Showing posts with label defeat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defeat. Show all posts
Wednesday, 5 June 2024
Wednesday, 29 December 2021
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.
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.
Sunday, 29 August 2021
Sunday, 20 October 2019
Boris Johnson’s Saturday drama turns to farce – and it was all his own fault
MPs rightly resisted an attempt to bounce them into blindly rubberstamping his deal writes Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian
FacebookTwitterPinterest Oliver Letwin greets supporters in Whitehall after his amendment succeeded in the Commons. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters
These tactics ultimately backfired. There was too much resistance to the attempt to bounce MPs into agreement. The debate was peppered with complaints that a prime minister who couldn’t be trusted was seeking a blank cheque from a parliament being kept in the dark. Justine Greening, the former Tory cabinet minister, tellingly complained that this was like being asked to buy a house without being allowed to see it.
By 322 to 306, a 16-vote defeat for Boris Johnson, MPs thwarted him by backing Sir Oliver Letwin’s amendment to withhold approval of the deal until MPs have had the chance to properly scrutinise the withdrawal legislation. For the prime minister, so-called Super Saturday turned into Squelched Saturday.
To understand why he was defeated, you first have to consider his deal. It bears no resemblance to the have-your-cake-and-eat-it promises peddled to the country by him and his fellow travellers during the referendum campaign in 2016. He succeeded in getting rid of the “backstop”, the element of the old deal so aggravating to the Tory Brexit ultras, but at the cost of inserting a frontstop that will keep Northern Ireland largely aligned with the single market and customs union for at least five years. The creation of an economic border down the Irish Sea made it impossible for him to gain the support of the Democratic Unionists. The other major difference with Mrs May’s deal is that it envisages moving to a much more distant relationship with Britain’s most important trading partners. The Johnson deal is one of the rock-hardest forms of Brexit. That diminished his chances of attracting support from Labour MPs.
In his speech to the Commons yesterday, the Tory leader said it was time to “move on”, a mantra parroted ad nauseam from the benches behind him. But as some of the more clued-up MPs observed, his deal does not “get Brexit done” at all. It covers only the divorce and a period of “transition”. Where Britain ultimately lands is still hugely uncertain. It is merely the prelude to a tougher stretch of bargaining about the terms of trade, customs, tariffs and standards with the EU. These negotiations come with another deadline attached. The cliff edge moves to the end of 2020. Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, put it wittily when she remarked that it was “a bad deal with a backdoor to a no deal.”
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Justine Greening, the former Tory cabinet minister, tellingly complained that this was like being asked to buy a house without being allowed to see it.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images
The fundamental trouble with this deal is the same as with all the many versions of Brexit floated by two Tory prime minsters over the past three-plus years. None offers terms as favourable to the United Kingdom as remaining within the European Union. A study by the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank projects that the Johnson deal will shave up to 7% from the per capita income of Britons over a decade. Other forecasts are available. None of the credible ones suggests that Britain will be better off outside the EU.
There were other reasons why Mr Johnson could not assemble the coalition of support that he needed. The 10 votes of the Democratic Unionists played a decisive role in his defeat. They radiated the fury of people betrayed. Mr Johnson attended their party conference last year to pledge that “no British Conservative government could or should sign up to” regulatory checks and customs controls between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Now he is pushing a deal that does this very thing.
Without the DUP, it was always going to be a very hard scrabble for the government to command a majority in the Commons. Its hopes depended on convincing enough Labour MPs to vote with the Tories. There is a band of Labour MPs who have their reasons for wanting to “get Brexit done”, but most had even more compelling reasons for not helping Mr Johnson to do it. He gave them less incentive to support him and more reason to distrust him by moving assurances on workers’ rights and environmental standards out of the binding withdrawal agreement and into the non-binding political declaration. His behaviour in his 88 febrile days as prime minister made it yet harder for Labour MPs to lend him their support.
The unlawful prorogation of parliament and the use of incendiary language to attack parliamentarians alienated some of the very Labour MPs he needed to persuade. The fact that it was a Johnson deal was a very big problem for them. The intense loathing he arouses among Labour people is much more visceral than their feelings about Theresa May. It is a very big step for a Labour MP to enable a Tory prime minister, especially when an election is looming. When that Tory prime minister is Boris Johnson, it proved just too much.
'Those hoping to take the question back to the people have more time to convince parliament to embrace a fresh referendum.
In response to his defeat, the prime minister rose to the dispatch box, fixed a smile to his face and spoke as if, to use a phrase made notorious by his predecessor, “nothing has changed”. Of course, quite a lot has changed. By the time you read this, the government will have sent a letter to the EU requesting an extension to the Brexit deadline, something Mr Johnson has repeatedly sworn he would never do, or he will be in breach of the law.
His deal is not necessarily dead. He mustered 306 votes, 20 more than Mrs May ever got for her deal. This leaves him 14 short of what he needs for a majority. Some of the MPs who defied him over the Letwin amendment, including Sir Oliver himself, have said they will support the government when it comes to votes on the Brexit legislation. There’s not much doubt, though, that the road ahead has become a great deal more rocky for Mr Johnson. Parliament will be able to seize the opportunity to subject his deal to the searching and detailed scrutiny that the government sought to evade yesterday. Pressure can be increased on ministers to reveal the true costs of the Johnson deal. Those hoping to take the question back to the people have more time to convince parliament to embrace a fresh referendum.
Boris Johnson called this special Saturday sitting in the hope that it would give him a reputation-boosting, momentum-building victory to flourish. He wanted to be able to claim that Brexit was done and dusted. Instead, Brexit is not done and he is dusted.
Much is in flux after another “historic” parliamentary vote that failed to settle Britain’s future. One thing is certain. Our long national nightmare continues.
‘After his defeat he fixed a smile to his face and spoke as if “nothing has changed”.’ Photograph: -/PRU/AFP via Getty Images
Everything that could be done had been done to secure a victory for Boris Johnson on what had been billed as “Super Saturday”. He had come back from Brussels with his so-called “new deal” to the sound of the massed brass bands of the pro-Brexit media trumpeting praise for a “stunning achievement”/“personal triumph”/insert more sycophantic hyperbole here. Some European leaders tried to help him frame the choice before parliament as “new deal or no deal”. Suggestions that the EU might not grant another extension to the withdrawal date were designed to spook MPs into voting yes for fear of hurling Britain into a crash-out Brexit.
Cabinet ministers were deployed to “man-mark” any Conservative MP whose vote was doubtful. Heavy-breathing Tory whips said they were going to get “medieval” with rebels. The self-styled Tory Spartans, who would have spat out the Johnson deal as treachery if it had been presented by Theresa May, had fallen into line. Some of them had begun to see the ridiculousness of being Brexiters who never actually vote for Brexit.
