'India’s cricket soft power is giving it back to old racists!’

 

‘Same old Aussies, always cheating!’ Chants cut deep for a nation still scarred by sandpaper

It was shocking to watch a baying crowd at Lord’s hurl abuse at players for effecting a stumping within the laws of the game writes Megan Maurice in The Guardian

In most sports, players simply follow the rules laid out for them, which are enforced by umpires or referees. If they break a rule, a consequence is applied and play resumes. There are times, naturally, when athletes are accused of being unsporting, but there is rarely a drawn-out debate over players following the rules exactly as written and being scolded for doing so.

Cricket is a very different beast in many ways. No more clearly did we see this play out than on day five of the second Ashes Test. Where the two cricketing nations of England and Australia are concerned, history is a living and hotly contested document, one that is constantly being grappled over and argued about. So as soon as Jonny Bairstow was stumped by Alex Carey and the third umpire sent him on his way, battle lines were drawn between Australian fans staking out their ground on the side of a “fair and legal dismissal” and the English abandoning their Sunday lunch plans to fight for “the spirit of cricket”. 

For those Australians, the incident cut deep. The scars of sandpaper-gate are still visible. Memories are fresh of cricket heroes crying on international television, the prime minister indicting it as a “shocking disappointment” and Australian cricket being brought into disrepute. It all sits just below the surface. Yet as difficult as it was, most Australian fans took the criticism on the chin; they were equally disappointed with the team and prepared for the onslaught of derision.

However, this is a new era of the Australian men’s cricket team. The biggest criticism most people can make of captain Pat Cummins is that he cares too deeply about social issues. Coach Andrew McDonald seems satisfied to work in the background, rather than front the media. The team has rehabilitated its image considerably over the last five years.

So it was painful for the scars to be ripped open so forcefully and painfully as boos rang out around Lord’s, followed by cries of “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” and “Same old Aussies, always cheating!”

Then there was the abuse of players as they walked through the Long Room to lunch, which was perhaps even more galling considering the waiting list of approximately 29 years and £500 ($955 AUD) annual membership fee paid to be part of this exclusive club.

 


With history simmering under the surface, it was shocking to watch the baying crowd hurl abuse at the touring players – not for breaking a key law of the game around attempting to alter the condition of the ball – but for their keeper throwing the ball at the stumps and effecting a stumping within the laws of the game.

Once the immediate injustice of the situation settled down, responses have mostly been tinged with bemusement. Most people can name a similar incident that occurred in club or junior cricket, with an unsuspecting batter, who did not quite have a grasp on what a crease was or the importance of staying in one while batting, caught out by a more wily wicketkeeper.  

Many Australians have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of the uproar from England – with incidents from Bairstow’s shy at the stumps of Marnus Labuschagne the day before, to his similar dismissal of New Zealand’s Colin de Grandhomme in a 2022 Test match, to current England coach Brendon McCullum’s dismissal of Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan while the latter was celebrating the century of teammate Kumar Sangakkara.

The mood of the nation was neatly summed up by cricket writer Dan Liebke who noted: “Always very interesting to me how the spirit of cricket seems to revolve around England batters being allowed to bat on even when they’re out.”

Between the jokes, there is a genuine confusion about what the “spirit of cricket” entails and when it is applied. These debates usually crop up whenever a Mankad is effected, but to have widened the field to include stumpings makes things even more complicated. For Australian fans, it was one thing to face up to the accusation of cheating when it was true, but quite another when it occurred in this murky, grey area between the rules and the mysterious “spirit of the game” – an area for which England, at least, seem to hold a map.

Ashes long-con exposed: England's dereliction of Test cricket threatens format as a whole

If the public loses confidence in the product, then its viability will be called into question Andrew Miller in Cricinfo 

As anyone who lived through the 2008 credit crunch will remember, economies are essentially built on confidence. So long as the public has faith in the robustness of the institutions charged with managing their assets, those assets barely need to exist beyond a few 0s and 1s in a digital mainframe for them to be real and lasting indicators of a nation's wealth.

When doubts begin to beset the system, however, it's amazing how quickly the rot can take hold. Is this really a Triple-A-rated bond I am holding in my hands, or is it actually a tranche of sub-prime mortgages that are barely fit to line the gerbil cage?

Likewise, is this really the world's most enduring expression of sporting rivalry taking place in Australia right now, or is it a pointless turkey shoot that exists only to justify the exorbitant sums that TV broadcasters are willing to cough up for the privilege of hosting it… a privilege that, in itself, feeds into the self-same creation myth that keeps the hype ever hyping, and the bubble ever ballooning.

On Tuesday, that bubble finally burst. After weeks of barely suppressed panic behind the scenes, England's capitulation in Melbourne deserves to be Test cricket's very own Lehman Brothers moment - the final, full-frontal collapse of an institution so ancient, and previously presumed to be so inviolable, that it may require unprecedented emergency measures to prevent the entire sport from tanking.

For there really has never been an Ashes campaign quite as pathetic as this one. Crushing defeats have been plentiful in the sport's long and storied history - particularly in the recent past, with England having now lost 18 of their last 23 Tests Down Under, including 12 of the last 13. But never before has an England team taken the field in Australia with so little hope, such few expectations, so few remaining skills with which to retain control of their own destinies.

Nothing expressed the gulf better than the performance of Australia's Player of the Match, Scott Boland. Leaving aside the rightful celebration of his Indigenous heritage, of far greater pertinence was his international oven-readiness, at the age of 32, after a lifetime of toil for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield. Like Michael Neser, 31 on debut at Adelaide last week and a Test wicket-taker with his second ball in the format, Boland arrived on the stage every bit as ready for combat as England's Test batters used to be - most particularly the unit that won the Ashes in Australia in 2010-11, which included four players with a century on debut (Alastair Cook, Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott and Matt Prior) and two more (Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell) with fifties.

The contrast with England's current crop of ciphers could not be more galling. It is genuinely impossible to see how Haseeb Hameed could have been expected to offer more than his tally of seven runs from 41 balls across two innings at the MCG, while Ollie Pope's Bradman-esque average of 99.94 at his home ground at The Oval, compared to his cat-on-hot-tin-roof displays at Brisbane and Adelaide, is the most visceral evidence possible of a domestic first-class system that is failing the next generation.

Even on the second day at the MCG, England's best day of the series had finished with them four down for 31, still 51 runs in arrears, as Australia's quicks punished their opponents for a fleeting moment of mid-afternoon hubris by unleashing an hour of God-complex thunderbolts. It stood to reason that the morning's follow-up would be similarly swift and pitiless.






Watching a bowed and beaten troop of England cricketers suck up Australian outfield celebrations is nothing new, of course. But this is different to previous Ashes hammerings, because despite the Covid restrictions and limited preparation time, never before has a series loss felt further removed from the sorts of caveats that sustained previous such debacles Down Under - most particularly the 2006-07 and 2013-14 whitewashes, both of which were at least the gory dismemberments of England teams that had previously swept all before them.

