A system to speak articulately

 

Cricket - It's not the plan, stupid: it's the performance.

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Merely calling for the heads of Cook and Moores isn't going to solve England's ODI problems © Getty Images

That the England hierarchy wasn't sure, even last week, who should captain them at the World Cup is seen as a terrible lack of planning. You know the kind of critique: problems have been obvious for a long time, need for long-term thinking, absence of a strategic plan, last-minute wobbles…

The consensus, sadly, is wrong and misleading. Planning has very little to do with it. It usually doesn't. The problem isn't bad planning but bad performances. No plan, however good in principle, can survive consistent failure. The fans and the media, understandably, demand change. Indeed, it is not good plans that lead to good performances but good performances that make plans look good. So we have the causality back to front: we talk about the consequences believing them to be the cause. After all, bad teams have plans, too. As Mike Tyson said in a moment of wisdom, "Everyone's got a plan, and then they get punched on the mouth."

Both sides - management and media - are complicit in what is essentially a kind of fraud: the myth of the plan. My television set is always at risk of having heavy objects thrown at it when coaches emerge after a defeat with the message: "Our plans were good, but we just didn't execute them well." (I don't think much more of the alternative: "We need to tweak our plans a little bit.") Always, this is said with the conviction that part a) "the plan" and part b) "the execution" were of roughly equal value and significance. In fact, as every aspiring but failed billionaire knows all too well, plans are really quite easy to formulate - it's getting the job done that's so damned difficult. My plan as a batsman was to get a fine hundred every time. Good plan. Not sure there's a better one. It was the execution that kept proving tricky.

In truth, taking refuge in woolly talk about plans is a polite way of avoiding the subject: the players didn't play very well. Perhaps it's even worse than that and they aren't that good, full stop. This is obviously not press-conference territory. So, artful ways have been cultivated to avoid the subject. An implicit deal has been struck, perhaps without anyone realising it. The media agrees to give credence to the power of planning. But in return, when the wheels fall off, it reserves the right to lambast the management's bad planning. Clichés always develop for a reason: they suit everyone. So it is with planning. For the media (and the fans served by the media), insights into "planning" hint at the inside track, a glimpse at the secret whiteboard in the dressing room. To the management, it sounds strategic and proactive, as though they aren't just sitting on chairs fiddling with rosary beads and cursing under their breath.

	Occasionally a team with fewer resources and less raw talent can win. Far more often, however, the better team wins. Acknowledging that central fact is the essential foundation of any good strategy

But how useful is planning as an explanation of events? When I was growing up in the 1980s, economic gurus constantly pointed at the apparently superior Japanese model. They argued that Japan was likely to pull ahead of America because its firms pioneered gradual consensus-building and long-term planning. But between 1990 and 2013 the American economy grew by 73% in real terms, whereas Japan's expanded by 24%. In the new economy, light-footed tinkering, the ability to "pivot" (a Silicon Valley phrase that means changing direction quickly and decisively) has often proved far more effective than long-distance planning.

I write all this as someone with a lifelong interest in strategy. By nature I am considered rational rather than spur-of-the-moment and devil-may-care. It is precisely because I care about planning - and recognise its occasional but serious contribution - that I also know the limits of its remit. Planning can certainly make a difference. From Odysseus' Trojan Horse to Jose Mourinho's Champions League title with Porto, we know that occasionally, very occasionally, a team with fewer resources and less raw talent can win. Far more often, however, the better team wins, regardless of what's written on the whiteboard. Acknowledging that central fact is the essential foundation of any good strategy.

	A bowler struggling for form? Fix the fundamental problem first © Philip Spooner  Enlarge

Yet there is widespread reluctance to admit common sense. I see this first-hand when I sometimes play in amateur cricket. A bowler will be bowling all over the place - full tosses on leg stump, long hops wide of off stump. Clearly, he doesn't know where the ball is going. And then the captain calls him over for a long conversation about field placement, or, even more insanely, starts barking instructions like, "Come on! Like we talked about in the dressing room!" If the barrel of your gun is randomly crooked, the precision of your aim is totally irrelevant. You aren't going to hit the target. So first fix the gun, then we'll worry about the fine-tuning target practice.

