Andy Zaltzman's Blog, page 5

Multistat: 4

Horses waltzing: better than KP
© Getty Images



The number of consecutive final Tests in home series against South Africa that England have won. The Proteas have lost every single final Test they have played in England since readmission – twice to draw a series they had been winning (1994 and 2003), once to lose a series they should have won and would have won but for almost superhuman tactical negativity (1998), and once to concede a consolation defeat (2008), when they cleverly hoodwinked England into thinking the Kevin Pietersen captaincy experiment was a strategic masterstroke.

Whether or not this sequence becomes a five-pronged one will decide whether this series constitutes England’s second significant failure of 2012 ‒ the series when England finally, after 108 years, were summarily overthrown as Olympic cricket champions ‒ or further proof of their resilience as a team, and their ability to alchemise victories from the apparent components of defeat. Was England’s startling 2011 a team at its peak, performing consistently close to the limits of its collective and individual abilities? Or is 2012 the anomaly?

4 is also: The number of people in Britain who gave the second Test their full, undivided attention. The match gave hints that England might be re-establishing parity, or at least near-parity, with the Proteas after the tourists demolished them like a cheap birthday grapefruit in a fistfight on the Titanic. The Test was played to the noisy backdrop of a nation becoming wildly excited at finding out that it is good at sports of which it had barely even heard a couple of weeks ago. Kevin Pietersen’s eye-watering innings and end-of-match strop-out added some intrigue, but a British person being able to make a horse breakdance captured more of the public’s imagination.

4 is also: The number of cricket fans in the world who have no opinion on Kevin Pietersen. Three of those four misheard the question and thought it was referring to the former bespectacled 1980s Kent batsman Derek Aslett.

I have written more often about Kevin Pietersen than any other player in the four years I have been writing this blog. That is because he is more worth writing about than any other player – not better, but endlessly interesting, baffling, arresting, exhilarating, inconsistent, and frustrating, on and off the field. He wears his brilliance and his frailties quite openly, in his cricket, his words, and his behaviour. I have no idea what he is like as a man, but he has been a cricketer of ceaseless fascination, through his cricketing peaks and troughs, and his moods, which have swung so much there have been unsubstantiated rumours that someone had been picking at his moods with a bottle top and smearing one side with Vaseline. Please don’t retire.

Morne Morkel and a pot of yoghurt

Through dramatisation, Vernon Philander explains to his captain that like everything his bowling graph too is eventually affected by gravity
© Getty Images




The second Test in the Olympics-buried series between Team GB and South Africa begins at Headingley on Thursday with Seb Coe and his men desperately needing a gold medal to haul themselves back into contention following a disastrous opening routine at The Oval. I’m confused. I think I have been watching too much sport, but not enough cricket. Too much sport and too much cricket is a combination I am familiar with. A combination for which I have spent most of my conscious life training assiduously.

I will be incapacitated for some of what promises to be a fascinating Test match by temporary afflictions, such as attending some badminton and wondering what the rules of sabre-toothed fencing are. I am not expecting canoe sprint to usurp cricket as the sport closest to my heart – cricket signed a long-term lease in 1981 and I believe, without access to all the paperwork, that it may even own the freehold ‒ but there will not have been many home Test matches in the last 30 years from which I have been more distracted.

It promises to be a fascinating match. But then, The Oval promised to be a gripping, evenly matched thriller, and turned into one of the hardest thrashing administered in this country since the days of 19th-century education and headmasters possessing a dangerous cocktail of strong moral convictions, innate sadism, and a plentiful supply of easily wieldable sticks.

England have generally bounced back well from their rare struggles of recent years, and proved many critics wrong at many junctures. (In fact, their success in doing so could have been their undoing at The Oval. Most modern sportsmen seem to thrive in the quest to “prove critics wrong”, whatever those critics have said, and whether or not those words had been wilfully misinterpreted. England’s stellar form had, until last winter, left them almost devoid of critics – and thus struggling for motivation.)

