All posts by n8rngtd.top

Bowlers have often got the short shrift in the IPL. This countdown winds the clock back to ten near-miraculous death overs from some of the tournament’s best

ESPNcricinfo staff02-Apr-2017Mustafizur Rahman, Sunrisers Hyderabad v Kolkata Knight Riders, Eliminator, 2016Equation – 32 needed off 12 ballsWould the champions have become champions without their cutter man? As ever, Mustafizur Rahman was saved for the slog and even a big-game team like Kolkata Knight Riders couldn’t find a way past him. The first ball of his 19th over was that despicable slower one. Somehow R Satish avoided being caught. The third was a yorker that was through Jason Holder before he knew what was happening. With 32 runs to defend – and a spot in the final on the line – Mustafizur gave away only eight and his partner Bhuvneshwar Kumar did the rest from the other end.Tim Southee, Chennai Super Kings v Kolkata Knight Riders, 2011Equation – 9 needed off 6 ballsAlmost exactly five years years ago, the first IPL match after India had become world champions, ended up with a certain MS Dhoni masterminding a win in a tight chase. This time, his contribution was by picking the right man to do the job, perfecting his field placements and directing Tim Southee to deliver a series of toe-crushers over the course of an incredible final over. Southee stepped up, first with the wicket of Laxmi Ratan Shukla and then followed it up with wicked yorkers Knight Riders could not even sneak singles from. In the end, Dhoni ended another night when he could do no wrong, this time vicariously through Southee’s perfect execution.Praveen Kumar, Delhi Daredevils v Gujarat Lions, 2016Equation – 18 runs needed off 12 balls“Some of the boys came up to me and asked me to try the slower ball, but I thought there were chances that it could have been swung over the ropes.” So he backed himself to bowl the most difficult delivery in all of cricket : the yorker. He went for them ceaselessly, nailed them two times, and somehow managed to keep even Chris Morris, who had just hammered the fastest fifty of the 2016 season quiet. Delhi Daredevils were on the verge of a fantastic come-from-behind win. But they were never quite able to take that final step across the finish line thanks to Praveen Kumar.Shane Warne speaks to Kamran Khan ahead of the Super Over•AFPKamran Khan, Kolkata Knight Riders v Rajasthan Royals, 2009Equation – 7 runs needed off 6 ballsHe was born in 1991 – right around the time his captain made his first-class debut. Kamran Khan and Shane Warne. The son of a woodcutter and a superstar of world cricket. The 2009 IPL was one for the romantics and there was no greater high than this match in which the 18-year old rookie was given the ball in the final over and asked to defend seven runs. Kamran did so by dismissing the set batsman Sourav Ganguly for 46 off the penultimate ball of the match and completed a run-out thereafter to secure Rajasthan Royals a tie. Then he came back to bowl the Super Over to seal the win.James Faulkner, Kolkata Knight Riders v Rajasthan Royals, 2014Equation – 16 runs needed off 12 ballsIt was exactly 11 months before the best day in James Faulkner’s sporting career, and it went all right too. Maybe not as good as a Man of the Match performance at the MCG in a World Cup final, but he did change the course of an IPL match almost single-handedly. Kolkata Knight Riders needed 16 to win off 12 balls when Faulkner came on and he knocked out Suryakumar Yadav first-ball, toppled Robin Uthappa and Vinay Kumar’s stumps and set up a tie that would eventually lead to his team’s victory in the Super Over. Rajasthan Royals had been the runaway train, heading straight to Beatdown City. But their star allrounder basically yawned, stretched, checked his watch, flicked the switch that changed
