The Shorter Wisden 2013

by John Wisden

  “I give thanks and praise to God that I’m not lacking in confidence,” he says. “I back myself to play my shots, and I like to look stylish doing it.” It was a method both effective and entertaining on a frenetic Sunday morning, when boundaries – many genuine, some slashed – came as quickly as records. First, the highest score by a last man for West Indies against England, beating a mere 19; then a fifty, matching Wes Hall’s record for any West Indian No. 11; then passing his own previous firstclass high of 51. On 76, he became the highest-scoring No. 11 in Test history. Each was ticked off with a sense of theatre and freedom.

  “I was thinking about my uncle Carlisle,” says Best of the batsman who played eight Tests up to 1990. “He says to me: ‘You’re a Best, you’re from the Caribbean. You grew up with the legends – show the flair, the determination they played with. This is in your blood.’”

  Today’s West Indian players have sometimes found the deeds and words of retired legends more of a burden than an inspiration. Indeed, in this innings Ramdin chose to mark his century by holding up a note answering back to Viv Richards.

  “I had no idea he was going to do that,” says Best. “It’s each man to himself. Myself, I feel connected to the past of West Indian cricket. We as a people have come a long way and had a lot of struggles. For us, cricket was something to fight in. People might say I’m over the top, but this is me, a West Indian, playing my cricket the way I live my life.”

  As Best’s score grew, so the good humour of England’s bowlers disappeared. There was no mention of the “Mind the windows” incident (when, at Lord’s in 2004, he was stumped after being goaded by Andrew Flintoff into trying to slog Ashley Giles into the Pavilion). For this, Best says, was “a much more serious situation”.

  With the temperature rising, his former county colleague Tim Bresnan was treated to some smears over midwicket and a straight six. “Bresnan said to me: ‘We never saw you bat like that for Yorkshire.’ I told him: ‘Don’t you worry about that – this is the big time now. This is the big stage.’”

  As the innings blossomed and England wilted, when did he think a century was a possibility? “I was just playing my shots, trying to have a bit of chat, trying to annoy them,” he says. “It wasn’t until I was on 88, and Matt Prior said to me: ‘I bet you can get there in two hits.’ I said, ‘All right, then,’ and he laughed and said, ‘You’re something else, mate.’”

  Only on 93, he says, did the magnitude of the situation hit him. Best had stoically resisted the temptations of Jonathan Trott’s dobbers, and survived the short stuff from Finn. With lunch put back up to half an hour, Andrew Strauss had switched his attack again. “I thought, ‘Oh heck, I’m 93 against England in a Test match.’ I tried to hit Onions, and it landed short of Bairstow for two. I tried to get a quick single, but I hit it too hard.” Ramdin rightly sent him back: it would have been a suicidal run. Nerves were jangling.

  “As Onions came in, I said to myself: ‘If he pitches this ball close to me, I’m going to lick him back over his head.’ I saw him fidget with his hand as he bowled it. I felt my eyes light up! But of course it was the slower ball, and I was through the shot too quickly.” He skied it, and was caught by Strauss, running back from slip.

  “I can’t watch it again,” Best says. “It’s too sad.” But then came another loud laugh. “Still, 95 in a Test match, though! My goal now is to score a hundred. I showed I have the talent. I have been misunderstood but I have a talent and I have something to offer. When people think back to Tino Best, I want them to smile and laugh and say: ‘Oh yeah, Tino!’”

  Alan Tyers is the author of WG Grace Ate My Pedalo and CrickiLeaks – The Secret Ashes Diaries.

  ENGLAND v AUSTRALIA, 2012

  RICHARD HOBSON

  One-day internationals (5): England 4, Australia 0

  Australia’s players arrived in England with the threat of strike action hanging over negotiations for a new pay deal with their board. As a one-sided NatWest Series unfolded, thoughts of a return home must have seemed increasingly alluring: while the issues concerning terms and conditions were resolved during the trip, questions of a different kind began to emerge – principally, how was it that a side at the top of the ICC rankings could suffer their heaviest defeat in any head-to-head limited-overs campaign?

