Cricket

Rahul Dravid's retirement, announced with typical elegance today, is not just a sad business because it means we'll never see the great technician again but because it is the beginning of the end of India's greatest generation. I think it is possible to argue that Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman have been the finest batting trio since Worrell, Weekes and Walcott bestrode the West Indian stage in the 1950s. There have been other great batsman, of course, but few trios whose achievements are quite so inextricably linked or whose careers have overlapped quite so completely. Add, at various times, Saurav Ganguly and Virender Sehwag to the mix and you had, for more than 100 tests, as formidable a quartet as has played the game since, well, since Indian independence.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh when reading about Australia's latest cricket crisis and, reader, I've no heart of stone. Much more of this and we'll have to wonder if the Aussies really deserve a five test series these days. The present crew are, apparently, "The Lowest of the Low". To which one can only say: not while anyone who played for England in the fiasco of 1988 is alive they ain't. But this is the thing about Test cricket: its habit of sneaking up and whacking your senses when you least expect it. This was a humdrum, low-key Test in tiny, sleepy Hobart (of which more later) designed as a useful warm-up for the Australians before the Indians arrive for the main event of the antipodean summer.

Watching Roger Federer destory Rafael Nadal the other day and knowing how many people can recognise their brilliance while always holding a vehement, even visceral, preference for one of these superb athletes I wondered if there was a correlation with another bitterly divisive sporting divide. I mean, of course, David Gower vs Graham Gooch. That is, how many people love Nadal and Gower and how many Gooch and Federer? Precious few I suspect. How could you? Even allowing for different sports and their different demands these things have an aesthetic quality. Gooch, English cricket's greatest monster these last 25 years, is obviously allied with Nadal; Gower with Federer. Perhaps I am mistaken but I cannot see how one could love Federer in tennis and side with Gooch in cricket.

Who dares say the County Championship is a useless anachronism? Rumours of its irrelevance have been much exagerrated for years and we were reminded of this again today as Lancashire took their first outright title since 1934, defeating my beloved Somerset by eight wickets and with just five overs to spare. It still, even in the evening glow of victory, seems improbable that a county with Lancashire's cricketing resources and tradition could have gone so many decades without a championship but whenever Lancs were good someone else was just a little bit better and, of course, sometimes - or so they'll tell you in Manchester - the rain would make it harder for the Red Rose county to prevail.

This England cricket team is rather like the great German football sides of the past: a collective rather greater than the sum of its parts. Hard, determined, efficient, ruthless, organised and together. There's quality too, for sure, but that's not what stands-out. They thoroughly deserve their success. Nevertheless, their success comes at a price. Or, rather, much as one relishes the novel notion that England might be the best side in the world at present, there is a gloomier picture to be considered too. India's feebleness in this series, combined with the nature and preferences of their governing board, is bad news for the future of Test match cricket. It's evident, I think, that cricket now needs India to be strong.

The Old Batsman - one of my favourite cricket bloggers - had a typically lovely post yesterday noting that August 11th is the anniversary of Geoffrey Boycott's one hundredth first class hundred. Few players will ever reach that landmark again; none will do so in a Test match. This is cricket's loss. The Old Batsman is a few years older than me and he remembers watching Sir Geoffrey - Yorkshire folk are right - in the flesh. My memories of him are slighter: the 1981 series is the first year of Test match cricket I really remember and even then I wonder how much those memories have been corrupted by frequent reviewings of old VHS tapes of "Botham's Ashes". Even as a seven year old, however, I knew that Boycott was a boring batsman.

Meanwhile, mercifully, there's a Test match taking place in Birmingham. The contrast between this England and that other England in the headlines these past few days is total, complete and reassuring. Which brings me to this lovely piece by Peter White on how a blind man may adore - and imagine - cricket: [...] I love cricket's sounds, its scores, its slowness. I delight in its long periods of apparent apathy, suddenly punctuated by a moment of frenzied excitement (I understand that non-cricket lovers claim to be unable to distinguish between the two). I, of course, attempt to explain I'm also there for the atmosphere: the sound of bat on ball in a live arena is completely different from having it filtered through the speakers of the most sophisticated stereo.

