All Sehwag's children

Jon Hotten

  

Sehwag and Warner: nothing traditional about them  © AFP

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David Warner's first-innings hundred in Adelaide was fraught with meaning. One of those meanings has, quite rightly, been less reflected upon than those surrounding the passing of Phillip Hughes, but it nonetheless carries great force.

Warner is at the top of his game now. He has made 11 Test centuries, six of them in the past 12 months (and there will be more to come). He walked out in Adelaide afloat on adrenaline and emotion and began pumping the ball through the field and to the boundary, scoring 30-odd before his opening partner, Chris Rogers, had got to 5. 

Cut back five years. Warner has just debuted as a T20 international for Australia without having made a single appearance in first-class cricket. The idea that he may one day play Test match cricket provokes not just laughter but horror. A few days later, Warner runs into India's opening batsman Virender Sehwag.

"He said to me, 'You'll be a better Test cricketer than you are a T20 player,'" Warner recalled. "I looked at him and basically said, 'Mate I've not even played a first-class game yet.' But he said, 'All the fielders are around the bat. If the ball's there in your zone, you're still going to hit it. You're going to have ample opportunities to score runs. You've always got to respect the good ball, but you've got to punish the ball you always punish.'"

Sehwag had looked at Warner and Test cricket through the prism of his own experience, and he knew.

Sehwag was right.

A few days before this Australia-India series was due to start, Sehwag was omitted from India's provisional 30-man squad for the World Cup. He last played Test cricket in March 2013, and last appeared in an ODI in January 2013. He says he wants to go on for another two or three years, batting in Delhi's middle order, but to all intents and purposes, it is perhaps over for him at the top.

He shares the era of Tendulkar, Ponting, Kallis, Dravid and the rest, but he is not one of them. There has always been something about his batting that suggests his otherness.

The great names of his era had deep connections to the game's past in their methods and their styles and their sensibility. Sehwag was always about the future.

He has not operated alone. Chris Gayle, for example, has been the alpha and omega of T20 batsmanship (at least at the top of the order). Sanath Jayasuriya sliced and carved a new way through ODIs. Barry Richards once scored 325 in a day against Dennis Lillee's Western Australia.

And yet perhaps only Brian Lara built huge scores as quickly and as often as Sehwag. But even Lara would often say that the first hour of his innings "belongs to the bowler". Sehwag was not willing to cede them the first delivery.

Sehwag tears into the England attack in Chennai in 2008  © Getty Images

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It was he who came up with the credo by which batsmen will come to live: "see ball, hit ball". A rich and complex game, all of its challenges of psychology and perception and neurology reduced to its barest essential. What joy it has brought. No one piled up runs quite like Sehwag piled them up. And he did it not just for a few overs, but for hours, and then sessions and sometimes days.

There are so many innings to choose from, but here's a thought about one that was almost entirely overshadowed. India's win over England in Chennaiafter the Mumbai terror attacks is rightly remembered as Tendulkar's Test, won with a knock only he could have played.

But it was set up by an innings only Sehwag could have played - 83 from 68 balls, and what was important about it was not his statistics but his intent. Faced with a score never before made to win in India, he simply tore into England's bowlers, smashing them so far and so fast that he shifted the entire psychology of the match from an inevitable England win into a joyous carnival of possibilities.

I have a pet theory that cricket must accelerate to match the culture in which it exists. It must become heightened; more compacted, more intense, more powerful. There's no doubt that it is already happening, and that it will continue to happen. Warner is just the first to walk the path from shortest format to longest.

Sehwag somehow saw that, or felt it, or just knew it deep within his bones. He has been great, and beyond that, he has shaped the future. They are all Sehwag's children now.

On Sledging - Anderson England's guilty pleasure

There is an uncomfortable recognition that the beauty of James Anderson's cricket comes with a professionalism that has been taken to the limits but weak umpiring has to share the blame

David Hopps in Cricinfo

As James Anderson prepares to face an ICC enquiry into his alleged misconduct during the Trent Bridge Test, it is hard to suppress a feeling of frustration about how this wonderful fast bowler has been allowed to become England's guilty pleasure.

