Cricket as complex narative (or how KP loves himself)

A novelist argues that cricket is more character-revealing than character-building

Patrick Neate

May 9, 2013

 

	The word "careless" came, not quite fairly, to become one of the defining terms of David Gower's career © PA Photos  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Ian Bell | David Gower | Kevin Pietersen Teams: England

I am currently working on a feature film script. A novelist by trade and instinct, I am finding it a testing process; a tricky exercise of discipline and concision. The opening line, for now at least, is: "You can learn everything you need to know about life from the game of cricket: the old man told me that."

The script is an adaptation of one of my own novels,City of Tiny Lights, a gumshoe I once believed would presage a whole new genre of suburban thriller. I even had a name for it: Chiswick Noir. Good, eh? Almost a decade later, my novel remains, so far as I know, its only exemplar.

The protagonist of City of Tiny Lights is a Ugandan Indian private eye called Tommy Akhtar. He's a hard-drinking, hard-smoking hard man with a fine line in repartee. Tommy and I have little in common but cricket-mad fathers. That opening line is borrowed directly from mine.

Dad was a much better sportsman than I ever was. (Funny, I originally completed that sentence as "than I'll ever be" but, in my forties, perhaps it's finally time to concede defeat.) He played first-class cricket for Oxford alongside the rare talent of Abbas Ali Baig and under the captaincy of the great "Tiger" Pataudi, oncetaking 78 off a touring Australian attack that included the likes of Garth McKenzie and Richie Benaud. He went on to captain Berkshire and play good club cricket for Richmond for many years.

In, I think, 1987, we played side by side in a scratch team that he organised. Chasing around 250, I opened and was out to the first ball of the innings. Our batting soon collapsed and I remember Dad walking out at No. 7 or 8, saying: "I'll just have to do it myself." And he did, returning a couple of hours later with an unbeaten hundred to his name.

Afterwards, in the bar, he enjoyed his moment in the evening sun and we stayed much later than he'd planned. He then had to drive me to Taunton, you see, where my school team was playing the next day. We arrived not much before midnight and then he turned straight round and drove all the way back to London.

On the way to Somerset, he'd told me (in no little detail) how to score a century and, the next afternoon, I duly did, the first of my cricketing life (which makes it sound like many followed - let's leave it like that). I was sorry he was not there to see my innings, but I rang him from a payphone in the evening and he listened while I talked him through every run. I'm not sure what part of this story I find most revealing.

The father-son relationship expressed through sport is a complex thing. We all know the archetype of the competitive dad who loves humiliating his boy at everything from three-and-in to Connect 4. It's not quite equivalent to pinning the kid's feet together and abandoning him on a mountainside, but surely every father of sons has a touch of Laius about him. My old man was certainly no more competitive than most and would never have enjoyed my humiliation, but he never let me win either.

A couple of years later, I was captain of my school first XI. We were an average team led by an average captain, struggling for form. I had never been an expansive batsman, the strongest part of my game a kind of bloody-minded obduracy; but by the time I was 18 I'd stopped moving my feet altogether and just poked at the ball like a tramp at a rubbish bin. I'd turned into some kind of cricketing mollusc: I want to say a schoolboy Chris Tavaré, but I think Jimmy Anderson (the batsman) would be a better comparison. If any captain had set a field with nine arranged in an arc from first slip to point, I'd have never scored a run.

The climax to our season was always the match against the MCC and that year Dad was their captain. They took first knock and racked up a bucket-load of runs.

When we batted, I was determined to do well and I was at my most crustacean. I left a lot and limped (or limpeted) to 30 in about an hour and a half. Then, Dad took the ball himself. I had faced him countless times in the nets and we both knew he was no bowler, a slow-dobbing mixture of legbreaks that didn't break and in-duckers that didn't duck. He arranged his field carefully and at great length - a short leg, slip, gully and the rest in a ring. "Well," he announced to one and all, "we've got to see if they'll go for it."

I left the first delivery and played down the wrong line to the second. To the third, I launched myself up the wicket and swung my bat with, the mythology tells me, "all my might" - Oedipus the King! The King!

Unfortunately, I made no kind of contact and a thick outside edge lobbed a dolly to backward point. Dad declined celebration, like a footballer returning to a much-loved former club. As I walked past, he said: "Bad luck." Then: "This is a very character-building game."

You can learn everything you need to know about life from cricket and when Dad and I now watch we agree on much - for example, that Kevin Pietersen is a genius for our times (i.e. he has made a virtue of stupidity), and that, while Ian Bell must never be asked to bat for our lives, there'd be no better man to arrange flowers prettily at the funeral should Steve Waugh be dismissed. However, Dad's assertion that cricket is "character-building" is, if not wrong, certainly meaningless. Isn't everything character-building? Sitting in a pub, drinking your life away; sitting in a garret, writing your life away; sitting in an armchair, spectating your life away - they're all as character-building as each other. Of course what Dad meant is that cricket builds good character. But I'm not sure there's much evidence for that either. Dad will often say of an acquaintance: "Well, he's a cricketer. Must be all right." But I assume he's joking because, while I've made many friends through cricket, I've met my fair share of tossers too.

