Category: Sport

A 32 point catch and the sudden disappearance of eight Surrey players

That cricket match at the Oval that my friend Darren took me to, the floodlit one, ended yesterday, and it got very tense, with Surrey eventually winning by just 6 runs.

The game ended with what you might call a 32 point catch, by Surrey substitute fielder Will Jacks. (Whoever won the game would get 16 more points, and whoever lost it, no more points.) Morne Morkel bowled what turned out to be the final ball. Lancashire number 11 Parkinson hit it hard to his left. But Jacks stuck out his right hand and caught it.

But what I really like about that bit of video is the way the Surrey players on view – bowler Morkel, Jacks on the right, the wicketkeeper and three slip fielders – all then celebrate.

Jacks takes the catch and turns and runs away from the pitch, like a child imitating an airplane.

I surmise that cricketers do this when celebrating, (a) because they just have to celebrate, so celebrational are they feeling, but (b) they run away from the pitch in order to avoid any chance of being accused of celebrating in the face of an opponent, which cricket’s authorities disapprove of. So, they run like lunatics away from where the game just happened.

So, Jacks turns and runs towards the boundary.

At which point the screen suddenly contains two more Surrey players, both running towards Jacks, to celebrate with him. In all, about six guys are running towards Jacks.

However, some of those doing this realise, or so I surmise, that if they run after Jacks, they might never catch him. Besides which, there is the matter of mobbing Morne Morkel, who has now taken six wickets and basically won the match for Surrey, so about three of the Surrey players wheel around and exit stage left, to mob Morkel instead, because Morkel has run off to the left, to do his celebrating. Instantly, the picture, which had contained eight Surrey players, suddenly contains none at all, just the two disconsolate Lancashire batters.

Lancashire, way down at the bottom of Division One of the County Championship, really needed those 16 points, so they must have been very disconsolate indeed. No Jacks catch and Lancs would surely have won. But Jacks caught it and Surrey’s winning streak continues.

But, the news tonight for Lancs is better. They are playing Kent in the quarter finals of the T20 slog, from which Surrey have already been eliminated, and they are well on the way to winning. I support Kent in this one, because Kent is nearer to London than Lancashire. And oh look, while I was just dashing off this posting, Kent have contrived to lose three more wickets and are now 114-9, with only two overs to go in their innings. That surely won’t be enough. So Lancs will soon, surely, be feeling much better.

But hello. Lancs now 10-2. Maybe Lancs will lose tonight’s game by 6 runs also.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A new Big Thing alignment as seen from the Oval

Yes, earlier this evening, my mate Darren arranged for me to drop by at the Oval to witness day 2 of the first Day/Night game of four day county cricket to be staged at the Oval. However, all I have the energy to show you for now is this new-to-me Big Thing alignment, as seen from the very superior seats way up in the pavilion, where Surrey members like Darren (and his plus one) can sit.

Not surprisingly, these superior seats are one of my favourite spots in London (therefore in the world), because you can see things like the above, and cricket.

What we mostly observe in the above photo is the Walkie Talkie. But behind we also see the newly erected Scalpel. And, eagle-eyed viewers will also be able to discern, from two very small clues, the Gherkin. Yes, that is definitely the Gherkin.

What the thing between the chimney pots in the foreground and the Walkie Talkie is, I do not know.

I especially like the two window cleaning cranes on the top of the Walkie Talkie.

Sleep well. I am definitely about to do this myself.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Helping hands

On that same photowalk with GodDaughter 1, five years ago, that I mentioned yesterday, and a bit earlier than when I took yesterday’s photo, of her and her shadow and my shadow, I took these photos:

You can see how that little mind of mine was working, can’t you? That being one of the amusements of me taking so many photos that comes across years later. I can now see exactly what I was thinking, in a little photo-moment, five years ago.

I encounter an interesting sculpture. (I find that I like sculpture more and more, provided I like it of course.) Then, in the distance, I see a favourite Big Thing, in this case the Big Olympic Thing. I line up the Big Olympic Thing up the sculpture. I line it up again, this time including only that very recognisable top of the Big Olympic thing, and putting that right on top of the sculpture, like a handle. Good. Nice one.

