Cricket

Cricket snobs will tell you that Twenty20, with its dancing girls, booming pop music and illuminated bails, is nothing but a glorified piss up for people with short attention spans. The accepted wisdom goes that a Test match is the ultimate form of the game, and it’s a view I’ve readily subscribed to throughout my cricket-loving life. Since the first T20 ball was bowled back in 2003, I’ve avoided watching much of what I thought to be the bastard son of ‘proper cricket’, yet to my great surprise, the current World Cup has won me over.

By god, you know matters have come to a wretched pass when you feel inclined to defend and protect the International Cricket Council. And yet, remarkably, such a moment is upon us. Like the old Roman republic, the ICC is threatened by a triumvirate. In this instance, Crassus is represented three times as India, England and Australia bid to carve up cricket's empire between themselves. Few people doubt change is needed. The ICC has been broken for ages. It is easy to conclude that it has outlived its usefulness. Nevertheless, that does not mean any proposed alternative is going to produce better outcomes for cricket. The proposals for reforming cricket's governance and, more pressingly, its finances are mooted in a 21 page paper that, usefully, has been leaked. You can read it here.

Apologies may be in order. A few weeks ago, I was advocating aid for Australia. As we had set the place up, we had a duty when this once-proud daughter house was sliding into decline. We used criminals to get the country going, which worked well. Hard, amoral characters, they built a nation in their own image. That was Australia for two centuries: hard, amoral - and good at cricket. Then everything seemed to be going wrong. Perhaps it was the southern sun's fault: melting down toughness and leaving a vacuum for decadence. It was time for the mother country to come to the rescue with fresh supplies of convicts (we have plenty). With their restorative blood-lines, the hardness might return and the Aussies should be capable of playing proper cricket again, in fifty years or so.

All winning cricket teams are alike; each losing cricket team loses in its own way. It doesn't matter, right now, that Shane Watson and Michael Clarke will never be chums just as it did not matter very much, back in the day, that Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist couldn't stand one another. Victory spawns solidarity. Happiness too. We are wired to over-react to defeat and under-react to victory. England have been trounced in Australia. Battered in Brisbane, assaulted in Adelaide and pummelled in Perth. The tour has become a travelling horror show and, god help us, there are still two tests left. A 5-0 whitewash is a distinct possibility. Don't believe anyone who suggests the Aussies might ease up now the little urn is back in their possession.

Here we go again. Time for another round of that perennial game so wearily familiar to England cricket supporters: Hunt the Positives. It is a mean game because, most of the time, there aren't any. Certainly not today. England were abject in Adelaide. Scarcely any better than they had been in Brisbane. If, borrowing from Evelyn Waugh, we classify sides as Leading team, First-Rate team, Good Team and Team we must acknowledge that England, at present, rank as Team. And as Mr Waugh would have put it, Frankly, Team is pretty bad. Less a team, in fact, and more a rabble. With the exception of Joe Root's second-innings knock England can take nothing but misery with them as they cross the Nullarbor Plain to Perth.

Don't say you weren't warned. You were. "Australia will win at least one test this winter...England will have a bad test or Australia an extremely good one...This is an Australian side learning who it is. There are signs of improvement, signs that on their day they could be formidable. (The question being, as before, how many of those days there will be). Meanwhile, England are solid but not perhaps quite as good as they think they are. Brilliant individual performances saved the English collective in this series. They are not a team in transition but nor are they quite a team going anywhere." That was this blog's verdict on the last Ashes series. England's 3-0 victory was both clear-cut and less than it seemed.

It was the sort of summer’s day that makes you glad to be alive; but we were watching the telly. We would not normally do this. If the weather was fine, we would play games of catch on the lawn: my 4-year-old self hurling any object that came to hand at my 78-year-old grandfather. The old man would leap about for my amusement, often careering into my parents’ sacred flower beds. He would pooh-pooh my father’s concerns about the wisdom of these exertions, and ignore my grandmother’s distress over the ruin of ‘yet another pair of trousers’. My delight would urge him to even greater theatrics when their backs were turned.

As you know, only seven batsmen have scored more than 50,000 first-class runs. Hobbs, Woolley, Hendren, Mead, Grace, Sutcliffe and Hammond are untouchable. We shall not see their like again. The game changes and old records written on parchment are left unmolested, gathering dust. Comparisons between the great players of a single era are troublesome enough; fashioning them between the cricketers of the prelapsarian past and those of today is an exercise easily considered futile. And yet the hunger to do so is a craving that can never be wholly pacified. The 50,000 run mark is an arbitrary figure, for sure, but if you add-up all the runs scored in all accredited forms of senior cricket you find only another eight batsmen have plundered bowlers for more than half a hundred thousand runs.