Jon Hotten
Give us box-set Test cricket, please
Fewer series may help give the format a more meaningful narrative and make it as immersive an experience as the IPL season just past
Jon Hotten
03-Jun-2016
There is a minor uproar online this week after some large UK internet service providers complied with a US court order demanding that they block access to Putlocker, the pirate streaming service that, among many other things, offers Game Of Thrones, otherwise only available with a TV subscription. So powerful is the lure of the box set, woe betide anyone taking access to it away.
When Lalit Modi established the IPL, he did several clever things, and one of them was streaming the first season for free on YouTube. It made his concept graspable and accessible, and what a concept it was (in the context of staid old cricket, at least): edgy, glam, futuristic, a melding of showbiz and sport designed to be consumed in the way that new things were being consumed - quickly, on demand, in gulps.
The IPL model is box-set cricket, and that is meant as a compliment to it. It fits with the tenets of modern life. It happens intensely and daily for a few weeks, its storylines playing out to their resolution but with a hint of what may come when it all starts again.
Full postBefore you can hit it, you have to think it
The scoop, the sweep and all of the other shots that are now becoming standard in cricket began as acts of imagination, driven by necessity
Jon Hotten
18-May-2016
In the golden years of single-wicket competition, around the mid 1800s and before the spread of the railways made it easier to transport teams of players around the country, concessions were made to allow for the lack of fielders. There were no standard rules regarding the number a player may have; sometimes it may be a couple of "given" men, one on each side of the wicket, sometimes more, occasionally - and exhaustingly - it could be none at all. In 1827 a farmer called Francis Trumper and his sheepdog beat a Two of Middlesex, the dog retrieving the ball "with such a wonderful quickness it was difficult to get a run even from a long hit". To even things up, a line known as a bounds would be drawn, usually level with the batsman's popping crease, and no hit going behind the bounds could be scored from. The skill of the game on these uneven, often dangerous wickets against erratic roundarm bowling was to strike the ball powerfully in front of the wicket.
When WG Grace came along, he strove to turn batting from a defensive occupation into something new: "There was a prevailing idea… that as long as a bowler was straight, a batsman could do nothing against him… That idea I determined to test," the great man wrote. He began hitting the ball in the air over fielders with his lofted drives, cuts and pulls.
Grace saw the draw shot, played by raising the front leg and hitting the ball underneath it, and the Chinese cut, but it was not until Ranji was credited with the creation of the leg glance that the speed produced by the bowler was deliberately used to send the ball into the wide-open spaces behind the wicket.
Full postDoes the decision to toss or not affect the pitch?
The further away a match travels from the coin spin, the harder it becomes to find solid evidence of advantage
Jon Hotten
26-Apr-2016
In a game as finely calibrated as cricket, small changes in method can bring about overwhelming changes in outcome. Here is the opening paragraph from chapter 13 of Simon Hughes' memoir of the graft and grit in county cricket, A Lot Of Hard Yakka:
"It was the pong of perspiration that dominated most changing areas in 1990, because bowlers toiled all day without getting anybody out. 'You're not going to like the balls we're using this season,' the umpire Alan Jones remarked one morning pre-season, and he was right. They were even more orange-like than we'd feared. The leather was dull and unpolishable, the seam imperceptible. It was like bowling with a large red mothball. Their arrival coincided with new, TCCB-defined straw-coloured pitches and the hottest spring since 1929. It was, in short, the prologue to the year of the bat."
As Hughes went on, ruefully, to point out, there were two triple-hundreds and a 291 by the first week of May, and at the end of a summer of carnage, ten players had made more than 2000 first-class runs, plus, astonishingly, 428 individual centuries and 32 doubles. All of this because of a slightly different cricket ball.
Full postChris Jordan and the art of delivering under pressure
England's yorker specialist has been front and centre in their World T20 campaign
Jon Hotten
02-Apr-2016
Sports Illustrated magazine has Tiger Woods on its cover this week, along with the question, "What happened?" There are lots of good anecdotes, but one, from the golfer John Cook about Woods' ferocious training - at the time pretty much unheard of in professional golf - stood out.
Tiger lived in Isleworth then, a resort complex near Orlando that was home to lots of tour pros, including Cook. "I would be on the back of the range, beating balls," he said, "and Tiger would come up after an eight-mile run: no shirt, hat backward, sunglasses, body soaked with sweat. He would grab my 2-iron and start hitting these missiles. How you going to beat that? You can't beat that."