Anderson is close to the apex of a fulfilling career, only 12 more wickets needed to draw equal with Ian Botham as England's leading Test wicket-taker. He is championed in England as a true craftsman among fast bowlers, a manipulator of a cricket ball who deserves to stand alongside the best.

And yet, this faith in his bowling purity sits uneasily with a sullied reputation; a player now well known to all but the most casual follower of the game as one of the most ingrained sledgers around and, a natural development, who allegedly has now tipped over into the pushing of Ravindra Jadeja as well. It does not take long to find an opponent, or a past opponent, who says there is nobody worse - even if they then admit it is a crowded field. It should never have come to this.

This then is England's guilty pleasure: on one side, the shy craftsman who became one of the finest fast bowlers in the world; on the other, the Burnley Lip, whose abuse of opponents has been incessant for many years. Many in the game will tell you it doesn't matter a jot. It does. Cricket has a problem - and it needs to deal with it before everybody starts to grow Luis Suarez fangs.

It is important to observe - and his captain, Alastair Cook, was shrewd enough to do so from the start - that the ICC code of conduct commissioner, Gordon Lewis, a retired Australian judge, has been appointed to judge one specific incident at Trent Bridge, about which the details remain at issue, and not to pass opinion on a verbally-strewn career.

The ICC's judgment, in the simplest terms, will determine whether Anderson is banned from his home Test at Old Trafford next week, and perhaps for the rest of the series. For many, that outcome is all that matters. It might swing a Test series towards India in the process, although the suggestion that this is India's reasoning is overly cynical.

This is not a tactic; this is a campaign. And once Lewis makes his ruling, we will wait to discover if it is the first campaign of many or if Anderson is to be its sole victim. A trophy killing for India's mantelpiece.

Anderson's fate will be determined on whether video evidence really does exist - India say so, but they might be bluffing - and on the dubious testimony of witnesses about Who Pushed Who When, Who Said What To Whom, all of which tittle-tattle should be enough to make Lewis wonder whether he should be doing better things with his life.

Cricket's fate will take longer to determine. What we may also be experiencing is the start of India agitation against persistent on-field abuse, a habit resented for its disrespect and occasionally because of its implied threat of physical violence. The reality is that only India is empowered to change the nature of the game - to say "we will not play this way". What is less unclear is whether it has the will to try to transform the way the game is played - or whether perhaps Lewis' ruling will carry wider encouragement for cricket to clean up its act.

We may know a lot more about the repercussions by Christmas. If India, and in particular their captain MS Dhoni, have taken a stand against what they regard as Anderson's excess, how will they respond when India pitch up for a Test series in Australia? They have acted independently of the umpires and match referees once. If Lewis rules in their favour, will they feel obliged to do it again?

If Mitchell Johnson snarls from underneath his vaudevillian moustache, will India be consistent and immediately lay a charge with the ICC? If David Warner yaps like a dog for much of a session, as he once stupidly did to irritate Faf du Plessis, will another charge be laid? If Shane Watson adds some sly words of his own, will three Australians be in the dock?

	Was Ajinkya Rahane's melodramatic response at the end of day four a sign of India's zero tolerance approach to verbal abuse? © Getty Images  Enlarge

Anderson's alleged push of Jadeja is presented as the catalyst for the complaint, but it was his reputation as a serial sledger that made Dhoni so anxious to pursue it. Anderson was charged because he has form - the alleged push was just a chance to get even. And physical contact, incidentally, is not necessarily needed to win a case. There is plenty in the ICC Code of Conduct that pretends to punish verbal abuse. It is just that nobody ever presses charges.

While England is invited to regard Anderson as a guilty pleasure, international umpires and the ICC must be feeling nervous. If India is embarking upon an attempted clean up, the umpires will need to intervene in a manner they have not seen fit to do for years. If they do, it will be long overdue. What we have at the moment is a sham.

So much in cricket is disingenuous. The Spirit of Cricket has become a widely-ridiculed moral salad dressing on a game where umpires allow verbal aggression to go unchecked in the misguided belief that they are permitting the vital confrontational elements that enhance the game at the highest level. As long as the invective isn't aimed at them, as long as nobody actually makes physical contact, they are only concerned with ensuring the public does not know too much.