Cricket is "the gentleman's game" and the motto "it's just not cricket" spread throughout the Victorian Empire. But, for me, these just bring to mind Oscar Wilde's description of a gentleman as "one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally". After all, the "gentlemen" who decided what was or wasn't cricket were a limited bunch who were, at the time, part of a culture engaged in some of the most rapacious pillaging of other people's resources the world has seen. Cricket was their game and, like the great swathes of pink across the globe, it was played by their esoteric rules. WG Grace may have been the first cricketing genius, but he was also renowned for his gamesmanship and/or cheating (depending on who you believe). And the subsequent century and a half of cricketing history is a litany of nefarious tactics, ball-tampering, match-fixing, surreptitiously effected run-outs, catches claimed and disputed, and so on.

But, perhaps the most telling example of the bizarre hypocrisies of cricket is "walking". Walking (or not) is an issue as old as the game itself. Walking is regarded as the height of gentlemanly conduct, a kind of sporting hara-kiri. And yet, let's face it, the term would never have come into existence were it not for the fact that some (including, of course, the great WG) didn't. Walking is the game's Hippocratic oath and its hypocritical taboo. I remember being given out caught behind at school. When I reached the pavilion, our cricket master chastised me for a full five minutes - cricket is a gentleman's game, he pronounced. If we don't play it like gentlemen, we may as well all give up now. Why didn't you walk? "Because I didn't hit it," I said.

So, I no longer believe that cricket builds character (in any meaningful sense). Instead, I have come to see that cricket reveals it; and isn't that a whole lot more interesting?

	There is something about cricket at its best that sets it apart - the space and time that allow for character development, the empathy and identification between player and spectator, the struggles of an individual against the backdrop of an interwoven narrative of a wider war for ascendancy

All sport is narrative: its central appeal to spectators being the highs and lows, the struggles overcome, that signify a story. But most sports are plot-driven pulp, built on archetypes of heroism and villainy with little of the nuance of truly great storytelling. I don't think it's any coincidence, for example, that football lasts 90 minutes (or 120, with extra time). After all, between 90 and 120 minutes demarcates the ideal Hollywood structure: a formula in which the surprises are necessarily unsurprising since the key purpose of the medium is to reaffirm and reassure. Of course, Bradford City occasionally beat Arsenal and Verbal may or may not be Keyser Söze. But these are the exceptions that confirm the core principles of a limited-narrative medium.

Cricket is, I think, different. If most sport is driven by plot, cricket is driven by character, and the nuances to be found therein are, if not limitless, as diverse as humanity itself. This idea fascinates me.

I sometimes teach novel-writing - such is the fate of novelists of a certain stature (writers of Chiswick Noir, for example). On such courses, my opening gambit generally goes like this: "What is a story? We meet our protagonist at point A. We follow him or her through to point Z. Typically, that protagonist will be faced with a personal flaw or external problem which he or she will have to overcome in the other letters of the alphabet. Enough said."

It is a facetious little speech, but it does the job, more or less, and it allows me then to go on and explain why I consider the novel the premier narrative form.

Allow me to give, say, Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterpiece, the A-to-Z treatment by way of illustration. Dorothea, an idealistic do-gooder, makes an ill-starred marriage to a crusty, deluded intellectual in the mistaken belief that personal and social fulfillment can be found in academic pursuit. After her husband's death, she eventually marries his young cousin, giving up material security and highfalutin ideals for love and, we are left to hope, some degree of redemption.

I haven't read Middlemarch for a while but, from memory, this is an adequate summary. But, it is also ridiculously reductive. Aside from ignoring the other great strands of plot and theme, it denudes our protagonist of all the subtleties of her character that conjure our empathy even as she infuriates and delights us in equal measure.

Put simply, while the 90-minute screenplay is necessarily built on character tropes of assumed common values and expectations, the novel form affords the storyteller space to build complex people who can be by turns comic and tragic, heroic and villainous, idealistic and cynical. My point? At its best, cricket, in its revelation of character, is the sporting equivalent of the novel.

I remember watching a Test match with Dad as a kid. I can't be sure, but I want to say it was during England's home series against Pakistan in 1982. That summer, England dominated the first Test before threatening implosion against the seemingly innocuous swing bowling of Pakistan's opening batsman, Mudassar Nazar. England lost the second Test by ten wickets before scraping home in the third for a series win.

I remember David Gower was particularly bamboozled by Mudassar's gentle hoopers and, after one dismissal, the commentator described his shot as "careless". This was, of course, one of three adjectives most used to characterise Gower throughout his career, the others being "elegant" and "laidback". In fact, so powerful was this critical stereotyping that Gower has become a triangulation point for all left-handed batsmen and, indeed, "careless" dismissals since.

But, on this occasion, Dad took issue. "Careless?" he said. "He's not careless. You don't get to play Test cricket if you don't care."

It's a comment that's stuck with me.