As a professional player, I saw one spinner get a mild version of the yips. The coach's insight into the situation? "We need to work with him on how to construct an over." I'll say. He's got six balls to bowl (if we're lucky) and he doesn't know where any of them are going. Construct an over? Sounded awfully hi-tech to me, as though we were in masterful control of events, tweaking at the margins like chess grand masters. The truth was simpler: he was struggling to land the ball. "Constructing an over" was not a plan available to us.

England's bad ODI form is not about Alastair Cook. It is not about Peter Moores. It is not about being too loyal to the captain or too attached to outdated plans. The real problem is the England team. It isn't that good. Hasn't been for a long time. Especially in ODIs. Especially abroad. This is a difficult conversation, tending towards the nihilistic. So we talk about planning and tactics and captaincy instead.

How can the really salient facts be changed and improved? The whole cricketing culture in England needs to take white-ball cricket more seriously. We need better pitches for List A games at home that encourage attacking batsmanship and make greater demands of bowlers. We need to encourage innovation and risk at every level, not ask players to learn new tricks on the grandest stage.

That, I concede, is the outline of my own plan. But as I said at the beginning, plans are easy. It's getting them done that's so difficult.

On Cricket Commentary - WHY CONTEXT MATTERS

Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph

The idea that we should respond to cricketers in purely cricketing terms is a piety that cripples commentary on the game. Cricket commentary’s organizing conceit — that at every turn in a Test there is a technically optimal choice to be made — produces formalist bromides that explain neither the course of the match nor the performances of its main characters. A good example of the technicist fallacy was Michael Holding’s criticism of Sri Lankan bowling tactics during the second innings of the second Test at Headingley. The Sri Lankan pacemen were bowling short at Joe Root (picture) who wasn’t comfortable. He was hit on the splice, on his gloves, on the body which encouraged the Sri Lankans to work him over for about half an hour. This provoked Holding into Fast Bowling Piety One: bowling short is all very well but you have to pitch it up to take wickets. Coming from Holding, one of the great West Indian quartet that unnerved a generation of batsmen with scarily fast and lethally short bowling, this was greeted in the Sky commentary box with general hilarity. Holding insisted that the tales of West Indian bouncer barrages were overstated and offered as proof the number of batsmen who were out lbw or bowled. Botham, from the back of the box offered an explanation: the balls must have ricocheted off their faces on to the stumps. Nasser Hussain spoke up to make the point that Joe Root seemed to have provoked the Sri Lankans while they were batting, and they, in turn had decided to see if they could sledge and bounce him into submission. Given Root’s visible discomfort, Hussain argued that a short burst of intimidatory bowling was a reasonable tactic. In response Holding produced his clinching cautionary tale: opposing fast bowlers once peppered Michael Clarke with short balls and he ducked and weaved and got hit but he had the last laugh by scoring more than 150 runs in that innings. Middle-aged desis recalled a very different precedent: the 1976 Test in Sabina Park where the West Indian pace attack led by Holding hospitalized three top order Indian batsmen with a round-the-wicket bouncer barrage and battered Bedi’s hapless team into surrendering a match with five wickets standing because the batsmen who weren’t injured were terrified. Holding was a member of the West Indian team that ruthlessly ‘blackwashed’ England after Tony Greig stupidly provoked the West Indians by promising to make them grovel. His inability to see that Mathews’s targeting of Root was a symptom of an angry team’s determination not to take a step back was a sign of how completely the conventions of cricket commentary can distract intelligent commentators from the real contest unfolding in front of them. Sri Lankan teams have long felt slighted by the ECB’s habit of offering them stub series or one-off Tests early in the English season. They have been treated like poor relations and this time round they felt not just patronized but persecuted by the reporting of Sachithra Senanayake’s bowling action during the ODI contests that preceded the two-Test ‘series’. It was this sense of being hard done by, this collective determination to be hard men, not game losers that played a part in Senanayake’s Mankading of Jos Buttler, in Angelo Mathews’s refusal to withdraw Senanayake’s appeal and in the public support that Sangakkara and Jayawardene gave Senanayake when Cook and Co. threw a hissy fit afterwards. And it was this keenness to give as good as they got that spurred the Sri Lankan captain to go after Joe Root who had been noticeably chirpy in the field. That passage of play, with the Sri Lankans bouncing and sledging Root and Root battling it out, was the series summed up in half a dozen riveting overs. This is not to argue that short pitched bowling is more effective than pitched up bowling when it comes to taking wickets: merely to suggest that producing axiomatic pieties as a commentator without accounting for context is pointless. If Mathews had persisted with a failed tactic over