Most of us - at whatever level we play the game - relish a clever sledge, most of us permit a physically-straining fast bowler a display of frustration, most of us don't mind a bit of backchat, but umpires have utterly failed in their duty to check the incessant boorish behaviour that has now become regarded as just a daily reality. Where were they when Anderson indulged in his 30-metre rant at Jadeja as the players walked off for tea? Where is the dividing line? Is everything acceptable unless you actually push someone? It is time we were honestly told.

Instead, we have Anderson, the essentially gentle guy trying to play tough; the diffident figure who has been told by coaches to become more aggressive; the man who could barely spit out a sentence in press conferences at the start of his career, transformed into a venomous on-field malcontent; a natural leader of no-one proudly bowling more Test overs than anyone in the world as he forever strives to be the Leader of the Attack; a talented, likeable lad who has been gradually lulled by this failure of umpires and administrators to rule and has developed, in his immense desire to win Tests for England, into a twisted, nastier on-field personality than he really is.

Considering all the jokes about his grumpiness - his best mate, Graeme Swann, loves to joke that it takes a couple of beers to cheer him up - this role play does not seem to have made him very happy.

As England celebrated an overwhelming victory at the Ageas Bowl, Anderson's hugs with his team-mates seemed slightly troubled. A few minutes later, he was collecting another magnum of champagne, another man-of-the-match award logged. He had produced his finest all-round performance for a year, a display summoned out of adversity, adversity not just for himself, but for his captain, Alastair Cook, and indeed the entire England Test set-up.

	While we cherish Anderson's skill, we prefer to be spared a truth. The abuse has become the sourness we would rather not recognise

It was a pleasure to see Anderson and Stuart Broad remembering once again how to play with joy - "play with the happiness of your first Test," the coach, Peter Moores had urged them as he sought to arrest England's worst run for 20 years, and England's senior players, as one, had released the yoke from their back. England kept their lips buttoned - and won by a country mile.

But on the one occasion that Anderson allowed himself some backchat - a sentence or two to Ajinkya Rahaneat the end of the fourth day - the response from Rahane was so melodramatic that India's zero tolerance policy was abundantly clear. Was this personal animosity, a tactical manoeuvre ahead of the hearing or further proof a long-term attempt to change the nature of the game?

Anderson's post-match interviews, as ever, were conducted in that vulnerable, polite, halting style. It is the Anderson that England wish to celebrate: the self-effacing, bashful sportsman who has succeeded in a physically-demanding, confrontational job. We would rather dwell on his 371 Test wickets and not wonder about his tally of C words when the game gets tough.

His newly-adopted beard looks like a defence mechanism against the uproar surrounding him. When he was asked after the match if he was confident about the outcome of the hearing, his "don't know" response sounded abashed. There was no petulant strut, no words of defiance, just a world-class player trapped in a behavioural mode that might be about to bring suspension.

While we cherish Anderson's skill, we prefer to be spared this truth. The abuse has become the sourness we would rather not recognise: the stain on the luxury, hand-woven carpet; the dodgy financial dealings that produce the beautiful marina; the uncomfortable recognition that the beauty of Anderson's cricket comes with a professionalism that has been taken to the limits. The alleged push has finally forced us to take notice.

We all know this: fans, team-mates, opponents, former players, umpires, administrators, all playing our part in this endless charade.

The ECB defends Anderson because it wants to win the series and protect its players; no thoughts here - not publicly anyway - of the wider picture. The ICC just bleats that the authority of the enquiry has been compromised because both Dhoni and Cook have passed comment on the situation, more concerned with systems and processes than the long-term health of the game.

Meanwhile, James Anderson, is hung out to dry.

And nobody is imposing, for all of us to see, the behavioural standards by which the game should be run.

Warner's honesty deserves respect

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

Greg Baum in The Age

Upon being given out lbw one day, W.G.Grace fixed the umpire with a stare and barked: ''Play on. They came to see me bat, not you umpire.'' That night, ICC match referee the Earl of Sheffield convened a hearing, where it was deemed that Grace had breached article 2.1.7 of the code of conduct, concerning ''public criticism or inappropriate comment'' about a player or official. He was fined half his match fee, which became a problem because he had already spent it on port for himself and kibble for his beagles.