Let us briefly imagine David Gower: The Movie - create its "beat sheet", as the movie business likes to call it. The screenplay would undoubtedly identify "carelessness" as our hero's fatal flaw within the first ten pages, probably illustrated by some anecdote of schoolboy insouciance. Act One would culminate with him striking his first ball in Test cricket to the boundary, before a decline in Gower's fortunes to the Midpoint (say, the time he was dropped for the Oval Test in Ian Botham's great summer of 1981). Our hero would then fight his way back to the end of Act Two where he would ascend to the captaincy for… well, let's make it the "blackwash" series of 1984. He would show renewed mettle in defeat, which would then lead to a grand series win in India, before the glorious summer following culminates in Ashes triumph and a glut of runs for the man himself - the golden boy all grown up. This is the feature film version. I'm not suggesting it's a particularly good feature film, but it pushes the necessary buttons.

David Gower the Novel, on the other hand, would be a very different undertaking. I won't try to plot it here, but I know that we couldn't simply signify our protagonist with "carelessness". In fact, there is no need to plot the novel here since it already exists in the person of Gower himself. And it is a subtle tale that can only be précised to 117 matches, 8231 runs at an average of 44.25 - greatness by anyone's standards. And that is why Dad took offence to that single careless adjective.

All spectators are, of course, guilty of careless description. I have already been so myself, characterising Ian Bell as a flower-arranger. So, by way of contrition, I will use a moment from Bell's career as one of my examples for the comparison of two sports instead of two narrative media.

In 2008, John Terry, Chelsea captain, stepped up to take a penalty in the shoot-out which could win his club the Champions League for the first time. As he struck the ball, he slipped and sent his shot wide. It was a moment of high sporting drama, certainly; if you were a Chelsea fan, some tragedy; if you were one of Terry's many detractors, an instant of glorious schadenfreude. But I challenge anyone to claim it revealed much meaningful about his character. No doubt in Chelsea-hating pubs across the country, JT was derided as a "bottler", but does that even approximate to a truth we believe? The fact is he missed a penalty kick he'd have scored nine times out of ten. He slipped. Shit happens.

Now, let us look at Ian Bell's dismissal in the first innings of the first Test against India in Ahmedabad in 2012. India had scored 521 and England were struggling at 69 for 4 when Bell walked to the wicket. Then, he tried to hit the very first delivery he received back over the bowler's head to the boundary and spooned a simple catch to mid-off. I'm sure commentators used the word "careless", though I don't actually remember the invocation of Gower. It was an extraordinary shot, no doubt, but it also seemed more than that - in some way a summation of Bell as cricketer and man. In no particular order, Bell was batting at No. 6, a kind of ongoing reminder of a perceived weakness - we all know (and he knows) that he has the talent and technique to bat at three, but isn't trusted to do so. We all know his reputation for scoring easy runs - even the game in which he hit his 199 against South Africa in 2008 eventually petered out into a high-scoring draw, while his double-century against India in 2011 was milked from a beaten team at the end of a long summer. The former young maestro was one of three senior pros in the England top six, the go-to men to bat their team out of a crisis. His place in the team was under pressure from the next generation of tyros and he was due to return home after the game for the birth of his first child. Lastly, we all know that cricket is a game in which you have to trust your judgement and, to Bell's credit, he trusted his. Unfortunately, that judgement was terribly flawed, but would we have preferred him to poke forward nervously and nick to the keeper? Perhaps we would. The incident reminded me of something else I tell would-be novelists: when you're writing well, you can reveal more about a character in one moment than in 20 pages of exposition.

	Anyone see Anna Karenina in this picture? © Getty Images  Enlarge

Of course I recognise that the oppositions I describe between cricket and other sports, and the novel and other narrative media, are false. There are plenty of unremarkable cricket matches and careers, plenty of epic examples from any other sport you can think of; innumerable bad, unsophisticated novels and many great films of considerable complexity. Nonetheless, I would maintain that the observations underlying these false oppositions ring true. There is something about cricket at its best that sets it apart - the space and time that allow for character development, the empathy and identification between player and spectator, the struggles of an individual against the backdrop of an interwoven narrative of a wider war for ascendancy (or, if you will, a "team game"). There is something about the novel form which, at its best, is exactly the same. Or, to put it another way, in the words of Tommy Akhtar, private eye, in the last scene of my film: "The Yanks will never get cricket. They'll never understand a five-day Test match that ends in a draw. They like victory and defeat. But victory and defeat are generally nursery rhymes, while a draw can be epic." Cricket, like a novel, like life, often ends in moral stalemate. And it's all the better for it.

If describing Ian Bell as a florist smacks of carelessness, then describing KP as some kind of idiot savant is unfortunate (see the KP Genius Twitter account) so, by way of conclusion, let me rectify that here. After all, the idea for this little essay came about while re-reading Anna Karenina against the backdrop of Pietersen's recent conflict with his team-mates, his captain, his coach, and the ECB.

Pietersen was, I began to consider, rather like poor, doomed Anna. He was regarded as self-serving, his judgement fatally flawed, seemingly hell-bent on alienating himself from his peers. He was characterised as a mercenary, and certainly he had no desire to live in anything but the considerable style to which he was accustomed. But, like Anna, his true tragedy was an ill-starred love: a love that could not be condoned by polite society, but would not be contained by its strictures either. But who did KP love?