the best part of the day as Cook did when Mathews and Herath were building their rearguard action, Holding might have had a case. But he didn’t, so Holding’s inability to recognize that this spell of short pitched hostility was a flashpoint in this two Test struggle for superiority is a good example of the way in which orthodox nostrums glide over the action they are meant to illuminate. It wasn’t just Holding who lost the plot in the Sky commentary box, so did David Lloyd. When Mathews began sledging Root and, in spite of remonstrating umpires, calmly carried on sledging Root, a historically minded commentator might have seen him as a worthy heir to Arjuna Ranatunga, that smiling, pudgy, implacable eyeballer of umpires, winder-upper of oppositions and, by some distance, Sri Lanka’s greatest captain. But all Bumble saw was a captain who, because he was sledging Root, had lost focus and lost control of the match. So what for the rest of the world was a spell of purposeful hostility with Mathews testing Root’s will to survive, was for Lloyd, a failure by the Sri Lankan captain to focus on his main job, thinking Root out. Just as Mathews’s sledging was read without context, the larger contest between England and Sri Lanka went unframed. On the one hand there was the English team backed up by a prosperous, hyper-organized cricket board which surrounded its Test team with a support staff so large that journalists joked about it, and on the other there was a Sri Lankan team at war with its board, whose players frequently went unpaid and whose principal spinner, Rangana Herath, had to apply for leave from his day job before going on tour. I learnt more about the Sri Lankan team from one brilliant set of vignettes on Cricinfo (“The Pearl and the Bank Clerk” by Jarrod Kimber) than I did through 10 days of Test match commentary. Do television commentators do any homework? Are they interested in the individuals in the middle or are the players they describe just interchangeable names on some Platonic team sheet? Virtually every commentator in the world is now a distinguished ex-cricketer; are these retired champions meant to embody totemic authority, to exude experience into a microphone, or should they pull information and insight together to tell us something that we can’t see or don’t know already? One answer to that leading question might be that ball-by-ball commentary has, by definition, a narrow remit. The answer to that, of course, is that you can’t take a form that originated with radio where the commentator had to literally describe the action in the middle and transfer it to a different medium without redefining it. Sky Sports’s stab at redefinition consists of more graphical information. We have pitch maps and batting wagon wheels which are useful, but surely the rev counter on the top right hand corner of the screen is an answer looking for a question. Does the fact that Moeen Ali gets more revs on the ball than Rangana Herath does make him the better spinner? Sky’s little dial seems to think so. The best human insights on the Sri Lankan-England series came from Shane Warne and he wasn’t even in the commentary box. The series cruelly confirmed his criticisms of Alastair Cook’s captaincy: having moaned about Warne’s unfairness and huffed about Buttler’s Mankading, Cook led his team to defeat with all the grit of a passive-aggressive Boy Scout. In the Sky box, we had Mike Atherton who earned a 2.1 in history at Cambridge but you wouldn’t known it from his commentary: he was as indifferent to time and context as his fellow commentators. Ian Botham was, as always, the Sunil Gavaskar of English commentary while the point of Andrew Strauss’s strangled maunderings escaped foreigners in the absence of subtitles. The one exception to the tedium of Sky commentary was Nasser Hussain simply because he was alert to the politics of a cricket match, to the personal and collective frictions that makes Test cricket the larger-than-life contest that, at its best, it sometimes is. I like to think that the reason for this is that he’s called Nasser Hussain and has an Indian father and an English mother so he can’t pretend that cricket is a self-contained country. Pace Holding, the rehearsal of textbook orthodoxy might be a necessary part of cricket commentary, but it ought to be a baseline on which good commentators improvise, rather like the tanpura drone that provides soloists with an anchoring pitch. Too often, though, cricket commentary amounts to just the drone without context, insight or information. If English commentators are frustratingly literal and narrow, their Indian counterparts make Holding and Co. sound like John Arlott channelling C.L.R. James. Policed by the BCCI, desi commentators are so mindful of their contractual obligations and so formulaic in their utterances that they could be replaced by bots without anyone noticing. Watching a cricket match glossed by the BCCI’s Own, is unnervingly like playing the FIFA video game with automated commentary, where software produces the appropriate cliché whenever the onscreen action supplies the necessary visual cues. Readymade words for virtual football are bad enough but canned commentary on real cricket needs a special place in hell. Tracer bullets, kitchen sinks, cliff hangers, pressure cookers, sensible cricket, best played from the non-striker’s end, give the bowler the first half hour, leg-and-leg… it never stops, and its petrifying banality turns live cricket into lead. With five Tests to play, this is going to be a long, hot summer. Welcome to purgatory.

