28/08/12

I've not blogged for a while. This entry will be very long, and it'll explain why. Various readers will be familiar with bits of the story. It's probably quite boring, and what's more pointless - but then enough people say that about the game of cricket, and still it seems to work. It's also my version of events. No doubt biased, subjective, and perhaps chronologically flawed. It's the best I can offer. So.

*

My story starts in 2005. I'm in my early 20s, and I've just moved to London. The year before I was a decent enough league cricketer on the South Coast, who was thinking I could find a similar club and do all the accepted things - work hard at my game, keep fit, try to break into the firsts, etc etc. 

It didn't happen. Instead I was roped into the world of friendly cricket by friends I met through work. I joined two friendly teams, and was pretty much their best player. This isn't saying much. Both were very bad, and the standard was much lower than I'd been playing the year before. But both were full of the nicest people I could have hoped to meet.

The first team I call the Decrepits. They had previously been half of another team, which was split between those who wanted to take the games more seriously, and those who didn't. Every friendly cricket team suffers from these stress lines. What it boils down to is pretty simple: do we give people a go, or try to win? Is it possible to do both, without the lesser cricketers feeling it's their fault if they lose? 

The tensions - which have been written about, at great length, in a couple of well-known cricket books - were far worse than most. Everyone knows what eventually happened: half the team - who'd become The Decrepits - upped and left, forming their own side. 

There are, however, some details that most people don't know about, but I do. And I guess, given the fact I'm not naming names here, I can fill in the blanks. The ringleaders on either side of this split were childhood friends. One of them, the man who wanted the club to take things more seriously, contracted a terminal illness. He wrote vitriolic, furious letters to the other man, blaming him for the breakdown of their friendship, telling him he never wanted to see him again. His fiancee - whom he married on his death bed - told the other man that he wouldn't be coming to the funeral. There was more, and nastier - but I think you have the picture.

The other man was devastated. I saw all this at first hand. And I quickly realised that this game, even though it was happening at a very low level, was far more than a game. It takes up so much time that it can end up becoming a central plank of your existence - the bit that isn't work, or relationships. And I realised something else: that I couldn't ever let something like this happen to my other club.

*

By 2007, my other club had been playing in a pub league in East London for three years. Our ethos hadn't changed since the day I'd joined - every player who wanted to play, be they good, bad or indifferent, was eligible to play. And every year, we came bottom of the league. I found it a bit frustrating; I didn't like constantly losing to teams of not-very-good players, but we had a lot of fun, and a thriving social scene - most games we'd even have a little fan club of 10-15 wives, girlfriends and others getting pissed by the side of the pitch. One of them would even become my fiancee.

I started to think about the future of this team. We now had a few better players, but we still weren't really good enough to compete. If we really wanted to challenge, we needed to recruit guys who were good and bat them all up the order, but was that what we were about? Absolutely not.

It meant that we were doomed to be out of the running for the league by week three or four, thus rendering every subsequent performance one "for pride". And you can only play for pride for so long before people get depressed. Players who'd enthusiastically turned up to make up the numbers were beginning to drift away - they would have if we'd been better, but we still needed to replace them.

And this meant there was an issue about sustainability. We were recruiting players from all over the city - but how long would they stick around if they had to trek to East London for every game? I knew we could survive solely by recruiting from the local area, but did we want that, or did we want to be as accessible as possible to everyone we met? I knew there were better games out there - we had access, for example, to Oxford and Cambridge wickets pretty much whenever we wanted - but we couldn't fit them all in around the league fixtures, which were always announced late in the day. 

Then there was the day-to-day experience of the league. Most of the teams weren't very friendly, or were polite at best. A couple verged on being outright thugs. The pitches were all terrible, with the exception of one, which was a pudding.  On top of that there were lots of little things I disliked: the format was 35 overs; five overs per bowler. In theory, it meant everyone got a good go at something. In actuality, batsmen would stodge out the first 15-20 overs, wait for three chaps who didn't know how to bowl or want to, to come on, and murder them. 