The 2021-22 team, by contrast, has swept nothing before it, except a few uncomfortable home ruths under a succession of carpets. Despite the enduring magnificence of James Anderson - whose unvanquished defiance evokes Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh's noble upholding of West Indies' crumbling standards at the turn of the millennium - and despite Joe Root willing himself to produce a year of such cursed brilliance it deserves to be inducted into Greek mythology, the rabble that clings to their coat-tails is little more than the zombified remains of the side that surrendered the urn so vapidly back in 2017-18.

They travelled to Australia with the same captain, for the first time on an Ashes tour in more than 100 years (and Root is destined for the same 5-0 shellacking that JWHT Douglas achieved in 1920-21); the same core bowling unit of right-arm medium-pacers, and by this third Test, the same outgunned middle order, with Root, Dawid Malan and Jonny Bairstow on this occasion physically united with Ben Stokes, compared to the spectre at the feast that had haunted the team's endeavours four years ago.

Nothing in the interim has progressed for this generation of players, in spite of a vast amount of hot air about how exhaustive the planning for this campaign has been - most particularly from England's dead-man-walking head coach, Chris Silverwood, whose epitaph deserves to be the same fateful phrase that he used to announce England's Test squad to face New Zealand at the start of the summer.

"The summer of Test cricket will be fascinating," Silverwood wrote back in May, shortly after he had taken over selection duties from Ed Smith to become the single most powerful supremo in the team's history. "Playing the top two teams in the world, in New Zealand and India, is perfect preparation for us as we continue to improve and progress towards an Ashes series in Australia at the back end of the year." Well, that aged well, didn't it?

And yet, Silverwood is just another symptom of English cricket's wider malaise. From the outset, and irrespective of his theoretical influence, he was only ever an uninspiring over-promotion from within the team's existing ranks - more than anything, a recognition of how undesirable the role of England head coach has become in recent years.

"All attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that Tom Harrison was appointed as ECB CEO in 2015"

In an era of gig-economy opportunities on the T20 franchise circuit - when barely a day goes by without Andy Flower, the architect of England's last truly great Test team, being announced as Tashkent Tigers' batting consultant in the Uzbekistan Premier League - who wants or needs the 300-hotel-nights-a-year commitment required to oversee a side that, like an overworked troupe of stadium-rock dinosaurs, fears that the moment it takes a break from endless touring, everyone will forget they ever existed in the first place?

English cricket's financial reliance on its Test team has been holding the sport in this country back for generations, long before the complications of Covid kicked in to make the team's relentless touring lifestyle even less palatable than ever before. It was a point that Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, acknowledged in a moment of guard-down candour before last summer's series against India - and one that he will now be obliged to revisit with grave urgency as the sport lurches into a new crisis of confidence, but one that is effectively the reverse side of the same coin that the sport has been flipping all year long. English cricket's ongoing racism crisis, after all, is yet another damning expression of the sport's inability to move with the times.

"It is the most important series, then we've got another 'most important series' coming up, and then another directly after that," Harrison said of that India campaign - which, lest we forget, also needs to be completed next summer for the financial good of the game, even if the players would sooner move on and forget. "The reality is, for international players, is that the conveyor belt just keeps going. You want players turning up in these 'most important series' feeling fantastic about the opportunity of playing for their country. They are not going to be able to achieve that if they have forgotten the reasons why they play."

The issue for Harrison's enduring credibility, however, is that all attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that he was appointed as CEO in 2015.

That summer's team still had the latent talent to seal the last of their four Ashes victories in five campaigns, but on Harrison's watch, the ECB has essentially spent the past six years preparing the life-rafts for the sport's post-international future - most notably through the establishment of the Hundred, but also through the full-bore focus on winning the 2019 World Cup, precisely because it was the sort of whiteboard-friendly "deliverable" that sits well on a list of boardroom KPIs… unlike the lumpen, intangible mesh of contexts by which success in Test cricket will always need to be measured.

It was a point that Root alluded to his shellshocked post-match comments, where he hinted that the red-ball game needed a "reset" to match the remarkable rise of the white-ball side from the wreckage of that winter's World Cup. But what do England honestly believe can be reset from this point of the sport's degradation?




It feels as though we've all been complicit in the long-con here. For 16 years and counting, the Ashes has been sold as the most glorious expression of cricket's noble traditions, when in fact that self-same biennial obsession has been complicit in shrinking the format's ambitions to the point where even England's head coach thinks that a magnificent home-summer schedule is nothing but a warm-up act.

Perhaps it all stems from the reductive ambitions of that never-to-be-forgotten 2005 series, the series upon which most of the modern myth is founded, but which was more of an end than a beginning where English cricket was concerned.

The summer of 2005 marked the end of free-to-air TV in the UK, the end of Richie Benaud as English cricket's voice of ages, the end of 18 years of Stockholm Syndrome-style subjugation by one of the greatest Test teams ever compiled. If English sport was to be repurposed as a series of nostalgic sighs for long-ago glories, then perhaps only Manchester United's "Solskjær has won it" moment can top it.

Sixteen years later, what are we left with? The dreadfulness of the modern Ashes experience has even bled into this winter's TV coverage, every bit as hamstrung by greedy decisions taken way above the pay-grade of the troops on the ground. It's symptomatic of a format whose true essence has been asset-stripped since the rivalry's heyday two decades ago, with those individual assets being sold back to the paying public at a premium in the interim.

It's not unlike a Ponzi scheme, in fact - a concept that English cricket became unexpectedly familiar with during a Test match in Antigua back in 2009, when the revelations about the ECB's old chum, Allen Stanford, caused a run on his bank in St John's, with queues stretching way further down the road that any stampede to attend a Caribbean Test match of recent vintage.

The warnings about Test cricket's fragility have been legion for decades. But if England, of all the Test nations, doesn't remember to care for the format that, through the hype of the Ashes, it pretends to hold most dear, this winter's experiences have shown that the expertise required to shore up those standards may not be able to survive much more neglect.

The Old Trafford Test or No Test

 

Wicketkeeping Masterclass - Jack Russell

 

We Scots have kept our kilts but shed our historical myths – a process sadly lacking south of the border

Ian Jack in The Guardian


I had never heard of the game called “welly wanging”, but there it was on the News at Ten this week – in a report by the BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, on the traditions that give the English regions their splendid variety. The report showed some people, probably children, throwing gumboots in a field – the competitor who threw a boot furthest was the winner. It was things like this, Easton said, that made Yorkshire different from other places, which had their own traditions that were just as special to them. Some morris dancers appeared, and a man in a Tyneside pub talked about how collective hardship had forged the Geordie identity, these days manifested in a love of Newcastle United Football Club and an equal hatred of its rival in Sunderland. It all felt flimsy and sad – that “regional identity” should amount to this rickle of bones.

FacebookTwitterPinterest A welly-wanging contest in an English village. ‘So far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.’ Photograph: Alamy.

The last colliery in the north-east closed in 2005, while the last shipyard on the Tyne launched its last ship in 2006, though those masculine industries had ceased to employ significant numbers long before. The north-east is poor, but then so are many other de-industrialised parts of the United Kingdom; hardship and heavy industry alone can’t explain its particular difference. As for “welly wanging”, so far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.