Cricket Commentary - What do they know of cliches...

Russell Jackson 

Ishant Sharma: exactly the bowler his average suggests  © Getty Images

Enlarge

As is the case with most of the sports we love and talk about, cricket long ago fell victim to a variety of enduring and evolving clichés. We're all guilty of indulging in them from time to time if we're honest with ourselves.

I guess you should consider this a kind of warning shot or manifesto for my appearances on the Cordon. Maybe it can even act as a warning to myself. "Is that really something you think or is it just something that everyone says?" Feel free to give me a nudge when I lapse.

RELATED LINKS

• Blogs:
 
• A little less commentary please
 
• Blogs:
 
• The nightmare called Television Commentary
  

Cricket clichés find their most obvious and oft-parodied home in the various commentary boxes of the game's major broadcasters. Often they fall into the category of "groupthink", where one ex-player's prattling or agenda comes to be accepted as the prevailing wisdom. A great example of this is the popular theory that, "Ishant Sharma is a better bowler than his figures suggest." Sorry to spoil the party, but aside from a couple of spells to one RT Ponting, Ishant is exactly the bowler his average suggests. A Test bowling average approaching 38 is a bit unlucky if you're a freewheeling rookie on the receiving end of some bad slips fielding, not if you're a 51-Test veteran. We have enough of a statistical sample size now; enough of this nonsense.

There are clichés to be found in the way we think about cricket, the way we talk about it, but most irksome of all in the way we write about it. If only I had a pre-war Wisden for every time some so-called cricket appreciator in the op-ed columns of a broadsheet newspaper has sprinkled that one CLR James quote (we all know the one, don't even say it) into a piece as though that in itself were persuasion enough that the writer does indeed have a thorough, beard-stroking understanding of the game's intricacies.

These James-referencing articles normally fall into one of two categories: ones that provide a ham-fisted or erroneous interpretation of the famous line and others again that present it completely devoid of context; just a bobbling boat of misguided self-importance. It's an attempt at adding a dash of intellectual heft to otherwise pedestrian observations and it usually sticks out like a wicketkeeper's thumb. Have any of these people actually read the damned book? It's great obviously, but please give us something that's not in the Amazon summary or the back-cover blurb.

To borrow the words of James' biographer Dave Renton, in coming to a genuine and considered appraisal of the Trinidadian writer's output and philosophy, "we must scrape through a muck of encrusted cliché". Renton also takes accurate aim at Wisden cliché-peddlers, sagely adding that "usually and lazily termed cricket's bible: more accurately it is the game's hadith: its tradition". Corollary to this is the equally hackneyed concept of the "cricket tragic", a self-description abused with regularity by boasting politicians and celebrity cricket frauds alike. Besides anything, there's actually very little about loving cricket, or any sport, that veers into tragedy. I guess Australians might now pause longer to consider that one.