Then I draw back, and take another shot that provides some more context, while being careful to keep the Big Olympic Thing present, to one side. What I do not do, regrettably, is photo any sign or caption which told me about this piece of sculpture. What is it? Who did it? When? Why? What’s it of? There must have been some clue I could have photoed.

Happily, this is the twenty first century, and a little descriptive googling (“sculpture clasped hands” or some such thing) got me to places like this, which tell the story. And it’s quite a story.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

“Exhuberation”

The word used by England spin bowler Monty Panesar, when he was on Test Match Special this morning during a rain break, to describe how it felt when, in a test match in India, he got Sachin Tendulkar out.

Despite all the rain of the last two days, England were exhuberating at Lord’s today.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Interesting headgear

The final full day of The Great Heatwave of 2018 was two days ago, on August 7th. August 8th was a couldn’t-make-up-its-mind day, and today was a could-make-up-its-mind day, and it made up its mind to be cold and wet and generally horrible, perhaps in honour of the Lord’s Test between England and India, today’s first day of which was totally rained off. One day, magic beams will rise up into the sky from around the boundaries of all major cricket games and will divert the rain into giant vats, also on the boundary, and play will proceed no matter what the weather beyond the ground. (Such devices will also transform global agriculture, and make the entire population of the world obese.)

So, as I was saying, two days ago was the last day of the Heatwave, and maybe it was this heat which cause this lady to be wearing, in a street near me, this headgear:

This lady looked normal enough, apart from the headgear. I made no secret of the fact that I was photoing her, and she clearly saw me doing this and didn’t seem to min. Or maybe she was concentrating on her phoning and actually didn’t see me. Either way, I waited until her face was hidden.

The sane explanation for the headgear was the heat. And honestly, I do believe that this was what it was for. That heatwave really was very hot.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cricket lovely cricket

Andy Bull of the Guardian lists the runs per over totals of the fourteen overs it took for Aaron Finch and Jason Roy to score 194 for the first wicket, for Surrey against Middlesex in a recent T20 slamfest at the Oval:

14, 17, 23, 15, 14, 15, 15, 10, 12, 9, 15, 11, 10, 14.

Middlesex had scored what looked like a very formidable 221 in their twenty overs. Surrey demolished this target with four overs to spare.

Then, in the next game, Jason Roy …:

… managed the philosophically challenging task of getting stumped for a duck without facing a ball, as he overbalanced to a wide speared down the leg side …

I was indeed puzzled, as I perused the result of that game on my mobile phone. 0 runs scored, 0 balls faced. Stumped. But I worked it out for myself, so I guess I solved the philosophical challenge. Finch didn’t do much better, scoring a mere 16. But Surrey still won.

And in between, there was the little matter of England squeaking home against India. So, a good three days of cricket, which, with the magic of mobile phonery, I was able to combine with having a bit of a life.

Apart from the little fact that Joss Buttler, whom I earlier talked up, was the only total non-contributor to England’s win. He got out twice for a total of one run, facing all of four deliveries. Adil Rashid, whom I talked down, got three wickets, including the crucial one of Kohli in the first innings. Kohli had, by then, scored 148 runs. But if Rashid hadn’t then got him, who’s to say Kohli wouldn’t have scored another big pile of runs and given India a match-winning first innings lead?

At least I didn’t trash Stokes, who got the vital wickets for England at the end, or Surrey’s own Sam Curran, who got Man of the Match for taking five wickets and for turning England’s second innings from match-losingly terrible into, as it turned out, sufficient.

The second test starts on Thursday. And another Surreyite, Sam Pope, is in the England squad and could also play. I can’t wait, as GodDaughter 2 and her sister both say in such circumstances. Meaning: I can wait and I will wait, even though I would prefer it if I didn’t have to wait.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A spinner with the wrong stuff and batsmen with the right stuff

The first test between England and India starts in under an hour, as I write this, and I have the feeling that this is going to be a really good series. India are a terrific side, playing away. England are … a side, playing at home. More exactly, England are a side with lots of individual good players, capable of good things, but for the last few years, they’ve not been putting it together. A five match series, and they just might.

My opinion on the Adil Rashid row? Not sure. But, probably, this: that a clever spin bowler bowling against batters who have to score at eight an over can get a ton of wickets, because the batters have to play a stupid shot about once an over. However, a spinner bowling against batters who would like to score at four an over but who don’t mind scoring at two an over or nought an over is in a massively weaker position, because the batters never have to play stupid shots. So, the bowler gets tired and bowls stupid balls, and eventually the batters are scoring eight an over, and the spinner gets figures of about nought or one for a hundred, and gets the boot. Hope I’m wrong.

