Cricket

All will be quiet here this week. I’m heading offline and, more importantly, to Ireland for a week of cricket. Six games in six days across three provinces is a punishing, even optimistic schedule. Then again, it can’t go any worse than it did on Saturday when my two overs were walloped for 29 runs. Anyway, see y’all next Tuesday.

I suppose that relatively few people in England knew Alan Ruddock, who died from a heart attack on Sunday aged just 49, but in Scottish and Irish journalistic circles he was a considerable figure. As Kevin Myers reminds us, he defied the IRA as editor of the Sunday Times’s Irish edition. Later, as Stewart Kirkpatrick remembers, he was a very fine editor of the Scotsman, presiding over the paper and its coverage of the first elections to the new Scottish parliament in 1999. Later still, and foolishly, the Irish Times declined to give Alan the chance to edit the old lady of d’Olier St. Their loss. Instead he wrote a

A new cricket season is upon us and something to take our minds off this election caper. Happily this also means it’s time for another lovely piece from Frank Keating, still the doyen of British sportswriters. This time he’s strolling down Shaftesbury Avenue, compiling an XI of playwrights who have played and loved the noblest game. It is everything you would imagine and hope it to be. Beckett* and Pinter and Stoppard feature prominently of course; so too Simon Gray. There’s this too, from Peter Gibbs, once of Derbyshire and subsequently of the stage: In that long ago piece Gibbs had been, in real life, even more metaphysical than Stoppard

Until today I had not known that Adolf Hitler played cricket. Once. Apparently. This is, actually, reassuring since it seems that cricket found him out and, as it is wont to do, smoked out the essential elements of Hitler’s character. Ben Macintyre has the story: Adolf Hitler played cricket. He raised his own cricket team to play some British prisoners of war during the First World War, then declared the sport “unmanly” and tried to rewrite the laws of the game. The Führer’s First XI sounds like a Spike Milligan joke, but this small nugget of history is true. In all the millions of words written about Hitler, his telling

I have many more enthusiasms than convictions (in any sense of the word) but I am certain about some things and enthusiastically so. Cricket and tobacco, for instance. They’re as natural a fit as ham and eggs. If the government really wants to clamp down upon smoking they should probably consider banning cricket – for in no other sport does Lady Nicotine provide such a useful, nay vital, service. There are the cigarettes you smoke when you’re waiting to bat and the wicket looks a little lively and the other mobs’ fast bowler has a vindictive look about him and you’re just hoping that he’ll have exhausted his allotted overs

Sunday evening: a roaring log fire, a calming glass of claret and listening to HMS Pinafore. For once, cruel world is vanquished. For a time anyway. And, of course, Pinafore helps illuminate our Britain too. Here, for instance, is how Bob Ainsworth became Secretary of State for Defence: And here is what the Barmy Army, if they had any wit about them at all, would sing* every time Kevin Pietersen** comes to the crease: *If sing they must. **Or Strauss, Trott and Prior too.

An occasional series in which the great theorist’s ideas are considered in terms of how they may be applied to cricket. Today: defence. Granted, Clausewitz takes the view that the defensive side in war generally finds itself in a stronger position than is customarily the case on the cricket field. Nonetheless, his observations on Types of Resistance are germane: Defence is thus composed of two distinct parts, waiting and acting. By linking the former to a definite object that precedes action, we have been able to merge the two into one whole. But a defensive action – especially a large-scale one such as a campaign or war – will not

Strauss: caught Amla, bowled Steyn 0 Photo:Duif du Toit/Gallo Images/Getty Images. Andrew Strauss might wish that he’d lost the toss at the Wanderers this morning since, as it turned out and despite a stripey pitch, South Africa would also have batted first. Strauss may have been dismissed by the first ball of the test but he’s in pretty good company: the first man to succumb to the opening ball of a test match was Archie MacLaren, done in by Arthur Coningham at Melbourne in 1894. Despite being skittled for just 75, England won the match by 94 runs… Strauss’s dismissal today was the 28th time that a batsman has succumbed

Graeme Swann and Ian Bell combine to dismiss Ashwell Prince for 16 runs: Swann would finish with nine wickets in the match. Photo: Paul Gilham/Getty Images. With his long-sleeved shirt and buttoned-collar there’s something appeallingly old-fashioned about Graeme Swann. True, the sunglasses he often favours add a modern touch but, at bottom, Swann’s the kind of chirpy Englishman familiar from so many classic Second World War movies. You can easily imagine him serving under Noel Coward aboard the Torrin in David Lean’s In Which We Serve. He is, without doubt, England’s cricketer of the year and I expect Wisden will ratify this come the spring when it the venerable almanack