the tracks and made them purr into the Victory Terminal instead.Rusty Theron, 2 for 9 in the Super Over, Chennai Super Kings v Kings XI Punjab, 2010Equation – Restrict Super Kings in the Super OverNot many in India knew of the man who runs in like a medium-pacer and bowls scorching yorkers. This night changed all that. Given the actual Super Over itself, Rusty Theron produced a beautiful slower ball that snuck into Matthew Hayden’s castle and took over its throne and then – right after a scarring blow over the midwicket boundary – he forced Suresh Raina to top edge one and has him caught. Kings XI Punjab made only 136 and they still won because they believed in Theron when few in the world had even heard of him.Vinay Kumar, Kolkata Knight Riders v Royal Challengers Bangalore, 2014Equation – 9 runs needed off 6 ballsQuestion. What is the short end of a stick? Bowling to AB de Villiers and Albie Morkel with only eight runs in the bank. Question. Who was
stuck with it? Vinay Kumar. Ah, you don’t have to go on. We know what would have happened. No seriously. Stop it. It’s fine. Don’t waste your breath. Wait, what? Vinay won it? How? He got AB out? What? How? Did the universe tilt on its axis suddenly and throw him off balance? Oh, the Chris Lynn catch. On the midwicket boundary. When he slipped as he raced to his left, then had to propel his body backwards, off his
knees, to grab the ball. Almost forgot about that. Maybe the universe did tilt off its axis ’cause nothing could explain that fielding effort.RP Singh, Deccan Chargers v Royal Challengers Bangalore, Final, 2009Equation – 15 runs needed off 6 ballsAdam Gilchrist was faced with that question in the biggest match of the IPL – “Who ya gonna call?” Now RP Singh is about as far removed from a Ghostbuster as a man has ever been but, in top form, he could certainly summon some scary thoughts in the batsman’s mind. His efforts were instrumental in India becoming the first World T20 champions in 2007 and, back in the country of that triumph, the left-arm quick looked like he hadn’t missed a beat. He was given the 18th over in a chase of 144 and gave away only four runs, the result of his canny changes of pace and not offering any room to the batsman. So it was essentially his right to come back to bowl the 20th over and seal the title for Deccan Chargers. He conceded only one boundary in his entire spell.Morne Morkel’s penultimate over helped Delhi pull off an improbable win, even by T20 standards•AFPMorne Morkel, Delhi Daredevils v Rajasthan Royals, 2012Equation – 15 runs needed off 12 ballsYou come on to bowl in the death, but the opposition have nine wickets in hand – wickets, and only need to chase at a
required rate as silly as 7.5 – and you win the game for your team. That is the devastating ability Morne Morkel has. Imagine his yorkers
for a second. Off that chest-on, high-arm action, coming down from at least 10 feet. It’s disorienting. Imagine his bouncers. Climbing up to
your throat off a length that when other bowlers hit barely even comes up to the ribs. His height, his pace, his accuracy all combined
seamlessly in this game to produce one of the most memorable game-changing overs in all of IPL history. Oh, did we mention he took out Brad Hodge with his last ball?Amit Mishra, Pune Warriors v Sunrisers Hyderabad, 2013Equation – 14 runs needed off 12 ballsIt was the stuff of high fantasy the kind kids have when they are out in the backyard, creating a world where they become the best player in
their country. A hat-trick to kill the match. A hat-trick to win the match. Pune Warriors needed 14 off 12 balls and they had their captain Angelo Mathews at the crease. That was a problem for Sunrisers Hyderabad. So Amit Mishra took care of it. Then it was just the tail and they don’t like legspinners. Especially legspinners who have a superb googly. One by one Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Rahul Sharma and Ashok Dinda swung hard and one by one they fell as Mishra covered himself in the kind of glory that is so scarcely believable it might never happen again.

