Nicholas Hogg
The fear and loathing of not getting picked
Nearly every cricketer has had to deal with rejection, even Bradman
Nicholas Hogg
24-Apr-2017
Like me, you may have a horrifying memory of being picked for teams when you were at school - two captains step forward, the squad stands in line, and the captains call out their team one by one in consecutive turns. Best players and mates are chosen first, then the big kids, or the ones who might have sweets as bribes. It's a sort of IPL draft without the riches. Although it does have the humiliation if you're the one picked last, or not picked at all.
Imagine three months of standing against the wall and not even making it onto the playground. Graeme Swann's "holiday" to South Africa in 1999-2000 included a solitary ODI, a hotel-bar bill, and the fear that Test cricket "required an unobtainable skill level", as he later wrote. Swann survived that early snub to star for England from 2007 onwards, but not all make the most of a second chance.
Not being picked for England would prove pivotal in Jonathan Agnew retiring from professional cricket to follow a media career. After a summer debut in 1984 against the visiting West Indies, bagging the prize scalps of Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge, Agnew flopped in the final game of the home season - a draw with Sri Lanka in which he was part of a vilified bowling unit. Still, he was chosen to go to India that winter, and he must wonder why he bothered.
Full postWhy actors are drawn to cricket
Both are art forms that encourage a contemplation of life and general faffing about
Nicholas Hogg
09-Mar-2017
X-Men mutant Wolverine has an accelerated healing process, retractable claws, and extra-sensory gifts of sight, smell, and hearing. Yet his most spectacular power is being able to hit Shane Warne back over his head. Well, this unique talent belongs to Hugh Jackman, one of the many actors who love to swing a bat when not learning their lines.
So what is it about cricket that draws thespians to the game in droves?
Writer Alan Ross described watching a cricket match as "a storehouse of thought, of thought occasioned by the game itself, by the beauty, wit or intelligence of one's companion: or simply a private unravelling of problems, personal, political, moral." Which is perhaps why it attracts the acting type. "We too are people who essentially dream and loaf for a living," admits Mike Simkins, actor, and author of Fatty Batter, his comic account of captaining a team of thespians. "We too have long hours in which to contemplate the uncertainties, worries, and illusions of life." The sporadic nature of a career on stage and screen is ideal. "Cricket is a glorious way to soak up the sun between interviews, a chance to pick up tips from fellow actors about auditions. I reckon half the crowd at a Middlesex match are out of work thespians."
Full postThe real spirit of cricket
Cricket has always had a drinking culture, but the promotion of alcohol in the game has reached saturation point now
Nicholas Hogg
15-Feb-2017
In the summer of 1989, three years prior to reaching the legal drinking age, I admit I'd already cracked open a good few cans of lager. Before I even watched David Boon in England during that Ashes series, I knew he had guzzled 52 tinnies on the flight from Australia. Fifty-two cans, on the way to an Ashes series. Perhaps it tells of the brash confidence of that great Aussie side that the almighty piss-up began before the 4-0 victory rather than after. Or it simply reflects the long and torrid relationship between cricket and alcohol.
All the blokes I played cricket with drank, as did the professionals of that era, and every other cricketing era. The modern game was born in a pub, the infamous Bat & Ball inn on Broadhalfpenny Down. From those beery afternoons with gamblers in top hats to mega-breweries emblazoned across billboards, willow and hops have forever been entwined.
Writing in 2009, shortly after Andrew Symonds had been dismissed from the Australian team for one beer too many, again, Mike Atherton worried that "cricket and booze" were inseparable. After calling out the hypocrisy of an organisation bankrolled by beer brands, and the "finger-pointing" righteousness of Ricky Ponting, a reformed legend of lager overload himself, Atherton also reminisced about his own drunken celebrations.
Full postThe magic of getting all ten
How do bowlers who get nine-fors feel?
Nicholas Hogg
18-Jan-2017
One bowler taking all ten wickets in an innings is a rare event. I've never seen it happen at any level - not in a match I've been playing in, nor watching, whether spectating from the stands or following it live on television.