Thinking of Newcastle, I thought of my late mother-in-law, who lived and died there: a sweet and clever woman blessed with good humour (“This is my last territorial demand in Europe,” she might say, requesting a cup of tea at bedtime), who in her forgetful days asked me the same set of questions more than once. “What’s your tartan? Isn’t there a Jack tartan? Have you never worn a kilt?”

My answers puzzled her – “I don’t know”, “I hope not”, “Not ever” – more by their brevity than anything else. I feel sorry for my irritation now. My explanation, that I came from a Lowland family, and had no entitlement to tartans, clearly didn’t wash. Having glanced through the window of more than one kilt emporium, she knew that the enterprise of the Scottish tourist industry had allotted a tartan to almost every surname in an old British telephone directory, often by deciding that a common Lowland name such as Taylor was really a “sept”, or subdivision, of a Highland clan such as Cameron. The clans ruled the roost.

Oddly, given that Jacks lie thick in the graveyards of the Black Isle, my surname didn’t then feature on these lists. (It does now; the Clan Jack Society registered a new design with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2012.) But I didn’t at all regret the omission. What I found impossible to tell my mother-in-law, without making a priggish meal of it, was that the whole rigmarole of clans and tartans, sometimes known as Highlandism, was largely confected in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that any reality it might be connected to was far removed from the one most Scottish people knew; and also that this feudal, claymore-wielding “identity” obscured a true history of achievement that had once made a trousered Scotland important to the world: Adam Smith, James Watt, Keir Hardie, the Forth Bridge and so on.

It could have been a long speech, and tedious to the listener. I grew up hearing versions of it. Tartanry had many enemies in Scotland, particularly inside a socialist movement that was keen to establish a more class-based and less fanciful view of history. It fought what amounted to an underground campaign against figures such as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the music hall singer and comic Harry Lauder, who with his kilt and curly stick presented a caricature of Scotland at home and abroad.  

Kilts in the 1950s were still worn mainly by Scottish regiments and public schoolboys, and often regarded by the rest of us as a middle-class affectation. Mocking evidence came from new scholarship that the kilt’s modern form – the “small kilt” – had been invented in the 1720s by a Lancashire Quaker and ironmaster, Thomas Rawlinson, to dress the workers at his Highland smelter. In the first half of the next century, the Anglo-Welsh Allen brothers printed the first colour illustrations of tartans – inspired, they said, by an ancient but never produced manuscript – that showed how different clans and families had adopted their distinctive patterns at least as early as the 16th century.

Hugh Trevor-Roper gave an entertaining account of these developments in his contribution to The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays edited by his fellow historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and published in 1983. “The creation of an independent Highland tradition, and the imposition of that new tradition, with its outward badges, on the whole Scottish nation, was the work of the later 18th and early 19th centuries,” he wrote combatively and, as it turned out, to no sartorial consequence. (Thirty-odd years later, nine out of 10 Scottish bridegrooms get married in the dress devised by the ironmaster Rawlinson.)

But his words were part of a general revaluation of Scottish history that did have a political effect. Scottish nationalism became less backward-looking, less romantic, less in thrall to fancy dress and myth. What too few people recognised – I include myself – was that no similar process was happening south of the border. England clings to history. Its view of its glorious past – as, for example, the begetter of parliamentary democracy and the lonely bulwark against Hitler – remains unmodified and may even have recently intensified. No myths have been shed.

The results are apparent in opinion polls about national identitycommissioned by the BBC, which led this week to Easton’s nightly appearance on the evening news. Welly wanging turned out to be a catchpenny sideshow, a misleading overture to more serious surveys of the states of mind of England, Scotland and Wales. All kinds of differences showed up, some unsurprising: fewer people in Scotland said that they felt “strongly British” than in England or Wales; the percentage of people in Scotland who strongly identified as Scottish was larger than the percentage in England who strongly identified as English, or as Welsh in Wales.

But the most marked contrast between England and Scotland was optimism. In England many more in the 20,081 sample said the country was better in the past (49%) than it would be in the future (17%). In Scotland, more people believed it would be better in the future (36%) than it was in the past (29%). The pollster John Curtice attributed this difference to two kinds of nationalism – defining English nationalists as those who said they were English and not British (one sixth of the sample in England), and Scottish nationalists as people who supported the SNP. More than two-thirds (70%) of English nationalists said the past was better; only 16% of Scottish nationalists felt the same. Only 8% of English nationalists felt “strongly European”; among Scottish nationalists the figure was 44%.

And so the quickening current sweeps our raft towards the waterfall, and the bones of Sir Francis Drake at its bottom.

Kevin Pietersen

Jonathan Liew in The Independent

At 11am on May 12, 2015, Andrew Strauss was unveiled as the new director of England cricket on the Lord’s balcony, in front of a horseshoe of photographers and camera crews.

At exactly the same time, on the other side of London, Kevin Pietersen was walking out to bat for Surrey against Leicestershire at The Oval, 326 not out overnight. By the time Strauss had finished his first interview with Sky Sports News, explaining why he was extinguishing Pietersen’s last realistic hope of playing international cricket, the man himself had moved on to 351.

It was the first and last triple-century of Pietersen’s career. Scarcely, if ever, has an innings been more auspiciously timed. Scarcely has English cricket’s fundamental duality – between inside and outside, genteel and chaotic, starched shirts and grubby whites, polished words and pure filthy deed – been more starkly depicted.

Above all, it underlined the basic and inalienable Pietersen trait, one that will likely follow him to the grave: his immaculate sense of occasion. Scarcely, if ever, has there been a cricketer who timed his interventions to such devastatingly maximal effect. 

Pietersen finished his timely knock on 355 not out (Getty)


“You’re not God,” he memorably told Yuvraj Singh during the Mohali Test of 2008. “You’re a cricketer. And I’m a better one.”

Here again, on a glorious spring morning in London, Pietersen was once again proving that whatever you had to say, he could – and would – say it louder.

---

In hindsight, it would have been brilliantly fitting if that scintillating innings of 355 had been Pietersen’s last in first-class cricket: one final, pointless, valedictory V-sign to the English game before he rode into a franchised sunset. But it wasn’t.

Instead, Pietersen’s last ever game in whites came a few weeks later, a rain-ruined draw against Lancashire. He came in at No4, scratched around for a few minutes, and then edged a vicious lifter to slip off Kyle Jarvis for two. The cameras picked him out in the Surrey dressing room, his gaze drawn to the England v New Zealand Test match on television rather than the drab game unfolding in front of him. Right to the very last, Pietersen never bothered to disguise his disdain for the domestic game, its mixed standard, its modest horizons, what he called the “county cricketcomfort zone”. 

And so, with England turning its back on Pietersen, Pietersen turned his back on England, spending the last three years of his career travelling the world playing Twenty20. St Lucia Zouks, Dolphins, Melbourne Stars, Quetta Gladiators, Rising Pune Supergiants, Surrey: over time, they all began to blend into each other, the same adoring crowds, the same airport departure lounges, the same arcade game of thrill or bust.

You might almost say Pietersen found his own comfort zone in the end.