But the form lines of their high-class bowling attack may been causing significant concern. The bowling unit, as it loves to be called, has been almost uniformly excellent for two years. However:

● In his last two Tests against South Africa, James Anderson has taken 1 for 227. In between those two games, from early 2010 until this July, he never took fewer than two wickets in a Test, and never fewer than three in a home Test. He had taken at least two first-innings wickets in 18 consecutive Test matches, dating back to the Lord’s Test against Pakistan in 2010.

● Stuart Broad took his first 13 wickets of the Test summer at an average of 14. Since the last of those – his second wicket in the first innings at Trent Bridge, against West Indies ‒ he has taken one more wicket for 238 runs.

● Tim Bresnan took 8 for 141 in that Test, and, when he dismissed Samuels at Edgbaston, he had followed that up with 3 for 46. Since then, in the rest of that Tino-Best-inspired frenzy and at The Oval, he has taken 1 for 205.

● Graeme Swann has taken 19 wickets at 50 in his last eight home Tests (nine of those wickets came in one match, at last summer’s Oval Test against India). He has taken 6 for 433 this summer. He bowled excellently in South Africa in 2009-10 (21 wickets at 31 - the first time in more than 30 years that an England spinner had taken 20 or more in an away series). There have been few major blips in Swann’s four outstanding years as a Test bowler, but he is in the middle of one now, and England need him to de-blip himself as soon as possible.

What comes after surgical disembowelment?

After playing a risky sweep, Matt Prior believes his chances at double or nothing are very good
© Getty Images



From today, cricket will be on England’s sporting back burner. The London Olympics, understandably, has wound Britain into a frenzy of wild excitement, and/or complaintative grumpery, and/or a sudden and unquenchable interest in the finer points of canoeing, equestrian dressage, and the timeless national hobby of watching people carry a small bit of fire quite slowly. It is a British tradition as old as Britain itself. There must be one spectacularly giant witch to burn at the opening ceremony tonight.

Perhaps it is fortunate that England has an Olympics to distract it from a Test match hammering so comprehensive it could have passed itself off as an underfunded inner-city school. Last year, England brutalised the then-world-number-one-ranked Indians. At The Oval, the boot was not only on the other foot, but it was triumphantly stomping on their throat like a vengeful rhinoceros. “Too close to call” had been many people’s pre-match prediction. It was as if Nadal and Federer had met at the Wimbledon final in 2008, with the world on the edge of its collective seat to see the two greatest tennis players in the universe, and Nadal had beaten Federer by knocking him spark out with an anvil to the head.

Andrew Strauss and his team can thus attempt to recover from their surgical disembowelment at The Oval away from the glare of press and public. The Test series moves to Headingley next week, before returning to the hauntingly sport-starved city of London for the final climactic showdown. Or last rites. Delete according to whether you think England (a) will be able to respond to this poor start as they have responded to most other poor starts recently, or (b) have been so utterly tonked that they will forget that they had taken 20 wickets in 22 of their previous 28 Tests, and remember only that, either side of those 28 Tests, they have suffered successive cloutings-by-an-innings at the hands of Graeme Smith’s rampant Proteas. (By my reckoning, this is only the fifth time that England have suffered successive innings defeats against a team in their Test history ‒ previously, v Australia in 1897-98, 1946-47 and 2002-03; and v India in 1992-93.)

It was one of South Africa’s finest Test wins, four days of almost perfect cricket against very good opposition on a tediously snoozy pitch that gave minimal assistance to either bowlers or, just as importantly, spectators. If an Ancient Roman fortune teller (and let us assume there is one amongst England’s numerous backroom staff) had tried to read the future from the entrails of England’s Oval disembowelment, he is unlikely to have come up with anything particularly positive. He might have prodded around in the still-warm guts and made vague prognostications of an improvement with the ball, but that would be merely a statistical inevitability. Wouldn’t it? As 19th-century cricket pundit Oscar Wilde once said: “To concede 600-plus for 2 once may be regarded as a misfortune. To do so twice looks like carelessness. Do join me in the tea interval when my special guests will be WG Grace, William Gladstone, Jack The Ripper and Nick Knight.” (Nick Knight is immortal. He has been alive since before the last Ice Age.)

