Last in the Tin Bath
Page 30
There was something to celebrate in Ireland’s performances again, though, and it was a delight to share a few drinks with their squad in Adelaide after they were eliminated – I was allowed to do so only after Ed Joyce demanded I wear an Irish shirt, mind. It will be criminal if Ireland, a side that has beaten Pakistan, Bangladesh, England and West Indies in its past three World Cup finals, are not involved at the next tournament in 2019 as per the ICC’s current plan. There is no reason why Ireland cannot be a Test nation by then, particularly considering that Bangladesh have been in for some time. Just imagine how good they would be if they were able to retain their best players, instead of losing people like Eoin Morgan and Boyd Rankin to England.
They played some really good stuff again and will realise they are only a couple of penetrating bowlers shy of moving up another level still. We so need these Associate nations involved if it is to be truly recognised as a world tournament. Yes, I am with the majority who urge a reduction in its length, and two matches could be played on the same day to condense it. As someone who works on television, I’m aware of the problem in carrying this out but do not believe it’s an insurmountable problem that can’t be resolved with some persuasion. Overlapping matches reduce the number of advert opportunities for broadcasters, and having worked for Star Sports I get the impression that getting the adverts on is more important to them than having all their equipment fully functional. Cricket has to be spread to new territories, not trapped in a colonial past, and everyone with a vested interest in its wellbeing should be finding solutions right now.
One other thing I would like to ensure stays in the game is traditional forms of spin. The guile of Daniel Vettori and Ravichandran Ashwin, who I thought was terrific throughout the World Cup, showed that if you are any good, there is still a place for you in the very highest company. Unfortunately, with Graeme Swann and Vettori now in retirement, the number of quality traditional spinners is dwindling.
Some of the modern variety would look more comfortable chucking darts at Alexandra Palace than bowling at Lord’s, but I still feel the likes of Sachithra Senanayake and Kane Williamson were victims of a haphazard and slightly unfair system when they were sent off to be laboratory-tested. Personally, I would rather see anyone with a suspect action being put on notice and then monitored in match situations instead. Get them to bowl in short-sleeved shirts so the umpires can see exactly what they need to, and then act if they keep transgressing. If they do, the authorities have a case. Under the current system it feels like those pulled are guilty until proven innocent, whereas I have preferred the benefit of the doubt to work the other way as it attaches less of a stigma.
These mystery spinners dominated Twenty20 cricket for some time. Just think how influential Saeed Ajmal and Sunil Narine were in helping Pakistan and West Indies win respective World Twenty20 tournaments. But their influence has reduced in competitions like the Indian Premier League – in part due to suspicion and their own independent testing procedures – which I was lucky enough to take in first hand in 2015.
These games leave our domestic Twenty20 matches looking like another sport. We have missed a trick in 20-over cricket, something I feel able to say with authority as I have been Sky Sports’ commentary figurehead on the format since its inception in 2003. IPL games are absolutely full on – the players come off the field exhausted – but the focus is on the entertainment side of things. Huge sums of money have been invested in the product and that’s reflected in its popularity. In contrast, we remained a bit village green, threw our lot in with Allen Stanford’s crooked empire in 2008 and have been left isolated ever since.
From a personal point of view I loved the IPL, and it was only when stood doing my own ironing one night that I realised how much I missed Vipers (that’s my pet name for my wife Diana, as in My Little Nest of Vipers, in case I hadn’t mentioned it). Those shirts and waistcoats they kitted me out in – getting the creases out of those would have made a suitable round on The Krypton Factor.
One of the intrigues of the IPL is how the world’s most decorated players mix with India’s up-and-coming talent. You can see the effect this has when a young lad like Sarfaraz Khan, the seventeen-year-old Royal Challengers Bangalore batsman, comes to the crease and from a technical point of view is trying to get as low when striking the ball as his team-mate AB de Villiers, the best player in the world, who is stood at the non-striker’s end. For aspiring cricketers to be able to work with the cream of the game’s global talent is a pretty special and extremely valuable educational experience. It’s a similar process to that which young English players went through in a bygone time. We used to attract the crème de la crème for seasons on end. Players of the calibre of Zaheer Abbas, Mike Procter, Imran Khan, Wayne Daniel, Andy Roberts, Viv Richards, Barry Richards and Joel Garner used to be part of county cricket’s fabric.
Yet the only one on the county scene to match the kind of dedicated commitment of those traditional imported signings is Warwickshire’s Jeetan Patel, whose affection for the club is matched by his team-mates’ affection for him. One of the things I don’t get, and I am old so perhaps I’m on a different wavelength, is some players coming in from overseas for three weeks. They have no sense of the history of the club, and I don’t know how they fit into the dressing room. It’s all a bit too mercenary for my taste.