When the cliché purveyors aren't telling you all about the "wristy" batsman of the subcontinent, they're banging on about the WACA being "a fast bowler's dream"

When the cliché purveyors aren't telling you all about the "wristy" batsman of the subcontinent, they're banging on about the WACA being "a fast bowler's dream". They should really have a word with AB de Villiers about the latter; he has made hundreds in his last two Tests there; or Hashim Amla, who belted 196 at near enough to a run a ball at the other end last November. Their South Africa team piled on 569 in their second innings.

On the topic of pitch-based clichés, Australians most famously view Indian pitches as untamable minefields perfectly curated to expose their side's deficiencies against spin. In actual fact they're not all that bad to bat on once you get yourself in and establish a tempo. Just ask the recently victorious England squad, who found the going far easier than the Aussies. Bad batting is bad batting.

Let's not allow players off the cliché hook either. A month or so back, Matthew Hayden took aim at recently displaced Aussie coach Mickey Arthur, decrying Arthur's leaked utterances about Shane Watson and painting the coach as an unwelcome interloper in his "old boy's club", an irony-gasm of epic proportions to those following the story at even the most superficial level. The former Test opener bellowed, "Correct Mick, we're an old boy's club. We're 450-plus players that have played for our country.

"We're proud of our culture, we're proud of our community of cricketers and one thing we actually can't stand is being interrogated on our watch in terms of criticising the fabric of the baggy green."

It's a sensational sound bite, but as with many evocations on the aura of the baggy green, it doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny. Was Hayden referring to the same tight-knit brethren that teased Scott Muller out of Test cricket? The ones who immediately turned on Bryce McGain the minute he bowled his first Cape Town long hop, or watched on as his spinning colleague Beau Casson rolled himself up into a foetal position and disappeared off the face of the earth?

I myself recently likened the Australian Test team of its recent glory years to the Cosa Nostra, and that's probably more accurate in terms of a family metaphor; if you step out of line or make a false move, you might get whacked.

And as for the present cricket cliché du jour? Well, the BCCI clearly isn't responsible for all of cricket's woes, just a decent heaping of them.

India's reinstatement of Ian Bell was a testament to their sportsmanship, not to cricket's supposed moral superiority

The oldest cricket cliche of them all

Ian Bell acknowedges the crowd after his second stint at the crease following his reinstatement against India. Illustration: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

A question: what connects the increase in 1923 of the cost of brewing licences, the British Army's use of dum dum bullets in the Boer War, modern Toryism, Arthur Balfour's opinions on Tariff reform, the lack of bilingual librettos in modern opera, the refusal of Lancashire mill owners to limit the working hours of their employees, and the theft, in 1921, of 1,000 cigars and a consignment of Trilby hats by the theatrical agent Marmaduke Miller?

The answer is that they were all, according to the Guardian "not cricket".

Unsurprisingly enough given its overuse, the cliche eventually lost its currency. But the myth persists that cricket adheres to a stricter set of ideals than other sports. There are a set of stumps pitched permanently on the moral high ground. And so, when MS Dhoni recalled Ian Bell to the crease last Sunday, the phrase "not cricket" was dragged out and dusted down by a couple of the commentators on Test Match Special.

My friend and colleague Rob Smyth wrote a good little book trying to fathom exactly what the spirit of cricket is. But one of the most telling definitions I've seen recently came from Steve James. "I was captain of Glamorgan for two full seasons and in both we won the MCC's Spirit of Cricket award," he wrote last Sunday. "But I've no idea what we did or what it was for." The spirit, Steve rightly points out, is a morass of contradictions. It is permissible for a batsman to stand his ground if he knows he has touched the ball, but it is a sin for a fielder to claim a catch that has touched the ground. It is against the spirit to "dispute an umpire's decision by word, action or gesture," but the DRS now encourages players to do exactly that.

