Nicholas Hogg
Sri Lanka, here we come
The Authors Club is heading back there, and this time they're armed with a pacey tyro and a freshly minted legspinner
Nicholas Hogg
07-Jan-2016
I'm in that familiar state of pre-tour fantasy. In a week's time I'll be lucky enough to fly out to Sri Lanka with the Authors Cricket Club, a team of writers I helped revive in 2012 with literary agent and author Charlie Campbell. Despite a dismal overseas record of played 21, lost 20, won 1 - when the gods of weather and swing bowling converged on the hillside of a tea estate in Nuwara Eliya - we still approach each tour with a boyish and unfounded optimism. From a dark and wet January in England, visions of match-winning hat-tricks, miraculous feats of six-hitting, and diving catches that only players with superpowers could possibly hold, fill the waking thoughts of grown men. This time we're coming home victorious.
Then we shamble up to our first, and last, tour-preparation net. Some of us even have new kit that we got for Christmas, and others have received coaching or been in front of a bowling machine. The chatter in the changing room is upbeat about our chances in Sri Lanka. We know what to expect now - scorching heat, superior cricketers - and we've recruited a pacey tyro who's half the age of our more "experienced" players.
So we start batting and bowling. The tyro zips red blurs past our heads, bats and into our stumps, or bodies (I may well resign from the macho "no thigh pad club" I founded last season, considering the purple blotches on my leg), and our more portly player manages to fall over in his run-up, tumbling over like Charlie Chaplin, if Charlie Chaplin drank bitter and binged on pie and pizza. Balls are whanged into the side netting, two players retire injured from their batting session, one with a dislocated shoulder. Our star opener holds a palm out to stop a straight drive, and spends the rest of the night massaging his hand back into shape. After 60 minutes we're sweating, red-faced and limping, and agree to regroup in the bar to talk tactics.
Full postFriendly rivalry: what's that all about?
Playing against a mate - whether he's on the same team or in the opposition - brings its own challenges and joys
Nicholas Hogg
07-Dec-2015
Sport, as audiences, players and especially football referees know, can bring out both the best and worst in us. Yet competition is what makes a contest, and a fair, hard-fought match is especially thrilling when an established rivalry adds backstory. Like ancient family vendettas, these rivalries can exist for years without either party ever knowing what originally caused the rift. The blood feuds between countries and clubs are well known, as well as those bitter personal battles that can escalate into violence - see Javed Miandad and Dennis Lillee for details. But what complications arise when the batsman or bowler is your team-mate, or best friend?
Though born and bred in Leicestershire, and being lucky enough to follow the Foxes in the 1980s, when they had David Gower and were capable of winning more than once every two years, the Somerset fixtures at Grace Road left me conflicted. I was usually willing on two of the visiting players - Viv Richards and Ian Botham - to succeed. They were my favourite cricketers of the era and I always wanted them to score runs and take wickets, and if neither performed and Leicestershire won (which did actually happen quite regularly, once upon a time), I went home disappointed.
This conflict of wanting the opposition to do well but ultimately for your own team to win must have been something experienced by those two Somerset players in particular.
Full postGot a good arm?
Enjoy it while it lasts. Once you're past 40, you'll be down to all kinds of subterfuge to make up for its loss of prowess
Nicholas Hogg
17-Nov-2015
Okay. You're the wrong side of 40, but you can still bat, as the wisdom of the willow blade is greater than the dumb speed of that teenage opening bowler, the unthinking tearaway who roars in and tries to knock your head off - which is fine, as you repeatedly glide him to the rope. Even your flighted twirlers, interspersed with a well-disguised quicker, flatter ball, can draw that same impetuous youth out of his crease. Perhaps your fielding skills aren't what they used to be, and it's been years since anyone called you "the panther", but if the ball is airborne and within your reach (non-diving, of course, because there's a silent pact among golden-club players that has decreed that diving beyond the age of 40 is both unnecessary and undignified) a steady eye and a safe pair of hands will take the catch. All in all, you're pretty good cricketer for your age.
Except you can't throw.
Having a "good arm" is just nostalgia. I can cope with the adjustments of no longer trying to bowl fast, and look forward to learning the craft of spin as my body slows down and I rely more on brain than brawn. But how I'd love to throw a screamer in to the wicket just one more time. Hear again that crack of ball on leather as the keeper pouches a perfect rocket that zeroed on target. Or better still, that one-bounce direct hit that lifts a stump clean out of the pitch, when the flailing batsman doesn't even turn around to watch the umpire raise his finger because he knows the cool marksmanship of your throw has taken his wicket.