At the end of 2007 I'd had a successful season and made my first ton for the club. I'd averaged around 50 for three years running, and I thought I'd earned people's respect as a player. So I put a motion to the team: we should leave the league, and play competitive friendlies. I thought, above all, friendlies would make it easier to manage the expectations of every player. There were fewer strictures. If a good batsman's in, you can put on a good bowler, and vice versa. And if you lose because you're giving people a go, then fine: there's nothing really riding on it. 

It felt like a no-brainer. But half the team, it seemed, disagreed with me. They said friendlies wouldn't be competitive enough. I told them there were friendly teams out there playing at a standard a hundred times that of the league opponents. They said that our standing in the league was the best way to measure how much they were improving. I told them coming bottom for three years running wasn't much of an indicator either, and that the best way to improve was to play good cricketers on good wickets, rather than bad ones on bad wickets.  There were murmurs, too, that this was about an attempt for us to play "posher" games, as if the pub league wasn't to my taste because I'd been to private school.

It was galling - I'd been playing friendly cricket for my other team for two years, and could see how it could work for us. I thought there was a great unspoken motivation behind most of these arguments: the fact the league was on the doorstep for most of them. They liked being able to roll out of bed, hungover, and stumble down to the ground. Maybe I'm being unfair. What I knew for sure was that a lot of people were making negative comments about friendlies despite never having played them - they'd set up this team straight out of uni, and always been in the pub league.

The argument turned nasty. I was accused of wanting to take over the club. I wanted no such thing - I just thought it would be better for us and would help secure our future if we changed the games we played. But that said, I did also run for captain that year.

At the hustings I said whatever happened in terms of the league/friendly situation, it was a separate issue: I'd lead the team whichever format we chose.  The club didn't pick me: they chose a guy who'd only been playing for half a season. Earlier in the week, the club had taken a poll and the split, between league and non-league, was almost exactly 50/50. I'm told the ratios for the captaincy vote were similar. I also know that some of the people who'd been against the idea of playing friendlies had approached the guy who beat me in the poll, and asked him to run. I left the AGM early, in tears.

*

In 2005, 2006 and 2007, I'd averaged around 50. In 2008, I averaged around 20. As a concession to my ambitions for the team, we'd elected to try a new ground, yet continue playing in the league. You can see how well that worked out here. To be honest, the pitch was only half the problem. It was the fact I simply didn't want to be there. I loved the team and the social life, but it had turned sour for me. I felt betrayed, and turned up to every game wishing I was somewhere else. 

The arguing continued. On a couple of occasions I was told that I was deliberately trying to get the team down to make them think again about the league. I wasn't - I was just depressed. On two occasions we were bowled out for under 40. The fact I couldn't think straight when batting wasn't exactly helping in this regard. After a particularly vicious humping, one player - who averaged in single figures at the time -  told me I'd lost it, perhaps due to a lack of fitness. That lead to perhaps the worst argument so far, and my saying things I still regret today.

At the end of the year, the guy who'd been voted in as captain told me I'd been right. We'd have another vote regarding the league, and if it didn't go our way, he'd leave the club, and I'd come with him. I should have felt vindicated, but instead it felt like everything I'd wanted to avoid - a painful schism in the team - had come to pass.

But we won the vote, convincingly, and left the league. There had been so much shit flying around over the past two years, I felt I couldn't run for the captaincy. By now there were some excellent candidates: it wouldn't have been right for the team. Instead I took the job of fixtures secretary, and spent four or five months every year putting together our seasons in my spare time. 

I wasn't sure how well it would work. Sometimes I've wished I walked back in '07. But I think the last three years have worked pretty well, on the whole. There are plenty of things that haven't - on occasion, we've either been stuffed, or stuffed other teams.  More recently we've had players join who are very good, and it's often a struggle to find fixtures that can accommodate them and the weaker players. It's an issue which bothers them as much as anyone - they love the team and the culture, but they like scoring runs - who doesn't? - and the question is how they balance their interests and those of the team.