As the Guardian has proven, it is often easier to point out what the spirit of cricket is not than what it is.
And what it is not has, over the years, encompassed just about everything. One of the earliest appearances of "not cricket" was in the Guardian, back in 1888, in a report of the opening match of the county season between Nottinghamshire and Sussex. "The Notts Committee agreed with the Marylebone Club in their endeavour to put down leg play," we are told. "It was not cricket, said Mr Oates, and people would not come to see play of that kind." Leg play! Perish the thought.

In England cricket first flourished as a game played by blackguards, rogues and gamblers, matches were played outside village inns for vast wagers, and results were bought and sold. It was the Victorians who recast it as an altogether more upright activity. "Not cricket" next crops up in the Guardian in a report of a sermon given by the Venerable Archdeacon Wilson at Rochdale Parish Church on 4 February 1894. "Cricket encourages a love of fair play," he told what we can only assume was an enthralled audience. "It is a moral training that operates far outside the cricket field." As for football, well, "the dishonourableness and ill-temper of its controversies is best described as 'not cricket'."

And yet anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the way the Grace brothers played the game will know that they committed sins against "the spirit" that went way beyond playing the ball to the leg side.
Back in 1864, for instance, "not cricket" makes its very first appearance in these pages in a report of an incident in a game between Surrey and '18 gentlemen', one of whom was WG's elder brother, Edward. "Finding Jupp holding his ground at the wicket in defiance of the most insidious and trying balls," Grace "resorted to the expedient" of bowling a series of three "full pitch deliveries which culminated at 30 foot high and descended on the wicket at an angle unprovided for in the practice of the game."

Jupp, assuming it was an errant delivery, hit the first of them to leg (gasp!) for two. But then "turned sulkily" away from the next two deliveries and allowed them to take their course. The third of them landed flush on the undefended wicket. "There were bursts of hisses from the spectators, who did not conceal their disapprobation for Mr Grace's bowling. They stigmatised him as an 'old woman' and his bowling as 'no cricket'. "The Sporting Papers took up the question, and numerous correspondents angrily support either side," the report continues. "The main accusation against Mr Grace's new trick is that it is "not cricket". That it is quite legal we may assume, as the umpire did not decide against it."

And there's the rub. To this day there is a tension between the letter and the spirit of the laws. What a team is allowed to do and what we think it ought to do can be two quite different things, and when it comes to winning matches players often prefer to give the first precedence over the second, while the press do the reverse.

When Rob's publisher designed the cover for his book, they chose to use one of the most iconic photographs in the history of cricket: Andrew Flintoff with his arm around Brett Lee in the moments after England's victory at Edgbaston in 2005. And understandably so – for many people it seemed to capture the essence of the spirit of the game.

And yet there are people who worked alongside Flintoff in the England team – who insist on staying off the record – who argue that this was the moment that spoiled him as a cricketer. From that point on, they have told me, he became too obsessed with the public perception of him as 'good old Freddy', the guy who always plays the game in the right spirit. When he was appointed captain for the 2006-07 Ashes, he was too friendly with the opposition, too keen to have a laugh during the game and a beer after it. England even brought in a sports psychologist before the third Test at Perth to try and toughen him up. Flintoff himself hinted at this when he wrote, in the forward to Matthew Hayden's autobiography, that the friendships he developed with the Australians changed the dynamic, bringing "a respectful edge to the proceedings" in the middle.

And so to Trent Bridge last Sunday. Some will always argue that MS Dhoni's decision – prompted, reportedly, by the insistence of Sachin Tendulkar – to recall Bell showed weakness in his team's will to win. Others, myself among them, would say that it was simply an impressive piece of sportsmanship, albeit no more so than Paolo Di Canio's refusal to score in an open net when the former Everton keeper Paul Gerrard was down injured, or Andy Roddick arguing that the line judge was wrong to call Fernando Vedasco on a double fault when he was down match point in the 2005 Rome Masters.

The credit is India's alone. The decision was a testament to their character and sportsmanship, not to the moral superiority of the sport they play. The prattle about other sports learning from India's example seems insufferably pompous coming from a game whose history has been as riddled with controversy as cricket's has.