by John Wisden
2009
Sweet Summers: The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn edited by Duncan Hamilton
2010
Harold Larwood: The Authorized Biography by Duncan Hamilton
2011
The Cricketer’s Progress: Meadowland to Mumbai by Eric Midwinter
2012
Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography by Chris Waters
2013
Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy by Ed Hawkins
CRICKET IN THE MEDIA, 2012
The goldfish bowl
JONATHAN LIEW
The world of cricket media is a smaller one than many of the men and women who inhabit it – men, mostly – would like to admit. Peer inside the press box at a Test match, and you will find friends and enemies sitting side by side, former team-mates and foes brushing against one another as they queue for the sweet trolley. The analogy of the goldfish bowl is apposite – not least because cricket journalists continue to eat for as long as you keep feeding them.
In such an environment, where information and disinformation spread like contagion, where a rumour can be halfway across the ground before the truth has got its pads on, it is unsurprising that beefs develop. In that respect, 2012 was a more rancorous year than most. Nourished by the onrush of social networks, the cyclic plod of quotes-driven journalism, and the unshakeable fondness of the press for writing about themselves – guilty as charged, by the way – the media, more often than is customary, became the story.
In April, as Andrew Strauss struggled for form in Sri Lanka, Graeme Swann turned his irritation on the assembled press corps. “It’s obvious there’s been a little bit of a witch-hunt towards him that I think is unjustified,” he said. “He hasn’t shown any signs of being under any pressure. We only realised he was under scrutiny because some of us can read.”
For while the world of cricket media remains small, its reach and penetration are now unprecedented. Online newspaper articles can be shared over oceans and across national borders. Tweets and television broadcasts ping across the globe at all hours of day and night. Throw enough opinions at the dressing-room and, eventually, some will slip under the door.
Ex-players, especially recent ex-players, can sometimes provide the most injurious criticism, and perhaps Michael Vaughan’s verdict on Strauss’s captaincy struck a nerve in the England camp. “If he clings on to the job and doesn’t score runs, then he runs the risk of it turning nasty,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “My fear is that if he carries on and has a poor start against West Indies, then the selectors might have to remove him from the team.”
In truth, the tone of Strauss’s inquisitors was never quite as shrill as his supporters claimed. “There is nothing fundamentally so wrong with Strauss’s technique that a little serious time and reflection in the nets is not likely to solve,” wrote James Lawton in The Independent. “Removing him from the captaincy, or pushing him towards resignation, would surely stand out as remarkable folly even by the old standards of English cricket.”
Of course, we all know how Strauss’s story ended. Indeed, at his final press conference he revealed he had been considering retirement for six to 12 months. Perhaps, in hindsight, there were cracks beginning to appear in his immaculate edifice. Back in Sri Lanka, he responded with uncharacteristic exasperation to the assertion by Bob Willis on Sky Sports that he had given up the England one-day captaincy at the behest of his wife. A surer-footed Strauss would have thrown Willis’s comments out with the rubbish. Instead, he bit. “That was pretty disappointing,” he said, “considering the person in question knows neither me nor my other half.” Whether he was referring to his wife or Andy Flower, of course, is a matter of tangential discussion.
May brought more shenanigans, as Kevin Pietersen was censured for tweeting criticism of Sky’s Nick Knight. It was a classic non-story, utterly extraneous to the game itself. But with Fleet Street struggling to drum up much interest in a one-sided series against West Indies, it could scarcely have been more perfectly timed. A delighted Daily Mail emblazoned “SKYGATE” on its back page, following up the next day with a “SKYGATE EXCLUSIVE”, in which Paul Newman revealed Pietersen had “held clear-the-air talks with Nick Knight to thrash out their differences” and “explained his feelings face-to-face”.
Surprisingly, given all the air-clearing, difference-thrashing and feeling-explaining, this particular storm blew over quickly enough. More of Pietersen later – you can be assured of that – but the Knight rumpus turned out to be a neat portent of the summer to follow, when cricket had to shout like never before in order to be heard.