Then there was the timetabling. To further ratchet up the pressure, the government staged the crackling drama of an “emergency” Saturday sitting of parliament, the first time that MPs had met at the weekend for nearly 40 years. This meant that everyone had an absurdly limited amount of time to get their heads around the latest tortuous iteration of Brexit. Concluding yesterday’s debate on behalf of the government, Michael Gove declared: “Our democracy is precious and this parliament is a special place.” They had a funny way of showing this supposed reverence for democracy and parliament. MPs were being asked to make a decision with huge consequences less than 48 hours after the deal had been unveiled. Were you able to conduct a confidential survey, guaranteeing to parliamentarians that their responses would remain anonymous, it is my strong suspicion that well under half of them have actually read the legal text and the rewritten political declaration. The government’s desperation to stampede parliament into signing off on the deal was further illustrated by its point-blank refusal to publish any analysis of its economic impact.
Everything that could be done had been done to secure a victory for Boris Johnson on what had been billed as “Super Saturday”. He had come back from Brussels with his so-called “new deal” to the sound of the massed brass bands of the pro-Brexit media trumpeting praise for a “stunning achievement”/“personal triumph”/insert more sycophantic hyperbole here. Some European leaders tried to help him frame the choice before parliament as “new deal or no deal”. Suggestions that the EU might not grant another extension to the withdrawal date were designed to spook MPs into voting yes for fear of hurling Britain into a crash-out Brexit.
Cabinet ministers were deployed to “man-mark” any Conservative MP whose vote was doubtful. Heavy-breathing Tory whips said they were going to get “medieval” with rebels. The self-styled Tory Spartans, who would have spat out the Johnson deal as treachery if it had been presented by Theresa May, had fallen into line. Some of them had begun to see the ridiculousness of being Brexiters who never actually vote for Brexit.
Then there was the timetabling. To further ratchet up the pressure, the government staged the crackling drama of an “emergency” Saturday sitting of parliament, the first time that MPs had met at the weekend for nearly 40 years. This meant that everyone had an absurdly limited amount of time to get their heads around the latest tortuous iteration of Brexit. Concluding yesterday’s debate on behalf of the government, Michael Gove declared: “Our democracy is precious and this parliament is a special place.” They had a funny way of showing this supposed reverence for democracy and parliament. MPs were being asked to make a decision with huge consequences less than 48 hours after the deal had been unveiled. Were you able to conduct a confidential survey, guaranteeing to parliamentarians that their responses would remain anonymous, it is my strong suspicion that well under half of them have actually read the legal text and the rewritten political declaration. The government’s desperation to stampede parliament into signing off on the deal was further illustrated by its point-blank refusal to publish any analysis of its economic impact.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Oliver Letwin greets supporters in Whitehall after his amendment succeeded in the Commons. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters
These tactics ultimately backfired. There was too much resistance to the attempt to bounce MPs into agreement. The debate was peppered with complaints that a prime minister who couldn’t be trusted was seeking a blank cheque from a parliament being kept in the dark. Justine Greening, the former Tory cabinet minister, tellingly complained that this was like being asked to buy a house without being allowed to see it.
By 322 to 306, a 16-vote defeat for Boris Johnson, MPs thwarted him by backing Sir Oliver Letwin’s amendment to withhold approval of the deal until MPs have had the chance to properly scrutinise the withdrawal legislation. For the prime minister, so-called Super Saturday turned into Squelched Saturday.
To understand why he was defeated, you first have to consider his deal. It bears no resemblance to the have-your-cake-and-eat-it promises peddled to the country by him and his fellow travellers during the referendum campaign in 2016. He succeeded in getting rid of the “backstop”, the element of the old deal so aggravating to the Tory Brexit ultras, but at the cost of inserting a frontstop that will keep Northern Ireland largely aligned with the single market and customs union for at least five years. The creation of an economic border down the Irish Sea made it impossible for him to gain the support of the Democratic Unionists. The other major difference with Mrs May’s deal is that it envisages moving to a much more distant relationship with Britain’s most important trading partners. The Johnson deal is one of the rock-hardest forms of Brexit. That diminished his chances of attracting support from Labour MPs.
In his speech to the Commons yesterday, the Tory leader said it was time to “move on”, a mantra parroted ad nauseam from the benches behind him. But as some of the more clued-up MPs observed, his deal does not “get Brexit done” at all. It covers only the divorce and a period of “transition”. Where Britain ultimately lands is still hugely uncertain. It is merely the prelude to a tougher stretch of bargaining about the terms of trade, customs, tariffs and standards with the EU. These negotiations come with another deadline attached. The cliff edge moves to the end of 2020. Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, put it wittily when she remarked that it was “a bad deal with a backdoor to a no deal.”
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Justine Greening, the former Tory cabinet minister, tellingly complained that this was like being asked to buy a house without being allowed to see it.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images
The fundamental trouble with this deal is the same as with all the many versions of Brexit floated by two Tory prime minsters over the past three-plus years. None offers terms as favourable to the United Kingdom as remaining within the European Union. A study by the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank projects that the Johnson deal will shave up to 7% from the per capita income of Britons over a decade. Other forecasts are available. None of the credible ones suggests that Britain will be better off outside the EU.
There were other reasons why Mr Johnson could not assemble the coalition of support that he needed. The 10 votes of the Democratic Unionists played a decisive role in his defeat. They radiated the fury of people betrayed. Mr Johnson attended their party conference last year to pledge that “no British Conservative government could or should sign up to” regulatory checks and customs controls between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Now he is pushing a deal that does this very thing.
Without the DUP, it was always going to be a very hard scrabble for the government to command a majority in the Commons. Its hopes depended on convincing enough Labour MPs to vote with the Tories. There is a band of Labour MPs who have their reasons for wanting to “get Brexit done”, but most had even more compelling reasons for not helping Mr Johnson to do it. He gave them less incentive to support him and more reason to distrust him by moving assurances on workers’ rights and environmental standards out of the binding withdrawal agreement and into the non-binding political declaration. His behaviour in his 88 febrile days as prime minister made it yet harder for Labour MPs to lend him their support.
The unlawful prorogation of parliament and the use of incendiary language to attack parliamentarians alienated some of the very Labour MPs he needed to persuade. The fact that it was a Johnson deal was a very big problem for them. The intense loathing he arouses among Labour people is much more visceral than their feelings about Theresa May. It is a very big step for a Labour MP to enable a Tory prime minister, especially when an election is looming. When that Tory prime minister is Boris Johnson, it proved just too much.
'Those hoping to take the question back to the people have more time to convince parliament to embrace a fresh referendum.
In response to his defeat, the prime minister rose to the dispatch box, fixed a smile to his face and spoke as if, to use a phrase made notorious by his predecessor, “nothing has changed”. Of course, quite a lot has changed. By the time you read this, the government will have sent a letter to the EU requesting an extension to the Brexit deadline, something Mr Johnson has repeatedly sworn he would never do, or he will be in breach of the law.