By the end of the professional career he finally brought to an end this week, he was a good T20 player, not a great one. The rapidly evolving format was beginning to leave him behind. His low dot-ball percentage, traditionally one of his biggest strengths, was beginning to creep up. Pune, his Indian Premier League franchise, released him at the end of 2016 and with little interest ahead of the 2017 auction, Pietersen decided to pre-emptively withdraw rather than risk the humiliation of going unsold.

Weirdly, T20 always seemed an imperfect fit for Pietersen’s remarkable and cadenced range of talents. Yes: like many others, he could belt it miles, and belt it often. But unlike them, he could also do it for hours, for days, and often after doing very little of note for months. Test cricket, with its epic scope, its wild fluctuations in texture and tempo, was always the most appropriate stage for him. He knew it, too. When he was on song, Pietersen could play as loudly as anyone who has picked up a bat. But somehow, it was the quietness that made it so devastating.

Most remarkably, Pietersen never won any of the franchise competitions he competed in: not the Big Bash or the IPL, not the Caribbean Premier League or the Blast, not the Ram Slam or the PSL. Here, perhaps, lies the greatest irony of all. Pietersen’s only winner’s medal in the format where he eventually focused his energies came in England blue, at the World Twenty20 in 2010. His only triumph was also ours.

For all the bad blood and the rancour, all the fraught meetings and snide briefings, the knives in the back and the knives in the front, the essential truth about Pietersen and England was this: they were stronger together, and weaker apart. 

You don’t need me to talk you through Pietersen’s greatest innings for England. You know them already: the 202 and the 186, the 149 and the 227, the 91 off 65, the 158, the 158, the 158. But the innings Pietersen always rated as his greatest was the 151 he made against Sri Lanka in Colombo in 2012, in 45 degree heat and 100 per cent humidity, with a bat that was slipping in his gloves, a haze so intense it was blurring his vision.

As he swept, clubbed and reverse-swept Sri Lanka’s spinners all around the wicket, an intense serenity, an invincible quiet, seemed to settle over him. As he would later write in his book ‘On Cricket’, the Colombo knock stands out because unlike so many other of his great innings there was nothing flamboyant or bellicose about it: just pure, blissful batting. So much of Pietersen’s England career felt like war. This felt like peace. 

Pietersen played brilliantly against Sri Lanka in Colombo (Getty)

Great art has dreadful manners, as Simon Schama puts it. Perhaps the same applies to great sport: it slaps you around the face, kicks you in the groin, demands that you acclaim it. That was as true of Pietersen off the field as it was on it. Having left home as a teenage off-spinner and fought his way to the very top of the game, he was ruthlessly intolerant of anybody who didn’t share his fierce work ethic and relentless standards.

He never really understood the point of county cricket. He never really learned to hold his tongue and keep his opinions to himself. This was Pietersen’s way – the natural product of a tough Afrikaner childhood in which even the most minor indiscipline would be punished with a swipe of his farmer’s “army stick” – and you could get in line, or you could go to hell.

English cricket – and England in general – is not quite as tolerant and broad-minded as it likes to think it is. The frequent refrain you will hear about Pietersen is that he falls out with people everywhere he goes. The implication, that Pietersen is an inveterate troublemaker who could start a fight in an empty room, is only really part of the story. Pietersen’s unapologetic ‘otherness’ made him as much a target as a protagonist.  

Strauss remembers his first encounter with Pietersen, a county game between Middlesex and Nottinghamshire in 2000. As soon as he arrived at the crease, the Middlesex wicket-keeper David Nash began to single out the young newcomer for abuse. Instead of simply ignoring it, Pietersen marched to the square-leg umpire and demanded he put a stop to it. The insult Nash kept using to Pietersen was “doos”.

And ultimately, Pietersen was English cricket’s ultimate outsider: by turns painfully awkward, wracked by self-doubt, beguiled by attention and yet capable of great generosity. As his final first-class game petered out at The Oval, Pietersen ventured unbidden out of the dressing room to sign hundreds of autographs for young fans on the boundary edge: not a TV camera or a PR enabler in sight, just a star and his adoring public, each getting exactly what they wanted.

Pietersen’s relationship with the England team was similarly transactional. It is fashionable to lament those lost years after the 2013-14 Ashes, decry the bitter rift that his sacking opened up within the game, chastise the ECB for their lack of indulgence. But ultimately, they got almost a decade of service out of a brilliant player who helped them win four Ashes series, an India tour and a global tournament. When they had had enough, they simply discarded him. The regime survived. The edifice remained intact.

They won. 

Strauss called an end to Pietersen’s England career (Getty)

What of Pietersen? He got to play a game he loved for two decades. He got to travel the world. He won caps, broke records. He got to captain his country and thrill millions. His determination to grasp the opportunities offered by franchise T20 and unwillingness to compromise on his attacking, confrontational approach cost him his career, but virtually everything the ECB has done since is a tacit admission that he was right all along.

Pietersen won, too.

“It’s your nation, not mine,” Pietersen once quipped to a British interview in a magazine interview. And it is no surprise, really, that as his relationship with the English game began to unravel, he began to seek refuge in the supranational: his wildlife projects, his family, his social media sycophants, the golden fist bump of the global T20 community. Ultimately, Pietersen and English cricket were too different in temperament and culture ever to be more than a fleeting entanglement.

The miracle, really, is that they managed to keep the show on the road for so long. And as the dust finally settles, as time breathes its heavy sigh on one of the great England careers, perhaps that will ultimately be Pietersen’s epitaph. When it all came together, nothing on earth could compare. Remember him that way, not the way it ended.

Tea and sympathy won't suffice as England face up to another drubbing

George Dobell in Cricinfo


There's a pattern of behaviour prevalent in England which dictates that, in times of extreme stress or emotion, we should do almost anything but acknowledge the truth.

So we sit around the hospital beds of the dying, telling them they'll soon be back on their feet. We tell doctors we hardly drink, never smoke and go the gym almost every night. We go to funerals and tell each other the wife-beating alcoholic had a heart of gold. Her bottom never looks big in that and there's almost nothing - not nuclear war or zombie apocalypse - that can't be overcome with a nice cup of tea.

It is, in some ways, a wonderful quality. It was that stoic refusal to acknowledge reality that enabled a previous generation to win a war that, in cricket terms, had them following on in gloomy light and on a pitch showing signs of uneven bounce. And the band on Titanic - just like the Barmy Army - played all the way down.

But there are moments when it is also an incredibly irritating characteristic. And damaging. So, just as you really should get that mole checked out, just as that lump probably won't go away, England really should acknowledge that this Ashes series really wasn't close.

There were moments - flashes might be a better word - when it looked as if England could compete. When James Vince reached 83 in Brisbane; when Australia were reduced to 76 for 4 in the same match; when Jonny Bairstow and Dawid Malan took England to 368 for 4 in Perth. On these occasions, it appeared England were working their way into a good position.

But they only made 302 in that first innings in Brisbane. They trailed by 215 on first innings in Adelaide (even though Australia declared their own first innings with eight wickets down). Only three men passed 25 in England's first innings in Perth, and only two men in the top seven managed more than 22 on the flattest Melbourne pitch you ever will wish you hadn't seen.