In the larger sporting patchwork of 2012, after all, cricket was the merest stitch, the Basil D’Oliveira Trophy proving no match for Team GB’s deluge of gold, silver and bronze. While Britain held the biggest sporting party in its history, cricket bumbled along at the peripheries, maintaining a dignified detachment from London’s orgy of precious metal. In truth, it was not until England’s win in India at the fag end of the year that cricket enjoyed anything like a firm grip on the nation’s consciousness.
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and there was a snide subtext to the giddy euphoria that greeted the Olympics. Football suffered most harshly, but cricket received its sideways glances too. “Cricket and rugby, with their positive celebration of alcoholic excess, should be taking a hard look at how they regard their paying customers,” wrote Richard Whitehead in The Times. “London 2012 has reminded us of one long-forgotten thing: that watching sport can be, above all, about pure, innocent fun.”
Beyond the soul-searching, our national summer sport was faced with the dilemma of whether to ingratiate itself with the ecstatic throngs, or tough it out until the Olympic tsunami subsided. Some cross-breeding did occur: Jonathan Agnew chuckled his way through the archery at Lord’s, while Mike Atherton, cricket correspondent of The Times, wrote a number of fine Olympic-themed essays.
Given London 2012’s immense drain on resources and space, most of the dailies deserve praise for operating a near full-strength cricket service. Coverage of the county game was generally threadbare, though there was nothing exceptional in that. But when the national press gathered at Headingley for the Second Test against South Africa, they were rewarded for their fidelity with the story of the year.
On August 6, Usain Bolt destroyed the field in the 100 metres, Jason Kenny triumphed in the men’s sprint cycling, and Britain’s showjumpers won their first Olympic gold for 60 years. But it was a measure of the gravity of the Pietersen saga that, the following morning, The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star all found space for it on their back pages.
Pietersen’s collision with the media had been brewing all summer. It began in July with an interview in the Daily Mail, when he spoke for the first time about his retirement from one-day internationals. “I’ve read and seen that we had heated discussions,” he said. “Well, that’s a lie. Whoever told the media that is a liar.”
The suggestion that Pietersen had demanded to be excused from Test duty to play in the Indian Premier League had generated a tranche of negative comment. “It takes a vaulting arrogance to believe you can return to a forum that has made its negotiating position extremely clear with a new set of conditions,” a seething Derek Pringle wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “By doing that, he brings his mercenary instincts, which many feel were his prime motivation when first qualifying for England, to the fore.”
Now, after it emerged he had sent questionable texts to the opposition, it was open season. Suddenly, all the old preconceptions began to resurface. “Suggestions that Pietersen is not the only one seriously at fault are far from convincing enough to enlist sympathy for the transplanted South African,” wrote Hugh McIlvanney in The Sunday Times. And in the Daily Telegraph there was this from Peter Oborne: “Pietersen is the latest white South African to use his selection for the England cricket team to promote his personal ambitions. Ultimately, Pietersen has not much idea of what it means to be British.�
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Perhaps the most astonishing philippic came from Michael Henderson, a long-standing and now gleeful detractor. “Those of us who have never accepted him as a bona fide Englishman,” he trilled in the Daily Mail, “have been expecting this balloon to go up since the moment he made his Test debut against Australia in 2005.”
But the best was yet to come. On a late-night discussion show on BBC Radio 5 Live the following week, Henderson embarked on a deeply addled, barely comprehensible, hugely entertaining ten-minute tirade that began as a broadside against Pietersen and ended up insulting virtually the entire cricket-loving public. “Everybody loathes Pietersen,” he asserted confidently, before turning on Pietersen’s defenders, who included fellow guest Paul Burnham of the Barmy Army. “I think people know who I am in this game,” he continued. “I know seven ex-England captains. I spent three days in the MCC president’s box – no riff-raff there.” It was a bizarre outburst, characterised by frequent interruptions and curt answers, and it ultimately told us a good deal more about Henderson than Pietersen.