The best eagerly awaited series of the last two years

Vernon Philander: George Lohmann in track pants
© Getty Images



One of England’s most eagerly awaited Test series of recent times launches into action today. Even the weather, which has been so single-mindedly sogging the entire summer, seems to want to watch Strauss’ England take on Smith’s South Africa. At stake: the pinnacle of the Test match rankings, and, in this Jubilee summer, a piggyback on the Queen for the winning captain (subject to Her Majesty passing a fitness test on a troublesome back injury that dates back to Mike Gatting’s days as England captain).

Admittedly most of this eager awaiting has been carried out by hardcore cricket fans. England’s wider sporting attention has been engaged with (a) the imminent Olympics, (b) complaining about the imminent Olympics, and (c) counter-complaining about the amount of complaining about the imminent Olympics. And probably also by (d) nerve-jangling rumours of the potential transfer of a left-back, or maybe even a defensive midfielder, between two second-tier football clubs. Nevertheless, in the cricket-conscious parts of the country, anticipation has been building throughout the summer, which has thus far registered barely a tremor on the cricketing Richter scale.

I expect this eagerly awaited Test series to prove rather better than the last eagerly awaited Test series in England, way back in the murky depths of history, in 2011. That showdown ended up in an abject drubbing for India, who were ageing, weakened by a couple of crucial injuries, and riding the rogue grandmother of emotional come-downs after their World Cup high. England are unlikely to have such compliant opposition this time.

The key battlegrounds

1. Swing bowling

England’s batting has been almost unremittingly exceptional since shortly after the start of the 2010-11 Ashes. It remitted fairly spectacularly in the face of some high-class tweakery against Pakistan in the UAE and in the first Test in Sri Lanka, but at home it has been historically dominant, crunching through records like a recently divorced crocodile through his ex-wife’s CD collection.

What England’s batting has not encountered in that time, however, is consistent top-quality swing bowling, since the naughtiness-besmirched 2010 series against Pakistan. Then, they collectively failed, but were bailed out by Pakistan counter-failing even more aggressively in the face of England’s own excellent swing contingent. Steyn and Philander will test whether the weaknesses that Amir and Asif exposed before their little “judicial kerfuffle” have been properly rectified, or merely camouflaged.

2. Swing bowling

South Africa’s batting contains four of the world’s top ten batsmen. No other country has more than one player in the top ten. However, in the three matches they have lost in the past two years – each when leading 1-0 in a series – vulnerability to swing has been influential, as Welegedara, Cummins, Zaheer and Sreesanth all made decisive inroads into their top order. Anderson is now a significantly superior bowler to the one who performed reasonably against them in 2008 and 2009-10, Broad has taken 54 wickets at 18 in his last ten Tests, and Bresnan has only ever had one actively ineffective Test match with the ball.

3. Dale Steyn’s body

It has been pointed out that Dale Steyn’s otherwise unimpeachable Test career has one significant blip – his performances against England. He averages 34 in eight Tests against England, compared with an overall career average of 23. But three of those matches were in his raw debut series in 2004-05, one was on a Lord’s featherbed in 2008, and one was his first match back after injury in 2009-10. In the other three matches (three of his most recent four against England), he has taken 20 wickets at an average of 22. England were thrashed in two of those games, and clung on by their fingertips in the other. If he remains fit and plays a complete series against England for the first time in four attempts, England will have to bat exceptionally well to win it.