On balance, I agree with Sir Geoffrey: Ian Bell was out and the Indians had nothing for which to feel ashamed. On the contrary, it is England whose reputations are, to my mind, (slightly) diminished by this incident. To recap: batting for England in the second test against India yesterday Ian Bell believed his partner Eoin Morgan had either hit a boundary or that, the players having run three, the umpires had declared the Over finished and announced it was time for tea. At this point Bell was sauntering down the pitch, miles out of his ground, and unaware that a) the ball had not reached the boundary rope, b) the Umpires had not called tea and c) the ball was still live.

I was going to write something about the 2000th test match but was distracted by Murdochpalooza. Happily this is not actually the 200th test. Or it should not be. The ICC, reliably mistaken as ever, have given test status to the (disappointing) 2005 match between Australia and the Rest of the World. The Bearded Wonder and his successors do not approve of this and there has, consequently, been much chuntering about the matter in scoreboxes across the land as this trivial-yet-oddly-significant landmark approaches. It is not the fact that the 2005 match was a marketing ploy that rankles, it is the inconsistency.

Via Johnson, a remarkable statute in Victoria which criminalises: Any person who in or near a public place or within the view or hearing of any person being or passing therein or thereon- sings an obscene song or ballad; writes or draws exhibits or displays an indecent or obscene word figure or representation; uses profane indecent or obscene language or threatening abusive or insulting words; or behaves in a riotous indecent offensive or insulting manner- shall be guilty of an offence. Penalty: 10 penalty units or imprisonment for two months; For a second offence-15 penalty units or imprisonment for three months; For a third or subsequent offence-25 penalty units or imprisonment for six months. Strewth! How on earth did Shane Warne avoid racking up the penalty units?

Three days on and Sri Lanka's collapse to 82 all out on the final day at Sophia Gardens remains astonishing. What should have been a routine voyage ended in disaster. One minute the Lankans were supposed to ease their way to a comfortable, even dull, draw, the next they were holed below the waterline and then, within minutes, broken-backed and disappearing into the murky oblivion of the deep. Such is life and such is cricket and test cricket still enthralls. The old dame still has some songs in her pipes. It's not uncommon in other sports - golf, snooker, tennis - for a competitor playing poorly to drag his opponent down to his own impoverished level. And of course these sports, golf most obviously, offer ample opportunity for an individual's game to collapse most pitifully.

So England will have different captains for each form of cricket this summer. Fine. Nothing much to see there. Much more important, really, is the news from South Africa: Australia's forthcoming tour has been cut to just two tests. As usual, the over-crowded calendar is blamed. As usual this is a reasonable diagnosis. As usual it's test match cricket that suffers. And it suffers at the hands of people who claim to value test cricket above all other forms of the game. The sport's administrators say they want to protect test cricket while at the same time they sacrifice it any time there's a spot of fixture congestion or their coffers are runnig dangerously low. (Incidentally, one rather suspects less effort is put into promoting test cricket than other forms of the game.

I've not been hugely impressed by Scyld Berry's tenure* as editor of Wisden and his decision to name just four rather than the customary five Cricketers of the Year this season merely confirms that. It's either a cop-out or a dishonourable play for extra publicity. Neither explanation reflects well upon the venerable Almanack. For the record the four players chosen are Jonathan Trott, Eoin Morgan, Tamim Iqbal and Chris Read. Morgan, in my view, scarcely deserves his place but none of the players chosen deserve to have their honour eclipsed by the controversy over Mohammad Amir's exclusion. Berry has done the four cricketers he did deign to name a grave disservice.

Jonathan Bernstein has a jolly post attempting to select a squad of baseball players who are still alive to take on Babe Ruth and his comrades on the All-Dead team in some kind of hypothetical celestial match-up. This is the kind of parlour game that can't be left to baseball alone. So here's an effort to do the same with cricket: All-Dead XI: 1 Jack Hobbs 2 Victor Trumper 3 Don Bradman 4 Wally Hammond 5 George Headley 6 W.G Grace (Capt) 7 Keith Miller 8 Godfrey Evans (wkt) 9 Malcolm Marshall 10 Bill O'Reilly 11 S.F Barnes The batting, frankly, pretty much picks itself. I'd questioned selecting the Doctor on the grounds that nineteenth century cricket - complete with his own, outdated even then, round-arm bowling - is so different that meaningful comparisons are hard to make.