To go, or not to go

My latest rant is about another column in the Times. This is possibly a little unfair on the Times, who has arguably (depending on the criteria) the best cricket coverage amongst all the broadsheets, but it should see it as a compliment of sorts, that I keep on picking on them.

First, as any site that professes as one of its aims being the better use of statistics should acknowledge, is that the Times probably produces more column inches of cricket than its rivals (and certainly more than the tabloids). It therefore follows that they are likely to produce more stupid articles, merely because they produce more articles.

Secondly, because they write more about cricket than their rivals, I tend to go to their web-site more often. As a rule, I try not to read bad articles (although if readers want to suggest articles to be dissected, feel free to draw them to my attention in the comments), but I had a feeling that there would be enough reactionary column inches to fuel a blog entry on the news that Andrew Strauss would miss the tour of Bangladesh.

 The column that irked me into remembering my password for blogger, is seemingly unattributed. To be honest I'm not surprised: I wouldn't own up to writing it either.

There are 14 reasons why Andrew Strauss, rather than Alastair Cook, should be leading the England cricket team on its tour of Bangladesh.

OK good, a nice start. This article is going to set out the reasons why Strauss and not Cook should captain England in Bangladesh. Not much to argue about here, other than the absence of any attempt at balance and acknowledgement that there may be reasons as to why Cook rather than Strauss should captain England in Bangladesh.

I am however encouraged by there being 14 reasons. Too often lists like this come up with an infeasibly round number of arguments. Why should these lists always been a round ten or a full dozen? Why not a baker's dozen? Why not 11 reasons? So I'm pleased to see fourteen reasons. Fourteen doesn't often feature in these sorts of lists, so this is promising. Well done anonymous columnist.

It also means the threat of the final couple of reasons being some incredibly lame joke, about being too tired or not bothered to come up with more, is less likely to be dragged out by our anonymous columnist which I'm sure will be a big relief to us all. No-one wants to see an article finish on such a weak ending.

1. Andrew Strauss is the team’s captain.

Hold the front page: we have an exclusive!

But wait, we were promised reasons. This isn't a reason. It's a bald statement of fact, only it isn't actually a fact.

The England team has more than one captain, and I'm not just talking about Cook who will contrary to this bold claim captain England in Bangladesh. Paul Collingwood captains England in 20:20 cricket. Split captaincy is already a fact. Collingwood captains largely the same core of players as Strauss does in tests and Cook will in Bangladesh. In ODIs, there is an even greater similarity between the sides.

2. He has been captain for only a year, not ten. Everyone needs a rest, but how tired can he be?

Oh dear. This is flawed on so many levels it's difficult to know where to start.

First he may have been captain for only a year, but is captaincy really the only part of cricket that can wear someone down? Might, I don't know, say being an batsman who has played 71 tests in five and a bit years be tiring?

Secondly, what a year! Three test matches that went down to the very wire, with the last pair batting out for a draw (a feat that has only taken place 19 times in test history) I'm guessing that takes more out of a captain than a routine win against a team like Bangladesh.

Third, how tired could he be - how about averaging 24.28 in the last series. His lowest series average for two and a half years. Last time he was in South Africa he averaged a stellar 72.88. Did burnout cause this decline? Maybe, maybe not. But it is definitely worth considering rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Fourth, and the biggest concern to me here, is that this seems to entirely miss the point. England are resting Strauss now, not because he is necessarily tired now; but so he isn't tired at the end of the summer, when England have to face both the Ashes and a World Cup campaign after two series this summer and a further two ODI series. Might not a bit of planning in advance be a good thing here?

3. He can hardly be exhausted by his exertions with the bat in South Africa, where his spells at the crease were mostly as short as John McCain’s temper: he averaged just 24 in seven innings.

Nice topical reference to the 2008 American presidential elections there.

Hmmm, didn't we dismiss the possibility that he could have been tired from his batting in the previous point. Strauss averaged 52.66 in the Ashes, might that have made him tired? How about his stupendous efforts in India where he averaged 84.00 the previous winter and then followed that up by averaging 67.62 in the West Indies?

Might his form be a symptom, not a cause of tiredness?

4. Alastair Cook? As captain? Cook was struggling to keep his place in the team until recently. Does he need the extra burden of being the boss?

Andrew Strauss was struggling to keep his place in the team until shortly before being made captain. Did he need the extra burden of being the boss?

5. Can you imagine Graeme Smith crying off tours because he craves a rest? He looks like he’d lead out South Africa even if he were on crutches.

Graeme Smith has played 81 test matches in 8 years. If Strauss plays every test match between now and the world cup, he will have played 84 test matches in six and a half years. Even skipping Bangladesh, Strauss will have played more tests in a shorter time frame.