Full postSorry, I slipped
In village cricket, if you're not very good at playing, be imaginative with your excuses
Nicholas Hogg
28-Oct-2015
The excuse is a method of self-defence, and a vital skill in the preservation of a club cricketer's ego. Where the professional player has an audience of coaches and HD cameras to scrutinise every action of his game, and the self-made error is there for all to see, the amateur has licence to blame an external force for his downfall. Depending on the mistake that needs a scapegoat, the excuse for the golden duck, dropped catch, or that over that mostly ends up in the next field, will be anybody's, or anything's, fault but our own.
The light, either too much of it or too little, can pretty much help out in any predicament. The spilled chance - from that lollipop that loops into your hands and then onto the grass, to the flat-batted screamer that singes your fingertips because you were too scared to make the attempt - can be nullified with the universal "I didn't pick it up", followed by a shrug of the shoulders, and perhaps a point to either the background or the sun. There is no argument with the player who can't see the ball - who can check your eyesight to see if you're lying? - and this bad light/bright light excuse can be called upon whether at the crease, while fielding, or not wanting to give your team-mate out stumped because you're staring into the setting sun.
Unfortunately I had none of these particular defenders at hand when I once dropped an absolute sitter at cover. Our famously luckless opening bowler was doing the Stuart Broad double teapot and glaring. My plea was that I'd slipped. I theatrically checked my studs and then the turf. Obviously the groundsman had over-watered the square. But when the batsman went on to make a hatful of runs, I had no allies, until weeks after the game, when a photographer sent us photos of the match. Quite clearly I could be seen losing my footing, and was nearly horizontal when my hands actually clutched at the ball. The bowler was having none of it. I'd dropped a sitter, as simple as that. The lesson was that an excuse must be instant to be effective.
Full postDon't miss the ending
That a game, lasting between 20 overs and five days, can be decided on the fate of the final delivery, is remarkable
Nicholas Hogg
15-Sep-2015
In a perfect world (meaning, game of cricket) every match goes down to the last ball. All results are possible, and in the mad scramble to victory, or defeat, there is delight, horror, humour and shame - like the Chappell brothers conspiring to roll New Zealand to defeat in 1981.
A couple of times a season I might be lucky enough to play in one of these thrilling last-ball finishes. My favourite ridiculous boyhood, and probably adulthood, fantasy is to be in the field with six runs required. As the batter seemingly lifts the ball over the boundary to glory I leap backwards, flexed like a springing salmon, catch the ball one-handed, before lobbing it back into play, balletically forward rolling and running on to the field to take the match-winning catch. Alas, such a daydream has not yet become a reality, although I did nearly clear out a row of deckchairs a few weeks ago when I dived from the field to try to tap a maximum back on to the pitch - instead, I bruised my palm and scared a couple of small children, and the six remained a six.
Less fantasy, but still occasionally ridiculous, is the very real drama from a final-ball finish at any level of cricket. That a game, lasting from 20 overs to five days, after all the twists and turns can be decided on the fate of a single delivery, is a remarkable climax.
Full postAll aboard the ECB bus
A recent interview with the England board's CEO Tom Harrison was a reflection of the ECB's priorities - and the issues it would like swept out of sight
Nicholas Hogg
24-Aug-2015
On TMS during the second day of The Oval Test, in the oft-repeated conversation on why bowlers rarely captain, Graeme Swann said of his former captain Andrew Strauss that he'd "take a bullet for him" and that he was "a natural leader".
Later that afternoon, in a rare interview, this time with Jonathan Agnew during the lunch break, ECB chief executive Tom Harrison praised Strauss as a man possessing absolute "integrity" and a shared "belief in our [the ECB's] vision for the game".
Harrison was hardly going to scythe down a man he had personally hired - not that he's sentimental. Even the sober Daily Telegraph described Harrison as the ECB's "hatchet man" after the appointment, in the wake of which he rapidly dismissed Paul Downton, coach Peter Moores, and, as every man and his dog knows, Kevin Pietersen. "It was a day I shan't forget," he said of the KP doomsday, before describing the cull as a "necessary" act in the determination to stick to a plan.
Full postDoes a high cricket IQ improve a player?
Intelligent players can often get bogged down by too much information and lose natural awareness of their game
Nicholas Hogg
07-Aug-2015
In an attack on the vapid state of British television's winner-takes-all talent show format, in particular the BBC hit Strictly Come Dancing, comedian Alexi Sayle wrote in the Guardian that "tyranny is the removal of nuance". By this measure, if he were a cricket fan, T20 would be his brutal dictator, and Test cricket the flourishing democracy. Although Sayle's point about nuance was directed at the simplification of his beloved art form, dance, his attack on commercial programming actually highlighted the fact that cricket, even the smash and grab of T20, is also a complex pastime that requires study to truly enjoy.
