Jon Hotten
Pink-ball cricket is a mere bulge in Test cricket's fabric
It's too soon to draw conclusions from the Adelaide Test, but going by the game's history, it won't be long before day-night Tests simply become Tests
Jon Hotten
30-Nov-2015
Every cricketer will be horribly familiar with the anxiety dream. Mine has remained steadfast through the years of playing: I'm in the dressing room and next man in. A wicket has fallen but I can't tie my laces up or get my pads on. Ricky Ponting once said that his was getting lost in a vast pavilion as he walked out to bat. The dream probably has as many variations as there are players, but it means the same thing, comes from the same place.
So it's easy to imagine David Warner or Steve Smith rubbing their eyes and saying something like: "Man, that was a weird one… I was playing in a Test match, but it was night time, full house at the Adelaide Oval… The ball was… pink. And the worst part was, it was hooping around corners. Couldn't get a bat on it, mate…"
There has been something dreamlike about the first day-night Test, especially as the sun set on the very first day, a fiery ball dipping down towards the city of churches, the ground renovation starting to make sense for the first time as the light touched the stands. The vision was, if not futuristic, utterly contemporary, a Hollywood remake of an enduring classic.
Full postAre batting orders more fluid now?
Players with transferable white-ball skills are no longer as easy to fit into old stereotypes
Jon Hotten
16-Nov-2015
In the first paragraph of George Dobell's wonderful Cricket Monthly story on Moeen Ali, he describes his subject as "an elegant batsman and a soft-spoken man…" I'm not sure how deliberate that was, but a batsman is what Moeen is. Later Dobell outlines some of Moeen's early feats: scoring 195 in a 20-over game as a 14-year-old, signed to Warwickshire at 15, making 68 on his first class debut and then being dropped and so on. His bowling enters the story halfway through.
This is not another piece about the current cricketing life of Moeen as a bowlery-batting, useful, good-egg kinda guy. Instead it's about batting orders, and what they mean to batsmen. Because for most of cricket history, the batting order has defined a player's standing in the world and to the world.
It can confer status, position, security of tenure. It can also define the psyche of its inhabitants. One of the great pieces of contemporary TV punditry (admittedly a small field) came from Steve Harmison, when he said of Ben Stokes, "Put him at No. 8 eight and he'll bat like a No. 8…" It's true that the position can force a player to bat a certain way.
Full postThe 3-2-1 scale
How about a measure of excellence that rates players' skills across the international formats?
Jon Hotten
29-Oct-2015
And so the great Sehwag rides off into the sunset, his international career concluding as it began: on his own terms. Avatar, revolutionary, seer, he has ushered in batting's new age, and, like Muhammad Ali, has been able to conceptualise his work. "See ball, hit ball" is cricket's "Float like a butterfly…", a perfect iteration of intent.
His full impact may only be apparent when the generation that grew up watching him arrives, because Sehwag, of all batsmen, was least about the raw facts and figures. Batting is a wider discipline now than ever before. As they blaze through the game's shifting sands, Sehwag and Chris Gayle, AB de Villiers and Brendon McCullum, Virat Kohli and the rest must, in their own quest for greatness, master a broader range than any of the greats that have come before: from 20 overs to five days; from 120 deliveries to two innings.
What are the figures that recognise excellence across that spread? Average? Scoring rate? Amount of runs?
Full postThe fastest bowler? It depends
It varies from spell to spell, and it also has to do with the perception of the men facing
Jon Hotten
12-Oct-2015
The reason that a fly is difficult to swat, I discovered recently, has to do with its vision. The fly's compound eye means that it can see a light flickering at a rate seven times faster than a human. Because the fly's system is processing seven times as much information per second, that second, to the fly, appears to last longer. Dr David McNally, a scientist from Edinburgh University, described the fly's perception of a hand or rolled-up newspaper moving towards it as being like "the slow-motion bullets in The Matrix". The same principle applies to the feeling of time appearing to slow down during the sudden trauma of something like a car accident: the eye and mind are processing more information, more quickly.
