Cricket

The roar of the Premier League is beginning to drown out everything else in sport (there’s even Friday night football now: another blissful resting place occupied. Shouldn’t we ring-fence some time — greenbelt-style — that football can’t colonise, say 2 a.m. on a Monday, that’s preserved from football’s endless development?) But while there’s a chance, let’s not lose sight of a great Englishman and a great English achievement. This Ashes series has not been a good contest; they often aren’t. But with his modesty, determination and resilience, it has been a personal triumph for the captain Alastair Cook.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3" title="Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England's victory against Australia" startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope.

All across the country this afternoon struggling club sides could cheer themselves with the thought that once their batsmen had survived for 112 deliveries they were doing better than Australia managed in their first innings in Nottingham this week. Australia's capitulation in 18.3 overs - a Nelson of deliveries - might just be the most extraordinary thing any of us have ever seen on a cricket field. Even now, 48 hours later, it still seems shocking. And when England motored to 274/4 by the end of that first, astonishing, day it occurred to me that this might well have been the single best day of English test cricket in my lifetime. It was hard to think of many that could even rival it.

What a terrific summer of sport it’s been: a wonderful Wimbledon, a rollicking Royal Ascot, an absorbing Ashes series that still has the best part of two Tests to go. And now along comes football, barging its way on to the back pages, shoving the other sports aside, sniggering all the way to the bank. Every August, the ‘beautiful game’ reasserts itself as the playground bully. Football is the most popular sport in this country — and the nastiest. It has become a cesspit of greed, debauchery and racism, especially in Britain. It is crude and overbearing and has all the subtlety of a disco at Holy Communion. I feel bad about this because I love football.

While Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and the Test Match Special team entertain us from Edgbaston this week, a different sort of cricket commentary is being broadcast live from a sports bar in north London. Guerilla Cricket, son of the alternative Test Match Sofa, is everything TMS is not. Expect music, drinking, occasional swearing, masses of interaction with fans and plenty of jingles. When Ian Bell trots out to bat, you’ll hear Anita Ward’s 'You can ring my bell,' for Joe Root it’s Odyssey’s 'Going back to my roots'. You get the picture.

Something wonderful is happening in English cricket. The Ashes are upon us and, at last, the England team seem determined to play the right way. The recent series against New Zealand was a revelation. The Kiwis’ have-a-go approach rubbed off and, for the first time in too long, England played as if cricket was more than a job. It could be fun too. Remember fun? We have seen it before. In 1981, at Headingley, England were revived by the rustic virtues of what their captain Mike Brearley called ‘blacksmith cricket’. See ball, hit ball. Bowl as fast as you can. Keep it simple. Trust yourself. For a long time England have approached cricket as though it was not a game but a military campaign.

A car crash is a terrible thing, but hordes of people still slow down to cop an eyeful on the motorway. Car-crash sport is equally compelling. In the US Open, up at Chambers Bay, Tiger Woods opened with two of the worst rounds he had ever played: 80, with eight bogeys and one triple bogey, and 76 before heading home. But no matter how dismal his performance, he had a huge number of spectators shouting in support. Fellow players refuse to write him off, former golfers are less amiable. One-time Open champion Tom Weiskopf said Woods ‘had gone from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of a coal mine’. Greg Norman said he ‘looks lost’ on a golf course. This is a 14-time Major winner made to look like a club hacker by... By what? By a chaotic private life?

For the first time since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team six years ago, a Test match side has visited Pakistan. The Zimbabwe tourists, playing at the same Lahore stadium where the attack was mounted, were greeted with wild enthusiasm. Less well reported has been the fact that a team of English cricketers (including myself and Alex Massie of this parish) has been touring the Hindu Kush. We played in Chitral, Drosh, Ayun, Kalash and Booni. In these mountain areas many of our opponents were using pads, gloves and a hard ball for the first time. Still, we were overwhelmed, rarely losing by fewer than 200 runs in games which never exceeded 30 overs.

If you watched England’s three-day Test defeat by the West Indies in Barbados the other day to the bitter end you will have heard some of the England players being interviewed afterwards. They uniformly referred to their coach, the now departed Peter Moores, as ‘Mooresie’. And therein you feel lies a few of the problems infesting English cricket. It’s hard to imagine even John Terry shouting across the car park: ‘Oi Mouro, that was bang out of order.’ Or in an earlier time, a post-match David Beckham telling the world about ‘Fergie’. No, it was always The Boss, or Sir Alex. I know we are all in favour of flat management structures, shirt sleeves, no ties, Dave and Sam, a few beers after work. But Mooresie? Seriously?