As India’s expanded backroom, with specialist coaches, takes charge for the Sri Lanka tour, we look at five instances when international cricketers benefitted from such coaching

ESPNcricinfo staff12-Jul-2017Steve O’Keefe bowled Australia to a famous win over India in Pune after a session with Sridharan Sriram•Associated PressSridharan Sriram’s role in Steven O’Keefe’s match-winning spell, 2017A month before their tour of India, Australia appointed former India allrounder Sridharan Sriram as their spin bowling consultant for the Test series. Sriram had been with Australia’s A teams before, during which time he had worked with Steven O’Keefe. After bowling a few overs before lunch on day two of the first Test in Pune, O’Keefe told Sriram that he needed to have a bowl with him in the centre. What happened next is history, as O’Keefe ended with match figures of 12 for 70, bundling India out on home turf in three days. As expected, he singled out Sriram for praise, calling him “a big influence, who knows how to bowl in these conditions”.Sanjay Bangar’s influence on the Indian cricket team, 2017Bangar has been credited by India’s batsmen and bowlers alike during his stint with the team. First, Umesh Yadav thanked him for assistance with his run-up, saying, “Sanjay told me that you were running faster to get that extra pace, affecting my line and length. He told me to enjoy your running so you would have better control”. More recently, Virat Kohli spoke about specialised throwdowns from Bangar and Raghu, the team’s throwdown specialist, at speeds of 145-150 kph. Ahead of the Champions Trophy final against Pakistan, Kohli said, “the preparations we have got are exactly like a match scenario, and a lot of credit goes to them. On a personal level, I can say that it’s because of these two that the last two years I have had whatever improvements in my batting”Saqlain Mushtaq’s coaching came in for high praise from Moeen Ali, following the latter’s maiden Test 10-wicket haul•AFPMoeen Ali dedicates his Lord’s ten-for to Saqlain Mushtaq, 2017After picking up his first ten-for in Test cricket, Moeen dedicated it to Saqlain, who was part of England’s coaching set-up in 2016. “I learnt a lot [in the winter] speaking to Saqi. It made things a lot clearer for myself and I’d like to dedicate this to him”, he said after doing the 2000 runs – 100 wickets double in the same match.Mark Ramprakash gets a thumbs-up from Joe Root, 2016Root came out of a rare lean patch by smashing a career-best 254 against Pakistan last year. After the game, he admitted to being “really wound up”, frustrated by a series of single-digit scores, and thanked Ramprakash, England’s batting coach. Ramprakash had asked him if he was “mentally in the right place to play Test cricket at the minute”, after coming to a conclusion that Root’s game looked in “good order”. Root said that the comment first hurt him, then made him think about it, and ended up boosting his confidence.Michael di Venuto’s advice draws Steven Smith’s praiseDi Venuto’s fabled line – “Smudge, you’re not out of form, you’re just out of runs” – was cited by Smith as among the biggest reasons for his extended purple patch between 2014 and 2015. Smith went on to hammer nearly 1500 runs in the next 12 Tests at a remarkable average of 77.84. Speaking to later, di Venuto admitted that it was a “bluff from my playing days when I wasn’t scoring anything but feeling alright in the nets”. With Smith’s preparations on point, di Venuto elaborated that “part of the thing with that comment is to stop the player from worrying about my hands, my head, my feet, other things about my batting, other than just going out there, backing your skills, watching the balls and making good decisions.”

The world has waited for the spells of 2010 from Mohammad Amir but – for a host of reasons – they have failed to really materialise. However, all is not lost

