From Ranjitsinhji to D'Oliviera to Pietersen, one of our strengths as a nation has been our ability to assimilate and integrate the talents and styles of immigrants (I'm talking purely in cricketing terms, but evidently the 'How Cricket Makes You Left Wing' post isn't a million miles away). That tendency took a while to reach the upper echelons of the game.
For much of my childhood, English cricket was ruled with a stubborn conservatism. It's an attitude that drips from the top to the bottom. How many terrible coaches told a young CC and his schoolmates to stop getting their bowling spanked around with the words 'slow it down, and find your line and length', as if it's some sort of exercise like darts, totally ignoring the fact that rhythm, control in the action (which you don't get by thinking about it as you do it) and muscle memory are the keys to accuracy?
There is no greater embodiment of that tendency than my bete noir - Ray Illingworth. There's a possibly apocryphal story about Glenn Hoddle becoming exasperated at an England training session by his players' inability to carry out a volleying exercise he'd devised for them, and humiliating them by doing it for them. It's the kind of thing Illingworth would have done - a great player in his day and a good captain on the field, but those traits only served to rob him of any sense of the need to innovate. Why bother, when it worked for you?
It's almost too painful to go into his flaws in detail. Read Dermot Reeve's autobiography. Reeve (and Bob Woolmer) was winning almost every one day trophy going with Warwickshire in the mid-1990s and was called up to the England team for the 1996 World Cup. His teams won because they experimented. He's rated highly enough to be a coach in the IPL today - half the things you see there seem to have eminated from the teams he lead. Every player was encouraged to master the reverse sweep so they played it as well as the conventional one. They bowled slower balls every other delivery. They were obscenely good in the field.
Reeve had plenty to offer the England team. But Illingworth blanked him at a team meeting and that was the end of his input. Illingworth's attitude seemed to be that public opinion alone had got him into the team - what use were the thoughts of a mediocre medium pacer who did a bit of slogging down the order? Where Sri Lanka revolutionised the opening overs of the innings, where other teams opened with spinners and batted like the end was nigh, England opened the batting with Mike Atherton and the bowling with Peter Martin.
I'm aware this is quite a long preamble. Let's get to Devon Malcolm. Now, of course we all know how good he was when in the mood:
I remember watching this. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I couldn't take my eyes off the TV. It's still the most electrifying spell of bowling I've ever seen. Forms a nice contrast to the Asif clips: nine batsmen, all utterly terrified, beaten by nothing more than sheer pace.
Why couldn't he do it all the time? Why was such a colossal talent such a colossal failure (and he was - an average touching 40 is pathetic given the ability he had)? Well, he had a tendency to spray it all over the shop, of course. That's not the coach's fault. But a talented coach would have tried to find a way to recreate that spell. Instead, less than a year later, Malcolm was bowling a match-losing spell at the last wicket pair in the final Test against the very same team. Long-eared bunny rabbit Paul Adams and decentish keeper-bat Dave Richardson took him for runs all over the park. Evidently this played a part. That article is somewhat misleading. No, he wasn't racially abused in the BNP sense, it was just chummy Ron Atkinson-style insensitivity. Whatever, it didn't help.
Of course much of the blame lies with Malcolm himself. But my God, even aged 15 you could see how badly he was being mismanaged. He fell away at the point of delivery when he started his career. He fell away when he ended it. Jimmy Anderson's been coached through about 15 different actions in that amount of time.
More to the point, it was clear he should have been deployed in spells of three or four overs at most, with the remit to go and kill someone. If he went for runs in the process then, well, shit happens. Brett Lee was used in much the same way by Ponting. Of course it's a lot easier to let a quick off the leash when Glenn McGrath's going for bupkis at the other end, but if you're going to pick a bowler like Malcolm, you've got to accept the limitations.
Team psychiatrists - much maligned back then, not least by Illingworth, the sort of pig-headed old fart who couldn't have that soppy nonsense, of course - could have tapped into the well of anger and aggression that inspired him that magical night at the Oval. In more enlightened times, this is all the kind of stuff we did with Steve Harmison, to good effect for a while. It's a big, balls-out gamble, because if it doesn't work, you may as well not have picked anyone at all - and maybe it was easier given the other bowlers around Harmison, but that's certainly not why Malcolm never enjoyed such treatment.
It's just rarely, if ever, the English sporting way. We like the goalkeeper who isn't necessarily the best shot stopper, but at least he cuts out the howlers. Ultimately, we always seem to end up playing a big lad up front, and of course John Terry's a natural choice for captain. Mike Tindall has played more games for us than he would for most other countries. Kevin Pietersen (average: 48) has attracted much more opprobium than Atherton (average: 37) did in his whole career (I know there are plenty of mitigating factors behind the discrepancy but the point stands).
I remember one of Devon's last Tests: Edgbaston 1997. He was older and a little slower and he bowled a tight line at a slightly reduced pace and got some outswing, and did rather well. At heart I guess he was the bowler he'd always wanted to be that day. Within the 90s team culture, that extreme pace was nothing but a curse. In a way Dean Headley and Simon Jones - the Jimi Hendrixes or Jeff Buckleys of English fast bowling - are the lucky ones. They burned bright, they burned fast. Poor Devon ended up being Oasis. But it wasn't all his fault.