I'm not as good as them, but I know how they feel. Ever since 2007, when the argument kicked off, I've failed to make a ton. I've played for a couple of better teams, and come close - a few 70s or 80s here and there - but for our team I've felt, if not depressed any more, too distracted. Is the game going ok? Are people enjoying themselves? Do the opposition like us, and will they have us back? Have half our team got the wrong train? To whom do we need to give a go? There was so much anger and bitterness at the time we chose to play friendlies that it absolutely had to work and make everyone happy, otherwise all those rows were for nothing.

So the worries pile up and up, and you find yourself either batting down the order so people can have a hit, or walking out to bat wondering if someone's forgotten the club kit, before missing a straight one. I've averaged about 30 odd over the last couple of years, which at this level is frankly shit. I'm not the player I was, and I probably won't ever be again. But that player at his peak was a decent club 2s all rounder who'd probably have been found out in horrific manner had he played enough games for the firsts. It's no huge loss.

*

Except in the last two seasons, there's been another dark cloud on the horizon. For a start, I took a job which meant I could only play one weekend in two. It was shift work, and it meant when I did play I was turning up sleep-deprived.

I was saving money, because my fiancee and I have to move out of London. I told myself that I could still play most games for the team next year because I was only an hour and a bit away, but really, I was lying to myself, and the team. I can still have an involvement, no doubt, but the chances of me being a regular - not that I could really call myself that now - are modest to say the least.

It's been a hard season: we've been struggling for players, due to weddings, marriages and all the other detritus that hits teams at this time. I've begun to fear for the club. That, on top of the realisation that as a player I've given up on chances to make runs so others can have a go and have usually been distracted when I haven't - has started to upset me.  All the above - all that stress, and worry, and upset - was it all for nothing? What have I got in return, other than fewer runs than I should and a team that may very well soon die?

This year I was going out to bat feeling, if not depressed, then certainly frazzled. And the results have been absolutely fucking awful. From the middle of this season, I've failed to make double figures and have barely had a bowl. I didn't want to blog about each failure because I felt the bigger picture - all of the above - was missing. 

Then, this weekend, something strange happened. We went on our usual tour to the West Country, and I was honest with the team about how I was feeling. And I realised that our team not only had some very lovely guys in it - I knew that anyway - but it had people who really, really cared about it. They promised me they wouldn't let it die, and I believed them. So yes, actually - all the above had been worth it. 

And on the Sunday our skipper let me open the batting, and I felt like a totally different player because of the things that had been said the night before, and I hit a ton*, as I did five years ago, and, just as had been the case on a different night five years ago, I sat away from my team mates in floods of tears, except this time they were tears of happiness. And that's why I haven't blogged. But I will now.

*Dropped three times against an attack containing two children. Probably worth about 37, on adjustment.

This blog is not dead

...it's only sleeping. There's all sorts of things I want to talk about, but I can't. There's nothing particularly bad going on; it's just a bit complex. Once the season's over, I'll spill the beans.

You may see more posts; but only on general cricket stuff, but I try to get those things published if I can. Until a suitable topic presents itself, over and out.

CC

Rubbish

Well, I have played a couple of games. On one I got to open the batting on a flat pitch, and got out LBW for 30-odd, because I keep drifting across towards middle stump as I get more confident to flick straight balls away to leg, and sort of gradually lose track of where the stumps are, so I was out to one hitting middle I initially thought was going down by a mile.

This I did earlier in the season in a game and I was so annoyed about it I didn't even blog the match, because it was one of those golden chances to make a ton that come along very infrequently. It's the sort of little technical problem you can easily sort out when you're playing a lot, but not when you're hardly playing at all, and I haven't been this year. Have also played one other game, scored 17* and bowled really badly.

Nothing more to say, because really there isn't - it would be blogging for blogging's sake. And I don't have much to say on the professional game at the moment, either. Due to this being the worst summer ever in terms of weather and due to the fact I'm SO busy with work, I've kind of given up on cricket for a bit. Let's see what August brings.

However, we do have something to write about, and what's more, we got paid to do it. So, my review of a book on cricket and international development. Here it is. Interesting subject, badly written book, sadly.

Oh, and I met Gordon Greenidge (along with Mohammad Yousuf, Saqlain Mushtaq, Henry Olonga, Wasim Jaffer, Lou Vincent, and a load of others). And made a tit of myself.