As I read on, I slowly came to conclude that KP also resembled Count Vronsky; as Leo Tolstoy describes him, "a perfect specimen of Pietermaritzburg's [sorry, "Petersburg's'] gilded youth". Vronsky is a brave soldier raised for derring-do and impressive in the regulated environment of his regiment. But he is a man of limited imagination whose bravery derives not from moral courage but the whims of his own desires. Indeed, when Vronsky resigns his commission, it is not from principle but to pursue the self-gratification of his love for Anna, a love that can never fulfill either of them.

And so it dawned on me: KP is neither Anna nor Vronsky, he is both of them - the cricketing manifestation of Tolstoy's epic of doomed love.

Is this a step too far? Certainly. But fun, nonetheless…

Watch out, George Osborne: Adam Smith, Karl Marx and even the IMF are after you

When even the IMF's free market ideologues recoil from the UK chancellor's austerity politics, democracy itself is at stake

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 8 May 2013

The Spanish Inquisition gets a Monty Python makeover. 'Being told by the IMF to go easy on austerity is like being told by the Spanish Inquisition to be more tolerant of heretics.'

George Osborne and his Treasury officials are gearing up for a fight. They've promised to make life difficult for the other side for the next two weeks. The unlikely opponents are the team of economists visiting from the IMF for a regular policy review.

Why has this routine meeting, which would hardly be noticed outside professional circles, become a confrontation? Because the IMF has recently dropped its support for the chancellor's austerity policy and repeatedly urged him to rethink it. It even said he was"playing with fire" in refusing to change course.

This is an astonishing development. For in the past three decades the IMF has been the standard-bearer for austerity. Back in 1997 it even forced South Korea – with an existing budget surplus and one of the smallest public debts in the world (as a proportion of GDP) – to cut government spending. Only when the policy turned what was already the biggest recession in the country's history into a catastrophe, with more than 100 firms going bankrupt every day for five months, did it do an embarrassing U-turn and allow a budget deficit to develop.

Given this history, being told by the IMF to go easy on austerity is like being told by theSpanish Inquisition to be more tolerant of heretics. The chancellor and his team should be worried.

If even the IMF doesn't approve, why is the UK government persisting with a policy that is clearly not working? Or, for that matter, why is the same policy pushed through across Europe? A certain dead economist would have said it is because the government is "in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor". Dead right.

Current policies in the UK and other European countries are really about making poor people pay for the mistakes of the rich. Millions of poor people have lost their jobs and the support they received through welfare, but how many of those top bankers who caused the crisis have suffered – except for a cancelled knighthood here and a partially returned pension pot there? If anyone has suffered in the financial industry, it is its poorer members – junior analysts who lost their jobs and tellers who are working longer hours for shrinking real wages.

In case you were wondering, it wasn't Karl Marx who wrote the words that I quoted above. He would have never put it so crudely. His version, delivered with typical panache, was that the "executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". No, those damning words came from Adam Smith, the supposed patron saint of free-market economics.

To Smith and Marx, the class bias of the state was plain to see. They lived at a time when only the rich had votes (if there were elections at all) and so there were few checks on the extent to which they could dictate government policy.

With the subsequent broadening of suffrage, ultimately to every adult, the class nature of the state has been significantly diluted. The welfare state, regulations on monopoly, consumer protection, and protection of worker rights are all things that have been established only because of this political change. Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few.

This is, of course, exactly why free-market economists and others who are on the side of the rich have been so negative about democracy. In the old days, free-market economists strongly opposed universal suffrage on the grounds that it would destroy capitalism: poor people would elect politicians who would appropriate the means of the rich and give handouts to the poor, they argued, completely destroying incentives for wealth creation.

Once universal suffrage was introduced, they could not openly oppose democracy. So they started criticising "politics" in general. Politicians, it was argued, would adopt policies that maximised their chances of re-election but damaged the economy – printing money, handing out favours to powerful monopolies, and increasing social welfare spending for the poor. Politicians needed to be prevented from making important policy decisions, the argument went.

On this advice, since the 1980s, many countries have ring-fenced the most important policy areas to keep politicians out. Independent central banks (such as the European Central Bank), independent regulatory agencies (such as Ofcom and Ofgem) and strict rules on government spending and deficits (such as the "balanced budget" rule) have been introduced.

In particularly difficult economic times, it was even argued, we need to insulate economic policies from politics altogether. Latin American military dictatorships were justified in such terms. The recent imposition of "technocratic" governments, made up of economists and bankers who have not been "tainted" by politics, on Greece and Italy comes from the same intellectual stable.

What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.

The conflict surrounding austerity policies in Europe is, then, not just about figures on budget, unemployment and growth rate. It is also about the meaning of democracy.

As José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, has recently recognised, the policy of austerity has "reached its limits" in terms of "political and social support". If European leaders, including the British chancellor, keep pushing these policies against those limits, people will inevitably start asking: what is the point of democracy, when policies serve only the interest of the tiny minority at the top? This is nothing less than crunch time for democracy in Europe.