For much of my childhood, English cricket was ruled with a stubborn conservatism. It's an attitude that drips from the top to the bottom. How many terrible coaches told a young CC and his schoolmates to stop getting their bowling spanked around with the words 'slow it down, and find your line and length', as if it's some sort of exercise like darts, totally ignoring the fact that rhythm, control in the action (which you don't get by thinking about it as you do it) and muscle memory are the keys to accuracy?
There is no greater embodiment of that tendency than my bete noir - Ray Illingworth. There's a possibly apocryphal story about Glenn Hoddle becoming exasperated at an England training session by his players' inability to carry out a volleying exercise he'd devised for them, and humiliating them by doing it for them. It's the kind of thing Illingworth would have done - a great player in his day and a good captain on the field, but those traits only served to rob him of any sense of the need to innovate. Why bother, when it worked for you?
It's almost too painful to go into his flaws in detail. Read Dermot Reeve's autobiography. Reeve (and Bob Woolmer) was winning almost every one day trophy going with Warwickshire in the mid-1990s and was called up to the England team for the 1996 World Cup. His teams won because they experimented. He's rated highly enough to be a coach in the IPL today - half the things you see there seem to have eminated from the teams he lead. Every player was encouraged to master the reverse sweep so they played it as well as the conventional one. They bowled slower balls every other delivery. They were obscenely good in the field.
Reeve had plenty to offer the England team. But Illingworth blanked him at a team meeting and that was the end of his input. Illingworth's attitude seemed to be that public opinion alone had got him into the team - what use were the thoughts of a mediocre medium pacer who did a bit of slogging down the order? Where Sri Lanka revolutionised the opening overs of the innings, where other teams opened with spinners and batted like the end was nigh, England opened the batting with Mike Atherton and the bowling with Peter Martin.
I'm aware this is quite a long preamble. Let's get to Devon Malcolm. Now, of course we all know how good he was when in the mood:
I remember watching this. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I couldn't take my eyes off the TV. It's still the most electrifying spell of bowling I've ever seen. Forms a nice contrast to the Asif clips: nine batsmen, all utterly terrified, beaten by nothing more than sheer pace.
Why couldn't he do it all the time? Why was such a colossal talent such a colossal failure (and he was - an average touching 40 is pathetic given the ability he had)? Well, he had a tendency to spray it all over the shop, of course. That's not the coach's fault. But a talented coach would have tried to find a way to recreate that spell. Instead, less than a year later, Malcolm was bowling a match-losing spell at the last wicket pair in the final Test against the very same team. Long-eared bunny rabbit Paul Adams and decentish keeper-bat Dave Richardson took him for runs all over the park. Evidently this played a part. That article is somewhat misleading. No, he wasn't racially abused in the BNP sense, it was just chummy Ron Atkinson-style insensitivity. Whatever, it didn't help.
Of course much of the blame lies with Malcolm himself. But my God, even aged 15 you could see how badly he was being mismanaged. He fell away at the point of delivery when he started his career. He fell away when he ended it. Jimmy Anderson's been coached through about 15 different actions in that amount of time.
More to the point, it was clear he should have been deployed in spells of three or four overs at most, with the remit to go and kill someone. If he went for runs in the process then, well, shit happens. Brett Lee was used in much the same way by Ponting. Of course it's a lot easier to let a quick off the leash when Glenn McGrath's going for bupkis at the other end, but if you're going to pick a bowler like Malcolm, you've got to accept the limitations.
Team psychiatrists - much maligned back then, not least by Illingworth, the sort of pig-headed old fart who couldn't have that soppy nonsense, of course - could have tapped into the well of anger and aggression that inspired him that magical night at the Oval. In more enlightened times, this is all the kind of stuff we did with Steve Harmison, to good effect for a while. It's a big, balls-out gamble, because if it doesn't work, you may as well not have picked anyone at all - and maybe it was easier given the other bowlers around Harmison, but that's certainly not why Malcolm never enjoyed such treatment.
It's just rarely, if ever, the English sporting way. We like the goalkeeper who isn't necessarily the best shot stopper, but at least he cuts out the howlers. Ultimately, we always seem to end up playing a big lad up front, and of course John Terry's a natural choice for captain. Mike Tindall has played more games for us than he would for most other countries. Kevin Pietersen (average: 48) has attracted much more opprobium than Atherton (average: 37) did in his whole career (I know there are plenty of mitigating factors behind the discrepancy but the point stands).
I remember one of Devon's last Tests: Edgbaston 1997. He was older and a little slower and he bowled a tight line at a slightly reduced pace and got some outswing, and did rather well. At heart I guess he was the bowler he'd always wanted to be that day. Within the 90s team culture, that extreme pace was nothing but a curse. In a way Dean Headley and Simon Jones - the Jimi Hendrixes or Jeff Buckleys of English fast bowling - are the lucky ones. They burned bright, they burned fast. Poor Devon ended up being Oasis. But it wasn't all his fault.
The bowling of Cronje at The Oval. A moment of moments in the last twenty years of English Test cricket.
ReplyDeleteCronje plays a perfectly acceptable forward defensive, the only problem being that by the time his bat comes down his stumps have already been shattered and there's nothing he can do except walk off.
If you have a look for it on YouTube (Im on my phone so can't get the link) you can find footage of him absolutely terrorising Michael Slater in Perth on the 94/5 tour. It's rare to see an opener genuinely scared & backing away like a tailender. Actually I can't think when else I've seen it.
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