Hedley Verity's 10 for 10 for Yorkshire against Nottinghamshire in 1932 is still the best ever return for a bowler in a single first-class innings.
Writing in 10 for 10 - Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat, a gem of an account recalling the momentous game, author Chris Waters delights in figures "so flawless, so symmetrically stunning", and describes a performance that "has an air of amazement that glows to this day".
Full postA letter to my 12-year-old self
A peek into your cricketing future and what you can do to make it better (and ache less)
Nicholas Hogg
24-Dec-2016
Dear Nick,
Merry Christmas from your future self in 2016!
First of all, you'll be glad to know the nuclear attack always threatened by 1980s TV and film hasn't happened, yet. And more importantly, as a cricket-mad kid, you'll be glad to hear that you're still playing the sport you love. I know you've been setting up ad hoc games on the park on weekends with your dad, and there are all those frenetic tennis-ball tournaments against the factories at the back of the Kwik Save supermarket, but as this was the first season you put on a pair of proper whites, I thought I'd send you a few words of advice.
Full postThe greatest debut innings of all time
What do you expect a foreigner from a non-cricketing country to do in his first time playing beach cricket in Sri Lanka?
Nicholas Hogg
02-Dec-2016
Sweden isn't known for its cricketers. Or even its baseball players. It's a proud Scandinavian nation that gave the world Vikings, Abba, Volvo cars, and flat pack furniture. Not willow bats and leather balls. So the mystery deepens as to how a Swedish holidaymaker walked into a game of beach cricket in Sri Lanka, and started launching the local bowlers into the hotel pool.
Earlier this month I was - working, I shall quickly add, not sipping cocktails by that pool watching sixes splash into the deep end - in Negombo, a fishing town turned tourist hub just north of Colombo. Between interviewing crab fishermen for my writing assignment, I wandered across the sand to an ad hoc game of beach cricket. Joining the throng of keen Sri Lankans, players drawn from kids barely in high school to men who could be their granddads, there was a single foreigner - apart from me, of course. As I was there "working", I decided to take some photos. Rather than walk in when the bowler started his run-up, I squatted in the covers and set my focus. The rough sand track was quickly deteriorating, and length balls either grubbed, leapt or stopped dead in the craters.
One of the locals, a lean young man who held the bat right at the top of the handle, fiercely clipped every other ball high over the boundary. The balls he missed darted past his leg stump, had him plumb lbw - if there were umpires - or scuttled across the beach like those famous Negombo crabs. Still, he hit high and hard, and entertained until a leading edge dropped into the tourist's crocodile-snapping hands at midwicket.
Full postThe heroic beauty of the last-wicket stand
Nine down and battling? Now, that's romance
Nicholas Hogg
05-Nov-2016
When the towering frame of Steven Finn took the crease at the end of England's second innings in Dhaka, I started dreaming. England, nine wickets down, needed 112 to win, or 111 to avoid defeat, which is probably a better way of phrasing the chase from this unlikely position. I hoped this could be one of the last-stand classics. I envisioned Finn blocking and nudging his way to a valiant 30-odd, while Chris Woakes, no amateur with a willow cleft, battled his way to the total. I pictured the two warriors slaked in sweat, raising their swords to the joyous Three Lions battalion celebrating on the balcony.
You might well guess, by how carried away I'm getting with the language, the military metaphors and the redundant hope, that I love a last-wicket stand. Tension, the scrapping underdog, this is cricket at its most riveting.
And why shouldn't I have hoped in Dhaka? The record tenth-wicket Test partnership is a monstrous 198 from when Jimmy Anderson baffled the bowlers, the fans, and certainly himself - his previous highest score was 49 - by notching up 81 against India at Trent Bridge in 2014. He was so surprised by his fifty, he was unsure how to celebrate. "I didn't really know what that meant, so I just did the round with the bat. I've seen people point at the dressing room, so I did that as well."