I guess it’s to do with market forces, and you cannot change the fact that on the world cricket scene the number one draw is the IPL. We have to accept that is the way it is, but I hate to think county cricket has become a resting ground for players who have come out of international cricket. These iconic figures of the 1970s and 1980s were current international players, the best of their era. Using my own county Lancashire as an example, in 2015 they had three southern Africans no longer involved at international level in Ashwell Prince, Kyle Jarvis and Alviro Petersen. Can they match the ambition of their great predecessors, who still had much to prove, or are they on a last pay cheque? They certainly came up with some impressive numbers when it came to wickets and runs, but I cannot shake the fear that the County Championship is becoming Easy Street. They are playing alongside Tom Smith, Simon Kerrigan and Jordan Clark, cricketers aspiring to be top competitors on the international scene. I hear the argument that they can pass on their knowledge of that environment, but there has to be a willingness for that knowledge to be shared or exchanged.
For me, from the outside looking in, Kumar Sangakkara is a fantastic signing by Surrey, because he’s of such great career pedigree and a thoroughly good bloke. He spoke of his love of the smell of a county dressing room and how he wanted to finish his career here, as it was one of his remaining ambitions on his cricket bucket list. Conversely, I sat next to Tillakaratne Dilshan in Colombo in November 2014, and he told me in no uncertain terms that county cricket was laughable. Not the standard, he insisted, but the scheduling it keeps. Although he signed up for Derbyshire, it was a concern to him that there was so much switching between formats. We need to react and start blocking off tournaments like the NatWest T20 Blast in three and four-week passages.
Cricket is all that matters in India so we’ll never match the IPL in the UK, just as they will never be able to get near us in terms of a Premier League in football. You need an inherent love for the game – something traditional, deep and established – to exist before you can develop something of such high quality. In India, it helps that cricket doesn’t have to compete with football, rugby, golf, tennis and flat-racing events that overlap our domestic seasons. They also have the advantage of the weather, the odd Armageddon-style deluge aside.
But if we want to advance our own game and offer the British public a product that will engage and excite, then we certainly have the capacity to stage something very similar to the Big Bash League. My proposed template – eight teams, who play each other twice – would replicate that used in Australia and India. Where we have an advantage in scheduling, however, is that we are not like the other two countries a
s there is no need for plane travel to get around the venues, enabling us to get through the same number of games in fewer days.
You’d have to play it alongside Test match cricket, as they do in Australia, to shoehorn it into the domestic itinerary and make it attractive to the best players in the world, because it needs that to give it credence as a proper event. When you consider that players such as Glenn Maxwell, Darren Sammy, Eoin Morgan, Dale Steyn, Chris Gayle, Morne Morkel and Virender Sehwag are not guaranteed to play, you know you are talking about a top competition. Every one of those players has featured in county cricket at some stage, and some in the past couple of years, but hosting something on a grander scale would attract more of the top global names for longer periods.
You need big money for big ideas, and the IPL model gets its money back from their TV coverage – and that means commercial sacrifices like strategic time-outs, breaks in play just so they can get more adverts into the live coverage. From an advertisers’ perspective it is perfect, because there are so many people watching and having fun that it looks like a great event to be associated with. Grounds are rammed with up to 75,000 people.
In contrast, some of our counties can get 4,000 tops and for them that’s a good return. But it’s not enough to justify top-level investment. No wonder then that there has been such resistance to an English Premier League from around the shires. Only those with traditional, international venues – that house 20,000 plus – could be accommodated in the kind of franchise system I propose.
I have a great affinity with Twenty20, but I’m still to revise my opinion that this is not serious cricket and has to be treated in a different way to the proper stuff. It may make people lots of money, and good luck to them. Kieron Pollard is a very good Twenty20 player, but there will be no one talking about him in the pub when the subject of great players comes up. Talk turns to people like Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting. They marvel at our own James Anderson. A player is judged by what he does in Test match cricket. It has always been thus. Rewind twenty years and we were not judging Sachin, Brian Lara, Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne on what they were producing in one-day cricket. We judged their credentials on Test match cricket ability.
So, what of Test cricket? For some time, there has been concern that although it is still embraced by us in England and over in Australia, it has been losing its appeal in other parts of the world. There was a feeling developing that like their former captain Sourav Ganguly’s bell-ringing – he made such a bodge of the job before the start of play one morning at Lord’s that it failed to register on Snicko – India were becoming out of sync with it.
There has been talk of modernising it, although when I heard Colin Graves mooting his idea of four-day Tests after succeeding Giles Clarke as chairman of the ECB, it struck me that we would be looking at one hell of a long day in the office. Graves proposed each day to contain 105 overs rather than the current set-up of five days of ninety overs, but the sad truth about Test cricket is that it just seems to be getting slower when it comes to over-rates.
If players are struggling to bowl ninety overs, how on earth are they going to get through an extra fifteen? A day’s play would be finishing just before News at Ten. It drives me mad watching the numerous stoppages that take place, from drinks breaks, and the twelfth man running on for a natter, to groundsmen arriving with all manner of implements. Then there are the stoppages for technology reviews.
I played at a time when eighteen overs an hour in county cricket was mandatory. They didn’t even need a minimum number in Test cricket, because bowlers simply got through their six balls without being given a hurry-up. I’d keep Test cricket at five days of ninety overs each, but empower match officials to clamp down even more than they do now on slow over-rates. If a captain can’t get his bowlers moving along at fifteen overs an hour, he’s banned for a Test – no questions asked.