His deal is not necessarily dead. He mustered 306 votes, 20 more than Mrs May ever got for her deal. This leaves him 14 short of what he needs for a majority. Some of the MPs who defied him over the Letwin amendment, including Sir Oliver himself, have said they will support the government when it comes to votes on the Brexit legislation. There’s not much doubt, though, that the road ahead has become a great deal more rocky for Mr Johnson. Parliament will be able to seize the opportunity to subject his deal to the searching and detailed scrutiny that the government sought to evade yesterday. Pressure can be increased on ministers to reveal the true costs of the Johnson deal. Those hoping to take the question back to the people have more time to convince parliament to embrace a fresh referendum.
Boris Johnson called this special Saturday sitting in the hope that it would give him a reputation-boosting, momentum-building victory to flourish. He wanted to be able to claim that Brexit was done and dusted. Instead, Brexit is not done and he is dusted.
Much is in flux after another “historic” parliamentary vote that failed to settle Britain’s future. One thing is certain. Our long national nightmare continues.
Thursday, 4 April 2019
The life of a loser: what fuels our fascination with the defeated?
They say that you find the best stories in the loser’s dressing room but discovering what defeat does to a champion is not easy topic to tackle writes Andy Bull in The Guardian
There are all different sorts of pauses, and in this business the worst is the one that starts every loser’s press conference, which sometimes drags on so long you worry it’ll never end. A winner’s press conference will fly by, but the ones held by the other guy feel sort of awkward. They usually start with some inoffensive and open-ended bromide, “how are you feeling?” or “you must be disappointed?”, a painkilling platitude before we start to probe a little deeper in the wound. Or everyone will latch on to some ready explanation for what went wrong, the referee’s decision, or someone else’s poor sportsmanship, grateful for an opening that avoids the blunt confrontation of someone’s public failure.
They say that you find the best stories in the loser’s dressing room. No one is sure which grand old man of US journalism came up with that. Maybe it was Bill Heinz, maybe it was Jimmy Breslin, maybe it was Gay Talese. Sixty years later, Talese’s profile of heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson is still one of the most excruciatingly honest accounts of what defeat does to a champion athlete.
Winners are boring!
Because it’s not an easy topic to get at. “I’ve wanted so much to talk to another fighter about all this,” Patterson told Talese, “but who can you talk to? Most fighters don’t talk much anyway. And I can’t even look another fighter in the eye at a weigh-in.”
Talese opened Patterson up like a sardine tin. Patterson told him how he used to keep a fake beard, moustache, spare hat and glasses stashed in his kit bag, and how, when he lost to Sonny Liston in a first-round knockout, he put the disguise on right after the fight and wore it all the way from Chicago to New York, where he went straight to the airport. “I didn’t care what plane I boarded,” he said. “I just looked up and saw this sign at the terminal reading ‘Madrid’, and so I got on that flight after buying a ticket.”
Yutaka Take riding Haru Urara in Kochi, Japan. Photograph: Sports Nippon/Getty Images
For the next five days, Patterson pretended he was an old man with a limp. “I began to actually think I was somebody else,” he said. “And it is nice, every once in a while, being somebody else.”
Patterson was an Olympic champion at 17, won the heavyweight title once at 21, then again when he was 25, and altogether, from his first victory against Eddie Godbold at the St Nicholas Rink, and his last defeat against Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden, he fought 64 times, won 55, lost 8, drew 1.
And despite it all, he told Talese, he couldn’t ever shake the feeling that he was some sort of a coward. “You can be a fighter – and a winning fighter – and still be a coward,” Patterson said. That’s why he kept that disguise ready. “It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself. In defeat I can’t face people. I haven’t the strength to say to people: ‘I did my best, I’m sorry.’”
Esquire called the piece The Loser, which was pretty damn provocative. Back at the beginning of this decade the British tennis player Robert Dee got headlines like that when he lost 54 consecutive matches in ITF/ATP events. The papers called him the worst tennis player in the world, and Dee got so annoyed that he spent the next year making everybody take back what they’d said about him, on the ground that he’d actually won a few matches in a domestic event in Spain.
Even now, Dee’s website reads like one long list of the retractions his lawyers extracted. He ended up taking the Daily Telegraph to the high court for libelbecause they wouldn’t back down. He lost. Fifty-five years later, Netflix has borrowed Talese’s title for its new documentary series, Losers, directed by Mickey Duzyj. There are some great stories, well told, among the eight he picked, such as the reluctant heavyweight Michael Bentt, who lost his world title in his very first defence, Surya Bonaly, the figure-skater who finished in second place at three successive world championships, and, inevitably, Jean van de Velde, who blew the Open on the 72nd hole.
It must have made an interesting pitch. “I’m making a show about losers and I’d like you to be in it.” Duzyj says he had “conversations” with most of the subjects before the launch, about why he’d picked such a pitiless title for the show. “Everybody gets it, mostly because of the tone with which we explored their stories.”
Floyd Patterson, the sleeping giant of boxing
And there’s the catch. Because, good as the show is, the stories all have happy endings. Duzyj calls them “noble failures”. He got interested in the topic when he made a short documentary a couple of years back about a Japanese racehorse called Haru Urara, who lost 113 races in a row. Haru Urara became such a popular underdog that people bet more than $1m on his 100th race, which saved his home track from going bankrupt. “Given the ruthlessness of American culture and the surprising wisdom that came from the Japanese story,” Duzyj says: “I thought it’d be interesting to explore a series of international ‘noble failures’ and see what we all could learn from them.”
It feels like Duzyj flinched, that he felt he had to spin a little sugar in to sweeten the mix. But then when you’re talking to losers, maybe that’s the way it needs to be – and maybe, too, it’s the way we want to think it is. Like Patterson said: “I was the fighter who got knocked down the most, but I also got up the most.”
There are all different sorts of pauses, and in this business the worst is the one that starts every loser’s press conference, which sometimes drags on so long you worry it’ll never end. A winner’s press conference will fly by, but the ones held by the other guy feel sort of awkward. They usually start with some inoffensive and open-ended bromide, “how are you feeling?” or “you must be disappointed?”, a painkilling platitude before we start to probe a little deeper in the wound. Or everyone will latch on to some ready explanation for what went wrong, the referee’s decision, or someone else’s poor sportsmanship, grateful for an opening that avoids the blunt confrontation of someone’s public failure.
They say that you find the best stories in the loser’s dressing room. No one is sure which grand old man of US journalism came up with that. Maybe it was Bill Heinz, maybe it was Jimmy Breslin, maybe it was Gay Talese. Sixty years later, Talese’s profile of heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson is still one of the most excruciatingly honest accounts of what defeat does to a champion athlete.
Winners are boring!
Because it’s not an easy topic to get at. “I’ve wanted so much to talk to another fighter about all this,” Patterson told Talese, “but who can you talk to? Most fighters don’t talk much anyway. And I can’t even look another fighter in the eye at a weigh-in.”
