Rain

Three games, which have taken the grand total of 64 emails to set up (yes, I counted), have resulted in my facing two balls. And that was only because we were on astroturf.

Still. Normally we sit at our desks on a Monday, anxiously checking the BBC website. Then, because we don't like what it's saying, we check the Met Office one. But we don't like that (especially because it has a detailed statistical break down of exactly how likely we are to get very wet), so we anxiously click around any number of other weather sites, finally finding one that tells us there's only a forecast of heavy showers. Fantastic! We can play through that!

Two days later the BBC changes its prediction and tells us we're looking at bright sunshine. A day later it picks 'light showers' from the meteorological roulette wheel, but being cricketers we'd already decided three days earlier the game was definitely on.

Under slightly ominous clouds, we wend our merry way to wherever the ground is, run out onto the pristine outfield, pull a bat and ball out of our bags, get ready for a bit of catching practise, and it immediately shits it down for eight hours straight.

15/04/2012 - Crouch End

During the off-season I got the chance to review a rather great book about middle age. One of the things the author touches on is his experience of becoming a dad. He makes the point that he was dreading the work, the lack of sleep, the distraction from his career - but that once it happened, he found it liberating - a "freedom from self".

I don't have any news like that to report, but I've been busier with work and other stuff (including sorting fixtures, which has been more of a nightmare than usual) this year more than any other. Those who've been hoping to see lots of blogging here, for example, may have noticed this. I don't expect this situation to change any time soon, but I've already realised it's likely to make the cricket a lot more enjoyable.

Where once I'd worry about how I and the team were doing, I can honestly say there's too much on my plate now. So more than anything, cricket's just an escape. I turned up having had an average of 4 hours' sleep a night for the last week, and I felt like death. This is something of a change from a few years ago, when I'd turn up feeling awful and having had similar levels of sleep, due to a five-day booze bender.

I was therefore overjoyed I didn't get to do much (a breathtaking 2* and a few overs of utterly rubbish spin/dibbly mediums), but I enjoyed it more than plenty of other games where I've done well. We had a laugh, we won pretty easily, the opposition were friendly, the tea was good, there was a bar with cricket and footy on - so even though it was FUCKING freezing, it was a top day. Not for the two guys who cabbaged themselves before we'd even started - one in a footy game in the morning, another catching a ball while we were warming up. Very important lessons to be taken there, I feel.

Off-season the netting has gone really well. I'm using my feet to the spinners well, and feeling confident against pace due to a couple of little technical changes. In fact I feel more in control of game plan than ever before. I'm not sure there's any other game where you can keep learning and developing as you do in cricket.

Back in 2003 I wouldn't have had a solid strategy for, say, a right arm over the wicket away swing bowler - I'd have known what they were trying to do, but I'd have carried on playing like I always did: block a couple then try and whack it somewhere. Then wonder what I'd done wrong on my way back to the shed. Today I shift my guard a stump across, stay side on, look to pick off the runs on length and try to avoid playing too square if it's on my legs. It's a lot to think about in isolation, but like all my other plans it's evolved over the years through failing, again and again, so it usually happens without too much thought. This means getting out these days isn't much of a mystery: it's usually either because I just wasn't good enough or lost concentration and deviated from some part of said plan.

Which makes it all the more frustrating when I do get out. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Can't complain, anyway. And there was a farmers' market at the ground.

It's going to be a good season, I think.

Resignation...

Here's the oddest thing. Last night I handed in my resignation as fixtures secretary. I'd been wondering about it throughout last year, as job and other things started to bear down on me, & once I made my mind up I felt pretty relieved - thank God I won't have to do that next Winter: now I can worry about all the other shite I have to worry about.

But as I typed my last fixtures email, I suddenly wondered if I was doing the right thing and out of the blue, I had a massive shock: I realised I didn't want to quit the job at all.

Fixtures secretaries are, by their nature, a weird bunch. I know I'm no different. I grumble a lot. Barely a month goes by on here without some mention of a useless council officer or twat of an opposition administrator. We all do this: after a game you'll generally find me and the opposition fixture secretary tucked away in the corner of the beer garden, moaning about the cunt who does the fixtures for XXXCC. The very next week the cunt from XXXCC and I will be in the corner of a different pub, slagging off the guy I was talking to the week before. He's really two-faced, apparently.