Cricket - Mallett on Grimmett and O'Reilly

The Tiger and the Fox

Bill O'Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett were the greatest spin-bowling partnership of their age, and arguably the best in Test history

Ashley Mallett

May 8, 2013

A

	Tiger O'Reilly was, according to Don Bradman, "the greatest of all" bowlers © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Sir Donald Bradman | Clarrie Grimmett | Bill O'Reilly Teams: Australia

Between the world wars, Bill O'Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett reigned supreme. They were the greatest spin-bowling partnership of their age, and arguably the best in Test history. O'Reilly, the Tiger, and Grimmett, the Fox, were both legspinners but they approached their art as differently as Victor Trumper and Don Bradman approached batting.

Arms and legs flailing in the breeze, O'Reilly stormed up to the crease with steam coming out of his ears. He believed in all-out aggression, and called himself a "boots'n'all" competitor. Bradman, who reckoned O'Reilly to have been the best bowler he saw or played against, said he had the ability to bowl a legbreak of near medium pace that consistently pitched around leg stump and turned to nick the outside edge or the top of off.

"Bill also bowled a magnificent bosey which was hard to pick, and which he aimed at middle and leg stumps," said Bradman in a letter he wrote to me in 1989. "It was fractionally slower than his legbreak and usually dropped a little in flight and 'sat up' to entice a catch to one of his two short-leg fieldsmen. These two deliveries, combined with great accuracy and unrelenting hostility, were enough to test the greatest of batsmen, particularly as his legbreak was bowled at medium pace - quicker than the normal run of slow bowlers - making it extremely difficult for a batsman to use his feet as a counter measure. Bill will always remain, in my book, the greatest of all."

O'Reilly first came up against Bradman in the summer of the 1925-26 season, when Tiger's Wingello took on the might of Bradman's Bowral. Sixteen-year-old Bradman, who to his 19-year-old adversary was hardly any bigger than the outsized pads he wore, edged a high-bouncing legbreak straight to first slip when on 32. But the Wingello captain, Gallipoli hero Selby Jeffrey, was busy lighting his pipe, and the chance went begging.

Stumps were drawn with Bradman 232 not out, leaving the Tiger snarling in disbelief and raising his eyes to the heavens at the blatant injustice of it all. The game resumed the next Saturday afternoon. Bradman faced the first ball from the wounded Tiger. It pitched leg and took the top of off.

In the year O'Reilly came into this world, 1905, Grimmett tore a hole in his new blue suit, clambering over the barbed wire at Wellington's Basin Reserve to watch Trumper hit a famous hundred. In 1914, Grimmett sailed into Sydney from his native New Zealand, seeking cricketing fame. But it wasn't until a long stint in Sydney and more fruitless years in Melbourne before a last throw of the dice in Adelaide proved to be a haven for an unwanted bowler.

Grimmett began his Test career against England at the SCG in 1925, taking a match haul of 11 for 82. He starred in Australian tours of England in 1926 and 1930, but it was in the Adelaide Test of 1932, O'Reilly's debut, that the Tiger and the Fox first joined forces. Grimmett was the master and O'Reilly the apprentice, in a game that was a triumph for Bradman (299 not out) and Grimmett (14 for 199).

	It is virtually impossible to compare spinners from different eras, although most would agree the best three legspinners in Test cricket were Grimmett, O'Reilly, and Warne

O'Reilly was amazed by the way Grimmett bowled: "I learned a great deal watching Grum [the nickname Bill always used for his spinning mate] wheel away. I watched him like a hawk. He was completely in control. His subtle change of pace impressed me greatly."

The pair played two Tests that series and two more in the Bodyline series of 1932-33, before O'Reilly took over as Australia's leading spinner when Grimmett was dropped. They were back in harness for the 1934 Ashes - the Tiger's first England tour, Grimmett's third. Here's O'Reilly on their unforgettable partnership:

"It was on that tour that we had all the verbal bouquets in the cricket world thrown at us as one of the greatest spin combinations Test cricket had seen. Bowling tightly and keeping the batsmen unremittingly on the defensive, we collected 53 [Grimmett 25, O'Reilly 28] of the 73 English wickets that fell that summer. Each of us collected more than 100 wickets on tour and it would have needed a brave, or demented, Australian at that time to suggest that Grimmett's career was almost ended.

"With Grum at the other end I knew full well that no batsman would be allowed the slightest respite. We were fortunate in that our styles supplemented each other. Grum loved to bowl into the wind, which gave him an opportunity to use wind-resistance as an important adjunct to his schemes regarding direction. He had no illusions about the ball 'dropping', as we hear so often these days, before its arrival at the batsman's proposed point of contact. To him that was balderdash. In fact, he always loved to hear people making up verbal explanations for the suspected trickery that had brought a batsman's downfall. If a batsman had thought the ball had dropped, all well and good. Grimmett himself knew that it was simply change of pace that had made the batsman think that such an impossibility had happened."