Talese opened Patterson up like a sardine tin. Patterson told him how he used to keep a fake beard, moustache, spare hat and glasses stashed in his kit bag, and how, when he lost to Sonny Liston in a first-round knockout, he put the disguise on right after the fight and wore it all the way from Chicago to New York, where he went straight to the airport. “I didn’t care what plane I boarded,” he said. “I just looked up and saw this sign at the terminal reading ‘Madrid’, and so I got on that flight after buying a ticket.”
Yutaka Take riding Haru Urara in Kochi, Japan. Photograph: Sports Nippon/Getty Images
For the next five days, Patterson pretended he was an old man with a limp. “I began to actually think I was somebody else,” he said. “And it is nice, every once in a while, being somebody else.”
Patterson was an Olympic champion at 17, won the heavyweight title once at 21, then again when he was 25, and altogether, from his first victory against Eddie Godbold at the St Nicholas Rink, and his last defeat against Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden, he fought 64 times, won 55, lost 8, drew 1.
And despite it all, he told Talese, he couldn’t ever shake the feeling that he was some sort of a coward. “You can be a fighter – and a winning fighter – and still be a coward,” Patterson said. That’s why he kept that disguise ready. “It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself. In defeat I can’t face people. I haven’t the strength to say to people: ‘I did my best, I’m sorry.’”
Esquire called the piece The Loser, which was pretty damn provocative. Back at the beginning of this decade the British tennis player Robert Dee got headlines like that when he lost 54 consecutive matches in ITF/ATP events. The papers called him the worst tennis player in the world, and Dee got so annoyed that he spent the next year making everybody take back what they’d said about him, on the ground that he’d actually won a few matches in a domestic event in Spain.
Even now, Dee’s website reads like one long list of the retractions his lawyers extracted. He ended up taking the Daily Telegraph to the high court for libelbecause they wouldn’t back down. He lost. Fifty-five years later, Netflix has borrowed Talese’s title for its new documentary series, Losers, directed by Mickey Duzyj. There are some great stories, well told, among the eight he picked, such as the reluctant heavyweight Michael Bentt, who lost his world title in his very first defence, Surya Bonaly, the figure-skater who finished in second place at three successive world championships, and, inevitably, Jean van de Velde, who blew the Open on the 72nd hole.
It must have made an interesting pitch. “I’m making a show about losers and I’d like you to be in it.” Duzyj says he had “conversations” with most of the subjects before the launch, about why he’d picked such a pitiless title for the show. “Everybody gets it, mostly because of the tone with which we explored their stories.”
Floyd Patterson, the sleeping giant of boxing
And there’s the catch. Because, good as the show is, the stories all have happy endings. Duzyj calls them “noble failures”. He got interested in the topic when he made a short documentary a couple of years back about a Japanese racehorse called Haru Urara, who lost 113 races in a row. Haru Urara became such a popular underdog that people bet more than $1m on his 100th race, which saved his home track from going bankrupt. “Given the ruthlessness of American culture and the surprising wisdom that came from the Japanese story,” Duzyj says: “I thought it’d be interesting to explore a series of international ‘noble failures’ and see what we all could learn from them.”
It feels like Duzyj flinched, that he felt he had to spin a little sugar in to sweeten the mix. But then when you’re talking to losers, maybe that’s the way it needs to be – and maybe, too, it’s the way we want to think it is. Like Patterson said: “I was the fighter who got knocked down the most, but I also got up the most.”
Saturday, 29 December 2018
A Marxist Analysis of Brexit & Corbyn's Labour Party
Syriza, Greece, and the Future of Left-Wing Coalitions
Late Capitalism and Neofascism in Brazil
Thursday, 21 December 2017
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.
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.
Monday, 16 January 2017
Julian Assange - The Democrats scapegoat?
G Sampath in The Hindu
To blame Donald Trump’s victory on Julian Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal by the Democrats to take responsibility for Hillary’s defeat but is also an insult to the U.S. electorate.
One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.
So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.
From revolutionary to villain
The past week or so has seen a spate of articles on the so-called unravelling of Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They suggest that Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election because of him. Backing this logic is the allegation that WikiLeaks served as a conduit for disseminating documents obtained by hackers working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The leaked emails and documents of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) published by WikiLeaks were damaging enough to spark the resignation of top Democratic Party officials, including the DNC chair and the communications director. These leaks, the argument goes, ruined Ms. Clinton’s electoral prospects, thereby paving the way for Donald Trump’s triumph.
The Democrats have been saying since July 2016 that their servers were attacked by Russian hackers. Last week, the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) officially confirmed the allegation. Kremlin has dismissed the USIC’s charges as “unfounded”. While President-elect Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that Russia may have been involved in the cyber-attacks, he has maintained that it had no impact on the elections. Mr. Assange has denied that he got the leaks from Russia, and claims that his source was not a state party. In such a scenario, what one believes boils down to who one believes, which, in turn, depends on one’s political or ideological allegiances — the quintessential “post-truth” situation.
However, the extraordinary spectacle of erstwhile liberal hero Assange and current liberal nightmare Trump on the same side of the American political divide, with each appearing to endorse the other’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks, had one immediate outcome: it prompted the American liberal elite to question Mr. Assange’s motives, and cast him as the villain who collaborated with Mr. Putin to interfere in the U.S. elections and ensure a Trump victory. For them, the USIC’s official statements are proof of Mr. Assange’s culpability, attesting to his metamorphosis from idealistic cyber-revolutionary to opportunistic charlatan.
It must, no doubt, be tempting, and rather convenient, for Democrat supporters to pin the responsibility for Ms. Clinton’s defeat on anyone but the Democrats themselves. But there are several problems with this narrative.
Flaws in the ‘trial’
For starters, both the declassified report of the USIC and the “Russian dossier” leaked allegedly by a private firm make claims of Mr. Putin’s involvement in the DNC hacks without presenting supporting evidence. The excerpts from the latter, published by some media outlets, were unverified quotes by anonymous spies. None of the claims has been independently authenticated by a media outlet. And no reason has been given why reports of Western intelligence agencies should carry more credibility than the denials of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Second, are Mr. Assange’s motives or credibility the issue here? If we assume that they are, then we cannot avoid subjecting his accusers — the American press and intelligence agencies — to the same test.
In the 10 years of its existence, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million classified documents. Till date, there is not a single instance where its material has been found to be false or inauthentic. On the other hand, sitting in judgment on Mr. Assange today are the same media outlets and the same intelligence community that sold to the public what is arguably the most egregious lie in the history of journalism — about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — which helped justify a needless, destructive war that consumed tens of thousands of civilian lives, dismembered a country, and hatched several terrorist organisations.
Perhaps it is because the authenticity of the DNC leaks is beyond question, and their content raises difficult questions about the Democratic Party establishment — questions easier avoided -- that the response has turned ad hominem, focussing on Mr. Assange instead.