On the one hand you have Jacques Kallis, on the other Chris Gayle. Together they remind one that there are many ways to play the game. And, also, that individual brilliance may manifest itself in ways that do not always help the team as much as quieter, more sustained application might. That may seem a churlish observation since one has just watched Chris Gayle score 102 off a mere 70 deliveries. And in some ways it is churlish, not least because Gayle’s innings was one of the most thrilling one has seen in years. In terms of deliveries faced it was the fifth fastest century ever; if he could ever

Having endured a miserable time of it last time he was in England, there was a typically Kallisian probability that the bugger would grind his way to a century today. And so he did. It had everything you’d expect from a Kallis innings – which is both a compliment and thin praise indeed. Naturally the commentators were united in praising the South African as a true modern great, “up there with the best of them”. But is this true? No-one ever said of Kallis, as Cardus did of Woolley, that his batting is the stuff of “soft airs and fresh flavours” nor does it even contain “the brevity of summer”

Test cricket in crisis! Again! That’s the headline you could draw from an MCC survey that finds just 7% of Indian cricket fans prefer Test cricket to other, lesser, forms of the game. On the face of it this is indeed a troubling , dispiriting, finding. The survey, which was conducted by TNS Sport, sought, via the internet, the opinions of 1500 fans in India, New Zealand and South Africa to try and discover why Test match attendances have been falling and what might be done to reverse that trend. Peter Roebuck, always a gloomy bugger, summarised the findings thus: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there” and worried

It’s that time of year and that time of the decade. So, what’s the best XI of the last ten years? In some ways it is a disappointingly easy selection. But here it is anyway: 1. G Smith 2. V Sehwag 3. R Ponting 4. S Tendulkar 5. B Lara 6. A Gilchrist* (Wkt) 7. S Pollock 8. S Warne (Capt) 9. J Gillespie 10. M Muralitharan 11. G McGrath Criteria: Anyone who retired before 2006 is ineligible. Lara, Tendulkar and Warne etc could also, of course, be in a team of the 1990s. As you can see – and as you know – there’s been a severe shortage of

The thing about cricket, or one of the things about it, is that the game makes few allowances for ability. The strong are persecuted just as surely as the weak are found out. There is, literally, no hiding place. Indeed, the strongest players may suffer more than the weakest. For with ability comes increased expectation and responsibility. The weak or average player can fail; the strong cannot if his team is to prosper. So not the least of the many wonders of Sachin Tendulkar is that he has withstood the all-but-intolerable burdens that come with being a hero to a billion people. Consider this: instead of the silence you might

Kevin Pietersen is an idiot. One day that will become endearing and amusing and we’ll look upon his daftness with fondness and so on. But that moment hasn’t arrived yet. So, for the time being, we look at Pietersen and wonder what on earth is going on. No normal person would tell the Times that:  “I truly believe Jacques Kallis is the greatest cricketer ever.” This is as absurd as Chris Adams’s claim that Mushtaq Ahmed was the finest cricketer who ever played for Sussex. I suppose we ask quite a lot of professional sportsmen, but is it too demanding to wonder if, from time to time, they might actually

1st May 1930: Australian opening batsmen Bill Woodfull (1897 – 1965, left) and Archie Jackson (1909 – 1933) going out to bat against Worcester at Worcester. Photo: E. F. Corcoran/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images. The other day Patrick Kidd wrote a nice post on cricket and the outbreak of the Second World War, but, speaking of cricketing heartbreak, Saturday was the 100th anniversary of Archie Jackson’s birth. Poor Jackson. We’ll never know what might have been and, of course, it’s that sense of if that lends his story its power. It’s not quite right to say that Jackson’s premature death was a tragedy since the rules of tragedy demand that the

Further to this post, an occasional series exploring the relevance and application of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War to the game of cricket. In Chapter Nine of Book Six the great theorist examines some of the problems faced by a side mounting a rearguard effort on a turning wicket: On the battlefield… it must be acknowledged that a turning movement is [often*] the more effective form. This is not due to the form of envelopment as such; rather it holds true only where the envelopment can be pushed to an extreme, when it can severely restrict the enemy’s chances of retreat while the battle is still in progress. This is

Earlier this summer, at the end of a conversation on other matters, the (excellent) American blogger Kevin Drum asked for more cricket-blogging. I’m happy to oblige! He said he finds the game “endlessly fascinating” if also puzzling. “I’m pretty much agog” he wrote “at the idea that you have a sport that frequently ends in a draw even though it takes five days to play.” This is a common observation and an aspect of cricket that mystifies many people, by no means all of them American. But of the three most common results – a win, a loss and a draw – it is not an overstatement to say that