4. Vernon Philander’s ability to keep thinking he is bowling in the 19th century.

Fifty-one wickets at 14 in seven Tests. Those are scarcely believable statistics in 2012. Rumours suggest that Philander summons the ghost of George Lohmann through a fairground medium before each Test he plays. South Africa will be hoping that the long-dead 1890s Surrey-and-England phenomenon continues his advisory role as personal bowling coach for the Proteas’ brilliant new blitztrundler.

5. Graeme Smith’s cover drive

Smith is a very good batsman. Perhaps in time he will be judged to have been a great batsman. He has been an admirable leader, and seems to be a perfectly decent human being. But with bat in hand he is an aesthetic abomination. If he starts chunk-slamming England’s bowlers through extra cover, the images burned into the England players’ retinas could adversely affect the home team when their turn comes to bat.

The diminishing returns of disembowelment by eagle

England celebrate their victory in the fourth ODI at an overcast Chester-le-Street
© Getty Images



England mercilessly claw-hammering Australia at cricket would normally provoke intense reactions on these shores. Some would charge around deliriously hugging strangers. Others would sit quietly with a glass of ale, ruminating in the satisfying afterglow of sporting triumph, before caterwauling wildly into the night skies and charging around deliriously hugging strangers. There would be spontaneous bunting, pigeons would be publicly applauded on the grounds that they might possibly have flown over the Lord’s car park and deposited on the Australian team bus, and it would generally be accepted that the Apocalypse was imminent, but that the end of the world was a small price to pay for conquering the old foe on the cricket field.

It is a little odd, then, to see the recently-completed 4-0 drubbing, an exercise in one-day-cricketing surgery executed with ruthless precision, pass by with barely a ripple from an understandably ambivalent public. For most of the last 25 years, England thrashings of Australia were as rare as the Queen being seen doing an Elvis impression in public (which is set to be the majestic, white-suited culmination of a spectacular Olympic opening ceremony).

It might have been arguably the least noticed England-Australia showdown since Rolf Harris and Leo Sayer had a growl-off over a disputed game of Snakes and Ladders in a BBC green room in the mid-1970s, but England have been brilliant in this summer’s micro-Ashes. The continually developing excellence of their bowling has enabled their Test technicians in the top order to use their class and craft to cruise to victory. It is a potent combination that bodes well for sterner and more relevant one-day challenges ahead.

However, as a curtain-raiser this series has whetted the appetite neither for next year’s Ashes – even the most enthusiastic Labrador would lose interest if you were to let it off its lead and stand poised to throw a stick for 12 months before actually throwing it ‒ nor for this year’s South Africa series, which would be eagerly anticipated if the schedule had given anyone the opportunity to eagerly anticipate it.

In this most congested of British sporting summers, saturated both with competing attractions, such as London’s biggest ever two-and-a-half-week-long high-end school sports day, and with water, water and more water, even a Test series between the two top-ranked cricket nations was always likely to struggle to capture the wider public imagination. Has the schedule even allowed it to capture cricket’s imagination? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I admit I have not had time to canvass much opinion because I have been too busy wondering what taekwondo is, trying to buy tickets to watch horsey disco, or “equestrian dressage” as the purists insist on calling it, contemplating whether Roger Federer’s backhand could solve the Middle East crisis (and whether trying to beating an in-form Federer on grass is easier or more difficult than trying to beat an in-form Michelangelo in a ceiling-painting contest), and desperately wracking my brains to remember what happened last time England and Australia played each other in England, in another midsummer contractual obligation two years ago.

Savouring the prospect of an alluring showdown is one of the joys of following sport. This crescendo of anticipation and speculation is increasingly impossible amidst the ceaseless churn of modern international cricket, where what was once special risks becoming routine.

The importance of Sehwag’s hair, and the most average cricketer ever

In this readers’ questions special: what’s more wasteful - Mitchell Johnson or carbon emissions? Does one pick eternal torment over watching Gary Kirsten? And is the BCCI evil?