2012's not going well in cricket terms, is it?

18/06/12 - Newton, Cambridgeshire

Marvellous. This game affords me the opportunity to produce a CC blog with two things we've been short of this year, to whit: 1) Godawful arty 'polaroid' photos taken through my iPhone and 2) A substantial innings needlessly dissected in forensic detail.

As to number 1: thus:

Let's deal with our effort in the field first. We (the Decrepits) have inserted the opposition on a damp pudding, and are pleased to bowl them out for 108. This, in retrospect, is more like 150 on a good pitch - the lush outfield converts 4s into 2s and 2s into singles, the wicket is so slow that it's barely possible to time anything other than a full toss, and despite the customary half-dozen dropped chances and missed run outs, a scoring rate of two an over will always produce wickets.

Our one good (off) spinner clears up, and while CC's economical but wicketless spell is best not dwelt upon (of course I should have turned to spin like everyone else on such a slow wicket, but some bugger had to try to bowl fast, just to give the game a bit of variety), I feel we can be pleased with our afternoon's work.

A word more on our spinner. He is an ageing chap who was once a very, very good league player. And one can see why. He bowls flat, fizzing them in at a decent pace (such that our keeper, who admittedly 'has the reactions of a breeze block' ((c) a famous author), has to stand back). It's the sort of bowling that we English like to see from our spinners (Swann and Panesar are the exception, rather than the rule). It will rarely go at more than five an over, against anyone, and in a Test match or similar it's almost entirely useless, but it's nevertheless a very useful skill set in any other form of the game, for scoring off it is nigh-on impossible.

Now, to our innings. Our captain asks CC where he'd like to bat. CC replies: 'Oh, it's only a hundred odd: give everyone who wants to bat a go, as I play all the time anyway.' CC is told he's at number three. I feel this speaks volumes about our team.

Within a couple of overs, CC is in. Let us speak candidly - for in recent times I feel I haven't been honest enough. Not in terms of overstating my achievements - (heaven forfend), but in terms of what's really running through CC's mind as he takes guard. And what it is, is this.

I really wish I was wearing the right shirt and cap.


This is nothing to do with the weather. This is to do with the fact that CC bats according to his attire. I know, it's ridiculous. But he really does. A long sleeved shirt and jaunty jazz hat are essential for these conditions. That's because, in CC's utterly warped mind, it summons an image of Ranjitsinhji which he once saw in the school library, and Ranjitsinhji played against bowlers delivering medium paced swingers and cutters on uncovered pitches, and his brand of wristy leg play was uniquely suited to this and is something that CC attempts to emulate even though he's only read about it via Neville Cardus rather than seen it, and it seems to work in these conditions better than the short sleeved shirt and maroon helmet worn by Marcus Trescothick whom CC tries to emulate at all other times, which results in a succession of booming drives without much foot movement which again in CC's warped mind are entirely acceptable because it worked for dear, dear Marcus Trescothick.

The next thought is this.

The bowler will swing the ball in and cut the occasional one away. Therefore I require a middle and leg guard and I need to open my stance slightly. I must be careful not to close the face on the ball: playing a leg side delivery with a straight bat will actually send the ball through the leg side even though it feels like it won't as I play the shot. As well you know, trying to clip it too fine is fraught with danger. But that's what you'll do.


And he bowls, and it swings in, and I attempt to glance it rather too fine, and it brushes my pad and there's an appeal for a catch, which is mercifully muted.

The next thought is this.

Told you.


Now, we have a fascinating battle here. We have a bowler delivering inswingers which cut away occasionally, and at the other end, we have a bowler delivering outswingers that cut back in. This is due to the action their fingers put on the ball. The inswing bowler (I am left handed, remember), is exerting more pressure on the ball with his index finger, so it's rather easy for him to deliver an off cutter (leg cutter to me) with just a little more emphasis on that digit. The away-swing bowler has more pressure exerted by the middle finger, and so the opposite is true.

