Jon Hotten
The post-Gilchrist effect
We don't know how change will manifest itself, but it is certain that Test cricket will soon feel the shiver that has run up through T20 to ODIs
Jon Hotten
29-Jun-2015
When did the world change? On January 23, 1998, as Steve Waugh stared into his bowl of ice cream at tea during the first final of the Carlton & United series at the MCG and told Tom Moody to stand down as Australia's ODI opener because he wanted Adam Gilchrist to go in first? Or on November 7, 1999, when Gilchrist walked to the wicket as Australia's Test match No. 7 and made 81 from 88 deliveries? Or maybe it was earlier, much earlier, in 1994, when he moved from New South Wales to Western Australia because he couldn't shake Phil Emery from his native State side?
Or perhaps it was when he made 149 not out to win the game against Pakistan at Bellerive in his second Test; or the double-hundred against South Africa, when he was in such exquisite form that he amused himself by trying to hit a sponsor's billboard offering a million dollars; or when Mike Atherton looked across at Duncan Fletcher's notes on the tactics for bowling at Australia in 2001 and saw that all Fletch had written next to Gilchrist's name was "?".
No, the world really changed once the rest caught on and "the Gilchrist role" became a thing, despite the fact that there was only one Gilchrist. It's hard to think of another modern cricketer with such a singular individual influence on the game. A specialist position had its job description rewritten, its specialisation changed overnight. Once, it had been nice to have a wicketkeeper who could bat. Now, not only did a wicketkeeper have to bat, he had to average 40; he had to open against the white ball and smash it over or through the field. It was a reality shift, a future shock, and along came the fruits of its influence - England alone have produced in recent years Geraint Jones, Matt Prior, Craig Kieswetter, Steven Davies, Jos Buttler, Sam Billings, Jonny Bairstow and more, a pattern repeated across the world.
Full postCan England find their Steven Smith?
The Australian's success story is a fine example of why a team must stick with a player it believes to be talented
Jon Hotten
17-Jun-2015
The Ashes 2013. Australia are being beaten by a good-ish England side for whom beating Australia is becoming routine; routine enough for their game to be lifted only periodically to its previous heights.
The fourth Test, in Durham, which secured the urn encapsulated things: England had conceded a first-innings lead and relied on an Ian Bell hundred to set Australia 299, a target that hove briefly into view during a century opening stand before Stuart Broad produced a 40-ball spell of 5 for 20. England were 3-0 up, despite having been behind on first innings in three of the four Tests and having only one of their top seven batsmen averaging over 40 for the series.
The fifth Test, at The Oval, is billed as a "celebration party", and when Michael Clarke is dismissed with the Australian score on 144, the idea that these teams are now on opposite trajectories, Australia up and England down, seems a distant one. Steven Smith walks in. He is playing in his 12th Test match. He's generally regarded as an allrounder, bats a bit, bowls some legspin. He's a bits-and-pieces guy in a transitioning team. He averages 46.62 with the ball and 29.52 with the bat. He started out at No. 8 in the order and then moved to No. 6. When Ricky Ponting retired, he moved up to No. 5. His highest score is 92.
Full postBeing McCullum
He has found a way of keeping his instincts free and fearless while offering real gravitas, and that is quite something to behold
Jon Hotten
27-May-2015
It's quite something to be Brendon McCullum in the early summer of 2015. At Lord's you could feel it even as the wicket fell and Ross Taylor began to walk back with New Zealand at 337 for 3. The stage cleared and the buzz began, the electric shiver that runs through a crowd when a really big player makes his entrance. The Lord's pavilion offers a backdrop like no other, too, the incoming man centred in the Long Room doors before descending the chute of steps and out onto the great island of green ahead, a lone white figure moving towards the enemy guns.
They take this stage in many ways. McCullum comes out coiled, taut, ready to unwind. He has the frame of a middleweight slugger - a body-puncher - and the jaw of Desperate Dan. He rolls his shoulders, chews his gum. Every eye is on him. The Lord's murmur ups in tone. He plays an innings that is part madness, part inspiration - he feels the pulse of the game and interprets it in his own way. Not everyone agrees. Almost everyone wanted more.
For his second innings he emerged in the middle of a wild afternoon, the punters let in for 20 quid, the game somehow listing queasily away from him. This time, the murmur has become a roar. He goes through the same routine, the shoulder rolls, the gum, but now the gods - and Stokes - are against him and he chops on, first ball. Amid the tumult around him, the camera catches his face, which hardly changes in expression. The eyes narrow, the mouth opens, he chews and shakes his head, because he knows this is what he signed up for. The joy in the hearts of his opponents is a compliment to him.
Full postIs England falling out of love with cricket?
Much of the game still runs to the timescales of a different, distant age. Nothing about the way we live now suggests these ideas still work
Jon Hotten
12-May-2015
On December 14, 1873, the P&O liner Mirzapore docked in Melbourne. Standing by the rail were WG Grace, his new wife Agnes, and a team of English cricketers. "The champion himself looks splendidly, and is a fine, strapping, muscular young Englishman…" reported the Melbourne Age the next day, going on to describe how the thronging crowd offered three cheers to Grace as he took his first steps on Australian soil.
They may not have known exactly what he looked like, but WG Grace was already famous in Australia. He was also the best-known sportsman in Victorian England, a proto-celebrity whose epic life and career would pull cricket from its scattered origins into its recognisable, modern form.
He had grown the great black beard that would create an image that has endured until today. Grace quickly came to represent not just English cricket but a certain kind of Englishness itself. When Monty Python needed a visage for the face of God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they chose Grace.