	Clarrie Grimmett: wicked spider © Associated Press  Enlarge

While O'Reilly was all-out aggression, Grimmett was steady and patient. They both possessed a stock ball that turned from leg. O'Reilly's deliveries came at pace: his legbreak spat like a striking cobra, and his wrong'un reared at the chest of the batsman. For any batsman in combat with the Tiger there was no respite, no place to hide.

In contrast, Grimmett wheeled away in silence. He was like the wicked spider, spinning a web of doom. Sometimes it took longer for him to snare his victim, but despite their vastly different styles and methods of attack they were both deadly. A batsman caught at cover off Grimmett was just as out as a man who lost his off stump to a ball that pitched leg and hit the top of off from O'Reilly.

Bradman once wrote me: "I always classified Clarrie Grimmett as the best of the genuine slow legspinners, (I exclude Bill O'Reilly because, as you say, he was not really a slow leggie) and what made him the best, in my opinion, was his accuracy. Arthur Mailey spun the ball more - so did Fleetwood-Smith and both of them bowled a better wrong'un but they also bowled many loose balls. I think Mailey's bosey was the hardest of all to pick.

"Clarrie's wrong'un was in fact easy to see. He telegraphed it and he bowled very few of them. His stock-in-trade was the legspinner with just enough turn on it, plus a really good topspin delivery and a good flipper (which he cultivated late in life). I saw Clarrie in one match take the ball after some light rain when the ball was greasy and hard to hold, yet he reeled off five maidens without a loose ball. His control was remarkable."

Grimmett invented the flipper, which Shane Warne, at the height of his brilliant career, bowled so well. Like Grimmett, Warne didn't have a great wrong'un, but he possessed a terrific stock legbreak and a stunning topspinner. When O'Reilly asked SF Barnes where he placed his short leg for the wrong'un, Barnes replied: "Never bowled the bosey… didn't need one."

Imagine if Grimmett and O'Reilly had played 145 Tests, the same number as Warne. At the rate they took their wickets, Grimmett would have snared a shade under 870 and O'Reilly 770. In reality Grimmett played just 37 Tests and O'Reilly 27, but what an impact they had on cricket. It is virtually impossible to compare spinners from different eras, although most would agree the best three legspinners in Test cricket were Grimmett, O'Reilly, and Warne.

The Tiger and the Fox were unique in their contrasting styles, but they had one thing in common: they were spin-bowling predators. Their prey was any batsman who ventured to the crease when they were on the hunt.

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data

By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Forget zombies. The data crunchers are invading Hollywood.

The same kind of numbers analysis that has reshaped areas like politics and online marketing is increasingly being used by the entertainment industry.

Netflix tells customers what to rent based on algorithms that analyze previous selections, Pandora does the same with music, and studios have started using Facebook “likes” and online trailer views to mold advertising and even films.

Now, the slicing and dicing is seeping into one of the last corners of Hollywood where creativity and old-fashioned instinct still hold sway: the screenplay.

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

His recommendations, delivered in a 20- to 30-page report, might range from minor tightening to substantial rewrites: more people would relate to this character if she had a sympathetic sidekick, for instance.

Script “doctors,” as Hollywood refers to writing consultants, have long worked quietly on movie assembly lines. But many top screenwriters — the kind who attain exalted status in the industry, even if they remain largely unknown to the multiplex masses — reject Mr. Bruzzese’s statistical intrusion into their craft.

“This is my worst nightmare” said Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” “It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

Mr. Parker drew a breath. “Look, I’d take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing,” he said. “But this feels like the studio would listen to my grandmother before me, and that is terrifying.”

But a lot of producers, studio executives and major film financiers disagree. Already they have quietly hired Mr. Bruzzese’s company to analyze about 100 scripts, including an early treatment for “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which has taken in $484.8 million worldwide.

Mr. Bruzzese (pronounced brew-ZEZ-ee), who is one of a very few if not the only entrepreneur to use this form of script analysis, is plotting to take it to Broadway and television now that he has traction in movies.

“It takes a lot of the risk out of what I do,” said Scott Steindorff, a producer who used Mr. Bruzzese to evaluate the script for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a hit 2011 crime drama. “Everyone is going to be doing this soon.” Mr. Steindorff added, “The only people who are resistant are the writers: ‘I’m making art, I can’t possibly do this.’ ”

Audience research has been known to save a movie, but it has also famously missed the mark. Opinion surveys — “idiot cards,” as some unimpressed directors call them — indicated that “Fight Club” would be the flop of the century. It took in more than $100 million worldwide.

But, as the stakes of making movies become ever higher, Hollywood leans ever harder on research to minimize guesswork. Moreover, studios have trimmed spending on internal script development. Mr. Bruzzese is also pitching script analysis to studios as a duck-and-cover technique — for “when the inevitable argument of ‘I am not going to take the blame if this movie doesn’t work’ comes up,” his Web site says.

Mr. Bruzzese taught statistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island before moving into movie research about a decade ago, motivated by a desire for more money and a childhood love of movies.

He acknowledged that many writers are “skittish” about his service. But he countered that it is not as threatening as it may sound.

