My new favourite innings

Like so many sportsmen who never quite deliver - stylish, flaky, had the insouciant air of a massive twat. But when it worked, it really worked...

Failorama

and

Moneyball gets the little master

Moneyball the film is coming out soon, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, and in a puff piece (£) on it for the FT I stumble across this little nugget which seemed worth sharing:

Andy Flower is a devotee of Moneyball. Before the series his statistician, Nathan “Numbers” Leamon, carried out a Moneyball-style analysis of India’s great batsman Sachin Tendulkar. “Numbers” discovered that Tendulkar struggles early in his innings to score runs on his “off side” – that is, when the ball is bowled on the side of his bat rather than his legs. In the 22 years that Tendulkar has played Test cricket, nobody had previously spotted this. England bowled to Tendulkar’s off side early in his innings, and repeatedly dismissed him cheaply.

All I want for Christmas is....

Dear Santa,

Please.

Yours

CC

Pitch. It. Up.

I once was at a cricket academy aged 14 lead by a mad bloke from the West Country. His coaching technique for bowling was very subtle. He'd stand behind me in the net and shout 'PITCH. IT. UP' after every ball, whether it had been a bouncer, a yorker or a full toss.

Seems like the Aussies have just learnt the same. Particularly love the opening par:

'Isolated to its most fundamental point, cricket could be described as the duel between a bowler tempting a batsman to drive and a batsman trying to ignore that temptation. Save for Bodyline and a few West Indian bouncer wars, this battle has endured across more than 2000 Test matches, often entrancing spectators as much as it has consumed the combatants.'

It's true. The bouncer is still a useful weapon, but fundamentally the battle is fought, won or lost, within an area about two feet long.

Tragedy

I know this is now a video blog but fuck it, it's Winter. Let's just remind ourselves, in HD, what we're missing. Thoughts on Asif over there on the right.

One of my favourite innings of all time

And it was in a losing cause. Classic shortarse - the fact he's only about 3ft tall makes the hook shot to balls just back of a length a distinctly plausible shot.

Here's some bonus De Silva genius.