Osman Samiuddin in Dubai06-Oct-2017The memory – why do you exist? To torment? To trap? To tease? To distort? To colour today and inflate tomorrow?What is it that you remember most? Likely it is something from the first career. That over to Tilakaratne Dilshan, with enough energy in it to big bang a universe into being. Maybe the banana that bowled Mitchell Johnson, a dismissal that, aesthetically, is perfect. The double dismissal of Shane Watson was his favourite, the umpire’s finger going up to confirm the lbw appeal before, somehow, he was also bowled. The spell of reverse in Melbourne – left arm, reversing at the MCG? It’s like he was daring you to not remember that. That crazy five-wicket over in St Lucia, in which he took three?Mohammad Amir, is this really you?Don’t get me wrong. There have been occasions when this Amir has been Amir. The Asia Cup spell against India, or its longer, more fulfilling offspring at The Oval in June; a few byte-sized spells in side games, or county matches enhanced by GIF-dom; and he did also pick up his career-best Test figures at Kingston in April. These are legitimate bursts of quality fast bowling, fit to include in the early Amir collection.But the overwhelming sense from this Amir has been of a man standing on the edge of a cliff and leaning. And leaning further, but neither falling down or bringing out the wings and taking off. Frustration is too narrow an emotion; add to it at the very least the endless and continuing anticipation that now, or now, or, no, really, this time, he will burst through this wall of non-wicket-taking and be the Amir that was promised, for instance, during the first half of Friday, August 27, 2010, when he ripped through England. was swing bowling.Until he picked up Sadeera Samarawickrama on the first evening of this second Test, he had gone 64.3 overs without a Test wicket. Three-hundred and eighty-seven deliveries. That is more than entire careers. And it isn’t an anomalous stretch. Since his return to international cricket in January 2016, among opening bowlers, he stands second from bottom (among bowlers with at least ten wickets) in terms of strike rate. The only man below him – Pakistanis will love this – is Ishant Sharma. Above him are men such as Alzarri Joseph, Suranga Lakmal and Nuwan Pradeep. With all due respect, and all that.How?We mustn’t forget the drops, 14 of them (in Tests alone) now after the latest spill in Abu Dhabi last week. Count them as wickets and, by the end of the first evening, he would still only be 24th on the list. He walked off tonight, his final over of the evening incomplete because of a shin problem, head down, tired, a solitary wicket in the series, as if aware of such stats, exhausted perhaps by the thought of them, pulled down by all the drops and the injustice.For it is not that he has bowled badly. He has bowled good spells, and it is still amazing how, after a five-year absence, he is able to bowl the spells, and as much of them, as he does at all. Maybe it’s the drops colouring the whole idea of his lucklessness, but after some spells, you’re left with the impression that he beats the bat more than other bowlers. It probably doesn’t stand to analytical scrutiny, and neither does it ultimately mean much but it is becoming his story.What about the spells he should be bowling, the spells memory dictates he should?In Dubai he began well. A little later he was striving too much and went for runs. Then he disappeared. Then he came back and took a wicket. Then he disappeared. Then he came back with the second new ball. Then he went off. He was short when he needed to be full. He was full when he could’ve been pulling it back a bit. But listen, it is hot, ridiculously hot, and these pitches are not hot at all and, with no atmosphere to speak of, it can all get debilitating.Azhar Mahmood, the bowling coach, provided a useful diagnosis later, not just of Amir’s work this evening or this series, but actually since his return. “He’s a wicket-taker and we work on that,” he said.”Unfortunately when you play three formats, too much one-day cricket, your length is slightly shorter. If you see guys playing just Tests – their length is slightly different, like [Vernon] Philander, they are fuller. But the guys who play all three, their lengths are slightly on shorter side.”I want him to bowl fuller with the new ball especially – when he bowls fuller he is more threatening.”That is a thing. You remember how it used to be with Amir? Curves is what it was, not these straight lines and angles. It could be said that he was a dreamer as a bowler, an idealist – throw it up there and what’s the worst that could happen? A boundary? How’s that a price when the best result is batsmen at your feet and the world in your hands? Those dreams are gone, and only pragmatism remains.Dismiss it as hokum, it’s fine. Focus on real things. People talk of his wrist not being right all the time. Or that he doesn’t get as close to the stumps as he used to. Rumours snake around that he’s thinking of giving up the longer format, rumours he has denied. But they’re rumours. They’re not around without reason and they won’t go away easily.It could be just memory grifting us – alas it exists, above all, to be questioned – into remembering him forever as Amir, interrupted. We remember that English summer, and how rich it was with potential. But we forget that for whatever reason, the ball swung big enough that summer, for everyone, for it to be unusual. And that before then, in between all the memories, Amir was a young kid, still learning how to bowl and that there were stretches where he was merely ok. And it’s not as if he had a chance to learn much more while he was banned, when let alone bowl competitively, he couldn’t even train and learn among professional cricketers or coaches. If he wasn’t fully formed when he left as a bowler, how can he be now, not two years back into competitive cricket?And then maybe – and this isn’t a thought as devoid of hope as it may come across – we’ll understand that he isn’t the bowler of that memory but instead a bowler we are still in the process of discovering.

A look at how Star’s new $944 million contract for the rights to broadcast Indian cricket compares with other big deals

ESPNcricinfo staff05-Apr-2018A bigger per-match value than the IPL dealStar India bought the rights to televise Indian cricket from 2018-2023 for $944 million. That works out to approximately $189 million a year, a 51.2% jump from the $125 million a year they paid for the same rights from 2012-18. The Indian Premier League still fetches a much higher per-year value, $508 million, but the IPL has more games than the Indian cricket team in a year. So, Star paid $2.55 billion for at least 300 IPL games, but for Indian cricket, they have paid nearly a billion dollars for 102 games.ESPNcricinfo LtdBCCI earnings from TV deals highest among boardsThe new deal means the BCCI will now earn a combined $697 million per year for IPL and Indian cricket rights. This is much bigger than the $287 million a year the ECB will earn for the rights to broadcast cricket, including domestic tournaments and leagues, in the UK. The ECB also earns some money from broadcasters in other countries, such as Sony Pictures Networks in India, but even with those included the amount will not match what the BCCI gets.ESPNcricinfo LtdIndian cricket competing with big global sporting brandsThe $9.26 million Star will pay to broadcast each India match at home is not much less than the amount paid to broadcast one match in the English Premier League. While the NFL still has a much higher per-game value, the other two big American leagues, the NBA and MLB, now actually cost less to broadcast a game than Indian cricket.ESPNcricinfo LtdA near-75% increase in eight yearsThe value of Indian cricket has risen by 73.39% since Nimbus paid $436 million for four years in 2010. Go back to 1999, and Doordarshan paid just $54 million for the rights to broadcast Indian cricket for five years. Now that amount would fetch you the rights for about six matches.ESPNcricinfo LtdStar bets big on cricketWith this deal, Star has now spent more than $5 billion on cricket rights since 2012. It’s significant that the same company has valued the IPL as more lucrative than ICC events and sees India games as right up there with World Cup games in terms of value.ESPNcricinfo Ltd