Download the podcast here (mp3, 13.7MB, right-click to save) | iTunes

For those of you unable to stream or download the audio of the World Cricket Podcast, a transcript of this month’s show is below the jump. However, the show is supposed to be listened to, not read. So I would prefer that you listened to it. And then recited it, word for word, on public transport, until you have the bus/train-carriage/aeroplane to yourself. Thanks. AZ.

Stop flogging a groggy horse

Norman Gordon could not be persuaded out of retirement to appear at this weekend’s cricket marathon, but the Inspiral Carpets will be there
© ESPNcricinfo Ltd



Four Things We Have Learned From Phase One of England’s Distended ODI Summer
1. England are a very good side in home conditions, particularly when fielding five Test-class bowlers.

2. West Indies are not a very good side in English conditions, particularly when England field five Test-class bowlers. They were, admittedly, not helped by Chris Gayle being given out maybe leg before wicket (and, in the DRS era, “mlbw” should be officially recorded in the scorebooks, as well as “plbw” [probably lbw [and “dlbwtwbifkmonq” [definitely lbw, that was bang in front, knocking middle out, no question]). However, as in the Test matches, they have shown themselves flawed in all departments of the game.

3. One-sided ODIs are not much fun.

4. We cannot learn many things from one-side ODIs.

Four Ways to Enliven the 50-Over Format
1. Stop trying to enliven the 50-over format. The ODI game did probably need a little surgery to keep it attractive, but years of attempted beautifications have left it looking like the Frankenstein’s Zsa Zsa Gabor of cricket formats. The latest tinkerings – attempting to add greater flexibility to when Powerplays are taken by restricting when Powerplays can be taken, for example ‒ may have been entertainingly counter-intuitive, but have damaged the game.

2. For a format that frets so much about its often featureless middle-over sludge, 50-over cricket has done little to encourage wicket-taking bowling. The initial fielding restrictions ‒ a maximum of two men out, a minimum of two men catching ‒ should apply, as they used to, for the first 15 overs, giving top-order batsmen time to play themselves in, and then attack with the field still up. Currently, fielding teams can ‒ and, by the immutable law of sporting caution, always do ‒ go on the defensive after ten overs.

The batting Powerplay, which was turning into a reasonably interesting tactical gambit before it was unceremoniously whacked on the head by the authorities and plonked immovably in the 36-40 slot, should revert to being taken anywhere in the remainder of the innings, and should ideally have the same restrictions, or at the very least demand one man catching as well as the current maximum of three outside the 30-yard circle. Alternatively, after the first 15 overs, only allow four men outside the circle for the rest of the innings. Or allow two outside in the first 15 overs, three from 16 to 25, four from 26 to 35, and five in the final 15. And demand one man catching at all times. Or six fielders catching and no one outside the circle, which now becomes the boundary. Or play ODIs over five days with two unrestricted innings per team, with players dressed in white using a red ball. Or introduce a Powerplay in which the batting captain skippers the fielding team for five overs (this could prove the single greatest innovation in cricket’s history). Or give fielding captains a “joker”, which they can play at the fall of any wicket, and which gives them the power to choose which of the batting team has to come in to bat next. Or involve the crowd in umpiring decisions by allowing them to adjudicate on all DRS referrals.

3. Stop flogging an already groggy-looking horse. Almost all cricket pundits advocate playing fewer ODIs. However, none of those pundits works in the accounts department of a cricketing authority, so their views are easily ignored. And none of those pundits only gets to see international cricket on the rare occasions that the remorseless juggernaut of ODIs visits their town. But the point basically stands. International sport should have meaning and context, importance, and a degree of rarity. However, cricket administrators are human beings, and the last 10,000-or-so years of history suggest that human beings are financial Labradors, unable to say “enough”.