Neither of them are doing this at any terrifying pace, but if anything, with the slow outfield and pitch, this actually makes one's life harder. Because while it slows down one's scoring off bad balls, when the ball misbehaves off the wicket, one still doesn't have a lot of time to react if it's on a good length.

Anyway, now we're up the other end and facing our away swinging chum. And the thought process is this.

Take middle stump as a guard so that your head is over off. Anything outside your eyeline must be attacked because it's missing the stumps and edges are unlikely to carry. Once again, the straight bat must be presented to everything else.


Within two balls I've been tempted into playing too fine against a ball that pitched on leg and came back towards off, and this time a tiny nick saves me from the plumbest of plumb LBWs. I rather feel that if one could transplant my internal monologue into the mind of a more talented batsman, you'd actually have a bloody good player.


Now then, much as I'd like to talk you through our innings ball-by-ball (and pleasurable though it would be) even I fear the tedium. So let's hear about notable moments - the Channel 5 package if you will.

1. Our in-swinging friend delivers a beautiful leg cutter on my pads which, damn fool that I am, I attempt to whip away to leg. The inevitable leading edge trickles to The Third Man, who no doubt feels I'm an ant. I assume, that having been so diddled, the bowler will now 'mindfuck' me ((c) an antipodean with whom I play and who is easily confused) by bringing the ball back in. But no, instead he dangles the carrot with a quicker ball outside off stump. I manage to restrain myself from fishing at him. Crafty bastard.

2. Our away-swinging friend bowls the perfect delivery, an away swinger towards which I am inexorably drawn into a cover drive, but which rasps back into me off the wicket just as I realise I'm nowhere near the pitch. I somehow allow my bottom hand some extra precedence and manufacture an inside edge. I realise that two years prior to this game, he did me with this very ball, and that it's my subconscious - which still remembers the hurt - that has saved me.

3. I am dropped twice. Both of them are catchable, but both of them are full-blooded, middled shots - a pull to a deepish midwicket, and an off drive to mid off. I feel rather less ashamed of these moments than normal. I suppose my feeling is that in these conditions luck is almost de rigeur.

4. I make 49 (or 50 - this rather depends on whether an incorrect leg bye has been returned to its rightful owner - the bowler was happy for this to be the case, so long as a couple of runs that were actually leg byes were sent his way, such are the vicissitudes of friendly cricket). I am out at approximately 80-5, whereupon I make a phone call I've been meaning to make all day. The phone call lasts 8 minutes at 34 seconds, at which point I discover we are all out, about twenty short. This is worrying, for we won't be in this situation very often this season. I fear we're going to lose all our games again.

5. The dismissal was a short ball that I attempted to smash back over the bowler for six. Long on - Mr Inswing or, peeling away the shroud a little, @miltonbrewery - scurried round and took a marvelous catch. I couldn't complain, having been dropped twice. An Australian would have tapped it into a gap for a relaxed double, but I am English and as such my instinct is to grasp us a heroic defeat. It was as inevitable as the fact I'd quaff far too much beer before heading home, and would then need a wee with the nearest public toilet 45 minutes away.

Sigh. What else to say? It was a wonderful day. But once one factors in the opposition team, the ground, the tea, the pub....it would have been wonderful if I'd made 0, and it would have been wonderful if I'd won us the match. This game will never, ever cease to lose its appeal. I have never felt so secure in my conviction that I will never hang up my pads. I rather worry that they'll have to be removed from my stone-cold corpse. Friend of a friend had a heart attack at the very moment he struck a boundary. I'm not sure there's a better way to go.

Needless to say, I am very, very drunk as I type this.

Some more bats which I have loved

1. Slazenger V Caribbean

Important point: this may be the only photo on the whole Internet. And it might not be the right bat.

Like Excalibur, the V Caribbean exists only in a half-remembered dream. It was Viv Richards' bat. Except, when you look at every picture on Google images, he's using an SS, a Duncan Fearnley, A V500, or a V100. Further research shows that someone tried to sell one on eBay Australia a little while back. Other than that, it has vanished without a trace.