''It was disrespectful for WG to publicly denigrate an official,'' said Lord Sheffield. ''I'm sure he will be careful when making public comments in the future.''

Fifty years later, at the Adelaide nadir of Bodyline, battered and bruised Australian captain Bill Woodfull refused to accept the sympathy of England manager Pellham Warner, saying curtly: ''I don't want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket. The other is making no attempt to do so.''

This was leaked to the media, prompting ICC match referee Sir Henry Leveson Gower to summons Woodfull, fine him and impose a two-match suspended sentence. Woodfull accepted his punishment stoically, but wondered as he sipped his bedtime cup of tea that night which of Don Bradman and Jack Fingleton was responsible for the leak.

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''It was disrespectful of Mr Woodfull to publicly denigrate an opponent and imply that the opponent was engaging in sharp practice,'' intoned Sir Henry. ''I'm sure Mr Woodfull will be careful when making public comments in the future.''

Some people never learn. This week, David Warner hinted in a radio interview that South Africa might have done more than simply take the rough with the smooth to achieve deadly reverse swing to win the second Test. ''We were actually questioning whether or not A.B.de Villiers would … with his glove, wipe the rough side every ball,'' he said.

Cue ICC match referee Roshan Mahanama, cue a fine of a quarter of Warner's match fee, cue reprimand: ''It was disrespectful for David to publicly denigrate an opponent, and imply that a South African player was engaging in sharp practice. I'm sure David will be careful when making public comment in the future.''

If anything is disrespectful in cricket, it is the reconfiguring of the concept of respect, turning it into some sort of state room carpet under which all tensions and spiritedness and debate must be augustly swept so as not to offend cricket's graven self-image of a game on a higher moral plane.

Even as England and Australia beat each other up in turn in the Ashes, they ''respected'' one another. After the Stuart Broad non-walking drama at Trent Bridge, Kevin Pietersen said: ''Aleem Dar is a fantastic umpire, and we respect his decisions.'' KP: home-wrecker in the change room, but ever ''respectful'' in public. Michael Clarke threatened Jimmy Anderson with physical harm in the gloaming in Brisbane, then said later: ''All of the England players know that we respect them.''

At the same press conference, Warner raised eyebrows when he talked of the Johnson-ed English batsmen and their ''scared eyes''. However much retrospective offence was taken, the sentiment beneath the momentary silence in the room then was that here was a rare cricketer, prepared to engage with the issue of the moment, not gloss over it in the name of respect, vainly taken.

It was not diplomatic, because it is not in Warner to be diplomatic. In this, the cricketer he most resembles is old WG, as described by Geoffrey Moorhouse in Wisden 1988: ''A hand of whist appears to have marked the limit of his capacity for cerebration, and if one wished to be rude to suburbia one might identify Grace as suburban man incarnate.''

Not every cricketer can be Rahul Dravid. Not ever cricketing utterance can be a Mike Brearley-style dissertation, nor should be a Clarke-esque circumlocution. Warner, unable to dissemble, most often tells his see-ball-hit-ball truth, and pastiche notions of ''respect'' be damned. The least that can be said of his approach is that it is crazy-brave: it is he who stands in the 22-yard front line, facing an attack doubly rearmed by a new ball and fresh slight.

As long as Warner's gibes are not personal, nor demean innocents, what harm is in them, except to a spurious ideal of respect? Impugning professionalism is as old as professionalism. Separately, it is mystifying that work to coax a ball to reverse swing is regarded as a sin. Ryan Harris, in distancing himself from Warner's stance, inadvertently bore him out. ''You've got to do something with the ball, everyone does it,'' he said. ''They handled the ball better than us.''

Ahead of Cape Town and its 47-all-out ghosts, South African coach Russell Domingo said: ''I'm sure [Australia] will look at the highlights … to see what happened here last time, and there will be a little bit of anxiety, I suppose.'' Like de Villiers' glove, it was meant to rub Australia up the wrong way. Disrespectfully. Fortunately, the ICC match referee was on a day off.

Cricket - Let's tonk for all our worth

Matt Cleary in Cricinfo
(The Editor wonders if such an article would have been written if cricket's ancien regime had scored similar runs in 43 overs! It's a bit like the MCC limiting the number of bouncers per over after the West Indies pace attack. Yet, Matt has a point.)