Full postThe beast that is batting
Even for those blessed with great skill, it is a hard, unforgiving craft - as Jonathan Trott will be able to testify
Jon Hotten
04-May-2015
There was no crueller moment at the end of the Barbados Test than the few seconds that the camera spent on Jonathan Trott. In Bridgetown, the floodlights were on and the twilight was coming, followed by the dark. For Trott something more than a match was over, and it showed in his face. "Sadder still to watch it die, than never to have known it…" as someone once wrote.
A few summers ago I had the chance to talk to a man who had worked closely with England at Loughborough. The conversation got on to Trott and his debut against Australia in the final Ashes Test of 2009. There had been some debate over his selection. There was a last-minute swell of emotion behind a romantic recall for Mark Ramprakash, who was coming towards the end of his great sunburst of runs in the county game. Trott, averaging 97 for the season himself, won the call, and, "as he walked to bat," said the guy I was talking to, "I knew that there was no one that I'd rather see going out there."
Trott made 41 and 119. He had a habit of scoring runs on debut - 245 for Warwickshire 2nds, 134 for the 1st team - and by the summer of 2011, when he made a double-hundred against Sri Lanka in Cardiff, he was established at number three and his average was approaching 67. He was a curio, a gem, a rapidly emerging cult hero. Trott was a batsman whose idiosyncrasies showed. Along with a practice regime that was quickly becoming legendary, his batting had the ritualistic edge that externalised some of the mental processes required to score heavily against the world's best bowlers. Each delivery faced, even those with the most banal outcome - a leave, a defensive push - brought a long routine of walking and scratching and scraping at the crease. Here was a mind that sought to impose order and control on the unpredictability and ever-present danger of batting.
Full postThe wrecking ball and the subtle knife
Ian Botham will soon be overtaken by James Anderson as England's leading Test leading wicket-taker. The two couldn't be more different from each other
Jon Hotten
15-Apr-2015
As Ian Botham prepared to deliver the final ball of his career, which came for Durham against the touring Australians in 1993, he paused at the end of his run, undid his flies and, in his own immortal words, "hauled out the meat and two veg".
Then he charged towards David Boon and brought down the curtain on his thunderous, unblinking era. It was a very Botham-esque end.
When the time comes for Jimmy Anderson it's difficult to imagine a repeat, and not just because cricket trousers don't come with zips any more. Botham was England's Falstaff, Anderson has been its brooding Heathcliff. They seem to share little except for their positions at the head of the list of England's wicket-takers and a mastery of the spooky art of swing bowling. Even in that, they are separate. Botham was a tank, a wrecking ball, a force of nature with a golden arm. Anderson's artistry appears far more delicate.
Full postFifty-over cricket, I was wrong
This World Cup gave us driven, vibrant, electric ODI cricket, played at the limit of current ability, and it was magnificent
Jon Hotten
30-Mar-2015
It is the first over of the World Cup final, the biggest game of your life. You are playing your greatest enemy on a ground where they never seem to lose. You are facing a man bowling very accurate, late-swinging yorkers at more than 90mph from left-arm over the wicket. There are 93,000 people watching you do it, and a few million more on television, on the radio and online. All of those ephemeral thoughts about the meaning of the occasion to you, your family, your team and your country must be dealt with.
What do you do next?
Well if you're Brendon McCullum, you run down the wicket and try and batter the ball into next week, or judging by the blur of bat speed, maybe even next month.
No retreat, no surrender.
Full postIs Root right for England?
He is a success story of the English system, but his kind of batting is going to be outdated in the next four years
Jon Hotten
20-Mar-2015
M Night Shyamalans' hokey horror flick The Village features a superstitious 19th-century community cut off from the rest of the world by deep woods and the creatures that live in them. When a villager defies the elders and escapes, it turns out - spoiler alert - that it's 2004, and the village is a reclusive billionaire's social experiment.
Of course the entire movie is actually an allegory for the England cricket team. They have staggered into the game's new era dazed and blinking, wondering just when it all got so… modern.
How long will it take them to get up to speed? Is the gap still bridgeable?
Full postThe future of ODIs as seen through this World Cup
Stats and trends that are more than six months old are redundant. A revolution is coming
Jon Hotten
04-Mar-2015
I once met a futurologist. He worked for a major international corporation, and his job was to predict technological and lifestyle trends as they pertained to the business. And not things that would be happening next week, either. Stuff that would happen years and years ahead.
"Wow," I thought. "That's the kind of job to have: one where you can never be wrong. Or at least by the time you are, everyone's forgotten about it."
So with a competition halfway done and the next one four long years away, what has the 2015 World Cup got to tell us about the future of the 50-over game? What hints and tremors is it giving out? What are the trends that will shape how it's played?
Full postChris Gayle is alive and great
Whatever his persona and supposed attitude towards the game, Gayle has had a huge impact on cricket
Jon Hotten
25-Feb-2015
Like Schrodinger's cat, West Indies cricket is either alive or dead depending on exactly when you lift the lid of the box and take a look. If it happened almost any time since their benighted tour of India then the answer has been clear, and negative. Not any more though, and at the head of their latest resurrection is the coolest cat of all, Christopher Henry Gayle, a man who seemed to have used up all of his nine lives a long, long time ago.
Asked yesterday what had changed, which switch he had flicked to turn himself from the scratchy simulacrum of a once-great player back into the awesome Gayle Force of 215 from 147 deliveries, he gave the immortal answer: "Cut down on the parties".
He now holds a unique, almost unthinkable triptych: Test match triple-century (two in fact), ODI double-hundred, T20I ton - and you can throw in T20 cricket's all-time highest score too.
Full postMost Read
Writers
Terms of Use|Privacy Policy|Your US State Privacy Rights|Children's Online Privacy Policy|Interest - Based Ads|Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information|Feedback
© 2024 ESPN Sports Media Ltd. All rights reserved