This is a newsletter for people who spend their time wondering about their best-ever England XI or working out, if India were to select three separate teams in the different formats of the game, who would play in each. It is a newsletter for people who enjoy sitting under a newspaper at the Buxton Festival or who want to be reminded of the time that VVS Laxman scored 281 at Eden Gardens to help India beat Australia after following on. If you care at all about who should open the batting in the Ashes or ever speculate that Cameron Green might be the first world class all-rounder Australia have produced since Keith Miller, then you are in the right place.
In this first edition we have a reflection on the opening of the two championships which stand at opposite ends of the spectrum of modern cricket – the county championship and the Indian Premier League. The great unanswered question is whether these two contests can exist in easy harmony or whether we are living through the conquest of the game by its shorter forms. In a summer which will see an Ashes but no Test cricket in August in order to accommodate the Hundred, it is a pressing question and one to which we will have cause to return.
That said, the general mood of this newsletter will be appreciative. We will be talking to people who are well known for other things and encouraging them to forget their professional accomplishments and tell us about the thing that really interests them, namely their cricketing life. There will be conversations with people involved in the governing and in the playing of cricket. We might occasionally pick a cricketing XI from among the great writers – look out below for a great all-rounder from Warwickshire. In this first edition we include an appreciation of Ravindra Jadeja which poses the intriguing question of why he is not universally recognized as the great all-rounder from Gujurat that he surely is. Then we close with a few bits and pieces of cricket writing and curiosities that intrigued us and might do the same for you.
Philip Collins
Uncertain Glory I
The uncertain glory of an April day’, wrote a promising Warwickshire all-rounder, who must have known a few growing up by the Avon. ‘Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, and by and by a cloud takes all away’.
Surrey, champions of all England last summer for the 20th time, have begun this season bathed in sunlight. As the cherry trees flowered they drew with Lancashire at Old Trafford and then walloped Hampshire by nine wickets at the Oval. Tally ho, brown-hatters!
Middlesex, promoted last autumn, resumed life in the first division of the county championship ‘by clouds covered’, as another poet had it. Man hands on misery to man, he also wrote, and Larkin’s line suited the mood of the Middle Saxons as they stumbled to defeats by Essex (97 runs) and the cobblers of Northamptonshire (seven wickets). The clouds parted slightly when they chased 249 in 39 overs to overwhelm Nottinghamshire but victory was only possible because Steven Mullaney, the visiting captain, let the dog see the rabbit. For the first three days of a rain-sodden match Middlesex were clearly second best.
In that season opener at Lord’s there was a remarkable sight. Replying to Essex’s far from formidable first innings total of 266, Middlesex were soon 4 for four, with the top quartet dismissed without a run to their names. Quack, quack, quack, quack. Only John Simpson and Ryan Higgins, batting at six and seven, reached double figures. It was a humiliation.
At Northampton it was left to Simpson and Higgins to repair the innings once more, when they were again the only batsmen (not batters) to reach double figures in the first innings. Another humiliation.
The wretched start disappointed the club’s followers, but it hardly came as a surprise. Most things Middlesex have touched in recent years have turned to lead. The Australian ‘dream ticket’ of Stuart Law as coach and Peter Handscomb as captain proved an abysmal failure. Nick Gubbins, once spoken of as an England prospect, toddled off to Hampshire, where the runs started flowing the moment he picked up his bat, and James Harris, recruited from Glamorgan amid huzzahs, returned to Wales with his tail between his legs.
Off the field the reorganisation from a committee to a board has been awkward. Mike O’Farrell, the chairman, stood down last summer after making comments about the academic aspirations of Asian families and the changing sporting attitudes of West Indian youngsters which seemed pretty unremarkable to reasonable people. Where matters of race are concerned, though, being reasonable is no longer good enough, so O’Farrell was obliged to fall on his sword.
Toby Roland-Jones, the new captain, is too advanced at 35 to reclaim the England slot he once briefly occupied. But he remains a fine all-round cricketer of the old school. Another member of the ancien regime is Tim Murtagh, still going strong at 41! What a superb servant he has been. And to think he didn’t really get going until, crossing the river, he put his uncertain Surrey days behind him to become one of Middlesex’s favourite sons. Here is a great county cricketer.