Full postThe price of cricket
If you want to play it properly, the game is likely to burn a hole in your pocket
Nicholas Hogg
15-Oct-2016
With an empty Coke can, a plastic bottle, or even just a stone, we used to play football. Drop down a pair of jumpers for goalposts and you have an instant pitch in classrooms, corridors, and even the little patio at my grandma's house, where I played epic matches against my sister. To form a basic game of football cost absolutely nothing. And yes, cricket too: with improvised bats from bits of wood and balls shaped from scrunched-up paper. You can pretend to be a national legend when stroking a sphere of rubbish along the floor with a rolled-up umbrella.
However, if you actually take the field and formally upgrade, the financial costs of playing football and cricket rapidly diverge.
Ask Durham, relegated from top-flight cricket because they couldn't balance their books.
Full postThe difference between 19 and 38 years old in Test cricket
Age is just a number. Regardless of how old or young you are, you can have a presence on the cricket field
Nicholas Hogg
24-Sep-2016
Critics of the England tour party to Bangladesh say that one player is too young and the other is too old. The more positive argue that 38-year-old Gareth Batty is a wizened pro who'll bring spirit, guile, and a steady offspinner's hand to the subcontinent this winter, and that the 19-year-old opener, Haseeb Hameed, is an exciting new prospect ready to take on Test cricket. Coach Trevor Bayliss quickly rolled out the cliché, "If he's good enough, he's old enough", when challenged on the greenness of Alastair Cook's potential opening partner.
Nineteen is young, but not that young. Pakistan's Hasan Raza made his Test debut against Zimbabwe aged only 14. Pelé first played for Brazil at 16, an 18-year-old Muhammad Ali won gold at the 1960 Olympics, and according to the Paul Hardcastle hit song "19", this was the average age of a US combat soldier in the Vietnam War.
Ultimately, age is only a number, and how you've lived your life is a better measure of maturity and character. Chatting with Phil Walker of All Out Cricket, the "preternaturally mature" Hameed revealed that he'd already been asked if he was ready for Test cricket and replied that he most definitely was. "Because if I don't believe that I'm ready, then nobody else will." His county stats, and those hundreds in each innings of a Roses match to make him the first Lancashire batsman to score consecutive hundreds against Yorkshire, stand up to scrutiny. He can bat, obviously. But more importantly, I believe, for the longevity of a career on the international treadmill, is the "boyish innocence and delight at being on a cricket field," noted by Scyld Berry in the Telegraph, paired with "an astute cricketing brain when calculating risk" that will preserve his talent.
Full postFinding family in your cricket brethren
Whether you're a homeless refugee or just a young person in need of guidance, your cricket team can often act as place to roost
Nicholas Hogg
05-Sep-2016
Despite not having played a true home game since the 2009 militant attacks on the Sri Lanka tour bus in Lahore, the Pakistan team proudly tops the ICC Test rankings. Misbah-ul-Haq, captain of this nomadic cricket nation, fittingly said that being No. 1 "is not a destination, but part of a journey". His players see their family and friends a few times a year. Considering the homesickness problems of some of England's best, Pakistan's mighty achievement has come under physical, logistical and psychological stress.
Cricket and home, or a lack of one, is a concept I was introduced to at the tender age of 17. Saturday afternoon, picked for a league game with my old Leicestershire club, Barkby United, I left my house in the morning, walked off my estate and carried my kitbag across the cornfields to the pretty little village ground I'd been playing on since I was 11. We played the match, win or lose I can't remember, and I hiked back across the fields to my house. Or what I thought was my house. My stepfather ensured that I never walked through the door again, and instead of my own bed I slept that night in the park, wearing my whites over the top of my clothes to keep warm.
The next morning I sought out the man I usually called upon for advice - my captain. He might not have guessed that his sage words from mid-off on my outswingers would result in me turning up on his doorstep without a home. However - and long before the #CricketFamily hashtag on Twitter - he welcomed me into his house. I stayed for a month before our opening batsman moved out of his flat so I could move in.
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