Then there is also the question of whether Smith is someone England want to necessarily emulate. Achieving a 1-1 draw away in South Africa reflected better on Strauss than it did Smith. The series prior to that for both teams was Australia at home. England won, South Africa lost. Maybe, just maybe, Smith should be looking at Strauss rather than Strauss looking at Smith.

Personally, I'd question the wisdom of leading your country out on crutches. I doubt it would look so clever when trying to turn a single into two runs and the crutches would hinder his slip catching.

6. Being England captain is an honour. Every schoolboy’s dream. A duty, but also a privilege.

True, although utterly irrelevant.

I should also point out it's also an honour, a privilege, a duty that Andrew Strauss hasn't been asked to perform for this tour.

7. English cricket is not in so flourishing a state that it can confidently be left to its own devices while Strauss enjoys a long, restorative massage. England has just lost a match by an innings. Team confidence is fragile. His men need him.

Ah, there's actually the bones of an argument in this. Although someone could equally say that drawing a series away in South Africa was a fine achievement and England are only playing Bangladesh, who in the words of Virender Sehwag are an "ordinary side" who can not beat India in test match cricket.

8. Strauss needs to be on hand to investigate his side’s problems and fix them before facing Pakistan this summer and Australia next winter.

I'm not quite sure what more investigating needs to be done to discover that England lack enough fire-power to consistently bowl sides out twice and that their batsman need to score more hundreds and stop collapsing.

Even if that wasn't obvious from the test series just concluded, what exactly will be learnt against a side like Bangladesh? Probably the same lessons as were learnt from Ravi Bopara scoring three consecutive hundreds against the West Indies.

9. Can you imagine Wellington saying: “You know what? I feel a bit pooped after that Peninsular War. I think maybe I’ll give Waterloo a miss and wait for the next battle. Let me know how it goes. I’ll see you guys later. Well, some of you.”

I can't imagine Wellington going out to the middle to toss with Napoleon to see who would go first, either. Nor, try as I might, I just can't picture the Duke of Wellington buckling on his pads and strolling out and taking guard. I'm not sure what exactly my lack of imagination proves*.

From my limited knowledge of military history, I understand that holding units back and keeping them fresh, was an important part of military strategy.

*Although the start of the Battle of Waterloo was delayed until noon to allow the ground to dry, so maybe it isn't that far-fetched a comparison after all.

10. Did we mention the crucial bit about Andrew Strauss’s paid job being to captain England?

Ah, yes. Andrew Strauss is an employee of the ECB. This means he has to obey their instructions, like when they tell you: "we want you to sit this one out, Andrew".

It also means that the ECB have a duty of care as his employer towards him as their employee. Might England want to avoid a key player going down the route of Marcus Trescothick?

We have another four reasons. But to be honest, we need a break before going on. This is turning out to more stressful work than we expected.

Aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ah, I never saw that one coming. Stop, my ribs are aching with all this joy and mirth. Where do they get such original material from?

There are arguments both for and against Strauss going and I'm perfectly happy for people to argue that Strauss should have gone provided they come up with proper arguments for doing so. Nasser Hussain, was one pundit who managed to put forward a fairly logical, reasoned argument in his Daily Mail column. I may not agree with Hussain's conclusion, but I can appreciate there is some validity in the arguments he puts forward. That's more than can be said for this column.

It is also worth pointing out the superficially impressive line of former England captains who have come out against this move: Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton, Bob Willis, David Gower and no less than Sir Ian Botham are all quoted in an accompanying article criticising the move. It may be overly cynical to point out that all five are in the pay of Rupert Murdoch, whose subscription Sky Sports channels will be broadcasting England in a test series now given second class status. The lone dissenting voice is that of Michael Vaughan, the most recent and most successful captain. But if Botham is against it, it has to be a good thing.

What a load of old w**k

Simon Barnes is arguably the best English sports-writer of the last decade so it is with some trepidation that I tackle his column in Monday's Times. He writes with a style and panache that us mere mortals could only dream of. However I do sometimes wonder how much substance is behind that style that threatens to cross over into hubris.

Ball tampering is like masturbation: everyone knows it goes on, no one will ever admit to doing it. To be accused of doing it is the most terrible insult a man can be offered and to be caught doing it is the most hideous disgrace anybody could imagine.

FJM, which part inspired this blog, use to love highlighting the use of sloppy food metaphors. I don't think I really want to go down the path of flagging sloppy sex metaphors or innuendo (and not just because I've already used the words tackle and column in my opening sentence), that's not what this blog is meant to be about. Besides which, that's actually a fantastic metaphor. In 48 words he has summed up the taboo nature of ball-tampering. It is writing like that which has seen Barnes win numerous awards. He could probably end his column there, or in a paragraph's time. Nice and pithy.