Our own team mates annoy us, because they don't seem to appreciate the work they do. They moan when a pitch isn't good. They moan when a pitch is too far away from East London. They moan when it's too far from West London. They moan if a game's on a Saturday. Or a Sunday. Or on a couple of memorable occasions, when it's rained off: no, really.

When they get in a sledging fight with someone or argue with an umpire they don't seem to realise that their little moment has suddenly made the next communication a hundred times more awkward, because in the eyes of the opposition "that guy who said he'd ram a stump up our wicketkeeper's arse" just become synonymous with the team as a whole. Everyone gets that, but it's just impossible for everyone to behave all the time. We're blokes, after all. The only way you can guarantee you'll behave is, well, spending a winter planning fixtures. And even that doesn't always work. Especially if their keeper won't shut up.

It makes you hate everyone in the world of cricket, your own team, local government, national government by extension, and above all yourself for choosing to take such a stupid job. Don't all sign up at once.

Ah, but. But but but. It's great. And here's why: you're making something. You're making a great big thing: a year of fun, and however soppy this sounds, that's very rewarding. How could it not be? You get to a good ground with beer on tap, have a laugh, smack a ball around with your mates and you know that if it wasn't for you the whole thing might not have happened. When you're doing the job you're caught up in what you're doing, so you never get the chance to step back and think about why you're doing it.

So the season's not even started and already there's a bit of a shock: I knew I had to quit my job, but I never really imagined I wouldn't want to.

Right that's enough of that, let's see how I'm going to bring up my 300 this season.

Hello 2012, Council Hell, Playing spin, A great bowler.

Fuck me sideways, it's cold.

So the Winter has been several months of hell, and there are two more to go. I've been busy organising our fixtures, which is always hugely stressful. In October I phoned our home ground's booking officer to ask when I could book pitches. She told me to wait for the form in December - first come first served. Could I use email rather than snail mail? No. Fuck knows why.

So I got the form, and sent it back straight away. Then I phoned to make sure it had been received. Her colleague took the call, said the booking officer was on holiday, but she'd leave a note to confirm I'd checked that it had been received. In January I phoned again, and the booking officer told me she'd received the form two weeks after I'd posted it, so I'd only got four dates. "But I phoned to confirm...no?...They told me they'd leave a...no?" Briefly contemplated vicious brutal murder, arson attacks, internet hate campaigns. Ended up saying "Oh well."

And worse than that - fixtures are basically a particularly annoying Chinese puzzle. You get the teams you want to play and the dates organised - then you find you can't get the grounds. Or you get the grounds and the team you want to play can't manage it. In attempting to rectify the situation you usually find you can't get the ground or the team so you go online and find a team you don't want particularly want to play at a ground you don't like. Still, we're nearly there and it's not looking too bad, all things considered.

At least I've been able to watch the world's Number One Test Team in action. Oh dear. I think we can all learn some lessons from the few successful innings played in this series.

1) You can't go at over 3 an over against good spin if they're bowling well. Accept it.
2) Use the feet when possible. Against someone like Rehman that's not very often but remember it's as much a defensive policy as an attacking one.
3) Go comprehensively forward or back. The two players most likely to do this - Trott and Bell - failed for different reasons: Bell because he couldn't pick Ajmal (suddenly his travails against Warne look like they might not just have been the struggles of a young batsman - does he have a problem reading spinners from the hand?), Trott because he was in terrible form.
4) There's no obvious answer to umpiring shockers. DRS, in its own way, is just as arbitrary as no DRS.
5) Whinging about actions won't help your cause.

Finally - this guy averaged 20 with the ball, second only to Sydney Barnes. Beautifully smooth action. Hint of Wahab Riaz there, and is that some 1950s reverse swing I see? Think it might be.

How to play spin bowling - a masterclass

Posting purely because I want to remember I've read this at some point

Fascinating stuff from Andy Bull.

Black Dog

Tragedy, sadness, depression and madness have long stalked the world of West Country cricket. I'm pretty sure there's no research on the area in isolation (there has of course been research on the wider subject thanks to David Frith) - I wonder what it would show. But anecdotal evidence - oh, there's plenty.