This was a team trying to snatch a goal on the break. This was Frank Bruno catching Mike Tyson with his left hook; Greg Thomas dislodging Viv Richards' cap; England's openers enjoying a good start (they were 101 without loss) against West Indies at Lord's in 1984; Graham Dilley reducing them to 54 for 5 at Lord's in 1988. Looking back now, they were far from reflective of the general balance of power. They were the cat hissing at the dog; the condemned man cursing his firing squad. To suggest they represent squandered opportunities is largely delusional.

So, while it's true that Steve Smith was a difference between the teams, he wasn't the only difference. The same could equally be said about Nathan Lyon and the Australian pace attack. So that's the batting, pace bowling and spin bowling covered, then. England were out-gunned from the start. They haven't squandered moments of great promise. They've occasionally caught sight of them in the distance when the clouds parted for a moment. But, actually, now they look again, it may have been a cow.

You can't really blame players for buying into the narrative - a narrative repeated several times by Joe Root and most recently by James Anderson - that the series was decided by a few key moments. It comes with the territory in top-level sport that the protagonists have to maintain high levels of self-belief. They have to believe they can win. It's part of the make-up of a champion.

But you would hope that none of those in positions of power fall for such nonsense. You would hope they reflect on this Ashes series - a series in which Australia scored in excess of 600 twice, won by an innings twice (despite losing the toss on both occasions), had the three highest run-scorers and four highest wicket-takers - and understand that it was a rout.

Nor should it be dismissed as an aberration. England have now lost nine of their most recent 11 overseas Tests. Sure, playing in Australia and India is tough. But England didn't win in the Caribbean, either. Or Bangladesh. Or New Zealand, the UAE or Sri Lanka. Living off their success against South Africa in 2015 - excellent result though it was - is a car driving on fumes.

It'll keep happening, too. Sure, they may snatch the odd series - perhaps in New Zealand in a couple of months, perhaps in the Caribbean at the start of 2019 - because they have, in Ben Stokes and Root and Anderson, a few top-quality players. But generally, such wins will come very much against the norm while England prioritise their white-ball development at the expense of their red-ball team. Until they can develop more spin and fast bowlers, until they stop hiding behind wins on home surfaces, they will remain also-rans in Test cricket.

Some will say this tour went wrong in September. And it is true England lost a key player - and just a bit of their energy and equilibrium - when Stokes was arrested that night in Bristol. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair (and the proper authorities can decide that) there are lessons to be learned about the level of sacrifice inherent in the life of an international sportsperson. There might well be some justification for some of Stokes' actions that night. But should he have been there in the first place?

But it went wrong long before that. It went wrong when the ECB continued their exclusive relationship with a subscription broadcaster long after it had become clear it was damaging the long-term health of the game. As a result, cricket lost relevance in the public consciousness. The talent pool on which the game relies has grown shallow and is absurdly over-reliant upon the private schools, Asian and ex-pat communities.

It went wrong when the Championship was shoved into the margins of the season, when counties were incentivised for fielding teams of young, England-qualified players, when the ECB stopped believing in their own domestic competitions and allowed them to be diluted and devalued.

While the suspicion lingers that Root caught the bug that laid him low on the final day of the series while eating jelly and ice-cream at a kid's birthday party (it was his son's birthday on the fourth day of the game), that will do nothing to derail the narrative that he lacks the maturity or gravitas of a leader, even though there is no evidence for that save his boyish face.

To see Root in the field, coaxing and cajoling his side into another effort, was to see a born leader. To see him behind the scenes, handling each crisis with calm good humour and ensuring this tour did not sink to the levels of the 2013-14 debacle, was to see a young man with strength, energy and integrity. He simply wasn't dealt a handful of aces. He's not the problem here.

And nor is Trevor Bayliss. Sure, he's not a technical coach. And nor is he a selector in the sense that he has the knowledge of county cricket to offer much there. His job, in essence, is to keep the first-team environment positive and focussed. And he's good at that. It's not his fault that England can't produce pace or spin bowlers. He's not an alchemist.

No, the trouble is much higher up the pyramid than that. The problem is the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, trying to kid us that English cricket is in good health, and Andrew Strauss who has achieved little in his time as director of England cricket other than settling a couple of old scores: getting rid of Peter Moores and Kevin Pietersen. If teams are judged by their success in global events - as Strauss has always said - it is worth remembering they did worse in the 2017 Champions Trophy than the 2013 Champions Trophy.

Blaming Stokes or Bayliss or Root for this loss will solve nothing. It's more fundamental change - and an acknowledgement of their problems - that England require. And a nice cup of tea. Obviously.

Cosmetic changes won't mask England's deep structural flaws

George Dobell in Cricinfo

Having carried the drinks for most of the Ashes tour, Gary Ballance now looks set to carry the can for it.

Ballance, despite not having played a first-class game on the tour, is one of the few involved in this campaign who appears to find his place in jeopardy ahead of the two-Test series in New Zealand in March. A couple of others - notably Jake Ball and James Vince - might be waiting nervously for a tap on the shoulder, too.

But most of the main protagonists in the series - the batsmen who have averaged in the 20s, the bowlers who have averaged over 100 - look set to keep their places. And most of those behind the scenes - the administrators who make the policies that have held England back, as well as the development coaches who have failed to develop a player for years - appear to be immune from consequence.

Nobody is advocating a return to the days when England used 29 players in a series (as they did in the 1989 Ashes). And nobody is advocating an adoption of the culture prevalent in football where managers - well, managers anywhere but in north London - are never more than a bad fortnight away from the sack.

But there has to be a balance. And the problem England - and the ECB - have at present is that they are in danger of breeding and encouraging mediocrity. And, while what appears to be a cosy life goes on for many of those involved, nobody is taking any responsibility.

The ECB have, you know, a pace bowling programme. It is designed to identify the most talented young bowlers and provide them with the best coaching and support to ensure they avoid injury as much as possible. It is designed to optimise their ability and ensure England get the best out of them.

Sounds great, doesn't it?

But let's look at the results: their first change in this Test is a medium-fast bowler who was born in South Africa and invited to England as a 17-year-old. And hard though Tom Curran has worked - and his efforts have been faultless - he has not looked likely to take a wicket. Meanwhile the fast bowlers who have developed in county cricket - the likes of Jamie Overton, Olly Stone, Mark Wood, Atif Sheikh, George Garton, Stuart Meaker and Zak Chappell - are either injured or not deemed consistent enough for selection.

The poverty of the programme has, to some extent, been masked by the enduring excellence of James Anderson and Stuart Broad. That's the same Anderson who went through the Loughborough experience, sustained a stress fracture, lost his ability to swing the ball and reverted to bowling how he did originally. Take them out of this attack - and time will eventually defeat even the apparently indefatigable Anderson - and you have real trouble for England. You have an attack that will struggle to keep them in the top six of the Test rankings.Mason Crane saw a chance fall between him and short leg Getty Images

The ECB have a spin bowling programme, too. A programme that has delivered so little that, here in Sydney, they have taken a punt on a talented kid who, in a more sympathetic domestic system, would be learning his trade bowling over after over for his county. But, as it is, with the Championship squeezed into the margins of the season, Mason Crane (who did fine here after a nervous start; Shane Warne took 1 for 150 on Test debut, remember) has struggled to warrant selection for Hampshire (he played half their Championship games in 2017 and claimed 16 wickets). Other promising young spinners - the likes of Ravi Patel and Josh Poysden - could tell a similar tale.

