There are many pleasing and vivid images in India’s 71-Year Test, a pictorial history of India’s cricket tours of Australia launched during the Sydney Test. But none are quite so happy as those capturing Indian cricketers on the touring parts of their tours, being welcomed, heralded and embraced.
Images of Indian supporters Down Under date back, perhaps surprisingly, to the 1960s. But the enthusiasm takes off in this most recent generation: we see disembodied hands stretching to touch Cheteshwar Pujara, fans posing for selfies with a beaming Virat Kohli, and Sachin Tendulkar on his famous pilgrimage to the home of Sir Donald Bradman.
If the book is ever updated, sad to say, there will be few such images of the summer of 2020-21
Is it possible to tour a country without actually visiting it? For that has been the fate of this admirable Indian team, pinned down and penned up since their first fortnight’s quarantine, far from home, cut off from their families, and a plaything of overmighty bureaucrats, absurdly execrated for a minuscule quarantine breach in a country that has long since lost any sense of proportion in dealing with COVID-19.
In the foreword to India’s 71-Year Test, India’s coach Ravi Shastri, a visitor to these shores for 35 years, calls Australia his favourite touring destination: “The patronage of the crowds and the big grounds contributed to the ambience. The women are wonderful, the men are sporting and the beer is great.” One wonders whether he’ll now be able to convince Mohammad Siraj of this wholehearted endorsement.
It was Siraj who brought Sunday’s Test match to a standstill at 2:55pm, coming in from fine leg and with a wave of his arms signifying his weariness of hometown heckling from the Brewongle Stand.
**Was this heckling racist? Prepare for it to be minimised as “friendly banter”, and for jokes about lip-reading through masks. A certain proportion of cricket’s followers will defend to the death their right to abuse players from other countries in whatever terms they wish.
Bear in mind, however, that Sunday’s events came on top of crowd behaviours of which the Indian team complained after play on Saturday, whose reported content sounds more serious.
In any event, what we should be prepared to say is that it’s at least ungrateful, certainly distasteful and arguably disgusting to jeer or harangue this Indian team given what they have experienced in the summer of 2020-21 so that we comparatively fortunate Australians might ha
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Australian cricket has a new obsession. “The line” has been replaced by “the door”, on which selectors have for some time been bemoaning the absence of insistent pounding.
“Try being a selector at the moment,” coach Justin Langer complained after the Boxing Day Test’s contribution to the #nationalbattingcrisis.
“We’ve got to be careful not to reward poor performances but … it’s not as if the guys are absolutely banging the door down. Most of our batters knocking on the door are averaging in the 30s (in the Sheffield Shield).”
Langer is an appealingly frank sort of fellow, and probably unused as yet to having his every word parsed.
Yet this hardly stood up to scrutiny. For a start, there is no “door” of first-class cricket for anyone even to scrabble at at the moment; there is the five-bar gate of the Big Bash League, on which is being scribbled graffiti such as “Darcy Short 4 Me” and “I Heart Marcus Stoinis”.
Also, as my colleague Peter Lalor noted yesterday, Langer’s remarks lack empirical support.
Since moving back to Tasmania after losing his Test spot, for example, Matthew Wade has made 1225 runs at 51. Maybe that’s not banging from the golden age of doors, but it deserves respect.
Over the same period Queensland’s Joe Burns has ground out 1197 runs at 52, Victoria’s Glenn Maxwell 833 at 49, NSW’s Daniel Hughes 1123 at 43.2 and Kurtis Patterson 1110 at 40.7.
Again, not perhaps comparable to those imagined glory days when every batsman in the Shield averaged 50 and every bowler 15, but still solid performances sustained over extended periods despite being compromised, as is the modern way, with ceaseless interruption.
After all, it’s hardly possible to talk about a “first-class season” in Australia since the Shield was cleft in twain by the BBL.