  The scoreline hardly flattered England. If rain had not washed out the third match at Edgbaston, they might easily have completed the 5–0 whitewash required to dislodge Australia and move top of the rankings in all three formats; such dominance would have been unprecedented (even if the Twenty20 listings had been introduced only the previous October). As losses piled up, the tourists did not mince words. Australia’s coach, Mickey Arthur, described his team as “submissive”, “bullied”, and lacking presence, while captain Michael Clarke spoke of “a wake-up call”. It could not have been louder had it been rung from the bells of St Paul’s.

  If this all seemed very un-Australian, then England were very English. Team director Andy Flower built a strategy perfectly suited to home conditions and the personnel available. Batsmen with Test-standard techniques were included to combat the two new balls in often tricky conditions, and a bowling attack heavy with specialist pace was threatening throughout. It takes far more than good organisation to overpower Australia so comprehensively, but Flower was entitled to wonder whether his plan could have gone any better. Only the number of dropped catches can have caused any alarm, with the notable exception of Craig Kieswetter’s athleticism behind the stumps. By the end, England had extended their sequence of one-day wins to ten (excluding washouts) since the start of the year.

  Any lingering concerns about the top three were removed: not even the harshest critic questioned the right of Alastair Cook, Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott to fill those slots. When Bell fell fourth ball in the final game at Old Trafford, it was his first failure since replacing Kevin Pietersen – now retired from the format, at least for the time being – at the start of the previous series, against West Indies. Circumstances allowed Trott to bat at his own pace, and Ravi Bopara grew in confidence to the point where he supervised the chase in Manchester like Eoin Morgan at his calmest. As he also provided some tight contributions with the ball, Bopara was unlucky that Bell pipped him for the Man of the Series award. Morgan himself put a sorry winter behind him to finish unbeaten in his three innings; his 141 runs came at a strike-rate of 130. Australia had wondered in advance whether Tim Bresnan was a potential weakness at No. 7, but in the event he was not required to bat at all, while Kieswetter at No. 6 faced only 29 balls. In the four games, England lost 14 wickets to Australia’s 32.

  Those facts speak for the Australian bowling as well as England’s batting. Only Clint McKay, persevering and accurate, claimed more than two wickets overall. Pat Cummins was forced to return home with a side strain after the first game, a worrying extension to his run of injuries. Shane Watson and Brett Lee followed after the fourth match, at Chester-le-Street, because of calf problems, though not before Lee – who announced his retirement shortly after the tour – had equalled Glenn McGrath’s record of 380 one-day international wickets for Australia. James Pattinson, built up beforehand, did not appear until late in the series – then went wicketless in 16 overs. And Australia lagged even further behind in the spin department, with Graeme Swann outbowling Xavier Doherty before Swann was withdrawn from the squad because of continuing soreness in his right elbow.

  Arthur tried to find some comfort, suggesting that England had shown opponents the approach required for the Champions Trophy, which they would be hosting in 2013. The Ashes series later that summer provided another appetising context, with John Inverarity, Australia’s chairman of selectors, saying that David Hussey, Peter Forrest and George Bailey represented the next-best batsmen below those in the current Test team. Hussey (who turned 35 shortly after this series) barely needed experience in England, after much success with Nottinghamshire, but he and Bailey, the Twenty20 captain, both proved inconsistent; the onl
y consistent thing about Forrest was his tentative footwork, exposed by the moving ball. A general uncertainty became evident as Australia tried in vain to reshuffle their hand in the absence of Hussey’s older brother Mike, at home on paternity leave. By the end, the aces were all England’s.