He’s a tall man, Kevin Pietersen, and he casts a long shadow. It loomed large over the Long Room at Lord’s last week where the great, the good, and the not very good at all of the cricket world had gathered for the annual Wisden dinner, one of the most enjoyable events in the life of man. For starters, indeed only a few minutes before we did get stuck into our starters, the hapless Paul Downton had been suddenly sacked as managing director of English cricket. It seems nonsense to blame Downton for all the failures of the England team, but he was the main man in the room for the botched firing of Pietersen last year.

When Charlotte Edwards collected her CBE today from the Queen for services to cricket, the acclaimed sportswoman and current captain of the England women's cricket team, got slightly more than she bargained for. Her Majesty used the meeting as an opportunity to let her feelings be known on the appropriate length of cricket matches for all-female teams compared with all-male teams. Speaking with Edwards, the Queen allegedly said that men were better suited to the longer format of matches than women: Although some social media users were quick to take offence at Her Majesty's 'sexist' suggestion that women can't cope as well as men at test matches, she does at least have history on her side.

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.

"We've got to look at the data". And so ended the Peter Moores era. Sure, Moores may yet remain the England cricket coach but he can never move on from the ignominy of this morning's disaster in Australia. He could, at a pinch, remain in office but he'll never again be respected. "We've got to look at the data." If ever there was an appropriate epitaph or this era of English cricket this is it. England have, under Moores, known the price of everything but the value of nothing. The data has given them heaps of information; they've had no idea what to do with it. But why would they? Cricket is a complex game but not a mysterious one. It has changed much less than most people think.

It used to be such a treat of a winter weekend, sitting down to watch France against Wales in Paris in the Six Nations. And not just because of the anthems. There would be the prospect of seeing players like Sella, Serge Blanco, the Williamses, JJ and JPR, Philippe Saint-André, Scott Gibbs, Rives, Jenkins — an almost endless list of exquisite, fluid runners, the essence of rugby genius. Now less so. It’s Mathieu Bastareaud and Jamie Roberts, a fifth of a ton of gristle and bone, banging into each other. The main question now is quite how poor Les Bleus will be. You can see it all in the resigned but deeply fed-up expression on the face of Thierry Dusautoir, the French captain.

Graeme Swann arrived late for the last cricket World Cup. His wife had given birth before the tournament and he was given leave to miss the warm-ups and just arrive for the first match. No need to worry: it was only the Netherlands, the competition’s weakest side. Naturally England nearly lost it, but Swann took two wickets. At the press conference, Swann was asked about leaving his new baby son. ‘I’m sure he’ll give me shit in the future for missing the first two months of his life,’ he said, ‘and I’ll reply: sorry son, I had to go and help England beat the Dutch.’ England have made a habit of being embarrassed by the Dutch.

What a remarkable innings that was in Johannesburg earlier this week when South Africa’s admirable Hashim Amla carried his bat throughout the 50-over match against West Indies for 153 off just 142 balls. Or perhaps you didn’t notice. Coming in at the 39th over after the dismissal of R.R. Rossouw (for a mere 128) was A.B. de Villiers, who proceeded to smash endless one-day records with 149 off 44 balls. His reached his century (31 balls) in just 40 minutes: I’ve seen people take longer to get their pads on. De Villiers completely overshadowed Amla’s pedestrian 153, and if the rest of the South African team had scored at the same pace as De Villiers, the team would have scored more than 1,000. Presumably they have had to do extra nets for not applying themselves.

The cricketing world has begun its slow trudge back to normality. Phillip Hughes has been buried and conversation has, half-heartedly, began to turn back to the game itself. Australia will take the field at Hughes’ adopted home ground of Adelaide on Tuesday for a Test match against India.   But it would be remiss to let this week pass without praise for Michael Clarke and the dignity that he has shown as he has led the game and Australia in mourning the death of a young man who was on the verge on fulfilling his great talent. As Alex said the other day, to anyone who has played cricket at any level there was something particularly moving about Hughes' death.