The general feeling around Lord’s, however, is one of drift. Middlesex have only ever been tenants at the home of cricket, and their lease seems particularly flimsy right now. There is little sense of direction, on or off the field, and the members are increasingly bewildered. No longer a producer of Test players, this proud club has been reduced to picking up players from other counties, Mark Stoneman being the latest example. He’s a decent batsman, who played very well against the new ball in the first innings of the Notts match, but he’s in the autumn of his years. Ah, the apple trees…
No such problems at the Oval. You can see it in the ground, which has been overhauled in the last decade. Here is a stadium, true, designed to stage Test matches, but here is also a cricket ground. More specifically it is the home of Surrey. The Oval remains an important part of life in south London, and the membership is plentiful and engaged. All things considered, Surrey is the best-run club in the land, and their home is the best-equipped ground.
On the field, too, their garden blooms. Ollie Pope and Ben Foakes are regular members of the Test side, and Sam Curran an important figure in the one-day XI. It may not be long before Tom Lawes joins them. Against Hampshire he looked a bustling fast-medium bowler of some potential, and his four first innings wickets did not flatter him.
The problem, as ever for young lads at Surrey, is getting into the team. The days when Surrey was a rest home for those about to retire have been banished, and about time. A lot of good money was flung after bad, or at least not so good. There are many fine cricket-playing schools in Surrey, and plenty of good clubs. The county should never have to go on the knocker, seeing whether chaps in other parts of the kingdom fancy a game.
Lawes will have to continue bowling well to nail down a regular place. The main bowling duties are currently entrusted to Sean Abbott, Kemar Roach and Dan Worrall, none of whom will see 30 again. Roach is a West Indian, Abbott an Australian, and Worrall an Aussie who holds a UK passport. They are supported by Jordan Clark and Jamie Overton, handy if not outstanding players recruited from Lancashire and Somerset. Conor McKerr seems to be on pemanent loan to one county or another, and Gus Atkinson, who caught the eye of some good judges in Dubai earlier this year, can’t get a game in first-class cricket. Riches there.
Cameron Steel, the legspinner who was preferred to Atkinson for the opening match in Manchester, justified his inclusion by taking a century off the Lancashire bowlers. The centurion against Hampshire was the team’s best batsman and my word, Pope played jolly well.
For three days the teams went at it like dogs at a bone. The top score in three innings was 270, which left Surrey needing 242 on the final afternoon. That they got them for the loss of Rory Burns, he of the ludicrous pony-tail, was down to Dom Sibley’s watchfulness (make of that what you will) and Pope’s magnificent striking of some fine Hampshire bowlers.
One stroke, a cleanly executed pull (not scoop) dispatched a short ball from James Fuller over the wicketkeeper for six extraordinary runs into the pavilion. ‘As dear old Kenny Barrington used to do’, they didn’t say once they had stopped laughing at Pope’s audacity. Nobody, surely, has ever attempted a stroke like that on this fabled ground. Pope may even have surprised himself.
In this mood he is a most handsome batsman, and, having reached a century to go alongside his first innings 91, he concluded the proceedings with two sixes, clean and straight. The margin of victory robbed Hampshire of some dignity, for they had contributed mightily to a well-contested match, but there’s no stopping Pope when his dander is up.
Here was the beauty of the sun. Not a cloud in sight.
Michael Henderson
Uncertain Glory II
The grounds of the Indian Premier League are full to bursting. It’s a great tamasha, to be sure, cheerled by dancing girls, the son et lumiere spectacle of cricket at its most lavishly prosperous. Yet the true fan, the one who pays the extravagant salaries, is at home, watching on television. Like the English Premier League in football, it is the TV rights that turn an exciting stadium spectacle into a global business venture.
There has been some intriguing cricket in the early stages of this year’s competition. Rinku Singh and the accountant turned cricketer Venkatesh Iyer have distinguished themselves. Harry Brook attracted disapproval for an interview after his first IPL hundred in which he spat out rather unnecessary defiance. There have been peculiar tweaks to the regulation. It is now possible to review a wide and teams can now bring on a substitute between innings, a poor idea that downgrades the value of an all-rounder. The cricket has been explosive. At the time of writing there have already been 20 scores of 200 or above, as many as in the entirety of the 2022 tournament. And the only reason I know all of this is that I have become of the sporadic television observers on which the IPL will come to depend.