Meanwhile Adam Riley, who not so long ago was viewed as the most talented young spinner in England - some well-known pundits recommended him for Test selection - didn't play a Championship game for his county, Kent, last season having previously been identified for inclusion in the ECB's spin programme. Does that sound like a success story?

It is not just those at Loughborough to blame. The county system is ever more marginalised by those who set the policies in English cricket - the likes of Tom Harrison and Andrew Strauss - so the development of Test quality cricketers has been arrested. The struggle to develop red-ball players will only be accentuated by the decision to have a window for white-ball cricket in the middle of the season. With so many games played either before the end of May or after the start of September (when the start time is brought forward to 10.30am), the need for quality spin and pace has been diminished. Why bother to invest in the time and effort of developing such players or fast bowler when the likes of Darren Stevens can hit the seam at 65 mph, nibble the ball about, and prove highly effective?

But will anyone be held accountable for this Ashes defeat? Will the director of England cricket take responsibility? Will the development coaches? Will the executives who prioritise T20 over the success of the Test side? Judging by recent events - Harrison telling us that, actually, England cricket has had a fine year, that the pace bowling programme is delivering "excellent results" (he namechecked Mark Footitt as an example of its success) and that changes to the governance of the sport somehow represent an "exciting moment" - the answer is a resounding no.

In the longer term, there is talk around the camp of the creation of a new position. A manager might be appointed - particularly on tours - who would be responsible for discipline within the squad and act as a sort of big brother for players who may be struggling. It would be no surprise if that new appointment - no doubt a recently retired player with experience of such tours - was in place by the time England depart for Sri Lanka in October.

There's probably some sense in such an idea. But it does grate a little that England's response to this latest series loss abroad is the appointment of another layer of middle management.
It's not as if they don't have a fair few figures on tour already. There's already a coach, an assistant coach, a batting coach and, in normal circumstances, a bowling coach. That's before we even consider the doctor, physio, masseuse, selector, strength & conditioning coach, topiarist and women who makes balloon animals. OK, those last two were made up, but you get the point. Does another manager on tour really answer the questions England are facing? Or does such an appointment further obfuscate who takes responsibility when things go wrong?

The fact is this: England have lost eight out of their last 10 away Tests and won none of them. The only away series they have won since the end of 2012 was the one in South Africa in 2015. Despite being awash with money (relatively speaking), England are about to slip to fifth in the Test rankings.

They really shouldn't be satisfied with that.

Ashes defeats used to hurt. They should hurt. If the ECB have in any way become inured to such pain, if they are in any way content with that away record and anything other than entirely focused on improving it, they are not just accepting mediocrity, they are bathing and swilling in it.

Why does county cricket always get the blame for England’s failings?

Andy Bull in The Guardian






A stock of explanations and excuses is a valuable bit of any cricketer’s kit and should be kept ready, stashed by bat, box, and pads. “The sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t pick it up in this light. My foot slipped. Somebody was moving behind the sightscreen.”

England, who, after all, have had no shortage of practice at this, have used some particularly ripe examples over the years. Ian Botham blamed the rain that ruined their chances in a group match against Pakistan at the 1992 World Cup on the team chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby “You’re useless, you are,” Botham told him, “It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of Islam.”

That was when Ted Dexter was the chair of selectors. Dexter, who once explained away his late arrival for pre-season at Sussex by saying “I was fascinated by an adorable girl”, had a fine line in alibis himself. When England were thrashed in Caluctta in 1993, he announced he was going “to commission a report into pollution levels in Indian cities” (India’s environment minister replied that Dexter should “commission a report into the effect of pollution levels on the trajectories of India’s spinners” instead). And when England lost the Ashes in 1989 Dexter offered the deathless: “Venus may be in the wrong juxtaposition to somewhere else.”

Dexter had a rare flair for the form, though. These days (if not always) a lot of the explanations, excuses, and arguments about what went wrong are starting to sound tired and familiar. As if English cricket was turning circles while it tries to find the way ahead. On the one hand there are the pundits offering old bromides about a weak county game that fails to produce the particular cricketers the national team needs, and on the other, there are county fans who bounce the blame back on to the ECB’s mismanagement of the sport and their coaching set-up at junior and elite levels.

This winter the focus is on fast bowlers, because England’s batsmen have been skinned by three of them. Steve Finn touched on the issues when he was doing some charity work for Chance to Shine last week. He picked out the pitches, which are “a bit of a pancake because people are scared of losing games”, and the workload, “when you play 12 months a year it can suck the pace out of you”, but defended the ECB’s national performance centre in Loughborough, where the coaches cannot seem to decide whether they should be teaching quick bowlers to stay fit or get fast.

The telling detail was what Finn had to say about the ECB’s recent changes to the playing conditions. Last winter it was not the lack of quick bowlers everyone was worrying about but the shortage of spinners, because England had been thrashed in India. The ECB had taken a step to fix exactly that problem earlier in the year, when they decided that in the championship visiting captains would have the choice of whether or not to bowl first. This was supposed to encourage counties to produce pitches that would bring spinners into the game as it wore on. And it worked.

The flip side, Finn explained, is that “we are trying to develop spinners in this country with the toss rules and not making pitches biased towards fast bowlers but I do think the slowness of the wickets discourages people from bowling fast.” Point being that in the attempt to fix one problem, the ECB has exacerbated another. Which is a pattern it is repeating on a larger scale. 

The last big ballyhoo in English cricket was after the team’s abject 2015 World Cup. Paul Downton lost his job as the managing director and Andrew Strauss took over with instructions to improve England’s limited-overs cricket before the 2019 tournament. Concurrently, the board was concocting plans to bring in a new T20 league. It’s been designed to address two other long-standing criticisms of the way it has run the sport, which were that having invented T20, the ECB’s version of it had long since been overtaken by others around the world and that youth interest and participation in the sport had dropped off a cliff while it was stuck behind Sky’s paywall.

Most of the key decisions since have been made to serve those ends. Trevor Bayliss was hired, in the large part, because he had such a strong record as a limited-overs coach. Then, the number of County Championship matches was cut and the schedules rearranged so teams could play limited-overs cricket on hard, fresh pitches at the height of summer, the one-day final could take centre stage again, and the players would have to do less chopping and changing between formats.

Problem being that when the ECB shifted one piece of this jigsaw into place it left a muddle in the other corner. The championship has been marginalised, shunted into the far ends of the season, when conditions are more likely to suit the very kind of bowling that suffered in Australia, and at domestic level, the counties and their players are being encouraged to prioritise limited-overs cricket.

