The Shorter Wisden 2013

by John Wisden

  Very few observers, by contrast, would describe South Africa’s Graeme Smith as naturally gifted. With his wide, ungainly stance, strangling grip, and closed-face back-lift, he makes batting look hard work. And yet his method makes perfect sense. In an era where bowling at fourth stump is accepted practice, and when fielders in the arc between wicketkeeper and point often outnumber the rest, Smith’s refusal to hit in areas traditionally regarded as left-handers’ strengths gives him an advantage. More than 8,500 Test runs at nearly 50 as an opening batsman suggest he possesses talents that transcend mere aesthetics (or their absence).

  Most of us are prone to this weakness of falling for the kind of talent that a moment of brilliance implies: a breathtaking stroke, a scintillating piece of fielding. As a result, we underestimate the gifts given to those who achieve consistently, if not spectacularly. After watching a young Dwayne Smith, the West Indian all-rounder who had made a rapid century on Test debut, smash a length ball from Steve Harmison over midwicket and out of the ground in Trinidad some years ago, I turned to my companion and said: “I’ve just seen the next great West Indian batsman.” One shot was enough to fool me. All through the disappointing years that followed, I kept expecting what I thought was exceptional talent to blossom. It never did.

  We are apt to hold too narrow a definition of what constitutes talent. One of Ramprakash’s contemporaries was Graham Thorpe. More than a decade ago in Colombo, I watched him score a hundred against Sri Lanka’s spinners in conditions that could not have been more testing, with the sun beating down and the pitch disintegrating into dust. His strokeplay was not eye-catching; in fact, the innings was devoid of any flowing shots at all. But what an innings it was – one of the finest I ever saw from an England player.

  That day, Thorpe revealed so many different aspects of his talent. He played the ball off the pitch later than any of his team-mates. It takes a particular gift to let the ball keep coming and coming until the bowler is almost yelping with success, but he adopted a kind of French-cricket technique, keeping his back-lift low, and turning the blade with his wrists at the last moment to pierce gaps that most others would have needed satellite navigation to find. His talent was to adapt to his surroundings.

  As for my own career, I take an innings of 99 at Headingley against South Africa in 1994 as one that revealed my own special – for want of another word – talent. It was after the dirt-in-the-pocket match at Lord’s and, in the intervening week, I had to cope with an unusual degree of public interest, with a tabloid tracking my every movement. Between Tests, I had not been able to practise, and there had been no county match for Lancashire.

  The attention was not on my batting, but on my captaincy and character. I had been forced to sit through two torturous televised press conferences, and to listen to a range of critics, from the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck to the chairman of the Headmasters’ Conference, who sought my resignation. It was an uncomfortable time, and before I walked out to bat, I had not given a moment’s thought to the innings. I scratched around for a couple of hours before lunch, and forced myself into some kind of rhythm by dint of nothing more than pure bloody-mindedness. But what I had managed to do, between walking to the middle and facing the first ball, was to put the events of the previous fortnight to the back of my mind. I am certain that, in the same circumstances, not many of my contemporaries could have played that innings, that day.

  The ability to shut out the noise and the clamour is something I see now – to a far greater degree – in Alastair Cook. It is not an aptitude that stands out, is easily recognised, or regarded as exceptional. Hidden from view it may be but, set against the requirements for success at international level, with all its pressures, it is a talent as important as the ability to play a good-looking cover-drive. It is only now, after over 7,000 Test runs and more hundreds than any other England player, that observers (I have been more guilty than most) are starting to think of him as gifted.

  Barring injury, illness or misfortune, Cook – who is only just entering his prime – will probably become the greatest batsman England have ever produced; greatest, that is, in terms of run-scoring, record-breaking and hundred-making. The adjectives that accompany most of his innings are hard-working, focused, driven, effective, pragmatic – as if these attributes, and Cook’s supreme thirst for self-improvement, are not identifiable talents in themselves.