It may or may not be true that Mr. Assange worked with Russia to publish the DNC leaks with the aim of ensuring a Clinton defeat. Let us assume that he did. Does it then constitute an act of villainy or moral trespass?
One could respond, as Mr. Assange has, with two arguments. First, that American interference in the democratic processes of other countries is well documented. Therefore, it is not tenable to hold that other nations do not have the right to pay back in kind.
Second, Mr. Assange believes that it is his moral responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent a Clinton victory. He has said many times that Ms. Clinton is a warmonger, that her victory would lead to greater American military involvement outside its borders, and thereby impose greater misery on the people of the world.
Liberal commentators have dismissed his statements as his “Clinton obsession” and the delusional ranting of a paranoid eccentric. And yet, a recent report in The Guardian cites U.S. Defence Department data to the effect that in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, or three bombs an hour. In this context, it is hardly immoral for anyone to want to deploy his resources to steer America’s presidential choice toward a candidate who he thinks might be less of a military interventionist. From this viewpoint, which Mr. Assange appears to hold, undermining the Clinton campaign by sharing secret information that is of public interest constitutes a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Interestingly, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged that the internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were newsworthy, and it is quite likely that mainstream publications would have published them had they got hold of them first.
It was about new information
What Mr. Assange did — the act for which he is undergoing trial-by-media — was to supply relevant but new information about an electoral candidate so that the American voter could make an informed choice. One could argue that he did what the mainstream media was supposed to do but wasn’t doing enough of.
In the event, it was the American voter who made the final choice, a choice that may or may not have been influenced by the material published by Mr. Assange. At any rate, thanks to the leaks, it was a choice made with more information than less. No one who believes in the accountability of political parties should have a problem with that. Therefore, to blame Mr. Trump’s victory on Mr. Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal on the part of the Democrats to take responsibility for the defeat, it is also an insult to the American public that has delivered a mandate from the limited choices it was given.
If Mr. Assange must be criticised, it must be for not giving enough bang for the buck, as it were, for his whistle-blowers. He ought to be doing more to ensure that his data troves are systematically analysed and organised in a user-friendly format, with the significant bits sifted out from the routine ones. But the bulk of the data on WikiLeaks’ servers continues to be inaccessible to the public even as they remain in the public domain. Second, he is yet to match the scale of his U.S.-centric leaks with similar disclosures on its geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China.
However, to blame him for Ms. Clinton’s defeat, or to brand him a Trump supporter, is to wilfully disregard his track record. Mr. Assange’s politics has been clear from the day he founded WikiLeaks, and it hasn’t changed since. He believes that the biggest threats to democracy and freedom are the twin phenomena of mass surveillance for the powerless and secrecy for the powerful. He has made a career out of reversing this paradigm: transparency for the powerful and anonymity for the dissenting citizen. His personal motive for publishing the DNC leaks, whatever it may be, is evidently not one that is inconsistent with his stated mission of making secrecy a losing proposition for governing elites.
To blame Donald Trump’s victory on Julian Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal by the Democrats to take responsibility for Hillary’s defeat but is also an insult to the U.S. electorate.
One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.
So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.
From revolutionary to villain
The past week or so has seen a spate of articles on the so-called unravelling of Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They suggest that Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election because of him. Backing this logic is the allegation that WikiLeaks served as a conduit for disseminating documents obtained by hackers working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The leaked emails and documents of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) published by WikiLeaks were damaging enough to spark the resignation of top Democratic Party officials, including the DNC chair and the communications director. These leaks, the argument goes, ruined Ms. Clinton’s electoral prospects, thereby paving the way for Donald Trump’s triumph.
The Democrats have been saying since July 2016 that their servers were attacked by Russian hackers. Last week, the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) officially confirmed the allegation. Kremlin has dismissed the USIC’s charges as “unfounded”. While President-elect Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that Russia may have been involved in the cyber-attacks, he has maintained that it had no impact on the elections. Mr. Assange has denied that he got the leaks from Russia, and claims that his source was not a state party. In such a scenario, what one believes boils down to who one believes, which, in turn, depends on one’s political or ideological allegiances — the quintessential “post-truth” situation.
However, the extraordinary spectacle of erstwhile liberal hero Assange and current liberal nightmare Trump on the same side of the American political divide, with each appearing to endorse the other’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks, had one immediate outcome: it prompted the American liberal elite to question Mr. Assange’s motives, and cast him as the villain who collaborated with Mr. Putin to interfere in the U.S. elections and ensure a Trump victory. For them, the USIC’s official statements are proof of Mr. Assange’s culpability, attesting to his metamorphosis from idealistic cyber-revolutionary to opportunistic charlatan.
It must, no doubt, be tempting, and rather convenient, for Democrat supporters to pin the responsibility for Ms. Clinton’s defeat on anyone but the Democrats themselves. But there are several problems with this narrative.
Flaws in the ‘trial’
For starters, both the declassified report of the USIC and the “Russian dossier” leaked allegedly by a private firm make claims of Mr. Putin’s involvement in the DNC hacks without presenting supporting evidence. The excerpts from the latter, published by some media outlets, were unverified quotes by anonymous spies. None of the claims has been independently authenticated by a media outlet. And no reason has been given why reports of Western intelligence agencies should carry more credibility than the denials of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Second, are Mr. Assange’s motives or credibility the issue here? If we assume that they are, then we cannot avoid subjecting his accusers — the American press and intelligence agencies — to the same test.
In the 10 years of its existence, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million classified documents. Till date, there is not a single instance where its material has been found to be false or inauthentic. On the other hand, sitting in judgment on Mr. Assange today are the same media outlets and the same intelligence community that sold to the public what is arguably the most egregious lie in the history of journalism — about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — which helped justify a needless, destructive war that consumed tens of thousands of civilian lives, dismembered a country, and hatched several terrorist organisations.
Perhaps it is because the authenticity of the DNC leaks is beyond question, and their content raises difficult questions about the Democratic Party establishment — questions easier avoided -- that the response has turned ad hominem, focussing on Mr. Assange instead.
It may or may not be true that Mr. Assange worked with Russia to publish the DNC leaks with the aim of ensuring a Clinton defeat. Let us assume that he did. Does it then constitute an act of villainy or moral trespass?
One could respond, as Mr. Assange has, with two arguments. First, that American interference in the democratic processes of other countries is well documented. Therefore, it is not tenable to hold that other nations do not have the right to pay back in kind.
Second, Mr. Assange believes that it is his moral responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent a Clinton victory. He has said many times that Ms. Clinton is a warmonger, that her victory would lead to greater American military involvement outside its borders, and thereby impose greater misery on the people of the world.