4. Make sure ODI series have an element of this meaning and context by doing one or both of the following: where possible (i.e. almost always), play ODI series as a curtain-raiser to a Test series; and rather than having mathematically obscure rankings, make each series part of some form of world league. Series should be three matches played over a week, or five matches played over two weekends. Teams would win two points for winning a match, with a bonus for winning a series. There could be a playoff at the end of each one- or two-year cycle, or just a big shiny trophy, some commemorative spangly capes and a photo opportunity with an Elvis impersonator for the winners.

It might be a bit awkward to assimilate this into the schedule, and the league would have to be done on a points-per-game basis, but it is probably not impossible. Cricket, uniquely, has three different formats, offering different challenges and attractions. It must choose whether to help them co-exist or allow them to compete with each other. Is it one sport or three?

One Alternative Format Being Launched on Sunday
At the opposite end of the attention-span scale to the voracious T20 megabeast is Loughborough University Staff Cricket Club’s 150-hour cricket marathon, which begins on Sunday the 24th and ends on Friday the 30th June, and will raise money for the Harley Staples Cancer Trust. The two teams will each bat for four hours at a time, and the players “will aim to sleep when their own team is batting” ‒ an old Yorkshire strategy dating back to the Boycott days.

Multistat: 9.8

Tino Best was understandably distraught to find a scorpion in his helmet during his innings
© Getty Images



Tino Best’s batting average when he strode to the wicket at Sogbaston last Sunday for his 24th Test innings.

A couple of hours of outlandishly brilliant batsmanship and one history-shattering slogswipe later, Best’s average stood proudly at 13.85, after perhaps the most startlingly unexpected innings of all time, an innings of panache, style and, perhaps most surprisingly control, that left cricket’s collective flabber well and truly gasted.

What the hell happened? Had Tino drunk a pint of strawberry milkshake laced with the DNA of George Headley? Had he borrowed Gordon Greenidge’s central nervous system for the day? Was this the first time he had ever batted without distracting himself worrying about whether the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva might prompt the instant destruction of the planet? Or was he hallucinating, and finally responding to Freddie Flintoff’s famous “Mind the windows, Tino” goad at Lord’s eight years ago, by trying to repeatedly smash a window he thought he had seen at ground level on the extra-cover boundary? Who knows. Actually, Who probably does not know. It is beyond the understanding of humanity.

Best’s innings, regardless of the match situation or the relative placidity of the pitch, was a staggering, glorious performance, a beacon of hope to tailenders the world over. He fell annoyingly five runs short of a century and cricketing immortality. I was very excited at the imminent prospect of seeing a No. 11 score a hundred in a Test match. It had taken 135 years of Test cricket for any No. 11 even to come close to it. If it takes another 135 years for it to happen again, I probably will not be around to see it.

If Andrew Strauss had been thinking of the legacy to the sport-watching world, instead of his professional responsibility as an international cricketer, he would have contrived to “accidentally” trip over and head the ball for six.

Instead, he wrote himself into the Encyclopaedia of Great Sporting Killjoys, alongside the likes of Stewart Cink, the prosaic American golfer who snatched the 2009 Open from 59-year-old legend of the game Tom Watson, thus scuppering what would have the most remarkable story of superannuated sporting success in human history; and the Italian 1982 World Cup football team, who so rudely and needlessly knocked out a ludicrously exciting and supernaturally stylish Brazil side, when, for the good of football, sport, humanity, and all that is good and beautiful in the universe, they should have had the decency and honour to knock in a couple of late own goals. I am sure their manager and fans would have understood.

Best’s would unquestionably have been the most unanticipated Test century of all time. More so than Ajit Agarkar’s thunderbolt from the bluest possible shade of blue at Lord’s in 2002. Agarkar began with a Test average well below Tino’s 9.8 – a dismal 7.47 ‒ but his first-class record suggested this was a case of significant underachievement, as The Bombay Botham had registered a first-class century and averaged in the mid-20s. More so than Jason Gillespie’s Chittagong double-hundred, as he had posted a couple of Test half-centuries, four more 40-plus scores, and a four-hour blockathon against Kumble and Harbhajan in Chennai. And he was playing against Bangladesh. And more so than Jerome Taylor (previous average 13.6, highest score 31) smashing New Zealand for a sparkling hundred in Dunedin in December 2008, because Taylor was batting eight and had at least put together a run of useful 20s in Tests over the previous year.