So the ECB have over-corrected, and ended up off course in the other direction. But then, you would need to be a hell of a plate spinner to come up with a system that serves the national team in all three formats, keeps the counties solvent, satisfies diehard fans and seduces a new audience too. The ECB would do well to find a chaplain to blame.

Britain's role in the growth of tax havens

Andrew Verity in The BBC


Here's the received wisdom: when the British Empire faded in size and significance after World War Two, a few scattered islands around the globe wanted to keep their imperial ties to London.

The British government had to find a way to reduce the economic dependence of the likes of Bermuda, Montserrat or the British Virgin Islands, so it awarded them special tax-exempt status, creating the conditions for a thriving financial services industry.

Yes, tax evasion and money laundering may have got a little out of hand from time to time, but overall it succeeded in lifting them out of dependence on the UK government.

But there's a deeper story. It wasn't by design that the remnants of a dying British Empire morphed into a world leader in offshore financial services, selling secrecy and tax avoidance to multi-nationals and the wealthiest individuals in the world.

Instead, the crucial moment was more of an accident - which gave rise to advantages no-one had foreseen.

And it began not in Bermuda or Jersey but in another offshore centre - "offshore" not to the UK, but to the US - the City of London.

Incentives to avoid

When the 20th Century began, income tax was in single digits and progressive taxation - charging richer people a higher rate - had barely begun.

In the run-up to World War One, chancellors of the exchequer - from Asquith to Lloyd George - began raising taxes to pay for social reforms, such as the old age pension.

As the war progressed, the state demanded more and more income tax from every citizen and higher rates for the wealthy, leading to a top rate of 30% by 1919.

Accountants to wealthy individuals began to devise ways to avoid tax. Clients could become resident in Jersey, where tax rates were far lighter.

Or, if they wanted to stay in London, they might put their money in a trust registered elsewhere, perhaps on the Isle of Man, where in theory it was no longer theirs - and therefore not visible to the prying eyes of an Inland Revenue inspector.

David Lloyd George served as Chancellor in Herbert Henry Asquith's government, before rising to PM in 1916

But it was in the dying days of the Empire that the offshore financial services industry truly boomed.

Defined by purpose rather than geography, "offshore" means any jurisdiction that seeks to attract investors on the basis of light taxes and looser regulations.

On that basis, the epicentre of the offshore industry is not Nassau in the Bahamas or George Town in the Cayman Islands.

As author Nick Shaxson points out in his fascinating offshore expose, Treasure Islands: "The modern offshore system did not start its explosive growth on scandal-tainted and palm-fringed islands in the Caribbean, or in the Alpine foothills of Zurich. It all began in London, as Britain's formal Empire gave way to something more subtle."

By accident - not design

In 1957, Britain and its imperial remains were trying to recover from a financial crisis. The previous year the UK had joined forces with France and Israel to try to recapture the Suez Canal after it was nationalised by the defiant anti-colonial Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Viewing the invasion as European imperialism at its worst, the US refused any assistance.

By the end of 1956, a run on the pound was under way. The Bank of England wanted to curb the outflow of pounds by boosting interest rates sharply, but Her Majesty's Treasury had other ideas.

Since the Bretton Woods economic conference of 1944 towards the end of World War Two, countries had agreed to control movements of capital to curb the speculative flows into and out of countries that had worsened the economic crises of the past.

If, say, Tate & Lyle wanted to invest several million pounds in a new sugar production facility in Jamaica, it would need signed approval from Her Majesty's Treasury.

Normally this was a formality. But during the Suez crisis, the Treasury announced that, on a temporary basis, it would no longer approve foreign capital investments.Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionThe Bank of England did not get its way against the Treasury

The City's merchant banks were alarmed. Arranging finance for projects in the former colonies was their lifeblood. How would they avoid ruin?

Digging through the archives, financial academic Gary Burn unearthed what happened next.

Hearing the banks' complaints in a series of meetings, the Bank of England agreed in late 1957 to allow the commercial banks to continue to lend and borrow to foreign clients on two conditions:
the lending had to be in a currency other than sterling, and
both sides of the transaction - the lender and the borrower - had to reside somewhere other than the UK
"The decision was momentous in all respects," says one of the leading experts in offshore finance, Prof Ronen Palan of City, University of London. "They simply deemed certain transactions as not taking place in the UK. Where did the transactions take place for regulatory purposes? Nowhere.

"I think it wasn't at all by design; it was a mistake. They didn't understand the implications. It was seen as an accounting device."

The so-called "Eurodollar" was born - a global offshore financial market, transacting in dollars and allowing unlimited sums to be borrowed and lent, but under the control of no single state. No act of Parliament (or Congress) sanctioned the decision. There was no thoughtful policy-making, no careful debate.

Success of the Eurodollar

The Treasury was at first left in the dark. But within years the implications were obvious - this could revive the City of London's fortunes.

"By the time the Treasury figured it out, they thought, 'this is good business for the City'," said Prof Palan.

Banks from all around the world could borrow and lend in dollars without being subject to US tax or banking regulations - making banking in dollars more profitable out of London than out of Wall Street.

Offshore banks didn't have to hold money in reserve for every dollar they lent (as they would in the US), which would dramatically cut their costs.

While transactions were arranged in London, the lenders and borrowers could be registered anywhere. But the parties to Eurodollar transactions needed addresses.

So, zero-tax jurisdictions from the Cayman Islands to the Montserrat were used by London's investment banks as the official tax residences of their wealthy customers.

Clients could avoid both tax and undesirable scrutiny - for example from the US tax authorities.

In the British Overseas Territories, local laws were passed to attract more registration business, collecting modest fees that mounted up. No need for a bank branch out there - just a drawer in an offshore lawyer's filing cabinet.

The City of London began its recovery to become the centre of finance it is today

Howls of protest from the US government were ignored. Between 1960 and 1970, the size of the Eurodollar market went from $1bn to $46bn.

In the 1970s, countries rich in petrodollars from soaring oil prices were faced with a dilemma: repatriate the money to New York - where they would be taxed on it - or keep it offshore.

By 1980, the so-called Eurodollar market was worth more than half a trillion.

After the deregulation of the City of London in the 1986 "Big Bang", US banks joined in, setting up in London.

And as the 1990s and 2000s progressed, it became the undisputed global centre for foreign currency trading.

Not for the weather

Banks' wealthy individual and corporate clients didn't incorporate in the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands because they liked the weather there - many never visited.

Offshore centres were attractive to businesses looking to reduce their tax bill, but sometimes, more importantly, to avoid what they regarded as excessive regulation.

Cayman Islands-registered companies were used heavily, for example, by the energy giant Enron as it built its business model based on fraudulent accounts.

Tax-free, light regulation jurisdictions, including the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and Delaware in the US, became the corporate locations of choice for legitimate hedge funds.

They were also used to incorporate the vehicles at the heart of the global financial crisis - the 'structured investment vehicles' that did not show up on bank's balance sheets and bought billions of mortgage-backed securities, massively increasing the unnoticed risks in the global financial system which led to the crisis of 2008.

Likewise, the British Virgin Islands has been used by many legitimate businesses. It has also become the favourite secrecy jurisdiction for clients of the Panama-based law firm exposed in last year's Panama Papers revelations, Mossack Fonseca.

