Jon Hotten
Why geography is increasingly ceasing to matter in Test cricket
A Test tour is no longer challenging for the main reason it used to be: unfamiliarity
Jon Hotten
16-Nov-2016
England's baptism in Rajkot ended in curious triumph, mid-over, and with the visitors if not ascendant then floating happily above expectations. Alastair Cook glowed, a 30th Test century in the books. "We proved to everyone else we can play…" he said. He called Ben Stokes "golden" and reckoned Haseeb Hameed was "pushing me close to retirement".
Was all of this good humour some form of survivor high? Or perhaps he was demob happy, having set in motion the idea that he will, in the not so distant future, pass on the captaincy and devote himself even more ascetically to batting.
Someone somewhere will one day write a thesis on Cook's public pronouncements, comparing them to actual events on planet Earth. Until that day, all we can assume is that the captain was about as pleased as he's ever been with a drawn Test match.
Full postAre we living through a new era of spin?
Warne and Murali's big turn has given way to something more subtle
Jon Hotten
27-Oct-2016
The life of the impoverished writer has an occasional upside, and one of those came along a couple of weeks ago at the Guildford Book Festival, where I did an event with Tom Collomosse, cricket correspondent for the Evening Standard and Mark Nicholas, the former Hampshire captain turned commentator. Nicholas told a story about facing Derek Underwood on an uncovered pitch. It was early in his career, which began at Hampshire in 1978. They were playing Kent in a three-day game and when the rain came down, the captains got together and negotiated a deal: Hampshire would chase 160 on the last afternoon to win.
Paul Terry and Gordon Greenidge went in. Greenidge took six from the first over. Underwood opened at the other end and Terry got through it by playing from as deep in his crease as he could get. Greenidge took another six runs from the next at his end. Underwood came in again, having had six deliveries to work out the pitch. By the time Nicholas had been in and out shortly afterwards, Hampshire were 12 for 4.
"Derek didn't really bowl spin on wet pitches," he explained. "What he did was hold it down the seam and cut the ball. When you were at the non-striker's end, you could hear it" - he made a whirring sound - "it was an amazing thing."
Full postTo hold on to the past, seize the future
A suggestion for those who don't want to see the county game consumed whole by T20 leagues
Jon Hotten
10-Oct-2016
A year and a half ago, Death Of A Gentleman, a cricket film that I co-wrote with Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber, was screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. It was the first time that anyone outside of the makers had seen it, and it was an amazing moment when, at the end, where Sam had inserted little updates on what had happened to the protagonists since filming finished, the last appearances of Giles Clarke and N Srinivasan were booed by the audience. Sam and Jarrod had pulled off a remarkable trick: they'd made a film about cricket administration - not a subject for which Hollywood or even Bollywood regularly came calling - and turned it into a story with heroes and villains, jeopardy and all of the other tropes that make movies watchable and fun.
As the film was shown through the summer, it seemed almost too prescient. The Big Three takeover that it had caught on camera floundered as the tectonic plates of cricketing realpolitik shifted beneath it. From nowhere, Srini was out and Clarke changed roles and things went in a new and different direction. The rows were different and the people having them were different, but somehow cricket administration remained broadly the same, an old game struggling to find its place in the pixellated, digitalised 21st-century world.
If Death Of A Gentleman had a broader point, this was it. Cricket administrators did what they did for their own reasons. They all (probably) began with a love of the game, but that was one of the only common factors. Their power to affect the game always seems somehow disproportionate to who they are.
Full postThe discreet charm of the County Championship
The competition retains a certain purity precisely because it is unfashionable and anachronistic, and is not loaded down by the requirements of television and sponsors
Jon Hotten
26-Sep-2016
Increasingly, cricket seems to have just one subject, the subject of time. Cricket fights time, struggles with its changes, but in other ways embraces time, puts time at the heart of its drama. As the autumnal sun, soft and fragile, fell down on Lord's at the end of this year's County Championship, time in all of these aspects was refracted.
The match had finished in the way it might in a kid's back-garden imagination: three teams in the fight, two engaged in the battle at cricket's HQ, the other watching anxiously on television 170 miles away (and lucky that Sky decided at the last minute to show the game, otherwise they'd have been clustered around a radio…). Within two hours the game moved from the farce of lob-up bowling to a desperate race against the clock and the light, settled at the death by a nerve-rattling hat-trick from an unsung hero. It was particularly, peculiarly English: nostalgic, anachronistic, dreamy, and almost impossible to explain properly to outsiders.