Ah, but there's more. Over 500 words more, must fill the column space, must fill the column space.....

But that’s cricket for you: always some terrible hideous sin, always some ghastly scandal, always a vast and tortuous moral maze to negotiate. Bodyline is the most extraordinary incident in sport — extraordinary not in what happened on the pitch, but in the complex reactions of all concerned.

So far so good. Cricket does have a strange relationship with morality: after all it is the sport that gave birth to the phrase "it's not cricket". There is a myth - and it always has been a myth - about sportsmanship and cricket that players have had to negotiate around, be it WG Grace retorting "they've come here to watch me bat, not you bowl" as he replaced the bails, or a batsman deciding whether to walk or wait for the umpire's verdict.

It is also an excellent point about the reaction to Bodyline, the most extraordinary thing about the entire affair was in the reaction to it. I never cease to be amazed by how it is us English who are referred to as "whinging poms" when it is our convict brethren down under - Prisoners of Mother England quite literally - who whinged so incessantly throughout the Bodyline series.

Then there was throwing. Sober judges believed throwing would destroy the game, and no doubt life as we know it as well. Throwing was not so much cheating as sin. It would “lead to the greatest catastrophe in cricket history”, Don Bradman said. The no-balling of Muttiah Muralitharan for alleged chucking has been a rumbling scandal and cause of resentment for years.

OK, so sober judges don't always get it right. Point taken.

There have been a million books on Bodyline, at least two just last year. I can also remember a book on the history of throwing. Can you imagine such a thing in other sports? The History of the Crooked Put-in? Pinching Yards at Throw-ins and Free Kicks?

Hmmm. A million books on Bodyline. I know this column likes accuracy in its stats but we'll let him get away with some poetic licence. But I'm not too sure what exactly his point proves.

First, I'd suggest that cricket has a far richer literary history than either football or rugby. Has football produced a CLR James or Neville Cardus? If it, or indeed rugby, has I'm unaware of that writer. Neither have these sports produced an Almanac quite as revered as Wisden. It would therefore follow that cricket was more likely to produce books regardless of any tortuous moral maze that had to be followed in that sport but not others.

Secondly,  those books were I think as much about the reaction to Bodyline, a reaction he has already acknowledged was remarkable. Is this not therefore repeating the same point?

The West Indies tactic of playing four superb fast bowlers in the same team was also regarded as immoral. They bowled short and asked questions about the courage of the batsmen: outrageous. When the West Indies bowlers declined to pitch it up to Pat Pocock, the England nightwatchman, Wisden thundered about the team’s lack of chivalry. The number of bouncers permitted in an over became a subject of legislation.

OK, are we going anywhere with this? As a result of that rule change you are only allowed to bang in 2 bouncers an over, yet you've spent the last four paragraphs hammering essentially the same point. At the risk of sounding like Wisden (I wish!) aim for the target - the stumps. Although it should be pointed out with this amount of padding, the article isn't going to hurt as much if it does hit you.

And then there is ball tampering. Pakistan surrendered a Test match rather than play on after being accused of ball tampering. Ian Botham took Imran Khan to the High Court over allegations of ball tampering. Now South Africa, unable to take 20 wickets in a match three times running, have decided that since England managed that feat, they must be tampering with the ball.

Ah, finally! Back on topic. Ball-tampering. No, not that kind, I said I didn't want to go down that route. The illegal altering of the condition of a cricket ball. The very accusation of which was sufficient for Pakistan to forfeit a test match. Enough for Ian Botham to take Imran Khan to the High Court over? Well not quite, Botham sued when Khan had appeared to suggest that he was “racist, ill-educated and lacking in class”, but ball-tampering was the back-drop for this unsightly spat, so it is sort of right.

But surely Barnes has curiously missed out one infamous case here - where is mention of his own newspaper's chief cricket writer, who nearly lost the England captaincy over the issue during the "dirt in the pocket" controversy?

And that brings us up to now. If England's success is a factor in South Africa's complaints - and remember England have in two out of three attempts failed to bowl South Africa out twice - it does seem strange that South Africa should complain of ball-tampering in an innings in which England's bowlers were looking least dangerous.

As a result, England and South Africa go into the last Test of a fraught series filled with all kinds of bitterness. South Africa think England are all cheats, while England have said that South Africa are malicious. And all because of a crime that is part of cricket’s daily life.

Is it part of cricket's daily life? South Africa certainly don't think it is as open and shut as that.

There are two matters to dwell on here. The first is that no sport does moral outrage quite as comprehensively as cricket. For that matter, the only area of life that does moral outrage so well involves religious fundamentalism.

I suppose it is possible that the Daily Mail involves religious fundamentalism.