(Incidentally, Taylor also painted his unexpected tail-end masterpiece on the fourth day of a rain-affected match, and the universe was so flabbergasted that it promptly sent a deluge to wash out the fifth day. Which suggests that West Indian tailenders clobbering brilliant innings against the statistical odds could solve all future droughts. I look forward to Devendra Bishoo being deployed by the United Nations to sub-Saharan Africa with a squad of club bowlers under strict instructions to feed him wide half-volleys.)

Best’s innings trumps all of these. Not only had Tino never passed the nervous 20s before in Tests, but also he had averaged 8 in first-class cricket over the previous two years, had a first-class highest score of 51, had effectively been out of Test cricket for seven years (if you exclude his two appearances in the dispute-ravaged pseudo-West-Indies team’s series with Bangladesh in 2009), and was facing a high-class England attack of proven internationals.

Samuels' Hooperesque breakthrough

What does the future hold for Samuels? Becoming West Indies' batting lynchpin or getting lynched for not batting well enough?
© Getty Images



In the absence of any play on the first day at Edgbaston, here are some thoughts, as promised, on Marlon Samuels, whose long-overdue success has illuminated a series which has thus far proceeded largely according to pundits’ predictions, form-lines, statistical likelihood, Nostradamus, and the secret diktats of the shadowy Bilderberg Group who allegedly run the global economy and probably have a few fingers in cricket’s various pies as well.

Samuels, hitherto an unfulfilled talent, has proved that spending a few weeks attempting to clonk a white ball around in the high-octane frenzy of the IPL is, contrary to what most cricketicians have always believed, ideal preparation for playing old-school Test innings of patience and classical technique in English conditions. We live and learn.

In accordance with modern West Indian tradition, Samuels has come to the crease with his team in deep trouble in all four innings this series (100 for 4, 65 for 4, 63 for 4 and 31 for 3), and, since a studious 31 in his first knock at Lord’s was spoiled by a careless sploot to cover, he has played three innings of startling, career-average-defying quality.

It has been the kind of batting you would have expected of a man who, in his second Test, at the MCG in December 2000, against an Australian pace attack of McGrath, Gillespie and Bichel, scored 60 not out and 46 after coming to the crease at 28 for 4 (soon 28 for 5) and 17 for 5 (soon 23 for 6); but not the kind of batting you would have expected of a batsman who had scored two Test centuries and averaged 29 in 37 Tests, splattered over 11-and-a-half years as if Jackson Pollock had been chairman of West Indies’ selectors. Which he might as well have been.

Samuels’ on- and off-pitch travails in his interminable apprenticeship since that seemingly portentous teenage performance (in which he was only dismissed when last man out in the second innings, caught on the boundary off Colin Miller, perhaps unwilling to trust the batsmanship of Courtney Walsh to score the 363 runs West Indies still needed for victory) are eloquently examined by Rob Steen in this recent ESPNCricinfo article.

There is a fascination in seeing a player who has long disappointed finally crack the curious nut that is Test cricket, and particularly in seeing a player with an average of below 30 suddenly break out and bat like a timeless legend of the game. Steen draws comparisons between Samuels and Carl Hooper, who in his first 38 Tests, averaged 26, a frankly laughable figure for a man who could (and occasionally did) play like a computer-generated simulation of The Perfect Batsman, and who, like Samuels, had excelled in his second Test, scoring an unbeaten 100 in Calcutta as a 21-year-old (although this being still the 1980s, Hooper came in with the West Indies at 288 for 4, rather than 28 for 4).