The passing of the Typhoon, Frank Tyson, reopened one of cricket's great and unanswerable questions: who was the fastest bowler of the last century? To even begin to find out would require a journey through myth, imagination, memory and technology. And even if the hardcore, empirical evidence of the speed gun were available, it would not be able to factor in the perception of the batsman facing the bewildering variety of thunderbolts that the contenders sent down. Speed is, to a degree, in the eye of the beholder.
Here is the late Bob Woolmer on the experience of facing Michael Holding during one of his most famous spells, at The Oval in 1976:
Full postWhat is the X-factor in cricket?
It's hard to pin down, particularly in statistics. You could say it's an aesthetic, an impression that what players who have it are doing is innate to them
Jon Hotten
25-Sep-2015
The late Jonathan Rendall wrote wonderfully about a certain type of sportsman. The boxer Colin "Sweet C" McMillan, who Rendall managed to a version of the world featherweight title, was one. Herol "Bomber" Graham was another, a fighter so elusive and brilliant that his party trick was to put both hands behind his back and invite anyone to try and hit him: no one could. Jimmy White, the snooker player considered the greatest never to win the world title - he lost in the final six times - was one of his favourite subjects: "It doesn't really matter what people like Jimmy do," he wrote, "it's how they express it. They have 'it', whatever 'it' is."
But whatever is "it"? And what is it that they do? Ed Smith wrestled with the high end of the debate in his recent piece about sport and genius. "Genius" is certainly too weighty a label for all but a handful of people in any strata. "It", in this case, is instead a kind of X-factor - itself a quality now inextricably surrendered to the soul-crushing reality TV show in which, ironically, no one ever has it.
Nonetheless the notion of the X-factor cricketer is valid. The mysterious "it" won't be found in their statistics. It doesn't often manifest itself through consistency and it can sometimes go missing for lengthy periods. It's an aesthetic, an impression that what they are doing is innate to them, a form of expression that flows naturally. A coach can no more put it in than they could take it out again. "It" just is. It also exists in the eyes of the beholder, an undeniable electric shiver that lets the observer know, "okay, here is something worth watching…"
Full postTechnology and the amateur cricketer
Having your game dissected can be disconcerting but fun if you're not a serious cricketer. Professionals, though, have no choice but to live with it
Jon Hotten
09-Sep-2015
Every journalist knows the horror of their own voice. The realisation comes early, when you begin recording interviews. There, on the tape or in the bytes or the VT, is not the voice you thought that you had, the one that's been echoing in your ears for your whole life, but the one that the rest of the world hears - reedy, nasal, pitched entirely differently.
It takes a while to get over the discovery and to become acquainted with the notion that self-image overlaps only slightly with the objective view of the rest of the world.
Cricket is deep into its age of analysis. Kartikeya Date's lovely piece in the current Cricket Monthly illuminates the depth of it: every ball in every major match is logged, filed, deconstructed. It means that the professional cricketer lives an examined life, and its information comes at them from all angles: their coaches, their laptops, the television, the internet, YouTube, Twitter… a bombardment of feedback that can leave them in no doubt as to what they look like in the eyes of the world. Reality here is absolute, self-image challenged from an early age.
Full postWhat will Ian Bell's legacy be?
He always made the difficult look easy and rarely got the recognition his batting deserved. The difficulty of replacing him may determine his worth
Jon Hotten
26-Aug-2015
"Happiness writes white," the old maxim goes. For me at least, so has Ian Ronald Bell done: there has been something frictionless about his long career, something hard to grasp. Even the news that he is to spend the next few weeks in contemplation of retirement seems strangely ambivalent. It's a very Ian Bell thing to do.
He has always been one of those players who made something very difficult look easy. It is his cross to bear. His struggles, physical or psychological, remain subterranean, hidden beneath the glossy and implacable exterior. Even the failures will often include a single boundary fizzed so effortlessly past the field that his bat barely appears to have moved from the perpendicular. Bell has glided through his career like a swan on a river, leaving just the slightest of ripples on the water behind. What will we think of him when he's gone?