Liberal commentators have dismissed his statements as his “Clinton obsession” and the delusional ranting of a paranoid eccentric. And yet, a recent report in The Guardian cites U.S. Defence Department data to the effect that in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, or three bombs an hour. In this context, it is hardly immoral for anyone to want to deploy his resources to steer America’s presidential choice toward a candidate who he thinks might be less of a military interventionist. From this viewpoint, which Mr. Assange appears to hold, undermining the Clinton campaign by sharing secret information that is of public interest constitutes a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Interestingly, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged that the internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were newsworthy, and it is quite likely that mainstream publications would have published them had they got hold of them first.
It was about new information
What Mr. Assange did — the act for which he is undergoing trial-by-media — was to supply relevant but new information about an electoral candidate so that the American voter could make an informed choice. One could argue that he did what the mainstream media was supposed to do but wasn’t doing enough of.
In the event, it was the American voter who made the final choice, a choice that may or may not have been influenced by the material published by Mr. Assange. At any rate, thanks to the leaks, it was a choice made with more information than less. No one who believes in the accountability of political parties should have a problem with that. Therefore, to blame Mr. Trump’s victory on Mr. Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal on the part of the Democrats to take responsibility for the defeat, it is also an insult to the American public that has delivered a mandate from the limited choices it was given.
If Mr. Assange must be criticised, it must be for not giving enough bang for the buck, as it were, for his whistle-blowers. He ought to be doing more to ensure that his data troves are systematically analysed and organised in a user-friendly format, with the significant bits sifted out from the routine ones. But the bulk of the data on WikiLeaks’ servers continues to be inaccessible to the public even as they remain in the public domain. Second, he is yet to match the scale of his U.S.-centric leaks with similar disclosures on its geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China.
However, to blame him for Ms. Clinton’s defeat, or to brand him a Trump supporter, is to wilfully disregard his track record. Mr. Assange’s politics has been clear from the day he founded WikiLeaks, and it hasn’t changed since. He believes that the biggest threats to democracy and freedom are the twin phenomena of mass surveillance for the powerless and secrecy for the powerful. He has made a career out of reversing this paradigm: transparency for the powerful and anonymity for the dissenting citizen. His personal motive for publishing the DNC leaks, whatever it may be, is evidently not one that is inconsistent with his stated mission of making secrecy a losing proposition for governing elites.
Wednesday, 7 December 2016
How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently
Maria Popova in Brainpickings
“In disputes upon moral or scientific points,” Arthur Martine counseled in his magnificent 1866 guide to the art of conversation, “let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.” Of course, this isn’t what happens most of the time when we argue, both online and off, but especially when we deploy the artillery of our righteousness from behind the comfortable shield of the keyboard. That form of “criticism” — which is really a menace of reacting rather than responding — is worthy of Mark Twain’s memorable remark that “the critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” But it needn’t be this way — there are ways to be critical while remaining charitable, of aiming not to “conquer” but to “come at truth,” not to be right at all costs but to understand and advance the collective understanding.
In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (public library) — the same fantastic volume that gave us Daniel Dennett on the dignity and art-science of making mistakes — Dennett offers what he calls “the best antidote [for the] tendency to caricature one’s opponent”: a list of rules formulated decades ago by the legendary social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport, best-known for originating the famous tit-for-tat strategy of game theory. Dennett synthesizes the steps:
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
If only the same code of conduct could be applied to critical commentary online, particularly to the indelible inferno of comments.
But rather than a naively utopian, Pollyannaish approach to debate, Dennett points out this is actually a sound psychological strategy that accomplishes one key thing: It transforms your opponent into a more receptive audience for your criticism or dissent, which in turn helps advance the discussion.
Compare and contrast with Susan Sontag’s three steps to refuting any argument.
“In disputes upon moral or scientific points,” Arthur Martine counseled in his magnificent 1866 guide to the art of conversation, “let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.” Of course, this isn’t what happens most of the time when we argue, both online and off, but especially when we deploy the artillery of our righteousness from behind the comfortable shield of the keyboard. That form of “criticism” — which is really a menace of reacting rather than responding — is worthy of Mark Twain’s memorable remark that “the critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” But it needn’t be this way — there are ways to be critical while remaining charitable, of aiming not to “conquer” but to “come at truth,” not to be right at all costs but to understand and advance the collective understanding.
In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (public library) — the same fantastic volume that gave us Daniel Dennett on the dignity and art-science of making mistakes — Dennett offers what he calls “the best antidote [for the] tendency to caricature one’s opponent”: a list of rules formulated decades ago by the legendary social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport, best-known for originating the famous tit-for-tat strategy of game theory. Dennett synthesizes the steps:
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
If only the same code of conduct could be applied to critical commentary online, particularly to the indelible inferno of comments.
But rather than a naively utopian, Pollyannaish approach to debate, Dennett points out this is actually a sound psychological strategy that accomplishes one key thing: It transforms your opponent into a more receptive audience for your criticism or dissent, which in turn helps advance the discussion.
Compare and contrast with Susan Sontag’s three steps to refuting any argument.
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Best quotations from The Simpsons
1. “Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail”
2. “It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen”
3. Bart: "Grandpa, why don't you tell a story?"
Lisa: "Yeah Grandpa, you lived a long and interesting life."
Grandpa: "That's a lie and you know it"
Marge: "What, do you follow my husband around to sell him hot dogs?"
Vendor: "Lady, he's putting my kids through college."
2. “It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen”
3. Bart: "Grandpa, why don't you tell a story?"
Lisa: "Yeah Grandpa, you lived a long and interesting life."
Grandpa: "That's a lie and you know it"
4. Marge: "Homer, is this the way you pictured married life?"
Homer: "Yeah, pretty much, except we drove round in a van solving mysteries"
5. Homer: "We're proud of you, Boy.
Bart: "Thanks Dad. Part of this d-minus belongs to God"
6. "Life is just one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead"
7. "You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try”
8. “If you pray to the wrong god, you might just make the right one madder and madder”
9. "When I look at people I don't see colours; I just see crackpot religions"
10 "Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals … except the weasel"
11 Marge: "It's Patty who chose a life of celibacy. Selma had celibacy thrust upon her"
12 Vendor: "Hot dogs, get your hot dogs!"
Homer: "I'll take one"Marge: "What, do you follow my husband around to sell him hot dogs?"
Vendor: "Lady, he's putting my kids through college."
13 "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"
14 "Lisa, you've got the brains and talent to go as far as you want, and when you do I'll be right there to borrow money.”
15 “I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!”
16 “Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.”
17 “What’s the point of going out? We’re just gonna wind up back home anyway.”
18 "Cheating is the gift man gives himself."
19 "Books are useless! I only ever read one book, To Kill A Mockingbird, and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds!"
20 "It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day."
21 "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."
22 "Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix."
23 Moe: "Homer, lighten up! You're making Happy Hour bitterly ironic."
24 "I don't get mad, I get stabby"
25 "I've been called ugly, pug ugly, fugly, pug fugly, but never ugly ugly."
26 "There's only one fat guy that brings us presents and his name ain't Santa".