  They are submerged beneath a game that sometimes stands out only for its ordinariness. Yet Andy Flower has commented upon his world-class facility to score through the leg side and off his hip, a gift those at Essex quickly recognised; his ability to shut out extraneous detail, and his concentration levels, speak of a particular talent too. The way he out-thought and outmanoeuvred India’s spinners during consecutive hundreds in Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Kolkata over the winter revealed a cricketing intelligence not shared by many of his team-mates. His hundred in Mumbai was certainly less spectacular than Kevin Pietersen’s, but can we really say Cook is less talented? He simply possesses different strengths.

  Talent may or may not be innate but, in all its facets, it certainly exists to be developed, honed and crafted. The more humdrum aspects of the game – the ability to work hard, stay focused, adapt to circumstance, bring your best game to the crease time and again, despite all the distractions – are all gifts, just as much as sweet ball-striking.

  One of the sweetest strikers in the English game right now is Bopara. The consensus is that he is more naturally gifted than Cook but, as he sat at home over the winter, watching him compile hundred after hundred, how Bopara must have wished for some of his talents – the ability, for example, to put a run of bad scores behind him, or to compile the kind of ugly runs that would keep him in the team from one game to the next until form returns, as Cook did memorably against Pakistan at The Oval in 2010.

  In one of his more poetic moments, Friedrich Nietzsche said: “All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming and ordering.” Cook is indefatigable in ordering his gifts, but no doubt it will be his Essex team-mates, Shah and Bopara, who are remembered as the more talented.

  Being tagged as supremely talented also diminishes Ramprakash’s achievements, because the implication is that the game came easily to him. If it looked that way, it was on the back of unstinting hard work. Having played with him for over a decade, I would not disagree with anybody who called Ramprakash the most dedicated batsman of his generation. As for the most talented? Well, that depends on your definition.

  Mike Atherton is cricket correspondent of The Times. He played 115 Tests for England, and captained them in 54.

  CRICKET BOOKS, 2012

  Stealing Christmas

  JOHN CRACE

  Cricket may be some way off the dodgy expenses claims and cosy kitchen suppers with powerful members of the media that have been enjoyed by politicians in recent years, but it can hardly lay claim to utter transparency in all its affairs. To many outsiders, the sport’s governing bodies still look suspiciously like old boys’ clubs, and their decision-making processes often have all the openness of a group of cardinals at a papal conclave. So, as a gesture of candour, I propose to break with tradition, name my cricket book of the year up front, and declare an interest, for my choice is published by Bloomsbury, the owners of Wisden. You will have to take my word for it that no money has changed hands; but then any of you who have had business dealings with Bloomsbury shouldn’t find that too hard to believe.

  Hundreds of millions of pounds were definitely changing hands in other areas of the game, and this was the subject of Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy by Ed Hawkins. This wasn’t the best-written book of the year – after a while, the breathless present tense becomes rather too, well, breathless – but it was far and away the most important, because it tried to get to the heart of the betting scandals that continue to dog the game.

  Listen to the ICC and cricket’s anti-corruption units, and you might imagine
skulduggery was largely a thing of the past. Journalist and betting expert Ed Hawkins thought so too, until he started hearing rumours from Indian bookmakers that it was alive and kicking. One game in particular was brought to his attention: the 2011 World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan at Mohali. According to his sources, “India would score more than 260... then pak will cruise to 100, then lose 2 quick wickets, at 150 they will be 5 down and crumble and lose by a margin of over 20 runs.” As Hawkins and an old friend, Cherenne, sat down to watch the match on television, they grew progressively quieter. It’s true that India made exactly 260 rather than more, but Pakistan reached 100 for two, slipped to 106 for four, lost their fifth wicket at 142, and were all out one ball before the end of the final over for 231. “You’ve stolen Christmas from me,” Cherenne said as she left. “I’m never watching a game with you again.”

  Hawkins was halfway through a one-man, heart-of-darkness voyage in investigative gonzo journalism to see what else he could uncover. And it hadn’t taken him long to make considerable progress after heading to India and meeting a host of spivs, runners, fixers and Mr Bigs, whose real names remain unclear. The evidence he discovered was damning on a circumstantial level, if not conclusive proof. But that was neither here nor there, for the advantage Hawkins has over other writers who have tried to get to the bottom of match-fixing is that he understands the mathematical nuances of betting.