“This is just advice, and you can use all of it, some of it or none of it,” he said.

But ignore it at your peril, according to one production executive. Motion Picture Group, of Culver City, Calif., analyzed the script for “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” said the executive, who worked on the film, but the production companies that supplied it to 20th Century Fox did not heed all of the advice. The movie flopped. Mr. Bruzzese declined to comment.

Mr. Bruzzese emphasized that his script analysis is not done by machines. His reports rely on statistics and survey results, but before evaluating a script he meets with the writer or writers to “hear and understand the creative vision, so our analysis can be contextualized,” he said.

But he is also unapologetic about his focus on financial outcomes. “I understand that writing is an art, and I deeply respect that,” he said. “But the earlier you get in with testing and research, the more successful movies you will make.”

The service actually gives writers more control over their work, said Mark Gill, president of Millennium Films and a client. In traditional testing, the kind done when a film is almost complete, the writer is typically no longer involved. With script testing, the writer can still control changes.

One Oscar-winning writer who, at the insistence of a producer, had a script analyzed by Mr. Bruzzese said his initial worries proved unfounded.

“It was a complete shock, the best notes on a draft that I have ever received,” said the writer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing his reputation.

Script analysis is new enough to remain a bit of a Hollywood taboo. Major film financiers and advisers like Houlihan Lokey confirmed that they had used the service, but declined to speak on the record about it. The six major Hollywood movie studios declined to comment.

But doors are opening for Mr. Bruzzese nonetheless, in part because he is such a character. For instance, he bills himself as a distant relative of Einstein’s, a claim that is unverifiable but never fails to impress studio executives.

Mr. Bruzzese, a movie enthusiast with a seemingly encyclopedic memory of screenplays, also speaks bluntly, a rarity in Hollywood.

“All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful,” he said, taking a chug of Diet Dr Pepper followed by a gulp of Diet Coke and a drag on a Camel. “I’m here to tell it like it is: Some babies are ugly.”

Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich

Essential public services are cut in order that the wealthy may pay less tax. But even their baubles don't make them happy

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 6 May 2013 20.29 BST

Saudi Prince Alwaleed is said to have been near tears when Forbes reported his wealth at £7bn less than he calculated it. Photograph: Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters

'I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a result." So says Bob Diamond, formerly the chief executive of Barclays. In doing so Diamond lays waste to the justification that his bank and others (and their innumerable apologists in government and the media) have advanced for surreal levels of remuneration – to incentivise hard work and talent. Prestige, power, a sense of purpose: for them, these are incentives enough.

Others of his class – Bernie Ecclestone and Jeroen van der Veer (the former chief executive of Shell), for example – say the same. The capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If executives were all paid 5% of current levels, the competition between them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the immensely rich HL Huntcommented several decades ago: "Money is just a way of keeping score."

The desire for advancement along this scale appears to be insatiable. In March Forbes magazine published an article about Prince Alwaleed, who, like other Saudi princes, doubtless owes his fortune to nothing more than hard work and enterprise. According to one of the prince's former employees, the Forbes magazine global rich list "is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature".

The result is "a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing". In 2006, the researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, "when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. 'What do you want?' he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. 'Tell me what you need.'"

Never mind that he has his own 747, in which he sits on a throne during flights. Never mind that his "main palace" has 420 rooms. Never mind that he possesses his own private amusement park and zoo – and, he claims, $700m worth of jewels. Never mind that he's the richest man in the Arab world, valued by Forbes at $20bn, and has watched his wealth increase by $2bn in the past year. None of this is enough. There is no place of arrival, no happy landing, even in a private jumbo jet. The politics of envy are never keener than among the very rich.

This pursuit can suck the life out of its adherents. In Lauren Greenfield's magnificent documentary The Queen of Versailles, David Siegel – "America's timeshare king" – appears to abandon all interest in life as he faces the loss of his crown. He is still worth hundreds of millions. He still has an adoring wife and children. He is still building the biggest private home in America.

But as the sale of the skyscraper that bears his name and symbolises his pre-eminence begins to look inevitable, he sinks into an impenetrable depression. Dead-eyed, he sits alone in his private cinema, obsessively rummaging through the same pieces of paper, as if somewhere among them he can find the key to his restoration, refusing to engage with his family, apparently prepared to ruin himself rather than lose the stupid tower.

In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.

Politicians justify these changes, when not reciting bogus arguments about the deficit, with the incentives for enterprise that they create. Behind that lies the promise or the hint that we will all be happier and more satisfied as a result. But this mindless, meaningless accumulation cannot satisfy even its beneficiaries, except perhaps – and temporarily – the man wobbling on the very top of the pile.

The same applies to collective growth. Governments today have no vision but endless economic growth. They are judged not by the number of people in employment – let alone by the number of people in satisfying, pleasurable jobs – and not by the happiness of the population or the protection of the natural world. Job-free, world-eating growth is fine, as long as it's growth. There are no ends any more, just means.

In their interesting but curiously incomplete book, How Much is Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky note that "Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough ... The vanishing of all intrinsic ends leaves us with only two options: to be ahead or to be behind. Positional struggle is our fate."