There were rare voices of calm amid the collective lunacy. Vic Marks wrote a considered defence of Pietersen in The Guardian: “There has been a whiff of witch-hunt about his omission, as a cricketing establishment closes ranks on an outsider. Some seem to be relishing his comeuppance.” But it was a measure of Pietersen’s estrangement from the media that, when he chose to break his silence, it was via his personal YouTube channel. In September, omitted from England’s World Twenty20 squad, he flew out to Sri Lanka to work as a pundit for ESPN STAR Sports. It felt like a divorce, and in more ways than one.
Of course, we know how Pietersen’s story ended too. His match-winning century at Mumbai completed a bizarre cycle of disintegration and reintegration, with his celebrity friend Piers Morgan among the first to exult. “He’s a consummate professional,” he wrote in his Mail on Sunday column. “He’s also a great, loyal friend, someone who’ll go the extra mile to help you if he can. We had breakfast together in Chelsea a few weeks ago…”
As the year ended, the media were forced to contemplate their own relationship with Pietersen. His talent had never been in doubt; nor had his flaws. But which outweighed the other? The answer, it seemed, was almost entirely determined by events. Even as the praise flowed like wine – a Guardian leader marvelled at the “concentrated focus that produced a dazzling, inventive, brilliant series of strokes” – there remained a suspicion that Pietersen’s next peccadillo would see the tide turn against him yet again. One fancies it will ever be thus.
The fixation with Pietersen may also be seen as a symptom of the increasingly narrow purview of newspaper sport desks. England or nothing; KP or nothing. It is certainly true that the wailing over Pietersen drowned out a number of worthwhile stories. The climax of the County Championship was one notable example.
But in cricket’s foothills, the shires were fighting back. The Daily Mirror website and ESPNcricinfo launched county blogs for the first time, their coverage augmenting existing online offerings from The Times, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. In May came the launch of The Cricket Paper, a new weekly offering from Greenways Publishing priced at £1.50. Its tone was refreshingly sober, its scope – “from Test match to village green” – satisfyingly broad.
Even in the traditional outlets, there were frequent affirmations that cricket journalism need not be hewn from the same changeless rockface. Peter Hayter’s moving interview with James Taylor in the Mail on Sunday, in which the young England batsman shared his memories of his friend Alex Wilson, who died in a tragic accident in late 2009, was touching and brilliant. Scyld Berry’s lament on the decline of state school cricket in the Sunday Telegraph, meanwhile, was superbly researched and powerfully argued.
On such fare does the goldfish bowl roll on: dwindling but defiant, frequently vilified but unstintingly vital. One fancies that this, too, will ever be thus.
Jonathan Liew writes for the Daily Telegraph.
CRICKET ON EUROSPORT
Breaking the sound barrier
JAMES COYNE
“Where the English language is unspoken there can be no real cricket, which is to say that Americans have never excelled at the game.” It’s hard not to chuckle at Neville Cardus’s classic put-down, whether you agree with it or not. But even he failed to foresee the impact globalisation would have on his beloved sport.
On a second-floor office above a bank in downtown Belgrade, Cardus’s axiom is being spectacularly undermined. England are collapsing to India’s spinners at the World Twenty20, and two Eurosport commentators, Predrag Vukanovic and Vladimir Ninkovic, are telling the Balkans about it in Serbian. Their language varies only minimally from Bosnian, Montenegrin and Croatian, something Eurosport takes advantage of by screening its Serbian coverage across the former Yugoslavia. Albania have to make do with the feed from Germany – who knows what might have happened if C. B. Fry had accepted the throne?
On holiday in Sarajevo a few days later, walking past the Catholic cathedral impeccably rebuilt after the siege, I notice something on a TV screen in one of the many indistinguishable café-bars on the main drag – it’s England v New Zealand in the Super Eights on Eurosport 2. I ask a waiter (in English) if he can turn the volume up, and what he thinks of the game. “Very weird,” he fires back.