Video games can't match the action we saw in Jaipur  © BCCI

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And so to the slaughter at Sawai Mansingh Stadium the other night, in which both sets of batsmen flogged the bowlers as if they were unrepentant 18th-century horse thieves. In 93.3 overs of crazy-mad bludgeon, Australia scored 359 and India chased it down for the loss of one wicket. Entertaining? No doubt. A contest? It was not.

For while all this heavy-batted bashing was sort of interesting, and you can admire the timing and skill required to achieve such high-octane hammer, the game itself was not a contest in terms of bat against ball. It was an arms race in which batsmen bullied bowlers and bowlers were powerless to fight back. And one team of bullies were just better bullies than the other. It was a lot of things. But cricket it was not. 

Not cricket?

Not cricket. Cricket is mean to be a contest. A contest has two parts. In cricket's case it's a battle between batsman and bowler. And the other night all the various weapons and devices available to bowlers - line, length, seam, swing, pace, spin, bounce, sweat, spit, minty sweets - were rendered redundant because of a pitch friendlier to batsmen than girls were friendly to Elvis.

What could bowlers achieve on that deck? What could they do? Everything from toe-crushing heat to half-tracking "spin" was dispatched by batsmen confident the pill would do nothing untoward. Like, at all. There was nothing doing. The cricket ball was nude. It was an ex-parrot. You'd have more chance against Viv Richards with a tennis ball on a beach.

I mean, had India been allowed to keep batting and had scored at a not-implausible 20 runs per over, they would have got close to 500. That's all well and good. People could have gone home and said, "I was there the night India scored close to 500." That's great. But it's not cricket. And it worries me how little people care that it's not.

Look at the rapture in the stands in Jaipur. Look at the worldwide love of T20. People love big hitting over everything else. Tonking trumps fast bowling, spin bowling, acrobatic fielding, a run-out, a stumping, a tail digging in to save a match. Everything is second to bat smashing ball. People enjoy it more than even winning. They would rather see their team smash 400 and lose than win chasing down 230 on a green top.

So let's not fight it. If the People's lust for the tonk is so prevalent, let's flat out change the rules of cricket. For instance, why not have let India keep going the other night after they had passed Australia's total? Give the people Full Value. Instead of ending the innings once a team has "won", continue as an exhibition of tonking, and so excite the people.

If the Jaipur pitch is the new paradigm, why grow grass on cricket wickets at all? Why call them "turf" wickets? Get the boffins to create a scientific blend of synthetic space-mat to give a perfectly uniform bounce every time, allowing batsmen to confidently tee off unfettered by doubt the ball will do anything "bad".

Why should teams be able to select bowlers who are any good? They may as well save their best bowlers for Test cricket anyway, and throw out any combination of grade hacks and kids and backpacking Fanatics. If Mitchell Johnson, Clint McKay, Shane Watson and James Faulkner can be flogged for 239 runs in 28 overs, it doesn't matter who you throw at them. You may as well pick a pace pack of piss-pots from the press gallery.

Does cricket need bowlers at all? Why not have a bowling machine at each end that shoots out a mixture of slow-medium full tosses, half-volleys and long hops, all relayed to the batsman before the ball is fed in. Or have the type of delivery required designated by the batsman. Instead of Aaron Finch asking for guard from the umpire, he could instruct the ball-feeder guy, "Half-tracker outside leg stump please", and so blaze away.

Why have fielders? Such is the public's ravenous appetite for boundaries, aren't these speed bumps just getting in the way of the fun? And on these wickets are they not largely superfluous anyway? They are there to chase balls thudding into the boundary and going over their heads. People in the crowd have more chance of catching Virat Kohli when he's batting on 192.

Maybe we make cricket like those home-run exhibition things they have in baseball. And have guys like Dave Warner and Chrissy Gayle - who under the new rules of cricket can play for whichever country/franchise they wish - toss balls in the air and flog them high into the crowd for people to catch and then wave like crazy people on big screen.

No bowlers, no fielders, no winners, no losers. Just big tonks soaring over the fence and into the crowd.

Sure, it won't be cricket. But it's not now either.