They note that the nations with the longest working hours – the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy, in the graph of OECD nations they publish in the book – are those with the greatest inequality. They might have added that they are also the three with the lowest levels of social mobility.

Four possible conclusions could be drawn. The first is that inequality does indeed encourage people to work harder, as the Skidelskys (and various neoliberals) maintain: the bigger the gap, the more some people will strive to try to close it. Or perhaps it's just that more people, swamped by poverty and debt, are desperate. An alternative explanation is that economic and political inequality sit together: in more unequal nations, bosses are able to drive their workers harder. The fourth possible observation is that the hard work inequality might stimulate neither closes the gap nor enhances social mobility.

Nor, it seems, does it make us, collectively, any wealthier. The Dutch earn an average of $42,000 per capita on 1,400 hours a year, the British $36,000 on 1,650 hours. Inequality, competition and an obsession with wealth and rank appear to be both self-perpetuating and destined to sow despair.

Can we not rise above this? To seek satisfactions that don't cost the earth and might be achievable? The principal aim of any wealthy nation should now be to say: "Enough already".

A Diet for those who love to eat and wish to lose weight

The 5:2 diet – feasts for fast days

With its flexible approach and simple rules, the 5:2 diet has become the calorie-control plan for people who like to eat

• 
• • Felicity Cloake
  • The Guardian, Sunday 5 May 2013 19.30 BST

The fasting diet, otherwise known as the 5:2, restricts calories for two days a week. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

For the first time since university I am on a diet. Somehow, I've become a calorie-counter, someone who weighs out porridge oats and drinks herbal tea. In other words, the kind of person I've always pitied.

1. Perfect Host: 162 easy recipes for feeding people and having fun
2. by Felicity Cloake
3. 

1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

The thing is, I'm actually quite enjoying it – enjoying being a relative term, of course. In an ideal world, I'd boast the kind of robust metabolism that laughs in the face of cooking six bakewell tarts an afternoon, but I don't. And since I started my Perfect recipe column a couple of years ago, I've noticed the pounds slowly creeping on. There's a lot to love about my job, but it does make it almost impossible to eat healthily.

The fasting diet, otherwise known as the 5:2 because of the format – five days of normal eating a week and two in which you restrict your calories (500kcal for women, 600kcal for men) – seemed to offer a glimmer of hope for my hips. It's basically the diet for people who like food. Everyone from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstallto wine writer Fiona Beckett has been boring on about fast days, and if they could do it, well, so could I.

So far, I've managed two months. As someone who's never made a habit of weighing themselves, I can only tell you that I think I've lost about 10lb since I started, which includes a two-week period over Easter where I gave myself a bit of a break, but only put back on 1lb.

The odd thing was, after Easter I was impatient to get going again. The 5:2 already feels like a long-term project. It's not difficult to stick to either. After all, if you really want a biscuit, you can always have one tomorrow – a thought I find extremely cheering.

Many people I've spoken to seem to avoid cooking at all on a fast day, reasoning perhaps that it simply puts temptation in their way. Indeed, in her book, the Fast Diet, co-authored with Dr Michael Mosley, whose 2012 BBC Horizon programme on fasting kickstarted interest in the idea, Mimi Spencer advises preparing food in advance, and keeping it simple, "aiming for fast-day flavour without effort".

I couldn't disagree more. For me, the challenge of devising satisfying recipes that fit within the daily 500-kcal limit has kept fast days interesting, and frankly, if you're only going to be eating two small meals a day, heating them up in the microwave makes things even more depressing. Here are a few tips I've found useful so far, and three of my favourite fast-day recipes …

• Low-calorie cooking is all about strong flavours: pungent spices, zesty lemon juice and salty soy sauce will all help to distract your attention from the missing calories, as will lots of garlic and big handfuls of fresh herbs.

• Don't be too hard on yourself. Usually I sniffily avoid artificial sweeteners, but a cold glass of slimline tonic with a slice of lime and plenty of ice goes down a treat when everyone else is glugging wine. I've even been known to indulge in a low-calorie pot of jelly when I'm feeling particularly wild.

• Carbs are rarely worth the calories. A paltry 50g of brown rice takes up over a third of your daily calorie count. Save them for tomorrow and fill up on vegetables and berries instead.

• Pickles such as gherkins (14kcal per 100g) and miso soups (20-30kcal a cup) are your friends for snacks.

• Drink lots. Sparkling water, evil diet drinks and weird and wonderful teas will keep you occupied mid-afternoon.

• Embrace your inner nerd and invest in a set of electronic scales and a calorie-counting book or app, or you'll find it impossible to measure your intake accurately.

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

	Mike Atherton copped criticism during Australia's dominance in the 1990s: "It is not easy to be bold, consistent or whatever else is deemed topical, when you are losing matches" Paul McGregor / © ESPNcricinfo Ltd  Enlarge
Related Links Ed Smith : What can colonoscopies teach us about cricket? Players/Officials: Mike Atherton | Michael Clarke Teams: Australia | England

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.