Soon after the current IPL ends on 25th October, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will seek to secure the media rights for next IPL cycle 2023-2037. The BCCI makes 60 per cent of its income from the IPL. Star India currently pay £54,500 rupees per match, but the price is about to go up as the number of matches grows and the global audience is increasing, especially among Indian emigres in the United States. The emergence of digital media could change the bidding process too. Facebook made a large, though unsuccessful, bid in 2017 and may yet come again. The more bidders there are – and more American money starts to tumble into India – the more the price will keep going up. Venkatesh Iyer is doing very well as a cricketer but there will be plenty of accountancy work for him when he can no longer hit the ball out of the ground.
Philip Collins
Tentdulkar
The game between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians, won by Mumbai in a flurry of Tim David sixes, contained a vignette of India’s past and India’s dominant future. The cameras cut frequently to the watching Sachin Tendulkar whose son Arjun is in his first IPL campaign. Out in the middle, Yashasvi Jaiswal, with 124 from 62 balls, was making his claim to be the next entrant to the pantheon of Indian batsmen.
It is early days for Jaiswal but he looks like he might be the real deal. After 15 first class matches he has 1845 runs, with 9 hundreds, at an average a touch over 80. But the thing that makes Jaiswal such an interesting herald of India’s future is not just that he is so good. It’s not where he’s going that is unusual; it’s where he has come from.
Specifically, Jaiswal has come from a poor family in Uttar Pradesh, the son of a small hardware store owner. At ten Jaiswal moved to Mumbai to pursue his cricket and took accommodation in Kalbadev in return for working in a dairy. Cricket was so all-consuming, though, that Jaiswal was soon fired. With no place of his own, he then billeted in a tent with the groundsman at the Maidan. He often went to sleep without eating and sold pani puri as a street vendor to make ends meet. He slept in the tent for three years before he was spotted by Jwala Singh, the boss of a cricket academy, who took power of attorney and became his legal guardian.
The boy who comes from poverty to the Wankhede stadium is not an unprecedented story in modern India but it is still an uncommon one. But here is the prospect of dominance. If this cricketing nation of more than a billion people starts to tap its talent from the Jaiswals of Uttar Pradesh as well as the Tendulkars of Mumbai it will surely be unstoppable.
Mani Collins
The strange case of the unappreciated Ravindra Jadeja
Sanjay Manjrekar once called Ravindra Jadeja a “bits and pieces” player, a slight that is strangely common. It was a strange judgement. Jadeja has 264 Test wickets at 24.22 and 2658 runs at 35.91. Only Sir Ian Botham did the double of 2,500 Test runs and 250 wickets quicker. There has been no significant left-arm spin bowler who takes his wickets more quickly or more cheaply. Jadeja was faster to 200 Test wickets than Bishen Bedi but most cricket pundits would place Bish above Sri Pandit Sir Lord Ravindra Jadeja. Why should this be, especially when you add the fact that Jadeja might be India’s finest ever fielder and ranks with Bradman, Lara, Hammond, Ponsford and WG Grace as a scorer of three triple centuries in first class cricket. He has a Test batting average over 35 which means the surplus of his batting over his bowling average yields only to Sobers, Miller, Kallis and Imran Khan. The next in the list of the great all-rounders, on the usual measure, is Ravindra Jadeja of the Jannigar district in Gujurat. Why is he not feted as such? What is it about Jadeja that goes under the radar? Perhaps, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “to be great is to be misunderstood”.
Jadeja is a flashy character but a prosaic cricketer. He has the comportment of Shane Warne, the mentor who called him a “rockstar” but a miserly and repetitive delivery style and bowling strategy. As a batsman he began his Test career like a hyperactive child but since going up the order in 2018 has batted calmly, responsibly, unobtrusively. The sense that Jadeja is unmemorable calls the mind the example of Jacques Kallis who is a legend in the record books but who attracted the criticism that his contributions did not sufficiently benefit the team. More than 4,000 of Kallis’s runs came in drawn games, at an average of 74. That begins to look like a personal pursuit. But this is emphatically not true of Jadeja. In Indian victories, Jadeja has 192 wickets at 20.11 and that includes 10 occasions on which he has taken 5 wickets or more. As a batsman, Jadeja has contributed 1737 runs to Indian victories at an average over 40. Only Ben Stokes among contemporary all-rounders has made a comparable contribution to his nation’s victories. Stokes is rightly regarded as a talent for the ages. Why not Jadeja?