Harold Gimblett was the first Somerset opener to be stalked by the Black Dog. Here he is:

Gimblett lived most of his early life in the West Country, making his runs for Watchet CC in Somerset. The story of his debut is something straight out of Boy's Own. The Wikipedia article on this is so good that I have to cite most of it:

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"Having a two-week trial with Somerset, Gimblett had been told, before the period was over, that he had no future as a first-class cricketer. Accounts vary as to how this decision was reached. Gimblett himself, quoted in David Foot's biography, which relies heavily on material taped by Gimblett in the years immediately before his death, said he was told by the county secretary and former captain, John Daniell: "You may as well finish the week. We'll pay you 35 shillings and your bus fare. Afraid you're just not good enough." Daniell's son, quoted in the same book, said that the Somerset professional players had advised against taking Gimblett on to the county staff: "They used to tell my father they thought Harold was far too impulsive." A further factor may have been the almost permanent financial crisis that surrounded Somerset: the county club was probably not able to afford another professional player.

"On the final Friday of Gimblett's trial, Somerset found themselves a player short for the match that started the following day against Essex at Frome when the amateur Laurie Hawkins reported in sick. Gimblett was told to get himself to Frome: Daniell arranged for the wicketkeeper Wally Luckes, who had a car, to pick him up from Bridgwater. Gimblett missed the bus from Taunton, and hitched a lift in a lorry. Somerset won the toss and chose to bat: three batsmen were out for 35, and at lunch the score was 105 for five. Soon after lunch, Dickie Burrough was out and Gimblett came to the wicket with Somerset six wickets down for 107 runs, joining Arthur Wellard.

"Gimblett's first run came off his third ball, and shortly afterwards he was hitting the leg-break and googly bowler Peter Smith for 15 in an over. He raced to his 50 in just 28 minutes, off 33 balls, reaching it with a six. Wellard, unusually for him, was outpaced and was out, followed swiftly by Luckes, but Gimblett was joined by Bill Andrews, who also hit powerfully. Gimblett's century came in just 63 minutes, which proved to be the fastest century of the season, and it was made out of 130 runs added while he had been at the wicket. He finished with 123 out of 175 in 80 minutes, with three sixes and 17 fours. Somerset won the match with an innings to spare."

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Gimblett was warned by Jack Hobbs that such a start would be difficult to maintain. In fact, at the start of the 1936 season, he piled on the runs, such that he was called up to face the Indians. He started well in the first Test, knocking off the runs required with 67* in the second Test on a tricky pitch. However, later in the season his form was patchy, and he was dropped from the Test side.

David Foot's biography of Gimblett indicates that this 1936 season, although one of his most successful, also showed early signs of the illness that was to afflict him later. He reacted badly to being criticised for dropping an easy catch in the Old Trafford Test, and when he himself was dropped from the team for the final Test, he responded with relief: "'Thank goodness that's over,' he said to anyone within earshot." Oddly, another supremely talented and attacking Somerset batsman, Mark Lathwell, was reported to feel much the same way when his England career was prematurely closed.

The next three years were relatively barren. Evidently his attacking instincts had become compromised due to his earlier failures, and he struggled to adapt to a more defensive game.

After the war Gimblett became a county stalwart. He was back to his attacking best, but had learnt which balls to attack and played with more nous than in his pre-war years. He never quite managed to play Test cricket again. England called him up to face Ramadhin and Valentine, but a boil manifested itself on his neck As the Wiki has it: "He was dosed with penicillin and travelled to Nottingham. 'A nation's sporting press meticulously documented the carbuncle's throb-rate,' [biographer David] Foot writes. It was to no avail: Gimblett withdrew from the match, and was not picked again."

What makes Gimblett a fascinating character is the dichotomy of his exuberant play and - festering beneath the surface - extremely morose personality. Now, here is where our parallels with yet another Somerset opener become downright creepy. Gimblett toured India and Sri Lanka. Again from the Wiki: "He was homesick and unhappy: 'At first I wondered whether I'd picked up a bug. But it was purely mental,' he said in a tape transcribed in his biography. Lighter by about 12kg, he struggled for runs more than usually in the 1951 season, and took a long break from cricket in July, returning to some form afterwards."

And again, as with Marcus Trescothick: "Alan Gibson, the cricket writer who himself suffered from bouts of mental illness, wrote of him: "Most of those who watched him, or even met him, took him for a cheerful extrovert. This was wrong. He thought a lot, worried a lot, fretted a lot, all the more because he struggled to present a calm, bold front to the outer world."

