Category: Cricket

Apologies to those uninterested in cricket, I’ve just risen from a long and pleasant afternoon, unable to drag myself from the coverage of the Lord’s Test, with unavoidable and frequent sorties into Carnoustie to watch Padraig ease out Sergio. The match between England and India looks poised; the balance of power is with England, but there could be enough in the Indian middle order to make a fight of it. Tomorrow promises much, especially if the two teams manage to drag the game beyond teatime.

I have this feeling of anticipation that is so rare with Test matches nowadays, and it brought to mind my memories of a Test nearly 30 years ago.

England v India. The Oval, 30 August to 4 September 1979. Test number 854.

It was the one where Gavaskar scored 221 and India scored 429 for 8 against a target of 437. At the time, if I remember right, only two teams had ever scored over 400 runs in the fourth innings to win a match, and they were Bradman and Co  going where none had gone before at Headingley in 1948, and India’s 406 for 4 at Port of Spain in 1976. [Since then there has been at least one more, Sarwan and Chanderpaul pulling off the Great Escape and beating the mighty Australians by scoring 418 to win at Antigua.]

I was spending the night with some college friends on a campus just outside Calcutta, it was a time when we had no television in India, when international battery-operate transistor radios were rare, and even rarer on student campuses. [Why battery-operated? Because power cuts (or load-shedding as we called it) were common, and we were in a power cut. It was after 10pm local time, everyone was huddled around the lone radio, and we kept getting interrupted by people coming back for the night and wanting to know the score.

So someone came up with an ingenious plan for the last 20 minutes. Three sets of candles. One set showing the number of runs India had left to get. One showing the number of balls left. One showing the number of wickets left.

At the death we had 9 candles lit for the Runs To Get, 2 for the Wickets Left and none for the Balls To Go. Match drawn.

What wonderful impromptu visualisation.

Other than the Tied Tests, I don’t think I’ve ever seen all three counters come down to single figures. BTW here’s a link to a brief video on the event, concentrating on Gavaskar’s innings, considered to be one of the six best performances by either side in Tests between the two countries. And it’s in my VodPod.

I was at the cricket today, with my son and some friends at Lord’s. Saw some fine attacking bowling (mainly by England) and some indifferent batting (mainly by India), leaving the match largely in England’s favour. A few early wickets tomorrow could change things, but I would expect this to be England’s game unless they collapsed before tea tomorrow. Maybe a part of me wanted to be there to see Tendulkar score his first Lord’s ton, on what is likely to be his last Test there; maybe a part of me wanted to be there to see Ganguly score his second century at Lord’s, or Dravid making up for his debut “failure” (I had the privilege of watching him when he scored on debut in 1996, when Dravid fell agonisingly short of matching Ganguly).

It was not to be. It was England’s day, a day with some significant rain-caused interruptions. A day when I could watch and marvel at the ingenuity and dedication of the ground staff at Lord’s, as they used a plethora of contraptions to ensure that the show went on.

The ground staff appeared to make one mistake. The new-fangled anti-rain equipment requires drainage holes to be opened up on the playing surface; there seem to be four such holes on either side of the square, at about leg-umpire depth. Each hole resembles a golf hole, although the diameter is closer to the water-sprinkler heads one sees adjacent to golf greens.

By accident or design, the holes on the Mound Stand side of the pitch were left uncovered when play resumed after tea. An I thought to myself, I wonder what would happen if a ball went down one of those holes. There aren’t any rules to cater for that. And that reminded me of one of the crassest abuse of the rules cricket has ever seen, the notorious Trevor Chappell underarm ball. In case you haven’t seen it, here it is courtesy YouTube. [And on my VodPod in my sidebar as always].

Talking about rules that don’t exist, I remember entering one of those light-hearted weekend competitions in the FT many years ago. It was a time when Test cricket was in the doldrums, and the mandarins-that-be were wailing and gnashing their teeth as they watched the one-day games remain packed. And so someone in the FT asked the question “If you could introduce one new rule, or amend an existing rule, to bring the fans back to Test cricket, what would it be?” or words to that effect.

My entry was simple. Introduce a new rule. Henceforth, a batsman is not allowed to have faced more than six dot balls in succession, he must score off the seventh. In addition, he must score a boundary within every 24-ball sequence. If he fails to do either, he is given out for “Abusing the audience”.  [I guess there weren’t that many entries, because I won the competition, receiving a wonderful bottle of bubbly as well as a book, I think it was the controversial Wolpert Nehru.]

It’s been a couple of years since Powerplays were first introduced into one-day cricket, although they became standard only last year. While I was aware of the principle behind them, I’d never really delved into how they worked until this World Cup came along.

Now that I’ve looked into it, I can’t help but think that Powerplays affect the Duckworth-Lewis Method materially. As long as fielding restrictions were in force for the first 15 overs, the current version of Duckworth-Lewis made the best of a bad job. The essence of Duckworth-Lewis is a graceful degradation of resources.

Today, while watching the Australia-England, I saw something rare: the Powerplays selected by Ponting weren’t contiguous. And when that happens, bang goes the graceful degradation principle.

Anyone interested in suggesting modifications to the (already modified) Duckworth-Lewis Method?

An old friend of mine, David Butler, while commenting on a recent cricket-related post, asked:

Can you name the batsman who played only one first class innings, scored a double century and never batted in a first class match again?

I had no idea. It didn’t strike me as a question that was easily GoogleAble, so I didn’t try. But I did go to cricinfo, to see if I could navigate a way to the answer quickly. Cricinfo home. Statsguru. Records home. First class records. First class batting records. Trivia/First class batting trivia. Highest First Class Batting Averages with no qualification. Bingo.

And what an answer. As a result of David’s question, I came across the brilliant but tragic cricketing career of Norman Callaway.

I quote from the article:

Norman Callaway made just one first-class appearance but it was one to remember. In February 1915, aged 19, he scored 207 in three-and-a-half hours for New South Wales against Queensland at the SCG, adding 256 for the fifth wicket with Charlie Macartney. In 1916 he joined the AIF and died during an attack on the Hindenberg Line in May 1917.

I’ve been very privileged, my life has only been marginally affected by war; the Indo-Pakistani wars of the 1960s didn’t really hit Calcutta, I can only remember some blackouts and air raid sirens, no real combat. The Bangladesh war of 1971 had a bigger impact, mainly as a result of the refugee influx.

So every time I read about the sacrifices made by youth and talent for the freedoms of future generations, I am taken aback in awe. Here’s to Norman Callaway and to all he represents. And here’s to peacetime for current and future generations.

Two aliens were visiting Earth to research the local customs. They split up so that they could learn more in the time allowed. When they met to share their knowledge, the first alien told of a religious ceremony it had seen.

“I went to a large green field shaped like a meteorite crater. Around the edges, several thousand worshippers had gathered. Then I saw two priests walk to the centre of the field to a rectangular area and they hammered six spears into the ground, three at each end. Then eleven more priests walked out, clad in white robes. Then two high priests wielding clubs walked to the centre and one of the other priests started throwing a red orb at the ones with the clubs.”

“Gee,” replied the other alien, “what happened next?”

“Then it began to rain.”

I’ve been following cricket for so long now I thought I’d heard them all. Live and learn….

[With thanks to cricinfo. com; only minor edits performed.]