Home advantage is a flaw in Jadeja’s claim to greatness. Jadeja is a much better player in India than he is outside his homeland. He averages 39 with the bat at home and only 32 away. He takes his plentiful wickets at 20 in India but his rarer successes away come at more than 34 each. Still, he is not a bad player outside India, just a solid one. At home he is, by a distance, the most successful all-rounder India has ever produced. He ought to command the respect and devotion rightly accorded to Kapil Dev but in India too Jadeja has had to fight for recognition.
It is not just that, in the first half of his career so far, Jadeja’s place in the Test side, or even the squad, was never secure. It is that Jadeja attracted scrutiny and criticism that was withheld from others. Jadeja received regular social media trolling in the wake of Indian defeats, sometimes castigated as an unwarranted favourite of MS Dhoni and sometimes the butt of sarcastic references. An online joke, begun in 2013 by Dhoni and Ashwin, in which Jadeja is mocked as Sir Ravindra went viral and his Wikipedia page has been vandalized to include derogatory remarks. Jadeja maintains he has no problem with any of this but it is hard to imagine Ashwin or Jasprit Bumrah being on the receiving end in the same way.
There is something about Jadeja that is just harder to take seriously. The elaborate facial topiary didn’t help. Neither did the ill-advised caste-based sword celebration with his bat whenever he gets to fifty. Jadeja seems to play the naughty boy companion to his more studious classmate Ashwin. Where Ashwin looks like the boy his mother could be proud of – a student of medicine or accountancy – Jadeja looks as if he wants the attention more than the achievement. He can even be drawn into political controversy. Jadeja’s wife Rivaba is a BNP politician and Jadeja himself has been outspoken in his support for Narendra Modi’s government.
Yet the paradox is that there has been so much achievement and that his play in fact belies his appearance. Sanjay Manjrekar made another telling remark when he said that Jadeja’s skill as a bowler lies in doing the simple things right. This might be a manifesto for first-class sport which is the endless repetition, at a high level of competence, of basic skills that often elude the rest of us. Jadeja as a player has no flamboyance or adornment at all. He just seems to put it there, in the right place all the time. He does the right thing again, the batsman loses the battle with patience and, 250 Test wickets later, there you have it. Jadeja has gone relatively unexamined as a bowler and, unlike his fluent and loquacious partner Ashwin who talks to the world about spin bowling on his youtube channel, Jadeja keeps his counsel. He may look like a cavalier, but he doesn’t play like one and he doesn’t speak like one either. But quietly, without fanfare, Ravindra Jadeja is building a body of work that makes him one of the greatest of Indian cricketers. Quite some bits and pieces.
Philip Collins
Out In The Middle
Jamie Porter advertises our newsletter and explains how to bowl at the same time
Jamie Porter Masterclass - Around the wicket to a lefty - YouTube
Bill Edrich also gave us a plug in his memoir, Round The Wicket
Round Wicket by Bill Edrich - AbeBooks
David Gower interviews Rob Key a year into his time as the England supremo
An account of how Andrew Strauss’s reform package for county cricket hit the buffers
Suresh Menon makes the case for the life of Test cricket
Why Test cricket is worth saving, and how balance is the key - The Hindu
Here Menon anoints Shubman Gill as the next great Indian batsman
Shubman Gill could extend the line from Sachin through Kohli - The Hindu
The Americans are starting to wake up to the appeal, or perhaps the prosperity, of cricket.
Man Utd co-owner Avram Glazer buys UAE T20 league franchise team - BBC Sport
The best, most well-informed and sensitive coverage of the Azeem Rafiq and Yorkshire case has come from Mike Atherton in The Times.
How the toxic Yorkshire racism row ruined lives on all sides (thetimes.co.uk)
Gideon Haigh’s fine list of “Things I Like”. Lots of things we like on there too, especially Mike Atherton, Elvis Costello, Bishen Bedi, Philip Larkin and Chris Tavare’s forward defensive stroke.
Things I Like — | Gideon Haigh
And finally….
Do have a look at Michael’s book That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket.
Michael Henderson and Philip Collins
Well, I liked it. I thought it was splendid. Worth every penny.