It is a game, I'd argue, that above all other sports improves the more you understand it - whether playing or watching. The infamous Kim Hughes quote about Mike Brearley, that "he had nothing going for him apart from being intelligent" is a barb that has become something of a compliment over time. Brearley, an average batsman but superlative captain, made a career using brain before brawn.
And it's not only players who benefit from using their brain cells. Another quote, less famous perhaps, is that of the late US comedian Robin Williams: "Cricket is basically baseball on Valium." To the uninitiated onlooker this may well be the case. Test cricket (well, apart from days like that utterly miraculous first morning from Stuart Broad at Trent Bridge) can be a subtle, many-layered event. The ignorant witness who watches a maiden without the ball even striking the bat, the stationary slips crouched, the fielders strolling, will wonder what on earth the dedicated fan finds so compelling.
Full postLost in cricket
To play truly well one must lose the words of the coach, the press, and the self, and revel in time spent at the crease
Nicholas Hogg
23-Jul-2015
Time in the middle was precious freedom from the world for Sachin Tendulkar. Though he took guard while fixed in the gaze of a billion-plus acolytes, this was his space, his moment. Writing in the New Statesman, Ed Smith argued that "the batting crease became his sanctuary from fame, somewhere he could escape the soap opera of his life".
I'm not worshipped by adoring fans, nor am I followed by voracious paparazzi, and I do not have a personal security detail. However, I too have come to savour my time at the wicket as refuge from the pressures of modern living. Right now my mobile phone sits in my pocket, loaded with potential life-changing information. At any moment I could receive a text message or a call that could forever alter the status quo. And if my personal drama is snoozing, there is always the global news feed available at the swipe of a finger.
Whether sleeping, working, or walking through city streets or over a country dale, I'm connected - and distracted - by the incessant buzz of technology.
Full postWill the new England last the Ashes?
They have been playing attacking, unfettered limited-overs cricket, but an Ashes series is a different battle altogether
Nicholas Hogg
06-Jul-2015
"Resurgent", "buoyant", even "born again", that phrase of spiritual renewal, has been used to describe the all-new winning England team after their ODI series victory against New Zealand. Diehard three lions fans, curmudgeonly sceptics when it comes to the national side - who don't always want England to win - discovered a spring in their step after Eoin Morgan and his youthful charges finally sparked up the cricket summer.
So when Stuart Broad, Ian Bell, James Anderson and Alastair Cook walk back into the England changing room for the first Ashes Test, will it be like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse casting their long and doom-laden shadows over the beaming foals? As much as I love Jimmy and Broad bowling well, and admire the gnarly comeback of Captain Cook after his one-day demotion and his barren run of form - sorry Bell, despite your technical perfections, I've never really connected with you as a player, despite the way that you connect with those textbook cover drives - I do wonder if their return may well kill the winning buzz.
And reading what Anderson said to Jack Pitt-Brooke in the Independent, I wonder if he feels this too: "The guys who have come in have been a breath of fresh air," he admits. "The only way that people come into the side and play like they have done in this one-day series, or in the Test series before, is if they are relaxed and they are comfortable in the environment."
Full postBioengineering the supercricketer
Whose DNA strands do you need to combine to make the ultimate allrounder?
Nicholas Hogg
12-Jun-2015
Dr David Bacon rested my battle-damaged cricket bat on the table and began his examination of my wounded favourite. Three seasons old, a hitter of nearly 50 sixes, with cracks taped over and chipped edges, she was showing signs of injury - one corner of the toe had been whittled away by tapping out leg-stump guards on dusty wickets, and the face, fatally, as Dr Bacon would gravely explain, had delaminated. This medical cricket bat term, explained to me gently by the good doctor, meant that the middle had gone.
The bat, the sprung willow that had launched balls out of grounds, could not be saved. However, as Dr Bacon explained, in the lab of B3 Cricket - well, a bustling workshop in an industrial estate on the edge of Nottingham - it could be replicated using a bespoke "bat-mapping" process that overlaid a digital grid over the blade to detect its particular contours.
"A replicant," I pondered, and then imagined, in a way that only an overthinking novelist would. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner the replicants were bioengineered androids with superior strength and agility. Although Dr Bacon quickly pointed out that it would be no superbat, simply a replication of my previous beloved - which in my biased opinion was a superbat - my brain was whirring.
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