  ENGLAND v SOUTH AFRICA, 2012

  REVIEW BY SIMON WILDE

  Test matches (3): England 0, South Africa 2

  One-day internationals (5): England 2, South Africa 2

  Twenty20 internationals (3): England 1, South Africa 1

  South Africa flew home with England grateful they would not be returning for a bilateral series until 2017. This was their third successive visit – each under the leadership of Graeme Smith – to coincide with the resignation of the England captain: for Nasser Hussain in 2003 and Michael Vaughan in 2008, read Andrew Strauss in 2012. It was a summer in which South Africa won the Tests 2–0 to retain the Basil D’Oliveira Trophy and replace England at the top of the ICC rankings; and it left the hosts questioning not only their own carefully established sense of worth, but the team spirit which had helped get them to the top of the world in the first place.

  Quite simply, England fell apart: both on the field, where they never truly recovered after Hashim Amla’s epic undefeated 311 condemned them to a humiliating loss in the First Test at The Oval; and off it, as a split between Kevin Pietersen and other members of the team sprang into public view. Despite batting brilliantly for 149 in the drawn Second Test at Headingley, Pietersen was dropped for the final game, at Lord’s, in part because it emerged he had sent “provocative” BlackBerry messages to South African players (although the ECB later accepted his assurance that the messages had not been derogatory about others within the England camp).

  Both teams knew they could not afford to put a foot wrong, but England – defending a record of seven successive Test series wins at home – now found themselves horribly distracted. It was during South Africa’s second warm-up game, at Canterbury, that reports surfaced suggesting Pietersen, who had already announced his retirement from the international limited-overs formats, wanted to miss Tests at home to New Zealand in 2013 to spend more time at the IPL. It was hardly likely to endear him to management or team-mates. Then, ahead of the Second Test, Ravi Bopara withdrew, citing domestic problems. He returned for the one-day internationals and Twenty20s, but his meaningful contributions came only with the ball.

  As a result, England were obliged to blood James Taylor at Headingley, and recall Jonny Bairstow at Lord’s not long after he had been dropped amid concerns about his technique against the short ball. Bairstow played two spirited innings but, despite a late fightback engineered by Matt Prior, England’s leading run-scorer in the series, as they chased an improbable 346, he could not prevent defeat. Strauss denied Pietersen was a factor in his resignation, which came after 100 Test appearances, 50 of them in charge. “My race was run,” he said. But not everyone was convinced by his claim; at the very least, the Pietersen affair had overshadowed his farewell – a further source of irritation to other team members.

  By contrast, South Africa, who watched the debacle unfold with detached amusement, remained impressively focused, in spite of several potentially destabilising events. Within a week of arriving, Mark Boucher – the veteran wicketkeeper hoping to play his 150th Test at Lord’s – sustained a freak injury at Taunton, where a flying bail struck his left eye. It ended not only his tour, but an unflinching career. His distraught team-mates had to regroup quickly.

  A. B. de Villiers was pressed into service as batsman-keeper, with J-P. Duminy slotting in at No. 7, a move that actually strengthened the line-up, even though England managed to keep de Villiers relatively quiet. Boucher’s misfortune, in fact, appeared only to stiffen the South Africans’ resolve. When the series was won, several of them took to the Lord’s outfield sporting T-shirts bearing tributes to their absent friend.

  The touring party also had to defend themselves against allegations of leaking the Pietersen texts, a charge they denied. Weeks later, following several apologies to his colleagues, Pietersen was preparing for what ECB chairman Giles Clarke called his “reintegration” to the fold, when chief executive David Collier went even further. “The texts were responses to messages from members of the South African team,” he told BBC radio. “I certainly think that did provoke the situation. There was definitely a policy. There was a tactic that was used.” South Africa, who had maintained all along that the texts were mere banter – a claim undermined by Pietersen himself, with his admission that they were “provocative” – issued strenuous denials, amid talk of legal action; Collier apologised. Whatever the truth, the South Africans never let the matter affect their cricket.

  For a team with a reputation for faltering in sight of the big prize, their poise was admirable, and much credit was due to Smith and Gary Kirsten, the coach. While Strauss appeared exhausted by three and a half years of captaincy, Smith’s energy in his tenth year at the helm of the Test side – he, like Strauss, had already ceded the one-day job – seemed undiminished; he even squeezed in a lightning visit home after the Oval Test to attend the birth of his first child. He had, in fact, been talked into staying in charge in 2011 by Kirsten, who may have had personal reasons for wanting to win in England: on each of his three tours as a player, South Africa had blown a 1–0 lead.