Since those revelations, governments around the world have pledged to improve transparency with measures such as automatic information sharing and registers of beneficial owners of offshore companies.

Many of those measures are yet to be enacted or tested.

But as the Paradise Papers are now confirming, the secrets of Britain's offshore empire are no longer quite so safe.

Is James Andersen an Alan Sked of English cricket?

Girish Menon

You might wonder what is the relationship between James Andersen the cricketer and Dr. Alan Sked the original founder of the UK Independence Party (UKIP)?  Prima facie, not a lot; one is a cricketer with not much connection with academia and the other is a tenured historian at the London School of Economics. But look closer and you can find both of them living in the past.

I attended Dr. Sked’s history lectures many moons ago. He was a fine orator and I fondly remember him after so many years, His pet theme was the greatness of the British Empire and the downward spiral of the UK since World War II especially with the increasing integration of erstwhile enemies into the European Union. At one of our social do’s we had the following conversation:

‘Alan, the UK needs a clock that rotates backwards’

‘Why?’ he asked

‘Because you seem to be forever living in the past’

‘Girish, do you know who you are talking to? I will be marking your papers in the summer’

‘Alan I am not from colonial India, I am from a more confident India’….

I had been out of touch with Dr. Sked until his proposal to start a UKIP of the left – however this proposal did not see the light of day at least not in the form Dr. Sked envisaged. Today's early morning reverie however linked Dr. Sked with James Andersen a great English bowler. Andersen, whose career appears fast fading, criticised the Indian captain Virat Kohli on the day he scored 235 runs. Kohli’s over 600 runs in four test matches has Andersen unimpressed. He suggested that Kohli is not so much an improved batsman, as a batsman playing in conditions that do not exploit his "technical deficiencies".

"I'm not sure he's changed," Anderson said. "I just think any technical deficiencies he's got aren't in play out here. The wickets just take that out of the equation.

"We had success against him in England, but the pace of the pitches over here just take any flaws he has out of the equation. There's not that pace in the wicket to get the nicks, like we did against him in England with a bit more movement. Pitches like this suit him down to the ground.”

"When that's not there, he's very much suited to playing in these conditions. He's a very good player of spin and if you're not bang on the money and don't take your chances, he'll punish you. We tried to stay patient against him, but he just waits and waits and waits. He just played really well."

Andersen, like Dr. Sked, loves to invoke the past when he does not wish to deal with the current reality. Virat Kohli may indeed fail on his next trip to England in 2018 on England’s doctored pitches. But Andersen could be a little less churlish, live in the present and share some of the Yuletide spirit.

Brexit is being driven by English nationalism. And it will end in self-rule

Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian

It is a question the English used to ask about their subject peoples: are they ready for self-government? But it is now one that has to be asked about the English themselves. It’s not facetious: England seems to be stumbling towards a national independence it has scarcely even discussed, let alone prepared for. It is on the brink of one of history’s strangest nationalist revolutions.

When you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement. If the Leave side wins the referendum, it will almost certainly be without a majority in either Scotland or Northern Ireland and perhaps without winning Wales either. The passion that animates it is English self-assertion. And the inexorable logic of Brexit is the logic of English nationalism: the birth of a new nation state bounded by the Channel and the Tweed.

Over time, the main political entity most likely to emerge from Brexit is not a Britain with its greatness restored or a sweetly reunited kingdom. It is a standalone England. Scotland will have a second referendum on independence, this time with the lure of staying in the European Union. Northern Ireland will be in a horrendous bind, cut off from the rest of the island by a European border and with the UK melting around it. Its future as an unwanted appendage of a shrunken Britain is unsustainable. Wales is more uncertain, but a resurgence of Welsh nationalism after Brexit is entirely possible, especially after a Scottish departure from the UK. After Brexit, an independent England will emerge by default.

And this is of course a perfectly legitimate aspiration. Nationalism, whether we like it or not, is almost universal and the English have as much right to it as anyone else. There’s nothing inherently absurd about the notion of England as an independent nation state. It’s just that if you’re going to create a new nation state, you ought to be talking about it, arguing for it, thinking it through. And this isn’t happening. England seems to be muddling its way towards a very peculiar event: accidental independence.

The first thing about the idea of England as a nation state that governs itself and only itself is that it is radically new. The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly “standing alone”, as it did against the Spanish armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early 10th century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016 when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.

Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.

English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) “ourselves alone”. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead.

As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: ‘There is no future in England’s dreaming’

Hardly anyone is even talking about England – all the Brexit arguments are framed in terms of Britain or the UK, as if these historically constructed and contingent entities will simply carry on regardless in the new dispensation. The Brexiters imagine an earthquake that will, curiously, leave the domestic landscape unaltered. English nationalism is thus a very strange phenomenon – a passion that is driving a nation towards historic change but one that seems unwilling even to speak its own name.

It is hard to think of any parallel for this. Successful national independence movements usually have five things going for them: a deep sense of grievance against the existing order; a reasonably clear (even if invented) idea of a distinctive national identity; a shared (albeit largely imaginary) narrative of the national past; a new elite-in-waiting; and a vision of a future society that will be better because it is self-governing.

The English nationalism that underlies Brexit has, at best, one of these five assets: the sense of grievance is undeniably powerful. It’s also highly ambiguous – it is rooted in the shrinking of British social democracy but the actual outcome of Brexit will be an even closer embrace of unfettered neoliberalism. There is a weird mismatch between the grievance and the solution.

None of the other four factors applies. As a cultural identity, Englishness is wonderfully potent but not distinctive – its very success means that it is global property. From the English language to the Beatles, from Shakespeare to the Premier League, its icons are planetary. The great cultural appeal of nationalism – we need political independence or our unique culture will die – just doesn’t wash. Moreover, this power of English culture derives precisely from its capacity to absorb immigrant energies. From the Smiths to Zadie Smith, from the Brontës to Dizzee Rascal, it is very hard to imagine an “English” culture that is not also Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Irish, Jewish and so on.

Is there a shared narrative of the English past that functions even as a useful collective invention? English nationalism has a hard time integrating the past of John Ball and the Levellers, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine with that of monarchs, generals and imperial power.

As for an elite-in-waiting, the English nationalist movement certainly has one. But the handover of elite power that will accompany this particular national revolution will surely be the most underwhelming in history — from one set of public school and Oxbridge Tories to another. And this elite’s vision of a future society seems to come down to the same lump of money – the (dishonestly) alleged £350m a week that will be saved by leaving the EU – being spent over and over on everything from the National Health Service to farm subsidies. Plus, of course, fewer immigrants, thereby creating some kind of imaginary Lebensraum. There is no attempt to articulate any set of social principles by which the new England might govern itself. As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: “There is no future in England’s dreaming.”

When it comes down to it, nationalism is about the line between Them and Us. The Brexiters seem pretty clear about Them – Brussels bureaucrats and immigrants. It’s just the Us bit that they haven’t quite worked out yet. Being ready for self-government demands a much better sense of the self you want to govern.