Why has KP retired? Time will tell

Reason No. 42: his personal stylist said white suits him so much better
© Getty Images



News of Kevin Pietersen’s characteristically unorthodox retirement from limited-overs international cricket shook this nation to its core. The Queen, just days before celebrating her Jubilee by being plonked on a flotilla and fired down the Thames, was reportedly “beside herself”, after booking a two-week holiday in Sri Lanka for her and the Duke of Edinburgh to coincide with the World Twenty20 this autumn.

Pietersen’s partial retirement was an announcement that, whilst not quite in the category of Elvis Presley appearing at an emotional press conference at Lord’s announcing that he was (a) still alive, (b) available for selection for England in all formats, and (c) turning down an IPL contract to focus on playing for Kent, was nonetheless still a shock.

From a cricketing perspective, whether you are an England supporter, player, administrator, or none of the above, Pietersen’s premature exit from the shorter forms of the international game is a massive disappointment. Albeit not quite as massive a disappointment as it would have been if Elvis Presley, at the end of that emotional press conference, had pulled off a mask to reveal that he was in fact Kent skipper Robert Key.

Inevitably, within seconds of the announcement, in which Pietersen declared unequivocally why he had taken this rather drastic step ‒ due to the physical demands of the international schedule on his ageing body ‒ speculation began as to why Pietersen had taken this rather drastic step. Was it to concentrate on his Test career? To maximise his potential T20 earnings? To spend more time with his family? Or, as some outlandish conspiracy theorists suggested, due to the physical demands of the international schedule on his ageing body?

Time will tell. Pietersen has already told, but time will also tell. As will the number of T20 contracts he hoovers up over the next few years. Personally, I think his stated reasons are understandable. Cricket, like most professional sports in the increasingly competitive 21st-century era, has been busily trying to squeeze eggs out of any even vaguely golden, silvery or bronze-tinted geese. In a summer when it was apparently impossible to schedule even a four-Test series against South Africa, let alone the five Tests it merited, Pietersen can be forgiven for looking at the calendar of 13 ODIs and thinking that it would be hard to maintain his focus and enthusiasm throughout. I am sure many England supporters are thinking the same. This absurd menu of 50-over porridge now looks even less appetising without England’s most exciting player.

As the current make-up of the West Indian team testifies, players are being forced to make choices that there is no good reason for them being forced to make. Cricket’s calendar urgently needs to see a psychiatrist. Its behaviour is increasingly irrational, and it is starting to alienate even those who love it. It clearly has deep-seated issues that need addressing, before it does itself irreparable harm. And, like the rest of us, it needs to find a satisfactory life-balance between money and spiritual well-being.

● Pietersen’s ODI career has been a rather baffling journey, but his back-to-back hundreds in Dubai in February suggested that he could have gone on to become a dominant, potentially tournament-winning one-day opener and England’s best-ever ODI batsman (not an especially hotly contested category, admittedly) (barely even warmly contested) (he possibly/probably is that anyway, but his overall ODI career has nevertheless been something of a disappointment) (in his first ten and final two innings combined, he averaged a supernatural 178, and scored five centuries – in the 104 innings over six and a half years in between, his average was a distinctly human 34, and he hit four hundreds) (so the feeling persists that ODI cricket had not seen as much of the best of Pietersen as it should have).

His retirement is also a sizeable baseball bat to the midriff of England’s hopes of retaining the World T20 title they won in the Caribbean two years ago, in which Pietersen was the dominant influence, scoring 73 not out (off 52 balls), 53 (off 33), 42 not out (off 26), and 47 (off 31) in the four successive victories that took England to their first major limited-over trophy. He can stake a claim to being the best batsman to date in the short history of T20 internationals, a format in which he scored consistently and rapidly ‒ he was out in single figures just four times in 36 innings, and scored 40 or more 14 times, more than any other player, ahead of Brendon McCullum (12 times in 47 innings).

However, if his voluntary streamlining of his England schedule results in him being mentally, physically and technically fresh for Test cricket in the next few Ashes-laden years, few will complain.