Historically a huge advantage of home countries staging Test matches has been their wider pool of active talent available for selection. A touring team in practice has only its own ranks to draw on; a host has in theory the whole of its first-class competition as a field of candidates.
We decided we were so good seven years ago that we could safely forfeit this edge. Now we’re stuck discussing piecemeal remedies such as more second XI games and shadow squads, or musing sagaciously about “rapid format changes” as though this is somehow a skill rather than simply a necessity.
Under these circumstances, the selectors deserve a measure of sympathy, as they are frequently relying on form with a time decay
... keep reading on reddit ➡Sharing the article here, because of paywall:
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The art of Warne By GIDEON HAIGH THEAUSTRALIAN 11:00PM OCTOBER 19, 2012
EIGHT paces: that's all it was. And only the last few counted. Shane Warne's bowling action was seen more than 50,000 times in international cricket. Yet it never ceased to beguile and excite - that something so simple, so brief and so artless could cause so much perplexity at the other end, and such anticipation around the arena.
You had to stop. You had to concentrate. Look away and you were bound to miss something. Has any Australian ever been so massively and minutely watched, had their every deed, mood and musing pored over? The sense of imminent event accompanied him everywhere, off the field as well as on, and still does, despite the passage of six years since he represented Australia. But this will be the sense most difficult to convey to those who did not see Warne at his long peak: the depth and breadth of the possibilities he conjured up so simply. These began to teem even as he walked back, starting each time with a rubbing of the right hand in the disturbed dirt of the popping crease - for grip, for feel, and for the reassurance, perhaps, of the ritual. It was a routine that hardly varied, one of those it is difficult to remember starting, and impossible to recall changing. And somehow, as in everything Warne did, it seemed to signify something larger: as dust and grit over time transmitted itself to Warne's clothing, he appeared to acquire an earthiness, an affinity with the conditions. No cricketer is so dependent on the turf on which the game is played as the spinner; it can make, break, enfang or defang him. So although Warne bowled better in a greater variety of eco systems than almost any other comparable player, his caress of the crease always felt like an act of propitiation of the cricket gods. Then there was that easy, relaxed saunter to his bowling disc. It was the stroll of a man without a care in the world, whether he'd just beaten the outside edge or been hit for six - as Warne would say cheerfully: "No matter how far they hit it, the ball always comes back." Once, at Trent Bridge, he observed England's Robert Croft looking at a big screen admiring a six he had just hit. "Hey Crofty!" he called out. 'Don't worry, mate. You'll be able to see the replay again in a couple of minutes." He was right. On another occasion, at Basin Reserve, he delivered a long hop - a ball that's pitched too short - that was hit
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hits and myths of Shane Warne, a suburban hero
GIDEON HAIGH12:00AM OCTOBER 17, 2018 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/gideon-haigh/hits-and-myths-of-shane-warne-a-suburban-hero/news-story/a581ff32d586d466fcdc67cef5cf9634
“A lot of people spend their life trying to be in the newspaper or magazines. I’ve spent most of my life trying not to be in them,” says Shane Warne. Last Thursday, Shane Warne told an interviewer that the current Australian batting line-up was “the worst” he had seen, and that Steve Smith and David Warner would “walk back in”. He followed this up on Friday with a tweet of lavish praise for their “guts and spirit”, their “outstanding performance”. On social media, this reverse ferret was thought a bit rich. Yet there was also something inimitable about it. Even in his 50th year, nearly 12 years on from his retirement from international cricket, he is prepared to throw it up, tempt fate, risk embarrassment, but take events insouciantly in his stride. In a branded, guarded, circumspect world, Warne remains a giver, nearing 18,000 tweets at a rate of 2000 a year, with as many followers as Warner and Smith put together. As he used to say of bowling: “No matter how far they hit it, it always comes back.” Warne knows this. And his new book No Spinsuggests that inhabiting his public persona is ever more of a challenge for him. “Believe it or not, I’d take the quiet life over the red carpet any day,” he insists as early as the third paragraph.