Bart Simpson, son of Father Homer Christmas.
27 "Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world."
28 "When will I learn? The answers to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle, they’re on TV!"
Monday, 15 December 2014
When defeat isn't depressing
Mukul Kesavan in Cricinfo
Under Kohli, India will always be up for a fight © Getty Images
Indian fans are a feverish lot. The truffle-like taste of victory, the bitter-gourd flavour of defeat, the sweet relief of stealing a draw - all this we know. But the adrenaline high of losing? The exhilaration of defeat? This is new.
I set the alarm for 5am and watched every ball of the fourth innings in Adelaide. I watched eight wickets fall in 26 overs as India collapsed from 205 for 2 at tea to 315 all out, without feeling suicidal or homicidal.
A friend suggested that 364 to win in a day's play was always so unlikely that it eased the transition from the delirium of hope to the reality of defeat, but I know he's wrong.
He's wrong because I didn't spend Saturday evening ploughing the rich, dark loam of grievance. I didn't think bad thoughts about Ian Gould for giving Shikhar Dhawan out, caught off the shoulder, or Marais Erasmus for fingering Ajinkya Rahane when the ball wasn't in the same latitude as his bat. And this wasn't because I was being fair-minded about the many decisions that went our way; I'm a fan, not a forensic expert. No, it had everything to do with the purposeful vigour with which the Indian batsmen, led by their captain, played.
I have not, so far, been an admirer of Virat Kohli. It's hard to like someone who seems so pleased with himself. But on the evidence of this Test match it's time the caretaker captain for the Adelaide Test took the job permanently.
| There were times during the Test when Kohli's field placings were too cute by half, and the way he handled his bowlers at the start of the Australian second innings was, if you want to be kind, eccentric | |||
This has little to do with Kohli's tactical nous: there were times during the Test when his field placings were too cute by half, and the way he handled his bowlers at the start of the Australian second innings was, if you want to be kind, eccentric. Twelve of the first 20 overs with the new ball were bowled by a debutant legspinner and a part-time offbreak bowler, and the fastest bowler in the team, Varun Aaron, didn't get a bowl till the opposition had put a hundred on the board.
No, Kohli should be India's captain because leading an inexperienced side against an obviously superior Australian team playing at home, he didn't take a step back and he didn't stop trying.
After the wretchedness of the last three years, when Indian touring sides sleepwalked their way through routs, led by a captain whose response to pressure spanned a narrow range from indifference through inertness to insouciance, it was good to see a stubborn team led by a man who actually seemed to enjoy the challenges of the long game.
The most extraordinary thing about India's performance in this Test was that the team backed itself to score more than 350 runs in a day's play twice. The Indians scored 369 runs on the third day of the Test, and then, on the fifth, fell short by 48, backing themselves to score 364 to win.
Under Kohli, India will always be up for a fight © Getty Images
There was a reason why Michael Clarke batted out the fourth day without declaring or having a go at the Indians late in the evening. The reason was: he had seen the same team chase 517 and get inside 150 runs of that total for the loss of five wickets in three sessions. Clarke is an adventurous captain but he isn't a suicidal idiot. Unlike the pundits who were harrumphing about 300 runs being more than enough, he knew he needed all the insurance he could get.
When Kohli was caught at midwicket, hooking Mitchell Johnson just before close on the third day, he wasn't being careless or irresponsible. He was putting a marker down. He was, to use Ian Chappell's favourite word, showing "intent".
I think the five Tests in England, where the Indians tried and failed to wage defensive, attritional battles against a first-rate seam attack in favourable conditions, had persuaded Kohli that grafting a response to Australia's massive first-innings score wasn't an option.
It was a crucial moment, even, perhaps, a turning point. Had Kohli survived till stumps, India would have walked out the next morning with two set batsmen at the crease and the very real prospect of chasing down Australia's first-innings total. But from Kohli's point of view, the choice was not between caution and recklessness. The choice was between self-assertion and subordination. He had been hit on the helmet by Johnson the first ball he faced, and the subsequent tenor of his innings was shaped by his determination not to be the coconut in a coconut shy. He repeatedly hooked Johnson in front of square in both innings, and it's fair to say that the way he imposed himself on Australia's most lethal quick bowler had something to do with the scores India made.
| I think the five Tests in England, where the Indians tried and failed to wage defensive, attritional battles, had persuaded Kohli that grafting a response to Australia's massive first-innings score wasn't an option | |||
After the match, Rahul Dravid asked Kohli if he had ever thought of playing for a draw on the final day, particularly after the flurry of wickets that followed M Vijay's departure. Kohli was categorical: the team had committed itself to going for the runs and he had no regrets about the way "the boys" had played. In particular, he had no regrets about being caught trying to loft Nathan Lyon to the mid-on boundary. There was no point, he said, trying to keep the offspinner out on a pitch that was turning square. You had to challenge him.
Unlike the reproachful post-mortems written on the post-tea batting collapse, Kohli blamed no one, not even Wriddhiman Saha, who was universally condemned for trying to follow up a six and a four off Lyon with a fatal hoick, instead of keeping his skipper sober company. Kohli was proud of them all.
It was a lovely conversation. Dravid, the greatest defensive batsman of modern times, was patently delighted by the daring and attacking intent shown by the younger man. They agreed that India lost to the better team, trying to pull off a win that, had it come off, would have been magnificent heist. Between the death-or-glory determination of Kohli and the cut-your-losses cool of Dhoni, all of us I think, know which one we prefer.
Kohli hit not one but two centuries chasing the prize. Like Browning's bird he sang his song twice over just in case the Aussies thought he couldn't recapture that "first fine careless rapture". The reason we turned off our televisions buoyed by defeat and not cast down by it was that the Indians didn't just perform, they competed with an uninhibited abandon that amounted to rapture.
In the past few years we have watched dismayed as gifted Indian teams that could have been contenders collapsed because they didn't seem up for the fight. This match was different: Kohli's men showed us that under his watch at least they won't die wondering.
Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in New Delhi
This article was first published in the Kolkata Telegraph
This article was first published in the Kolkata Telegraph
Monday, 18 August 2014
Dhoni's Revenge
By
Girish Menon
As
the brickbats from aficionados of Test cricket kept piling on the abject Indian
cricket team at the Oval yesterday, I was pleasantly amused by Dhoni's comment
at the press conference following the Indian surrender. He stated, as quoted on
Cricinfo, "Don't be so
jealous of IPL". It made me ponder if Dhoni and his teammates have affected their revenge in
such a cold blooded and undetectable manner.
Given
India 's quick and abject
defeats in two consecutive series in England ,
which county chief will have the gumption to bid to host India India
The
counties may hope to attract the 'white pound' to compensate for the Indian
diaspora's absence. But cricket as a sport is dwindling in popularity as the
coffers of most counties will reveal.