  The big scams, such as the Cronje affair and, allegedly, the 2011 World Cup semi-final, may be the easiest for the lay person to grasp. But what Hawkins shows is that, because of the phenomenal amount of money wagered at any one time on even the most insignificant televised match, a very small amount of information can nudge the odds firmly in the bookmakers’ favour. It’s all about probability. A bookie with the right algorithms can make a fortune in marginal, high-volume bets from knowing something as simple as who will bat first. Throw in the knowledge of a bent, bought player, and it’s a licence to print money.

  In the process, Hawkins also exposes the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing scandal – for which the cricket authorities were quick to claim the moral high ground – as something of a show trial. The whole purpose of the no-ball scam was not to influence the betting, but merely to prove that Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif could be got at. Bookmakers follow betting patterns on a second-by-second basis: if anyone tried to place a bet on something as specific as a no-ball, it would be rejected as abnormal. Whatever else bookies may be, as Hawkins points out, they are not stupid. But others appear to be. The real importance of this book lies in its existence. Over the past 15 years, the cricket authorities have spent millions of pounds on various match-fixing investigations and have uncovered very little. Armed with what was almost certainly an extremely modest advance, Hawkins on his own has uncovered substantially more, in less time.

  I can’t remember Gideon Haigh ever constructing a duff sentence, and On Warne more than maintains his reputation as the most literary of the current breed of Australian cricket writers. There have been countless biographies – not to mention autobiographies – of “the greatest spin bowler who ever lived”™, and Haigh sensibly eschews this route, despite having spent more time with Warne over the years than many of his predecessors. Instead, as the title suggests, he has opted for something rather bolder: a philosophical treatise on the meaning of being Shane Warne; a deconstruction of genius.

  If some of the material feels relatively familiar – the betting scandals, the weight-loss drugs, the infighting in the Australian dressing-room – Haigh’s approach casts them in a new light. While never less than forensic in his analysis, he makes us reconsider the sheer physical exertion and contortion in imparting so many revolutions on a ball, hour after hour, year after year; the burden of being every captain’s go-to bowler; the expectation of being asked consistently to win the unwinnable; and the sheer absurdity of finding a unique talent in someone who would be just as happy sitting on a beach, drinking beer with his mates.

  My only small reservation is that Haigh perhaps loves his subject just a bit too much. Plenty have queued up to knock Warne for his off-field behaviour and, as an author, Haigh is within his rights not to join in. But, while never avoiding the difficult issues, he does tend to give Warne the benefit of the doubt. Take the incident in which Warne and Mark Waugh were found to have accepted money from an Indian bookmaker on the 1994-95 tour of Sri Lanka in exchange for information about pitch conditions and team selection. Haigh’s view is that it was an act of naivety on a very demanding tour, no real harm was intended or done and, however badly Warne and Waugh might have acted, they looked like saints in comparison with the Australian board’s handling of the situation.

  All of which may, or may not, be true, but it rather misses the central point that Warne and Waugh did take the money on offer, and should have known better; deep down, they probably did. But why did no one else in the Australian team do the same? Why did they not even think to ask their team-mates whether they thought it was a good idea? Haigh is equally lenient in regard to Warne’s diet, drinking, gambling and womanising, his attitude being that countless other cricketers have done the same or worse; that Warne’s behaviour away from cricket is a personal matter; and that he gets more flak simply because of his celebrity. These are valid points, but they close down the argument rather than open it up. The aim is not to pass moral judgment on Warne – as far as I’m concerned, he can do pretty much what he likes – but to understand him. Why is he so self-destructive? Is there a relationship between his personality flaws and his bowling genius? I’m fairly sure there might be, if you looked carefully enough.