Woods' domination of golf was about to become total. His greatest asset was not his body or his swing but his mind. He could not only hit his best shots on the range with someone else's clubs when he was knackered after an eight-mile run in the Florida heat, he could do it out on the course under the severest pressure.
Full postCould Morgan be England's McCullum?
The team's transformation has been dramatic and their captain has been instrumental in bringing it about
Jon Hotten
15-Mar-2016
Eoin Morgan is emerging as one of England's most significant captains, a catalyst in an era of change. In two decades or so, when the light refracts on these early years of T20 and franchise cricket, we will see his kind as pioneers, men in the forefront of a revolution in technique and mindset; pathfinders and phase-shifters. With wrists as steely as those ice-chip eyes, he is both skipper and father figure to England's emergent side, a man who has walked it like he talks it, whatever the game has thrown at him.
Morgan still has something of the outsider about him, and not just in the lilt of his accent. His talent is freakish, his batting outré and outrageous, yet subject to some great valleys of form from which it often looks like he'll never emerge. It may have cost him the chance of a substantial Test career (this is England's loss: I feel he'd be an excellent captain there, too) but the way of white-ball cricket means he is only ever a few of his mighty straight hits and whip-crack reverses away from his best. Along with Kevin Pietersen - another outsider - he was the first of England's players to truly seize this new reality. It's no coincidence that they have been the most consistently in demand from franchise teams.
Cricket at this level can be a game of bluff. Adam Gilchrist tells a lovely story about batting against Murali with Mike Hussey, when the great Sri Lankan was in his pomp. Neither batsman could pick which way the ball was going, and were playing him purely on line. In between being beaten by the vast array of offbreaks and doosras, Hussey was slog-sweeping Murali into the stands. Tea came and everyone trooped off. Back in the dressing room Gilchrist asked Hussey how he was feeling.
Full postAnd so it ends
In cricket, there is often no fairness to the end of a career and the way it comes, just the inevitable knowledge that it will. Which makes McCullum's exit remarkable
Jon Hotten
24-Feb-2016
"Great men die twice," Norman Mailer wrote of Muhammad Ali, "once as great and again as men." It's not just great sportsmen who face two ends either. All sporting careers finish, and few with the fairy-tale, gunslinger's ride off into the sunset that Brendon McCullum has earned so magnificently with his record-breaking century.
Most players have probably sensed the onset of the end in the dulling of once-fine motor skills, even if they're not being shown towards the exit by the injury that no longer responds to treatment or the contract offer that does not come. The End is no respecter of achievement or reputation, and its message can be delivered brutally. In what turned out to be his penultimate Test, Ricky Ponting, Australia's second-greatest batsman, was left on his hands and knees in the dust by a Jacques Kallis yorker, an indignity that proved the tipping point. Kevin Pietersen was called into a meeting with a former captain a couple of hours after he had scored 355 not out at The Oval for Surrey and informed it was all over for him (again).
And here is Geoffrey Boycott on the end of his final day as a professional cricketer, which came not at Headingley but at Scarborough, in a game in which the lateness of Northamptonshire's declaration denied him a final innings:
Full postChanderpaul's lesson
His career, with its excellence and its quirks, tells us that cricket is big enough to contain everything and everyone
Jon Hotten
26-Jan-2016
So the King of Red Ink has laid down his crown. As Shivnarine Chanderpaul takes his leave, it's appropriate that the record as cricket's most not-out player goes with him, because throughout an era of mighty deeds with the willow, no one has been as attached to the crease - Shiv's was a love that would not waver.
Imagine, then, that you were one of India's bowlers in 2002, when you toiled for more than 25 hours and over a thousand deliveries without dismissing him. Or the bowlers of Bangladesh and England, who strained for more than 17 hours in 2004, or the Englishmen of 2007, who were repelled for 17 hours in Manchester and Durham, or the Australians who encountered him in North Sound and Bridgetown for 18-plus hours in 2008.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Bangladesh bowlers who met him when he was 40, batting undefeated through not just a match, but an entire series. Or imagine you were a bowler turning up for your game for the Transport Social Club in Guyana, and discovering that he was batting No. 3 for the Ghandi Youth Organisation side, with his son Tagenarine at No. 4, and sweating through the 30-odd overs in which they piled up 256 together - unbeaten, of course. Or that you were Brett Lee, felling him with a terrifying bouncer in Jamaica, only to find him still there, rock-like, an hour later, going past three figures. Or the Australian bowlers in Georgetown on April 10, 2003, who had West Indies five down for 53 and were flayed for a 69-ball hundred...