The drama had built not just on the last afternoon or during the final round of matches, but across a season that began under iron skies on April 10. Behind that lay history, of Yorkshire, the defending champions; of Middlesex, who had not won the title since 1993, when their current director of cricket was still chuntering in, through wind and rain, from the Nursery End; and of Somerset, who have not held the gold trophy at all since the County Championship was constituted at Lord's on December 10, 1889, when the Marquis of Salisbury was prime minister and the Wisden Almanack named six bowlers as its first Cricketers of the Year, among them George Lohmann and Bobby Peel.
Full postMorgan's problem
He has been a galvanising, socialising force in England's limited-overs cricket, but does not enjoy the support that Alastair Cook does
Jon Hotten
07-Sep-2016
One look at him tells you that he is both an athlete and an orderly man. His kit, of whatever hue, is usually pristine and there is a sense of precision and economy to everything he says and everything he does. Nothing is wasted. He moves with the same grace noticeable in most of the best cricketers. Moreover, he looks like a player, his eyes have that same narrowed stare that Steve Waugh's did, and all of the playing and training and discipline are obvious in the hard planes of his face. It adds up to something, a sense of substance, an authority that separates him from his team, gives just the amount of distance that leaders need.
Cricket moves fast these days, and the days run away. Pictures of Eoin Morgan at his early photocalls are of a wider-eyed, softer-faced kid, not yet toughened by real failure or defeat, and so far unstopped. His first-class debut had come not for a county side but for Ireland against Scotland in Dublin, where in his maiden innings he made a three-ball duck. He was already an outsider, and already talked about, a batsman who seemed innately tuned in to the new information beginning to thrum through the game, a player with a technique of hitting late with an almost audible hiss of bat speed, especially when he whipped the ball, reverse-style, backwards of square.
Here began the myth, the notion that some of this weird invention came from a life of hurling, a colloquial Irish sport. It offered him the kind of otherness that brings originality to an ancient but changing game. And this was 2004: in terms of getting funky, he was George Clinton, an originator of the form. Yet like the flamingo and the switch hit soon coined by his sometime soulmate and another of England's great outsiders Kevin Pietersen, there were hours of thought and practice put into their conception: Morgan was obsessed with cricket.
Full postWhat good are Test rankings?
They don't really provide narrative shape to the uncoordinated mess that is the FTP, but they can occasionally provide a compelling story - as they did this week
Jon Hotten
24-Aug-2016
Asked how he felt about literary prizes, Kingsley Amis once said, "Well, they're all right if you win." It's easy to imagine the group of teams circling around the top of the ICC Test match rankings feeling the same. Like literary prizes, the criteria for victory seems arbitrary and hard to understand, and anyway "the best" - it's subjective, isn't it?
We don't need algorithms to tell us when a truly great team emerges. The West Indies of the late 1970s and early '80s and the Australian dynasties that succeeded them didn't need a mace and a cheque to validate their efforts. Their greatness bestowed itself upon the game, their defeats in some strange way more memorable than their victories; rare, valiant proof that they were (sometimes) human. Did anyone care about rankings as they watched India play Australia in 2001, or the Ashes of 2005? No, they did not. The battle itself was the thing, and it needed no further context.
We live now in less certain times. Has there been a sadder sight than West Indies playing India in a four-Test series before almost no one, the great Viv Richards commentating on a mismatch in an empty stadium named after himself, while the last days of the CPL burned onwards towards a packed-out final tie contested by the real stars of Caribbean cricket? It appeared symbolically bad.
Around the same time, Pakistan, a team that has not played a home international match since 2009, won a Test at Lord's, but then subsided to defeat in the next two games, in Manchester and Birmingham. New Zealand went to Zimbabwe and illustrated the gap between a side in the middle of the rankings and the team at the bottom (Zimbabwe are so far adrift that eight of the other Test-playing nations are closer in points to the No. 1 spot than they are to tenth place). Australia, officially the best, went to Sri Lanka, who had just been roundly beaten in England, and were humiliated. New Zealand hopped on a plane to South Africa and found themselves trying to play a series out of season, as wet as West Indies and India ultimately became.
Full postEngland's batting future is here
The likes of Jason Roy, Sam Billings, Ben Duckett and Daniel Bell-Drummond will fill grounds and keep the game alive for the next generation of fans
Jon Hotten
09-Aug-2016
As I skirted The Oval two Fridays back, a couple of hours before Surrey faced Kent in what turned out to be both teams' final game in this year's T20 Blast competition, the PA was playing Massive Attack's anthem to paranoia, "Angel", its wall of guitars powering towards a sky beginning to bank with dark clouds, miles long. Behind the gasometers, the new cityscape loomed.