  With its subtitle of “Manliness, Yorkshire Cricket and the Century that Changed Everything”, Max Davidson’s wonderfully entertaining We’ll Get ’Em In Sequins nails its quirkiness to the mast from the off. Which immediately requires a second disclaimer for mentioning another Bloomsbury title so soon. I haven’t been got at. Honest. Nor is it a coincidence. Rather it’s a matter of common sense. Cricket has become far more of a niche market in recent years, as book sales have declined substantially and mainstream publishers have become cautious about commissioning anything at all. So when a publisher does commission a talented writer with a proven backlist, it shouldn’t come as a total surprise if the book turns out to be a good one.

  When Davidson saw Darren Gough competing in tight-fitting spandex and sequins under strobe lighting on BBC TV’s Strictly Come Dancing, he realised that the long-established link between Yorkshire cricket and testosterone-heavy displays of manliness had just been smashed in front of his eyes. “Was that thunder in the distance?” he writes. “No, it was generations of Yorkshire fast bowlers turning in their graves. What had gone wrong? Or – depending whether you were Old Yorkshire or New Yorkshire – what had gone right? Wasn’t there something rather exhilarating in a 90mph fast bowler and lusty tail-end batsman who could also do a nifty foxtrot in an outfit that glittered like a Christmas tree?”

  We’ll Get ’Em in Sequins is divided into chapters on seven of the greatest cricketers to play for Yorkshire – George Hirst, Herbert Sutcliffe, Hedley Verity, Fred Trueman, Geoffrey Boycott, Gough and Michael Vaughan – and can be read pleasurably in that way. Cumulatively though, the book amounts to rather more, as what emerges is an intelligent and touching social history of a sport and a county that were dragged, at times kicking and screaming, from the repression of the Edwardian era, via the Angry Young Men of the post-war period and the reluctance to engage with women’s rights and social diversity, through to the all-singing, all-dancing man hugs of the early 21st century.

  Davidson’s approach does have its minor drawbacks. I’m all for seeing cricketers as rooted within the social mores of their time – not enough writers have done this – but they are also individuals responsible for their own actions. Even by the standards of their day, Trueman and Boycott took boorishness and self-centredness to new levels. My favourite chapter by far, though, is the one on Verity, in w
hich Davidson perfectly captures his reserve, dignity and self-sacrifice. The description of Verity’s war service is almost unbearably moving, and it remains a goal of mine to visit his grave in Sicily.

  One of the perennial genres of cricket writing is the ghosted autobiography of the senior, well-established international, and this year’s pick of the bunch is James Anderson’s Jimmy: My Story. I don’t know Anderson at all, but he has always come across as a nice bloke, even when he was larging it up as the tyro with the red streak in his hair. And his book, the story of his rise, fall and rise again as an England player, does nothing to disprove the notion. Here is a thoughtful, determined and quite gentle man working hard to develop his skills and maximise his success as a bowler.

  The inevitable downside of this sort of book is that it feels as if it has been written by committee, with his agent checking every chapter to make sure Anderson has been outspoken enough to secure a newspaper serialisation deal, but not so much that he will risk offending the ECB or any of his current team-mates. As a result, we get a lot of cod psychology about how a man called James – a laid-back guy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose – has to turn himself into fearsome Jimmy, the lairy geezer who is never short of a few insults for opposition batsmen. The first time he describes the process, it’s quite interesting. By the fourth or fifth, I’m ready to skip a few pages.

  More troublesome are the diplomatic omissions. By far the biggest story in the England camp over the past 12 months has been Kevin Pietersen’s falling out, and subsequent rehabilitation, with the squad. And as a long-term member of the England team, Anderson is ideally placed to offer an insider’s-eye view. We get nothing. Nada. I appreciate that the book’s deadline may have predated the denouement of the Pietersen affair, but KP had long been an accident waiting to happen, and Anderson’s unwillingness to offer anything but total admiration for him leaves the reader in an unconvincing no-man’s-land. Describing his match-winning 151 in Colombo early in 2012, Anderson writes: “At that point things could have gone either way, but he well and truly took the game out of the Sri Lankans’ reach by playing one of the innings that has made him as popular as he is with England fans.” But what about Pietersen’s popularity within the team? Surely relations must have been fairly toxic by then.