English county cricket can look after itself. But the fact is, for spinners, it’s a very good proof that you can do it, if you can. But, by the way, what you have to do is quite subtle. Mostly, bowl a lot of overs for not many runs without getting tired, and as a bonus, while regularly taking wickets. You can’t do that in white ball cricket. White ball being the 50 and 20 over slogs, in which bowlers bowl only ten or only four overs.

White ball batting, on the other hand, is a different story entirely. A truly good white ball batter can bat for about forty overs and make a score that’s truly big even by test standards. I suspect that white ball cricket will supply a steady stream of batters to the England test team, and the result will be that in a few years, England’s test team will regularly score 450 in a day, or more. Jos Buttler is the sort of batter England are going to rely on for the next few years. Buttler went straight from having a good IPL – the IPL being the Indian T20 slamfest, played to packed houses and packed TV channels for more money in a year than most pro-cricketers earn in a lifetime – to the England test team. And it worked a treat. Why? Because Buttler can really bat. And he is used to doing it in a big time environment, where his whole future as a human being is at stake, just as it is when you play big test matches.

What’s happening here? With batting, all the best and most ambitious county batters now try to bat like Buttler. They try to break into the big time not by grinding out boring 150s over two days, but by smashing a clutch of match-wnning sixes in a T20 game that their county looked like they were losing. They get some chances and they grab them. And I do mean: all. Only the second-raters now cut out the shots, in the manner of the young Geoff Boycott or Ken Barrington, and try to graft their way to greatness. That’s how it now feels to me. It’s like The Right Stuff said about how all those daring-do fighter-jocks suddenly morphed into risk-averse astronauts, only with batting, the culture switch is in the opposite direction, from risk averse to slam bang. The slam bang batters are now where all the true class is to be found. This was why Buttler was such a great choice. He is just really, really good at batting. He proved it in the IPL. He will prove it again in test cricket. It’s the slam bangers who now have the right stuff.

If I am right about all this, then the search for The Opener To Open With Cook will end when they finally decide to give up on all the second-rate grafters whose legs turn to jelly when they see spectators instead of empty seats around the boundary, and to pick classy slam banger Jason Roy. For that, Roy needs to do what Buttler did and have a good IPL. He hasn’t yet done this. Before that, they’ll probably pick Rory Burns, and he won’t cut it. And he will go back to Surrey and be Ramprakash.

We shall see.

Sorry about there not being as many links in this as there should have been. I’m was/am in a rush to nail my petard onto the chopping block before the game kicks off. I’m talking about this game. There you go. Another link.

England have won the toss and will bat.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Silly sofa to advertise domestic television getting bigger and better

I like this, in an I wouldn’t actually want one sort of a way::

But it isn’t a serious piece of furniture. Nobody is actually going to buy one of these edifices. If that’s wrong, I look forward to learning about it and telling you about it, with more photos, of this 3 decker sofa in an actual home type home, instead of in something that looks like a city office.

The idea is, I assume, to flood the internet with the set of pictures of which the above is but one, of this cross between a sofa and a sports stadium, and thereby get people to link to stories like this one, which are about some kind of joint venture between BT (which stands for British Telecom) and EE (which stands for Esomething Esomething), involving being able to shove whatever television stuff you are receiving on your mobile phone onto your television. At no extra charge, blah blah, which always actually means at a definite extra charge. (EE probably began life meaning Extremely Expensive. Something to do with mobile internet connections, I think.)

For me, what this sofa-sports-stand is about is the fact that domestic television is getting steadily bigger and better, and cinemas and pubs are get steadily less attractive as places to watch … video. This is the trend that EE/BT are tuning into, to sell whatever it is they’re selling.

The key moment in this process was when big TVs started getting cheap.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Surrey’s hot streak continues

Mark Church, the Surrey commentator-in-chief, tweets the gory or glorious (according to taste) details of Surrey’s recent run of triumphs in the Country Championship:

Surrey’s 5 straight wins:

Innings and 17 runs
Innings and 58 runs
Innings and 89 runs
7 wickets
Innings and 183 runs

6 wins in total this season

Good numbers those 🏏🏏

Very good. No surprise, then, that Surrey are way out in front and are hot favourites to win the whole thing.