Just as quickly, however, he also consents: “Lying low hasn’t been my thing. I have lived in the moment and ignored the consequences.”
Shane Warne and his captain Steve Waugh were both teammates and enemies. Later Warne pauses for reflection: “A lot of people spend their life trying to be in the newspaper or magazines. I’ve spent most of my life trying not to be in them.” Moving on he relates a story of suing the Herald Sun for defamation and as part of the settlement agreeing to write a column for them. Huh? “People close to me … wonder why I open myself in such a public way,” he concludes. “So I’m going to keep things to myself a lot more and live less of my life on the edge.” Only Warne could make the act of publishing a tell-all autobiography into an act of reclaiming his privacy: what do they say about genius being the capacity to continue functioning while holding two contradictory ideas in one’s head? Little purpose is served reviewing No Spin. It is not a reflective book; his has n
... keep reading on reddit ➡Gideon's article in The Australian today (paywalled): https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/innings-over-hints-cricket-australia-umpire/news-story/e23afeefd38d707731a6f9a8dd2693ac
The venerable mining chief John Ralph used to tell this story to prospective company chairmen.
One day, a chairman was handing over to his successor. “If you get in trouble, go to the safe,” he said. “In it, you’ll find two numbered envelopes. They’ll help you.”
So the new chairman took office, duly faced his first crisis, went to the safe and opened the first envelope. Inside was a piece of paper that read: “Blame me”. So the chairman heaped blame at his predecessor’s door, and the crisis duly abated.
It worked so well that when a second crisis eventually broke out, the new chairman could hardly wait to return to the safe. What pithy wisdom would the second envelope impart? Inside was a piece of paper that read: “Prepare two envelopes”.
Which brings us to another mining man, coincidentally from the same group where Ralph was a tribal elder. David Peever spent 27 years at Rio Tinto before becoming a member of the inaugural “independent” board of Cricket Australia in 2012, succeeding to the chairmanship in 2015.
Ralph’s observation that chairs will generally be indulged one crisis but seldom more is presently being put to the test.
Last year, Peever was the key string-puller in CA’s breathtakingly maladroit campaign to end the revenue share agreement with the Australian Cricketers Association that had underpinned 20 years of sporting industrial peace.
Now he finds himself embroiled in another fiasco largely of his own making. It was not Peever who applied sandpaper to a cricket ball at Newlands — he was, in a rare moment of good timing, flying in the opposite direction, away from South Africa.
Peever did, however, put faith in an independent review of the “culture and governance” of CA by Sydney’s Ethics Centre — and independent it sure is.
Simon Longstaff’s 147-page report is detailed, blunt and often scaldingly critical. In the case of Newlands, Longstaff concluded, CA was culpable for its failure to “create and support a culture in which the will to win was balanced by an equal commitment to moral courage and ethical restraint”.
More generally, CA was widely regarded as “arrogant and controlling”, perceived to “say one thing and do another”, and understood to be a place “where people struggle to say ‘no’ to people in positions of power and influence”.
The
... keep reading on reddit ➡He must have written a beautiful piece. Unfortunately, I can't access the Australian or the Times (UK). The beginning of the article is here:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/the-ashes-this-was-the-kind-of-drama-you-can-only-get-from-a-test-rnklpzckp
Every modern Test match is a quiet referendum on the format’s future, and referendums don’t always turn out as you expect or hope. Yet here was a referendum that, just for a change, had no loser. Nobody who played, watched, described or officiated in this third Test could feel anything other than honoured to have been part of it.
On Thursday, Ben Stokes bowled nine expensive overs. On Friday, he was caught from a ball he almost could not reach. Yet Test-match cricket offers the cumulative drama of second chances.
Stokes’s influence on this match began with Australia nearly 200 runs ahead and three wickets down, when he seized the ball from the Football Stand End. Twenty-four overs he bowled off the reel but for…