All I know is this. Aged 11 I'd managed to nab the V Caribbean from the school kit bag. A leg spinner bowled me a long hop first ball. I took a big swing, which was what I did every ball those days, and unusually I connected, and it went up, and up, and over a fence, and into a moat a very long way away, and I was therefore an automatic selection for the first team all year, where I don't think I ever made more than 10, and that was clearly because I kept having to use the shitty Dynadrive. This bat existed. I know it did.

If this bat was a singer it would be: Bobbie Gentry.

2. Grey Nicolls Elite 500

One word: badass. As I recall this bat came in two different weights - oak tree trunk or, for the ladies, railway sleeper. Robin Smith only used it because the very fact he could lift it sent a message. Fuck having a scoop - this bat would have had extra wood on the back, if it could. Once you'd decided on a shot, there was no going back. If you'd picked the right one, you probably had six runs to your name. If you hadn't, you generally had to lump the thing back to the pavilion.

If this bat was an actor it would be: Tom Hardy.

3. Grey Nicolls Powerspot

It's got a spot, right? That's where you hit the ball, right? But what if you grew up in the 90s and all you saw was Mike Atherton facing Glenn McGrath or Curtly Ambrose and the ball steadfastly refusing to hit that bit of the bat and instead hitting the bits around the spot, and then usually heading to one of the people standing behind him? Well then it wouldn't fill you with confidence when you used it, would it? If they'd named it something like the Grey Nicolls "Thick outside edge to Mark Waugh at slip" - then at least poor Athers wouldn't have felt he was being sold down the river every time he picked it up.

Look at bats these days. The stickers imply you're going to smash it out of the park, possibly off the splice. Whereas this bat says 'you might get a four, if you time it perfectly'. Low expectation having motherfucker, to quote Chris Rock. No one I know ever made runs with a Powerspot.

If this bat was a TV family it would be: The Royle Family. Unmistakably English in how low it sets its sights.

4. Kookaburra Bubble



Bit of a rip off of the Powerspot, of course, but this was in a different class. Because this was Alec Stewart's bat. And Alec Stewart did the bat twiddle. So if you owned a Bubble, you had to learn the twiddle. And that automatically made you look, ooh, about 110x cooler at the crease. Alec Stewart also did the thing where you tucked the bat under your arm as your middle stump got knocked back. Which even made getting out cool. To the point where some of us might even have deliberately got bowled in a practise game just so we could do it. Because we were lovable losers. That's at least half right.

If this bat was a film character it would be: Vince Vaughan in Dodgeball.

5. Duncan Fearnley 405

Really? Because flaying a rubbish attack to all parts of a tiny ground on the flattest wicket on earth warrants the creation of a bat in your honour? Really? Seriously, given the comparative standards of Australian and English domestic cricket at that time I'd rather have bought the Kookaburra "David Boon gritty 37* at the Hobart Oval" or something.

If this bat was an annoying MP that really rated itself it would be: Louise Mensch.

6. Gunn and Moore Purist

I don't really have anything amusing to say about this bat. It was Michael Vaughan's bat. He was stylish. It made you want to be stylish too. I owned one for three years. It was, without question, the best bat I've ever owned, ever. For those three years, I averaged 50. Then one day, at the end of a season, it went kaput. It was still good, but it was tired. I loved it so much I'd have done ANYTHING to keep using it, but every time I went out I found myself scared of playing shots in the air in case they didn't go far enough, so I really had to donate it to the club bag. The next year, I averaged about 20. Might have been the new bat; more likely to have been grief.

If this bat was a cricketer it would be: Michael Vaughan. Well, during that Ashes tour, anyway.

09/06/2012 - Hampstead Heath Extension

Absolutely bugger all to report. Came in towards the end, didn't get much strike and didn't time it very well when I did, suddenly discovered there were only five overs left and four wickets still to come, had a bit of a slog, then ran myself out for not many. Bowled some alright seam up that didn't go for any runs but to be honest the wicket was so very slow and the outfield so long that I'd have had to bowl very badly for that to happen.

I've kind of resigned myself to the view that this season isn't really going to happen as there have been so many games rained off: I don't get to play as much as I used to due to work and next year I'll be leaving London and starting a new life. It's kind of depressing, and kind of liberating. But that's another story, for another day.