  Not many rival coaches had got the better of Andy Flower, but Kirsten did. He managed expectation and crises with a sure hand, and it was his idea to take the bulk of the squad to the Swiss Alps for a pre-tour team-building exercise run by polar explorer and mountain climber Mike Horn. They walked and cycled, climbed peaks and plunged into freezing lakes, and arrived in England armed with aphorisms, which were duly aired at every opportunity. Horn must have purred when, with the Tests in the bag, Duminy tweeted: “Getting to the top of the mountain is just the start of the work.” Horn, like Boucher, was with the team in spirit every step of the way.

  South Africa might have achieved their main goal, but England rallied to earn a share of the one-day and Twenty20 series, preserving their top ranking in one format and regaining it in the other. But these contests felt like an irrelevance, especially after a dramatic final day of the Test series: they were diminished by rain and the absence of some high-profile personnel, and the 20-over games were used by both sides to experiment ahead of the World Twenty20 (a fat lot of good it did either team). In truth, it was a poorly structured tour, partly because of a clash with the London Olympics. Whatever happened to assurances from both boards that England–South Africa would always be a marquee series consisting of at least four matches?

  South Africa won most of the tricks that mattered, and England’s top three batsmen each had a personal nemesis. Morne Morkel, thrown the new ball on the first morning of the series to general surprise, picked up where he had left off in South Africa on England’s tour in 2009-10, tormenting Strauss from round the wicket and removing him with his fourth delivery. Morkel dismissed the England captain only once more, but he was a constant thorn in his side, and Strauss’s last act – padding up to Vernon Philander late on the fourth evening at Lord’s – was that of a man who had simply become overwhelmed. Only once before, against Sri Lanka in 2011, had he averaged fewer in a series of at least three Tests than the 17 he managed here.

  Philander – whose ability to swing the ball received belated reward at Lord’s, where he also played two valuable innings – removed Alastair Cook cheaply in each of the three matches after he had begun the series with a century. And Dale Steyn accounted for Jonathan Trott in four of his five completed innings. England’s average score at the fall of the second wicket was 67, to South Africa’s 124. But even that barely did justice to the gulf in quality between the two batting units.

  Smith, who had been sidelined before the tour by an ankle problem, as usual scored heavily, taking his aggregate in 12 Tests in England to 1,355. If his century at The Oval in his 100th Test brought the satisfaction of setting up a crus
hing win, his fifties at Headingley in two opening stands of 120 were equally valuable. His unorthodox method sent England’s bowlers into a predictable tizzy. At Headingley, they came up with all manner of theories, when a simple off-stump line, with a view to an outside edge, was later confirmed as the best policy during the one-day internationals (Steven Finn thought he had removed Smith that way during the Second Test, only for umpire Steve Davis to call dead ball because he had dislodged the bails with his knee).

  England presumably spent less time in advance worrying about where to bowl at Alviro Petersen, but he shook off a foot injury to keep them at bay for a nine-hour 182 after they had chosen to field first in the Second Test.

  Nothing compared, though, to the majesty and might of Amla who, in going unbeaten for more than 13 hours at The Oval to make South Africa’s first Test triple-century, broke not only records but English spirits. His tactic of moving across his stumps to Graeme Swann was instrumental in the off-spinner going wicketless for 52 overs; Swann was immediately dropped by Flower for the first time since being left out of two Tests in the West Indies in 2008-09.

  In Swann’s absence at Headingley, part-time off-spinner Pietersen took a wicket with his second ball, and finished with four in the game, which only highlighted the extent to which England had been thrown off course. For his part, Amla was unfazed by ascending such heights: he crafted runs serenely for the rest of the tour, finishing with 900 in all internationals (including 100 fours and two sixes), and top-scoring in eight innings out of 11.