you insert in them; trying to understand why Big Brother and Piers Morgan interviewing a turbo-chested glamour model are considered prime-time TV; battling to make sense of a system which, in a recession, cuts the pay and/or work of the lower-paid journeymen (and women) so that the bosses and middle managers can retain salaries that they could never spend in a month of Sundays; why, if you’re suffering from (community-acquired) pneumonia – or even swine flu – you’re expected to tramp up to your nearest hospital, possibly by bus, thereby potentially spreading it to other people in the community, sit in a waiting room for a blood test or chest x-ray, again potentially spreading it to more people in the community, rather than being quickly isolated in a bed with some nice medicine; and most pernicious of all, why parking attendants are being paid to walk up and down your road – the road that you already pay £60 to park in (if you can find a space) – and to issue you with a parking ticket even though you have tried your hardest to position your car as close to the one in front to give more of your neighbours room to squeeze their 4×4s in.

…..but, then, of course,  after Colly, the one-man fighting band that would no doubt put a stop to all the above nonsense should he be elected the next Prime Minister – which I don’t think would be a bad idea - finally departed, came the unexpected denouement. Suddenly Jimmy “in the form of his life” Anderson (I thought that epithet was meant about his bowling, not his batting), and the much-maligned Monty came together, and made all those things that make us grumpy to be English seem not so bad after all.

There was, it seemed, fight and stomach in this body of English men:  and for that I will take the scrounging MPs, the bellicose bankers, the defective Tube machines,  over-inflated celebrity chests, a crumbling NHS, and tyrannical traffic wardens.

But if we don’t do better at Lord’s on Thursday, you can be sure I’ll be getting around to writing that article……

Ashes update, day 4, first session: Another English let-down

So, not only do our batsmen underperform, so does the English weather. What about all those promises from the Meteorological Office of a washed-out fourth day? You can’t rely on anything this country, can you? An explanation please, Michael Fish, Bill Giles, Suzanne Charlton.

Ashes, day 3, close: North has been around the compass but looks to be going in the right direction now

Not sure what to make of today’s play. I woke up late, hurried downstairs to find that Jimmy “in the form of his life” Anderson had done some damage – and something to make that label fit – and before long Punter had brought up his 150 and chopped Monty on.

But further inroads proved impossible to come by and despite another hour’s absence from the TV while I trod the weary route to work, the Aussies were still only four down when I arrived.

What I saw of Marcus North impressed me greatly; for someone who has played for five English counties, I can’t help feeling I should have seen a bit more of him. Some have used that record as a stick to beat him with, the implication being that he has never been able to cement his place at any one county; without further research, which I’m not in the mind to do right now, I don’t know whether there’s any truth in that.

It could just be that he has lots of admirers out there in English domestic cricket. Or he likes to move around. Try new things. See new places.

Whatever, he seems to see the ball very well and is a much more attractive watch than Katich or Hughes, regularly giving it the full face. He seems to have that solidity which appears to be endemic among Australia’s middle order.

It may rain tomorrow, giving England hope of saving the match, but if not, I expect more runs to flow from North and there’s still Brad Haddin and the ever-improving Mitchell Johnson to come.

Even Nathan Hauritz at No9 can put bat to ball.

So England will do well to get out of this and head to Lord’s still on level terms; then, their all-round game has to improve markedly.

Ashes, Day 2, close: Aussies gorge themselves as England revert to tripe

Half an hour before lunch on the second day, there were still two ways of looking at it: England’s batsmen had either shown a collective irresponsibility in getting out when they’d almost all got set or had all played their individual parts to perfection in a great team display. No one, after all, had expected our last three wickets to add another hundred

By lunch, we had enjoyed a spot of counter-punching from Phillip Hughes, but expected Freddie, post-ham salad, to put him straight, and Jimmy “in the form of his life” Anderson and Stuart Broad to have lowered their hands into the wickets lucky-dip and come up with a Ponting or two.

By tea, Hughes had gone, not in the expected manner to a Flintoff snorter, but with a rather tame inside edge, but Ponting and Simon Katich were refusing to be prised from the lottery barrel.

And by the close, the pair were still there, hundreds apiece and looking well set for the 650 that will give Australia a fighting chance of victory on the final day – if you accept that Saturday, as the meteorologists assure us, is going to be even damper than usual in Cardiff Bay.

So now we know: England had been under-performing badly. That none of our 11 could better 69, while two of three Australians to have visited the crease have already passed the century-mark is a damning indictment on what came, and too quickly went, on Wednesday.

Ponting was back to his usual self, as presaged on these pages yesterday and in the process, clocked up his 11,000th Test run. To be honest, I feel like I’ve seen every one of those runs with my own eyes. The face of his bat has begun to look as broad as next door’s fence , and that is a meaty – and indeed mighty - impressive construction I can tell you.

A small digression: when I first saw Ponting, he had not scored a Test run. It was 1994 at Lilac Hill, that pretty outpost of  Perth suburbia which, wikipedia whimsically reminds me, the Swan River wraps around on its southern and eastern borders. But the 17-year-old was highly regarded and, if memory serves me correctly, he unfurled a number of those pull shots that would become something of a trademark on his way to a fifty for the Aussie Chairman’s XI against the English tourists.

Now, I am sick to death of that shot. I see it when I close my eyes, I seet it in my Ashes nightmares, it creeps up on me even when I’m thinking of something completely unrelated.

It’s a great shot, admittedly:  a silky swivel, of a type which Michael Jackson might have been proud to incorporate into one of his dance routines, followed by the crispest of connections and the almost instantaneous meeting of ball and boundary board and a flailing backwards square leg barely making it into the picture.

But you can overdose on beauty, even of the savage variety, and I have done so. Usually, when great cricketers leave the stage, it is a time for regret and reflection. When Ponting goes I will just breathe a sigh of relief.

And his cover drive and cut slightly backwards of square weren’t going too badly either.

Beauty, of a savage kind or any other, is not what you would associate with Simon Katich, but he is a sticker,  and works some pretty impressive angles.

With Anderson back to his inconsistent worst, Broad, who’s beginning to look a bit of a prima donna with the aghast appearance his baby face takes on when another of his deliveries a yard wide of the off stump gets the treatment it deserves and one of two spinners suffering a recession of his very own, it was going to be a tough ask for England.

Graeme Swann said afterwards that he and Monty had got a bit excited when they’d seen Nathan Hauritz turn it on Wednesday and, although there was the occasional puff of dust from the bowlers’ footmarks, the spin was too slow and faithful in bounce to cause the Australian batting too much concern. In the end, they were merely keeping the scoring rate within manageable limits.

So another night, the same story. The first session tomorrow – or today as it indeed is – is going to be crucial. The new ball will come into play probably within the first hour and Anderson, Broad and Flintoff just have to make it deviate off the straight and narrow. Otherwise, you can see Ponting and Katich, the in-form Hussey and North and the classy Clarke filling their boots.

By the way, where was Warnie?

Since I was watching the afternoon and evening sessions of the first day while puffing my way up a random hill on on of my gym’s cycling machine, I missed whether Warnie – Sky’s heralded new boy in the commentary box – actually turned up.

Shortly before the start of play I heard a wry David Gower lamenting that he was expected and would be joining the crew later, but didn’t hear his voice through my tinny headphones.

So, where was and indeed, is, Warnie? Was he stopped on route by a well-timed text. And are there any nurses in Cardiff wearing a strange smile on their faces?