I’ve been following all these wins, the scores via Cricinfo, and if I want to hear the actual fall of wickets being described by normally taciturn men who suddenly start shouting, then through the BBC commentaries, the ones that Mark Church does.

If you follow a sports team, you will know both how deeply satisfying this Surrey hot streak has been for me, a Surrey supporter, and also how impossible it is for me to explain to someone who doesn’t share such sports fan feelings why it is so satisfying.

With four day county cricket, keeping track of the progress of a steamroller team, like Surrey have been this year, means tracking your team for twenty solid days, six hours each day, minus the days you miss because Surrey have already won inside three days, like they did today. Imagine following your football team doing that, winning for twenty solid days!

Follow that link, and you will learn that the guy who made the difference for Surrey today was South African pace monster Morne Morkel. The word is that people around the counties hate Surrey a bit less than usual just now, on account of so many of Surrey’s good players these days being proper county cricketers that they have nurtured in their Academy or whatever, rather than bought in from The World. But Morkel is a classic throw-money-at-the-problem answer to a problem, the problem being that Surrey needed a bowler like Morkel to make their bowling attack the complete steamroller than it now is.

Morkel wasn’t just the difference today. On the first morning of this game, when Notts were just one wicket down and were groping towards a position of batting adequacy, Morkel got two quick wickets, and Notts never recovered. Instead of Notts batting in the second half of the day when batting was easier, Surrey got to bat then. Yesterday morning, Surrey batted on and lost four wickets for not a lot, but this wasn’t enough for Notts to get back into the game. The Surrey tail didn’t so much wag as flail. Rikki Clarke, who started his career at Surrey and is now finishing it there, got a century batting at eight, Burns having already scored a century batting at one, and that was pretty much that.

Okay, your eyes glazed during that last paragraph, but you are now here. The point is: Surrey are now really good.

This metaphorical hot streak of Surrey’s has been a great comfort to me, in these literally very hot times.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Confessions of a preemptive pessimist

I was asleep when England got their first goal. My urban locality erupted with honking and shouting. I looked at my bedside clock, and it was just after 7pm, when the game was due to begin. Sure enough, when I cranked up the telly: CRO 0-1 ENG. (You don’t need any links. You surely know what I’m talking about.)

I recall this phenomenon happening before, this time right at the end of a game of this kind. It was 0-0 at the very end of extra time, and about to be a shoot-out. Against Belgium, I think it was. And then someone called Platt, I think it was, scored a goal for England, when I was in my toilet. The noises that I heard from my neighbours could only mean an England goal. So it was with Trippier’s early goal this evening.

I am and remain a preemptive pessimist about England’s chances in this tournament, because this will soften the blow when the blow does fall, as fall it surely must. An early goal, such as England have just scored, is often a mistake, because it gets the opposition stirred up. It makes them forget any nerves they feel and really play, because they have to really play. The early goal-scorers on the other hand, are tempted to defend too much and let the other fellows into the game. And then when the other fellows equalise, they are the ones with the momentum. Sure enough, as half time nears, England are getting sloppy and Croatia now have a chance. Well, it’s now half time, but I still back Croatia to win this.

Now, they’re saying that England had lots of chances and should be further ahead. Indeed. So when Croatia do equalise, England will be very depressed, and will lose.

Roy Keane, a fellow pre-emptive pessimist by the sound of it: “England got a bit sloppy.”

Oh, the torture of hope.

And the further torture of feeling like a idiot, for taking such events far, far more seriously than anyone should.

In particular, I feel the difference between someone like me, who refuses to get his hopes up, and “real” fans, who do get their hopes up. I “contribute” nothing to the success of any team I support, as in: like to see winning but don’t get hysterical about. Yet in truth, the hysterics contribute very little more than I do. Just the occasional encouraging bellow. But if England never do get eliminated from this World Cup (I shun the w word) I feel that I will not have deserved it, but that the hysterics and the bellowers will have deserved it. If you suffer, you deserve to succeed. If you shun suffering, you do not. Even if the suffering accomplishes nothing.

LATER:

A cleverly chosen name, wouldn’t you say?

For “first” at the start of this, read: early. And only.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog