If you haven’t seen it before, you should take a look at the video I’ve linked to in my sidebar, showing Shane Warne’s eight greatest balls. I thought the Gatting ball was sensational but the Chanderpaul one is something else.
Incidentally, the videos I show via Vodpod are not mine, there is no attempt at defining ownership of the “content”. You should consider the VodPod sidebar on the same basis as my last.fm or librarything coverage. These things tell you what I like, what I’m watching, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to. Why? So that I can hear from you using some form of collaborative filter, something I can do with quite a few of the tools I’ve mentioned.
And our American cousins find cricket dull?
They have no idea, do they?
The death of Arthur Milton reminds me of another of those strange coincidences which seem to be plentiful in cricket. Milton was the last man to play cricket and soccer for England. He made his debut as an opening bat at Leeds against NZ in 1958. The opening bat at the other end was M.J.K.Smith, the last man to play cricket and rugby for England.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I detest one-day cricket. I shan’t watch it any more, either at the ground or on TV. Here are my reasons.
1. It’s not possible for a batsman to play a long patient innings against the odds, as Atherton and Thorpe (for example) have done for England in Tests.
2. It’s not possible for a bowler to have a long, well-sustained spell. At Manchester in 1956 Lock and Laker bowled over 50 overs apiece.
3. It encourages defensive bowling at the expense of wicket taking.
4. It’s not possible for a side to gain an honourable draw.
5. The staging of the events is vulgar in the extreme, with ghastly music and dancing.
6. The crowd behaviour is distasteful, especially in some overseas countries. One-day matches are for people who know nothing about cricket.
7. The language of the one-day game is infiltrated with Americanisms like ‘pinch hitter’ and ‘power play’. If people want to play baseball, let them.
8. It encourages bad behaviour among the players more than Test cricket. Even newcomers like Tait are already mouthing obscenities at the opponents.
9. In many one-day matches, the result is inevitable long before the end.
David, while disagreeing with your points 5 and 7 I agree with your overall response to 50 over cricket. I think cricket’s administrators are coming to the same conclusion too, which is why they have invented the execrable Powerplay idea to try to overcome the shortcomings of the format. Powerplay has failed, and 20 over cricket will inevitably come to dominate the short form because it has all the good things of 50 over cricket and none of the bad.
Of course 20-20 cricket is an order of magnitude more vulgar than 50 over matches. This, I think, is one of its strengths. It is not pretending to be Test cricket lite. There is no compromise between entertainment and the subtle arts of the game – it is purely about entertainment.
It will develop its own language, and like any new language it will absorb words from other arenas that help to convey its particular requirements of meaning. If this is baseball then so be it.
In principle I agree, but I fear that even Test cricket isn’t what it used to be. I see far too much negative bowling, and for that matter far too much negative batting.
Balls constantly outside the offstump, treading a thin line between wide and legal, boring the batsman into playing an injudicious stroke. Not the cricket I used to watch.
Pads constantly out of the crease just crushing the spin before there is spin to crush, lulling the bowler into losing his rhythm. Not the cricket I used to watch.
I can live with the changes in technology. I can live with (but detest) the noisy sledging. I deplore the paucity of batsmen walking (though I am heartened occasionally). I deplore the appeals for nothing, and the number of occasions they get a result.
I want to see cricket where batsmen try to score and bowlers try to get batsmen out, real wars of attrition are fine but not the negative nonsense we see regularly.