He is still only 33, but there are miles on the clock. He first toured with England in 2001-02 and even before that, as a 16-year-old, he was the next big thing. It is perhaps not a decline in talent so much as in the will to keep going. Since the last Ashes in England, in which he made three hundreds, he has played in six series and in them averaged 26.11, 34.25, 42.42, 31.00, 10.75 and 26.87 - all are under his overall mark of 43.00. The move to No. 3 for the Edgbaston Test brought the briefest of spikes. He never quite seemed able to summon the thrumming energy that trailed Joe Root to the crease, nor the unadulterated concentration of his old compadre Alastair Cook. Both were once there.
Full postShould Cook think of quitting now?
Modern captains get only fleeting moments when they can leave the game on their own terms before the pressure is back again
Jon Hotten
12-Aug-2015
Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of one of the most famous boxing matches of the modern era, the first fight between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson in Las Vegas. I was fortunate enough to be there as Holyfield, a natural cruiserweight on a mission from his God, somehow beat the brooding post-prison Tyson in 11 rounds, breaking him down physically and psychologically long before the end actually came. All of the talk beforehand was about the heart condition that Holyfield had been diagnosed with: the question was not whether Tyson would win - how could he not - but whether Holyfield would survive.
Afterwards there was a press conference in the media tent that the promoter, Don King, had erected behind the MGM Grand Hotel. King was glowing. If there was one thing he loved more than a big fight it was the chance to promote another, and Holyfield's upset win had handed him the rematch on a plate. With the exhausted fighters sat either side of him, King called for the first question. An English journalist, who shall remain nameless, stood up and said something like: "Evander, don't you think that after overcoming your health problems and regaining the heavyweight championship, you should retire… and Mike, now that you've lost again, do you think that you will retire too?"
The look on Don King's face was priceless. At the time, I was with him on that. Who would not want more of what we'd just had: the action… the drama… the eyes of the world on those 12 square feet of ring. But I've thought about it often since, and I see it now as a question with a different meaning. It's not a question about drama or money or what the spectators want. Instead, it's about what is best for the people involved. They are sportsmen but they are also human beings and the needs of one do not always serve the needs of the other.
Full postIs it time to rethink the toss?
Why not let captains decide what batting or bowling first is worth and use runs to buy the advantage?
Jon Hotten
31-Jul-2015
One of the myriad suggestions for "improving" Test match cricket is to abandon the toss in favour of giving the visiting captain the choice of whether to bat or bowl, thus negating the home side's opportunity to doctor a pitch in their favour.
As with many apparently simple things - and you don't get much more binary than the toss of a coin - it hides its complexity in unexpected ways. As a piece of sporting symbolism it is perfect: no matter how mismatched the two sides may be, the captains come together at the start with a gesture of absolute equality. The toss is ritualistic and it offers a focus for the start of every game.
It can reveal the psychology and the superstitions of the captains. Some always call the same way. Michael Clarke has won twice in this Ashes series by varying his call. Michael Vaughan admitted that in the 2005 series he flipped the coin miles in the air simply to prolong the uncertainty.
Full postThe pain of the discarded England opener
Facing the new ball acts like a can-opener on a candidate's game and his psyche. Also, failure in the role is harder to deal with than for other players
Jon Hotten
22-Jul-2015
Here are some sequences of six numbers. What connects them?
8, 13, 16, 2, 68, 11
13, 2, 16, 15, 1, 7
43, 31, 38, 12, 0, 43
17, 7, 26, 13, 6, 37
0, 4, 59, 0, 0, 9
13, 2, 16, 15, 1, 7
43, 31, 38, 12, 0, 43
17, 7, 26, 13, 6, 37
0, 4, 59, 0, 0, 9
No, they're not Tiger Woods' latest scorecards. They're the last six innings of Joe Root, Nick Compton, Michael Carberry, Sam Robson and Jonathan Trott before they were replaced (or in the case of Trott, retired) as England's opening batsmen.
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