Full postWhy England could do with Wright and Pietersen in their World T20 mix
Of the survivors of the 2010 final, these two still have plenty to offer
Jon Hotten
15-Jan-2016
May 2010: The Eurozone and IMF agree a deal to bail out the Greek economy. Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sells in New York for $106.5m, a world record for a work of art. The X Factor semi-finalist Diana Vickers reaches No. 1 on the UK charts. Oh, and England win the ICC World T20 final, their first and to date only international tournament victory.
It seems both a long time ago and like yesterday, that heady charge across the field in Bridgetown after Paul Collingwood bunted the winning runs off Shane Watson. And as you might expect, the fates have been mixed for the XI that played that day. Collingwood and Ryan Sidebottom ended their international careers on their own terms. Michael Yardy left the England team a year later with clinical depression. Graeme Swann's elbow yielded to the weight of cricket. Craig Kieswetter lost his career to a serious eye injury after a delivery from David Willey pierced the grille of his helmet. The noble Bressie Lad, also nagged at by injury, labours on for Yorkshire but perhaps will not for England again. Eoin Morgan will captain the World Cup side in India, and Stuart Broad has Alastair Cook's blessing to appear, although he hasn't played a T20I since March 2014.
Which leaves three men who remain gainfully employed by franchises across the world; three men who appear unlikely to be selected for the forthcoming World T20 squad but who deserve at least some level of consideration: Michael Lumb, Luke Wright and Kevin Pietersen.
Full postAlastair Cook's Christmas wishlist
Wanted: an opening partner, a spinner, and durable fast bowlers to start with
Jon Hotten
25-Dec-2015
Given the demands of the calendar, it's probably good that Alastair Cook manages to cram both his birthday and Christmas Day into one of his rare days off. As he awakens as a fresh-faced 31-year-old on Boxing Day, the cycle begins once more.
Cook holds the Ashes, his captaincy is a secure as it has ever been as a result, and his batting has regained all of those unfashionable but monolithic qualities that first established him as one of the game's great, cussed throwback openers. He's even started hitting sixes, so perhaps he feels that most of his wishes have been fulfilled this festive period. But if he were to write a little note to put up the chimney or offer up some New Year resolutions, what would they be?
An opening partner
Obvious but true. The position has been discussed endlessly and the stats don't need rehashing but the parade of Cook's exes is beginning to look like something more than just bad luck. Alex Hales could hardly have been asked to take the job on in tougher circumstances, in South Africa against Steyn and Morkel. Debate over the position has tended to be ad hominem but perhaps it's time to look at the changing nature of the position itself.
Full postObvious but true. The position has been discussed endlessly and the stats don't need rehashing but the parade of Cook's exes is beginning to look like something more than just bad luck. Alex Hales could hardly have been asked to take the job on in tougher circumstances, in South Africa against Steyn and Morkel. Debate over the position has tended to be ad hominem but perhaps it's time to look at the changing nature of the position itself.
Why didn't everyone copy Bradman?
Today unorthodox, self-taught techniques are celebrated and emulated, but the greatest batsman of all had few followers
Jon Hotten
14-Dec-2015
Last summer, on assignment for Wisden's cricket quarterly, the Nightwatchman, I went to Birkenhead to meet Tony Shillinglaw, a man who has spent 20 years teaching himself to bat like Don Bradman. Tony is 78 years old now but still able to stage a convincing recreation of Bradman's technique, especially the Don's famous childhood game, played at home in Bowral, where he would use a cricket stump to strike a golf ball rebounding off a water tank from a distance of eight feet or so.
Shillinglaw taught himself Bradman's method by relearning the golf-ball game in his garage using a blue plastic bat and tennis ball. Now, having unravelled some of the details of the singularity of Bradman's batting, he has a question for the rest of cricket: why does no one else try to bat like the game's greatest genius?
He is not the only man asking, at least not anymore. Bob Woolmer's epic book The Art and Science of Cricket includes a section on Shillinglaw's analysis of Bradman, written by one of Woolmer's own analysts, the South African research scientist Tim Noakes. A week before Woolmer left for the 2007 World Cup, from which, sadly, he would not return, Noakes showed him pictures that he had collected of the greatest batsmen, "most of whom had elements of Bradman's technique". "We need to look at this as soon as I get back…" Woolmer had said.
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