This is the third time, after England 2009 and West Indies 2010, that Eurosport has purchased the World Twenty20 feed from ESPN STAR Sports – and given 18 different languages the keys to the kingdom of cricket. It costs Eurosport a pittance by modern broadcasting standards, but then cricket has to compete with snooker and Polish football in the schedule. Cricket aficionados, usually high-ranking officers in the national associations like Ninkovic – general secretary of the Serbian Cricket Federation – are brought in to provide expert analysis, and spread news of their crusade. Ninkovic knows what he’s talking about, and proudly shows off an Essex cap collected from Reece Topley on the boundary at Chelmsford. For enthusiasts like him, Eurosport, Facebook and YouTube have been a revelation.
Naturally, there is the odd cautionary tale: in Romania, the lead commentator is a football man, who speaks in terms of points rather than runs, and hollers every time a run is scampered, let alone when a boundary is hit or a wicket taken. The Romanian cricket authorities are lobbying ICC Europe and Eurosport to have him gently moved aside for the next tournament.
Vukanovic, though, is a consummate broadcaster, blessed with a deep, authoritative baritone. He knows who all the players are, and what they do – which, in the case of Irfan Pathan opening the batting, is not very much. As Jade Dernbach is whacked for consecutive fours by Gautam Gambhir, Ninkovic ribs England about the number of South Africans playing for them. Vukanovic has called five tournaments to date, so perhaps a touch of Twenty20-weariness has crept into his commentary. “The Champions League is a nice competition,” he tells me later. “I expect a few surprises, because the top cricket stars look like they are on holiday in South Africa.”
As England slide to defeat in Colombo, it doesn’t take long for the duo to diagnose that young English batsmen struggle to read spin bowling out of the hand. By the time Jonny Bairstow is cleaned up trying to slog Piyush Chawla, foxed by a googly, mild mirth has broken out in the commentary box. It’s strangely reassuring that, even in Belgrade, English cricket is capable of being a laughing stock.
CRICKET AND BLOGS, 2012
On the outside looking in
S. A. RENNIE
In 1956, Len Hutton – newly retired and hired by the London Evening News to give his thoughts on the Ashes – was barred from the Lord’s press box because he wasn’t deemed a proper sportswriter. E. M. Wellings, the paper’s cantankerous cricket correspondent, objected to Sir Len’s use of a ghostwriter, forcing one of England’s greatest captains to go and do his work outside, like a naughty schoolboy. The landscape has changed considerably: nowadays, bloggers get press passes, while ghosted columns and autobiographies are old hat. But the debate
over what constitutes cricket journalism continues.
Some regard today’s bloggers with the same disdain. Last year, evidence came in a tirade from an employee of the United States of America Cricket Association against ESPNcricinfo writer Peter Della Penna for his criticisms of the administration – or, as USACA’s unofficial Facebook page put it, his “unethical, journalistic bias”. Ending up with a verbal pitchmap that resembled Mitchell Johnson’s bowling on a bad day, the page administrator – USACA executive secretary Kenwyn Williams – sprayed his invective in the direction of anyone who dared register disagreement (and, in many cases, their disbelief). This broadside was also directed at Cricinfo’s executive editor Martin Williamson: “In the USA, journalists need to be QUALIFIED and belong to an organisation that endorses their profession… I beg Peter and Martin to prove to me they are qualified as journalists. They are internet bloggers and have NO journalistic privilege. NONE!!!”
Williams was dismissed for his role in this social-media meltdown, and the Facebook page deleted. But when the worst insult that can be aimed at a journalist is to call him a blogger “using the internet to spew venom”, it reflects the common view that a blogger is a mere hobbyist, undeserving of consideration or courtesy.
Even if you are a blogger whose work is deemed worthy of inclusion on, say, the website of a national newspaper, there is no guarantee you’ll be paid. With the print media scrabbling around for a viable business model, newspapers are now “partnering” with bloggers. In the case of The Guardian, this means reproducing articles from blogs on a section of their website called the Guardian Sport Network. Cricket blogs include “99.94” at nestaquin.wordpress.com, and theoldbatsman.blogspot.co.uk. This has ruffled a few feathers in the blogging community. One of the writers of “99.94” was forced to defend himself against the accusation he was taking jobs away from professional journalists, and admitted he felt uneasy. Others wondered if the failure to pay people for their work was rather un-Guardian.