By the time Jason Roy and Aaron Finch walked out to open the Surrey innings, the aircraft-warning lights on the tallest buildings were blinking red against the purple. Finch was the world No. 1-ranked T20 batsman but he struggled to find his timing. Roy didn't, though. The ball started to crack from his bat, and didn't stop. He hit thunderously, and as I watched from the third tier of the Bedser Stand, his power took on a different dimension, the speed of the ball through the air, along the ground and past the fielders newly apparent.
Finch finally got himself going with a giant six into the second tier of the pavilion. Dominance subtly challenged, Roy followed him, and then hit an even bigger one over the longest boundary at deep midwicket and into the crowd. It was sci-fi batting in a spectacular setting, the old gasometers dark and hulking, and just as WG would have seen them when he made his famous 224 not out here in 1866, a few days after his 18th birthday, and in the distance the gleaming Shard, which he couldn't have imagined even in his grand old age. It was ominous for Kent, whose bowlers were taken apart. Roy finished with 120 from 62 deliveries, Finch 79 from 51.
Full postThe hinterland of 40
At Lord's we saw three in-between scores of the sort that are as likely to annoy the selectors as excite them
Jon Hotten
22-Jul-2016
Forty. It's a good average but not a good score. An innings of 40 occupies that hinterland between success and failure, a liminal score, a score for the flaky talent or the not yet good enough. Forty is as likely to annoy the selectors as excite them. When he remembered the golden run that saw him average more than 100 for two full first-class seasons in 2006 and 2007, Mark Ramprakash said: "If I gutsed out 40 or 50 on a difficult wicket, I thought, 'Yeah well done.' But it also meant if conditions were in my favour, I was absolutely ruthless."
A score of 40 does not represent ruthlessness in the mind of Ramprakash, or of any serious batsman. The reactions of the fielders if they dismissed a Lara or a Ponting or a Kallis for 40 said it all: it was a win, a bullet dodged, a cause for celebration. And take a look at the face of Brian or Ricky or Jacques - were they happy with 40? They were not. In a strange way, they'd rather get out early than fight through all of that and then chuck it away. It's like putting Led Zeppelin IV on the stereo and turning it off again before "Stairway to Heaven".
Most batsmen fail to make their average in two-thirds of their innings. This rule applied even to Don Bradman, the most ruthless of all, who was as vulnerable to early dismissal as everyone else (Jack Hobbs apparently had more chance, statistically, of reaching 10). But of his 80 Test match innings, Bradman made just four scores between 40 and 50. He passed fifty 42 times, and turned 29 of those into a hundred or more. Thirty-six per cent of his innings were centuries, and 25% were scores of fewer than 20. He was the ultimate converter of starts.
Full postThree men in a box
Just as the game has changed, so has the way it is talked about
Jon Hotten
05-Jul-2016
Through the shires of England it rolls…
The Sky Sports Pod is a tricked-up fish-and-chip van-type affair from which commentary on the T20 Blast competition is dispensed, breathlessly, "at pitch level" (allowing, we're supposed to believe, this bunch of recently retired professional cricketers to be publicly astonished by the speed of the game).
Sky's coverage of cricket has been nothing if not innovative, and time stops for no one. Leaning through the Pod's serving hatch is the tasty menu of ex-pros now on the Sky roster, from the veteran Paul Allott, who last played in 1993, to the fresh-from-the-field Rob Key, until earlier this year captain of Kent.
Full postGayle's problem
The acknowledgement he craves as a cricketer has become more distant for him, and he only has himself to blame for it
Jon Hotten
22-Jun-2016
When Fuller Pilch was deep into his dotage, he was taken to watch WG Grace, his successor as the greatest batsman in the game. He sat for a while and then exclaimed, "Why this man scores continuously from balls old Fuller would have been glad to keep out…"
Maybe we should wonder if a young Chris Gayle, gangly and loose-limbed, would have said something similar had he been transported, Back to the Future-style, to watch his older self batting in the first age of T20 cricket, when he was hitting one in every nine deliveries he faced for six.
Arguably batting has, in the last decade, undergone its greatest change since Grace became its conceptual force, shaping the game for modernity. And arguably Gayle has been T20's conceptual force, muscle-bound and ferocious, implacably pushing at the received wisdom of what is possible. Only now, in this most recent edition of the IPL, did the batting of Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers appear to have edged past his in terms of how things may move forwards from here. For the preceding years, Gayle reigned, not the best player of the age but the most extraordinary, the only holder of a 3-2-1 that demonstrates mastery of all forms: Test match triple hundred (two in fact), ODI double, T20I century. Of all of cricket's players, it was he who seized the moment at hand.
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