Where Gimblett appears to differ from Trescothick is in the fact that the depression seems to have manifested itself more as a pent-up bitterness and rage. His anger was directed, like a blowtorch, at everything - it manifested itself as class resentment, frustrations about money and his own health. He was furious about how he was treated by Somerset and England, and utterly distraught that his career had not gone quite the way it should have. Many would look at his figures and see a more than successful time in the professional game. Gimblett saw only failure.

He suffered a breakdown in 1953, and undertook electro-shock therapy. He tried to play for Somerset once more but was given time off. According to him, he was then barred from the ground. There then followed an unsuccessful post teaching at Millfield. He ended his life with an overdose of prescription pills in a mobile home near Minehead.

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That sense of bitterness and rage, of fury at what seems, on the surface, very little, reminds me more of another Somerset opener. I was saddened, though not necessarily shocked, by Peter Roebuck's death. I don't want to reduce his life, Gimblett's and Trescothick's to a series of universals, though all three clearly suffered depression, and Gimblett and Roebuck were clearly affected by a very similar sense of rage and bitterness at their perceived mistreatment. In the case of three Somerset openers - Lathwell, Gimblett and Trescothick, there's also a clear split between their zestful batting and their nervous, introspective personalities.

But if I were to draw a comparison between Gimblett, Trescothick and Roebuck, and suggest how their background might have a part to play in how they have been tormented, I suppose it would come down to this: their sense of right and wrong. If it's a West Country trait - and I don't know for sure that it is - all three men shared it. No one can claim to have a window into a man's soul, not least in the case of taciturn men like Gimblett and Trescothick. But I've blogged on MT's stern sense of right and wrong before, and for me it's what marked out Roebuck as a great writer.

It's an odd attribute. Most writers who pen things with the blinkers on are flawed because of it. Roebuck turned it into a virtue. There were, of course, the diatribes for which he was best known - and it takes a certain self-confidence to write a piece like this in the Australian press.  It'd be a huge mistake to think that he only criticised. Andy Bull at the Guardian cites this overwhelmingly positive piece on Kumar Sangakkara as one of his greatest. But it's the pieces when he took on the administrators that linger in the memory. Of that last link, Bull is great:

'Both cricket and Sri Lanka deserve better from the governors. Alas, the worst remain in office in so many places, with Ijaz Butt running amok in Pakistan; Givemore Makoni, with terrible inevitability, returning to official ranks in benighted and betrayed Zimbabwe; Gerald Majola still in charge in South Africa; and a mixture of government lackeys and bookmaking families running the show in Sri Lanka. Nor is there any reason to retain faith in Giles Clarke, England's puffed-up principal, or Australia's Jack Clarke, whose limitations have been exposed often enough.'

"There, in the space of a single paragraph, Roebuck made himself more political enemies than many cricket writers do in a lifetime."

How true. And this all leads us to what I consider the best piece he ever wrote. It's on Glenn McGrath. Here it is. From line one, there's no fucking about.

"Glenn McGrath is the subtlest and most patient of fast bowlers."

Fact.

"He rarely takes wickets with yorkers or bouncers or even bad balls; and he does not involve himself in the marketplace where runs and wickets are exchanged. He is the meanest of opponents, seeks to dismiss batsmen without cost, or at worst for a few runs apiece. In truth he is more accountant than murderer."

What a great pair of metaphors. Neither really true, of course. Roebuck knew that McGrath did actually bowl quite a few short ones, when it suited the situation (Atherton, for example, got them repeatedly, because McGrath knew he liked to hook). But the point is it's true enough to reduce the bowler down to his essential attributes.

"Do not bother sending out an inept opener to face him for he will be devoured like a small fish by a shark. McGrath's bowling requires exceptional control of body and mind. Amongst contemporaries only Anil Kumble bears comparison with him in terms of discipline and intent."

Again - facts. The opener will be devoured. And there's no mention of, say, Murali, Warne, Pollock - all of whom would be reasonable comparisons. Nope, just Kumble.

But Roebuck's ability to reduce the argument to its bare bones is what makes him such a powerful and effective writer. Dare I say it, it's what made his perceived mistreatment at the hands of his employers sting him so painfully. Maybe it was that sense which informed his fatal decision that night in South Africa.