One of Graves’s concerns was about fifth-day crowds, but I would have a solution to that. As a Yorkshireman he should know – and I’m a temporary resident of the county, so have some experience of their thinking – that folk like something for nothing. I would propose throwing the doors open for free against opponents other than Australia. It certainly worked at Headingley in 1998 when 13,000 turned up for the half an hour it took to wrap up South Africa’s tail. And those that shelled out to be cut price fifth-day Ashes spectators in Manchester and The Oval in 2005, and Cardiff and The Oval in 2009, will testify what great value for money it was.
One thing for certain is that there are challenges ahead but after more than half a century in the game, after starting out as cricket’s great unwashed on Water Street, I have come to accept that times move on and attitudes will alter. But the more it changes, the more it stays the same.
There have been several periods when county cricket has been dismissed as obsolete, but it’s still here. We have shifted from three-day to four-day cricket and even had seasons of both; we have seen players on strike, others banned; the world’s brightest talents have been shipped in, and the world’s brightest talents evacuating for other destinations. On the international stage, the revolutionary World Series Cricket threatened to split the game in two, and did so temporarily at least. Others have tried to form breakaways and failed; some have had fleeting success, some will keep on trying.
But none of this has diminished my enthusiasm for traditional cricket – for the purest contest between bat and ball. English cricket has provided me with a wonderful life in various guises, and continues to do so. As a player I was knocked off my feet; as a coach I was kicked when I was down; and in the commentary box I have been in and out of my seat as its number one fan. I will continue to champion its cause and make no apologies for doing so.
Index
(the initials DL refer to David Lloyd, GL to Graham Lloyd)
Abberley, Neal, ref1
Abbott, Sean, ref1
Abdul Qadir, ref1
Accrington, ref1
DL’s early life in, see under Lloyd, David
DL’s favoured hangouts in, ref1
Accrington CC, ref1
brewery loan to, ref1
Chance to Shine grant for, ref1
characters at, ref1
DL at, ref1
and first-team debut, ref1
DL rejoins, ref1, ref2
for third playing stint, ref1, ref2
DL’s donation to, ref1
financial affairs of, ref1, ref2
GL plays for, ref1, ref2, ref3
Khan’s donation to, ref1
Accrington Institute, ref1
Accrington Secondary Technical School, ref1
Accrington Stanley FC, ref1, ref2, ref3
DL becomes non-executive director of, ref1
financial affairs of, ref1
Scottish players in, ref1
supporters’ club of, ref1
and Twitter, ref1, ref2, ref3
Accrington Victoria Hospital, ref1
Agar, Ashton, ref1, ref2
Agnew, Jonathan, ref1
Ali, Moeen, ref1
All-England Methodist Church Cup, ref1
Allen, Gubby, ref1
Allott, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Ambrose, Curtly, ref1
Amiss, Dennis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
injuries suffered by, ref1
Amla, Hashim, ref1
Anderson, James, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Andrew, Keith, ref1
Archer, Mrs (teacher), ref1
Arlott, John, ref1, ref2
Arnold, Geoff, ref1
Arthur, Mickey, ref1, ref2, ref3
Ashes (see also Australia national side):
1913-14, ref1
1974-75, ref1 passim, ref1
crowds at, ref1
1975, ref1
1977, ref1
1981, ref1
1997, ref1, ref2
1998-99, ref1, ref2
2005, ref1, ref2, re
f3
2009, ref1
2013, ref1, ref2
2013-14, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
intrigue and drama engendered by, ref1
Ashwin, Ravichandran, ref1
Asif Iqbal, ref1
Aspin (a.k.a. o’Moleside), Bill (maternal grandfather), ref1
Aspin, Annie (aunt), ref1
Aspin, Brian (cousin), ref1
Aspin, Harry (uncle), ref1, ref2
Aspin, Jean (cousin), ref1
Associated Tyre Specialists, ref1
Astle, Nathan, ref1
Atherton, Michael, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
Atkinson, Ron, ref1
Austin, Ian, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Australia national side, ref1, ref2, ref3 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 (see also Ashes)
and Arthur–Lehmann coaching contrast, ref1
in Centenary Test, ref1
in World Cup, ref1
Bailey, George, ref1
Bailey, Trevor, ref1, ref2
Bailhache, Robin, ref1
Bairstow, David, ref1
Ballance, Gary, ref1, ref2, ref3
Bangladesh national side, ref1
Banks, Tommy, ref1
Bannister, Jack, ref1
Barber, Bob, ref1, ref2
Barclay, John, ref1, ref2
Barker, Andrew, ref1
Barker, Keith, ref1
Barlow, Eddie, DL encouraged by, ref1
Barmy Army, ref1, ref2
Barratt, Peter, ref1
Barrington, Ken, ref1
Baxenden FC, ref1
Baxter, Peter, ref1, ref2
Bayliss, Trevor, ref1, ref2
Bedi, Bishan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Bedser, Alec, ref1, ref2
Bell, Ian, ref1, ref2
Bell, Jimmy, ref1
Benaud, Richie, ref1, ref2
Bennett, Bob, ref1, ref2, ref3
Benson & Hedges Cup, ref1
1973, ref1