(If I wasn’t already a Doctor of Letters, I would write a doctorate-level thesis about cricket and religion.)

**head explodes**
**checks to see if it is my head or Simon Barnes' head**

But there is another point. All the great scandals of cricket history — at any rate, those that have come up through the playing of the game — come down to the crimes of bowlers. It is bowlers who, by bowling short, by bowling at a leg-side field, by bowling with a crooked arm, by messing about with the ball, are committing moral outrages, behaviour that might destroy the game.

Is this the case? What about as I referred to above, WG Grace replacing the bails, or batsmen failing to walk? What about batsman deliberately running down the middle of the pitch with their spikes, or Dennis Lillee attempting to use an aluminium bat? Or are you saying that these are not perceived as scandalous as they should be? Presumably match-fixing - which reputedly involved players getting out before a certain score, would fall outside your category of having arisen through the playing of the game (although gambling was intricately intertwined with the development of the game).

In any case, is this not just a product of batsmen being essentially reactive to the fielding side, a passive entity until the ball is delivered? Surely they have a more limited scope to commit moral outrage?

Meanwhile, the game really is being destroyed before our eyes. It is being destroyed by the technologies of pitch preparation, bat manufacture and protective clothing. Batsmen, playing on chief executive wickets, in helmets, with supersonic railway sleepers in their hands, facing, in one-day cricket, compulsory batsman-friendly fields and draconian calling of wides, with the help of the occasional free hit, have never had it so good.

Wait a minute! The game is being destroyed before our eyes? When? How? Whom? Why didn't someone tell me sooner, I could have saved myself the trouble of sitting down and watching five days of gripping test match action that went thrillingly down to the wire.

WHAT TEST HAVE YOU BEEN WATCHING BARNES?

Sure, cricket is evolving and not all changes are necessarily for the better (even if they are predominantly for the batter), but I don't think test cricket is in too sorry a state when three of England's last eight matches have gone down to the final ball of the final hour on the final day with the last wicket partnership at the crease. Test cricket is not just a battle between bat and ball; it is also a battle against the clock. And rarely has that battle ever been more exquisitely poised than in the past six months or so.

Those supersonic railway sleepers have also produced quicker scoring rates which has enabled more results. The balance may not be quite perfect, but I certainly wouldn't pick this last test, the 1946th (nor indeed the 1945th, the Australia v Pakistan match at the SCG) to suggest that test cricket is moribund.

But then maybe sober judges - like we must presume Barnes to be - don't always get it right when they predict the demise of the game and the world as we know it.

The game is marketed, organised and legislated on the belief that the ultimate excitement in cricket is a six. It is not. The ultimate point of arousal in cricket is the wicket.

**rolls over and lights cigarette**

But across the cricketing ages, and to an ever-increasing extent, a bowler who looks for an advantage is a moral outlaw — while any batsmen can just help himself to the proliferating advantages that are thrust at him on all sides.

  **Puts out cigarette and falls asleep**

Most pointless new statistic of the year

It may be only Epiphany, but the Sky commentary team have surely sealed their first award of 2010: most pointless new statistic.

To show that members of the Ursidae family defecate in land covered with a thick growth of trees how utterly useless Daryl Harper is, Sky compiled a table showing for each umpire how many decisions had been referred, how many had been reversed and then our award winner: what percentage of decisions referred were upheld.

On the face of it, it seemed a sensible enough statistic - because it appeared to back up what we already knew: namely that Aleem Dar was excellent (80% of referral decisions upheld, the highest percentage upheld) and that Harper, who on Steve Bucknor's retirement had inherited the West Indian's dark glasses and white cane, was useless (50% of referrals overturned).

Sir Ian Botham leapt on this stat and started laying into Harper, like he was an Australian spinner (a metaphor which works pleasingly just as well if we are talking 1981 and Botham as a batsman and Ray Bright as the spinner, or Australia post-Warne and Botham as a pundit). Now I'm quite keen on using statistics to further our understanding and appreciation of this wonderful game and if I have already hinted at it, I don't particularly rate Daryl Harper as a test umpire, but it's a shame that nobody stopped to think what this statistic actually shows us.

The important column was the second one: the number of decisions that were overturned and therefore wrong (assuming Harper wasn't the third umpire). An umpire that is challenged ten times in a test and has got only two overturned (80%) has got more decisions wrong than an umpire in the same test that was only challenged once and that challenge was overturned (0%).

Even this isn't a perfect way of measuring an umpire's performance (not every incorrect decisions is necessarily referred), but it has to be a better way of measuring an umpire's competency than the percentage of referrals upheld. I have no issue with bashing Daryl Harper - who produced two howlers when missing a clear inside edge and mistaking a leg for a bat - but please choose the right stick to hit him with: it's the white one, marked property of S. Bucknor.