Anyway, the fact I don't have anything to write about ties in with the subject of today's blog, which is actually a little book review of this: Ed Cowan's diary of the 2010/11 season. Sadly many of the incredibly intelligent points I wanted to make about it have passed me by, because I read it bloody ages ago and haven't had a chance to blog about it till now, but let's give it a go anyway.

So then. We all like Eddie Cowan, don't we? Many a cricket fan has literary tendencies and the fact that one of us bookish sorts is currently practising at the top level is rather exciting. Professional sportsmen, by and large, are a frustrating lot - they can just do the stuff they describe: they don't need to think about or analyse it a huge amount, and if they do they're not given to articulating their analyses in any great depth. The classic example of this is something like the Darren Lehmann book I reviewed ages ago on here.

It really pisses crap cricketers off, this tendency, because cricket is a game of skill, and technique, and many an intelligent but bad cricketer has been lulled into thinking that their game's deficiencies can be resolved if only they think about it enough, which neglects that sad fact that actually there's a point where it's all about co-ordination, and you can't will that into existence.

In 2005 I joined a club that was full of Cambridge graduates who'd spend hour after hour after hour getting drunk and talking about their games (usually after they'd scored 0 and we'd been bowled out for under 100). It was interesting because you'd hear them correctly analyse why they'd been bowled middle stump, and agree with them on what they needed to do next time round, but the fact remained that they would continue to make technical mistakes because they just weren't very coordinated. It meant they'd instinctively do the wrong thing every now and again, and those mistakes would be more costly than they would be for their opponents because, well, they weren't very coordinated. The sad truth is that MS Dhoni actually has a worse technique than many club players. He also has an eye approximately 10,000 times better.

But now we have Eddie Cowan. He has a LOT more talent than us, and he thinks about it all as much as we do. And the end result is - well, a stodgy late-blooming Test opener who has yet to make everyone sit up and take notice. But of course, we're absolutely rooting for him, because he's one of us.

And I suppose the depressing thing about this book for the average crap cricketer is how familiar it all seems. In terms of his technical analyses, there's some great insight here - and it's particularly interesting for left handers like me - but actually, there's nothing that made me think 'gosh, how cunning, I've never thought about incorporating that into my game'. At one point he talks about how to play right arm over inswing. He describes exactly what I do. The only difference is that the bowlers he faces are 20mph quicker and a lot more accurate. The difference between the scenes that were played out on the field in the picture above and the ones he describes at the Hobart Oval come down, I'm afraid, to talent.

Fuck. This is bad news. And it gets worse.

He gets incredibly excited about playing alongside famous players like Ricky Ponting. He's overawed by famous opponents, and scared of quick bowlers. Exactly as we would be.

He worries about keeping a diary. Why's he doing it? Is it healthy? When things are going well it's fine, but when things are going badly isn't it just adding extra layers of self-doubt and wrecking his own confidence? Is he - like me - just writing for writing's sake, and making things worse? Turns out it probably is.

He worries about his form. The overriding impression that comes out of the book is that he's struggling to buy a run, that the game is making him miserable, and that he's really not good enough to play it. Except, when you look at the stats, he actually had a very good season. Turns out that's just how the game makes you feel, unless you're averaging about 200.

He loves and respects his team mates, to a rather touching degree. If anything they're the only things that keep him sane. But he also frets and becomes increasingly bitter and slightly jealous when he's dropped from the team for shorter forms of the game. As we all have at one point or another. Turns out that's just what we do.

To reiterate - this is a man who was just about to be selected to play for his country, having a strong season in one of the toughest domestic leagues in the world, and the entire experience, word-for-word is....well, it's pretty much this blog.

Worth reading? Absolutely, if you can take the dispiriting news that the game is no different at all at the top levels, with the small difference that the people competing are much better. Here's an extract.

And as an added bonus, here's a piece by him on facing Mitchell Johnson, which is really one of the better bits of cricket writing by a professional in the last few years.

21/05/2012 - Lord's

Wrote this one up for the New Statesman here.

(May borrow a few lines from other blog posts).