Indian
advertisers might also be mad at the team's performances as the 'brown
eyeballs' would be switching channels to avoid the shambles put up by Dhoni's
men. They may henceforth demand the negation of 'home advantage' and creation
of pitches that suit Dhoni's men. Thus match fixing, frowned upon by the ICC,
may make a re-entry in the form of scripted matches all in the name of
entertainment.
In
the process, Dhoni's men would have wreaked sweet revenge not only on the
lovers of Test cricket and the ICC but also on Andersen. For after all, what
will his record as England's highest wicket taker be worth, if Test cricket is
dead and the only records worth mentioning are set in the IPL?
Wednesday, 1 May 2013
Cricket and Causes - It's not about selection or tactics, silly
Understanding causes is incredibly difficult. It is much easier to assume that easily discernible surface issues are the primary explanations for victory and defeat
Ed Smith
May 1, 2013
If you want to understand sport, you have to understand causes. More accurately, you have to understand how difficult it is to be sure about which causes really influence events, and which are merely irrelevant side issues.
Coaching is about understanding causes: what causes players to perform better? Journalism is about causes: which factors led one team to beat the other? Fans, too, reflect obsessively about causes: what might make the difference for us next season? Sport, like history, is about causes.
And yet understanding causes is incredibly difficult. Causal threads must be observed and disentangled, then weighed and judged. It is much easier simply to assume that easily discernible surface issues - such as selection and short-term tactics - are the primary explanations for why teams win and lose.
That is why the books that have most influenced my thinking about sport address the question of causes rather than sport itself. If I had to name one book that anyone with a serious interest in sport should read, it would be Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. It scarcely mentions sport, and Taleb actively dislikes organised games. But Fooled by Randomness explores the dangers of sloppy assumptions about causality. It attacks lazy guesses about one thing "leading" to another. It makes the reader re-examine his own flawed reasoning.
Taleb recalls watching the financial markets on Bloomberg TV in December 2003. When Saddam Hussein was captured, the price of US treasury bills went up. The caption on TV explained that this price movement was "due to the capture of Saddam Hussein". Half an hour later, the price of US treasury bills went down. The TV caption explained that this was "due to the capture of Saddam Hussein".
The same "cause" had been invoked to "explain" two opposite effects, which is, obviously, logically impossible.
The next time you absorb sports punditry, keep in mind that story about Bloomberg TV and the price of Treasury bills. You will learn that a golfer misses a crucial putt "because he lost concentration", and then misses the next putt because he was "trying too hard". You will learn that a team loses one match "because they didn't stick to the game plan", then loses the next "because they were unable to think on their feet".
A manager messes up one match "because he was too loyal to his favourite players", then fails in the next "because he unnecessarily alienated the core of the team". And, my favourite: there is always the player who "benefits from utter single-mindedness" one week, and then "suffers from a damaging lack of perspective" the next.
The point, of course, is that causes are being manipulated to fit outcomes. They weren't causes at all, merely things that happened before the defeat. The ancient Romans had an ironic phrase for this terrible logic - post hoc, ergo propter hoc, "after this, therefore because of this".
It is hard to imagine a stronger contender for adopting false causes than the failure of English cricket teams to win the Ashes between 1987 and 2005. This dismal sequence was, apparently, "caused" by the following factors: structure of county cricket, unshaven stubbles worn by some England captains, sticking with a failing core of senior players for too long, introducing too many new players, being insufficiently hard-working and professional, being insufficiently joyful and amateur, having too many counties, being too English, not being English enough. And so on.
Pretty much anything that existed within English cricket, at some point or other, was used to explain England's lack of success in the Ashes. An English cricketer in the 1990s only had to brush his teeth to be told that they didn't do it like that in Australia.
Above all, English cricket failed because it was not like Australian cricket. If only England teams would copy Australian teams by (in no particular order): swearing/caring/sledging/bonding/singing/ drinking/attacking/being mates/taking risks/backing themselves/fronting up/digging in/manning up/playing for the badge/never saying die… if England teams simply did all that, then, frankly, playing Shane Warne's flipper and Glenn McGrath's metronomic seam-up would be a doddle.
| When your best is not quite good enough, the two levers under your control - selection and tactics - begin to look very inadequate. In other words, they are not really "causes" of defeat at all. They are simply things that happened along the way | |||
Imagine the logical gymnastics required when England started winning Ashes series again. All the previous causes of defeat had now to be converted into explanations for victory. If England's Ashes success continues, it can only be a matter of time until we have the ultimate "Bloomberg moment", when an article is written arguing that Australia routinely loses the Ashes because they have too few state sides and must urgently copy England's first-class structure of 18 counties.
True, some things within English cricket have changed in reality as well as perception: players are now centrally contracted to the England team, for example, rather than to their counties. But not as much has changed as is often claimed. Revolution - "chumps to champs" - is a snappier narrative than gradual evolution.
But the real fun lies elsewhere. It has now become fashionable to scour Australian cricket looking for "causes" of their decline. A few years ago, the personality of Michael Clarke became the focal point for critics of the culture within Australian cricket. When Clarke came good, it was time to look elsewhere for "causes" of muted Australian performances. Ex-players attacked selection as confused, even insulting. Australia, they argued, had to pick more young players, and yet had to pick more players with hard-earned experience; they had to stick with a consistent team while also, inevitably, abandoning obvious mistakes. Sound familiar?
Mike Atherton, the former England captain who received his fair share of criticism during the era of Australian dominance, remarked wryly this week: "It is not quite so easy to be bold, to be consistent or whatever else is deemed topical, when you are losing matches."
The two central variables in sport, the main levers controlled by the management, are selection and tactics. Imagine, for a moment, that you are in charge of the lesser of two teams. You pick what you think is your best XI. And you lose, despite the team playing at or near its potential. If you stick with the same team, are you not merely sleepwalking towards another defeat? And yet if you change it, what has led you to change your mind about the team that you thought was the best XI last week and which, after all, did not really under-perform? Difficult one, isn't it, picking a team that is less good than the opposition?
Now tactics. Imagine you devise what you consider to be your optimal tactical approach. You execute the plan reasonably well. And you lose. Do you change tactics, with the same logic that led you to change the team, or stick with the old tactics that led to defeat?
Very simply, when your best is not quite good enough, the two levers under your control - selection and tactics - begin to look very inadequate. In other words, they are not really "causes" of defeat at all. They are simply things that happened along the way.
It is the same with national economics. Governments and central banks control the familiar levers of interest rates, money supply and taxation. They are endlessly criticised for their handling of all three. But what if the actual economy, the thing itself, is simply not very robust? A rabbit cannot always be conjured magically from a hat.
I would not have explored all this if I wasn't surprised at how often it is forgotten or overlooked in the analysis of sport at every level, from the pub to the board room, and from the commentary box to the armchair. We have long accepted that understanding historical causes is profoundly subtle and intellectually demanding. Exactly the same applies to understanding causes in sport.
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