Plenty, and then some more, as we found out in February

Andrew Fidel Fernando01-Mar-2018Test cricket’s decades-long demise continued at breakneck velocity yet again this month, with many warning that the format is not merely dying, it is dying more, dying faster, and – now that Ireland and Afghanistan are involved – dying in more nations than was ever thought possible. But who is responsible for this planet-wide butchering of the format? Can Test cricket’s legitimate offspring – ODIs and T20 internationals – expect their inheritance soon, or will the uncouth, bastard love-children that are the franchise T20 tournaments carve up the estate instead? And just how much dying can Test cricket really do anyway? The Briefing takes you deep.A spirited decline
Among the many wringing hands about cricket’s future is Moeen Ali, who has expressed “fear” for the future of the long format, based on his experiences in Australia. How could you fail to worry, after all, following the latest Ashes, for which no fewer than 867,002 tickets (the most in 80 years) were sold? How sad it must have been to see such multitudes turn up – many in fancy dress and high spirits – to watch Test cricket in such energetic throes of emperishment. How gut-wrenching to see the sport disco so vibrantly towards its grave.The sucker
Let us mourn for a Mr Dinesh Chandimal, who once was an attacking batsman suited for the exhilarating world of franchise T20, but like an idiot has recently become a very defensive sort and thus wedded himself to this doomed long format.Hang on, what do you mean he used his Test form to propel himself into the limited-overs captaincy and has just led Sri Lanka to victory across formats in Bangladesh?ESPNcricinfo LtdAnother pink-ball party
WICB will become the sixth board to host a day-night Test, when Sri Lanka come to Barbados in June. As the format moves evermore into the night, could it be that it is not dead, but undead?Remorseless dropouts
Adil Rashid and Alex Hales became the two latest players to plunge daggers into Test cricket’s bedridden, life-support-addled body, announcing that they would refrain from first-class cricket in the impending county season. Shame. Not because they are effectively giving up the most challenging format for the shorter ones – no, plenty of cricketers have done that before. Shame, because unlike the long-format quitters before them, these two have not even had the decency to pay empty lip service to the wondrous glory of the Test game, with its five-day picket-fence ebb-flows and its cherry-red ball stains upon player groins and buttocks. Rashid and Hales have neither bothered to invent long-term injuries that prevent them – regretfully – from partaking in the best of the formats, nor at any stage spoken of magnanimously making way for the next generation of red-ballers. Rashid instead just said that his “heart is not there” and Hales has merely suggested that his decision “wasn’t taken lightly or on the spur of the moment”. I mean, throw in a hollow “nothing has given me more satisfaction than to represent England in whites” or something, at the very least.The Briefing award for tokenism
Sunil Narine, meanwhile, in choosing to play the Pakistan Super League over helping West Indies qualify for the World Cup, has said that playing for West Indies remains his “ultimate goal” and he will rejoin the team the moment he regains some “self-belief”. See, Adil and Alex – this is how it’s done.When you break up with someone, you should do them the courtesy of saying “it’s not you, it’s me”•Getty ImagesDave Cameron’s diagnosis
In other news, WICB president Dave Cameron has this month pinned the cricketing decline of Jamaica not on the WICB’s horrendous recent record of managing its players, but on “female PE teachers” in Jamaican schools, who “don’t know cricket” because it is “very complicated”. Enormous congratulations are thus due to Stafanie Taylor and Co, whose winning of the most-recent World T20 trophy is even more impressive for apparently having come despite their indifference towards the head-smarting rules of their sport.The embarrassing dad
Think you had it bad when your parents turned up to check on you in school? Think you suffered when you father cracked terrible jokes in front of friends you were trying to impress? Well, spare a thought for Tagenarine Chanderpaul, who was batting for Guyana in one of the biggest games of his 21-year-old life – the semi-final of the Super50 one-day tournament – when his dad Shivnarine turned up and ruined everything. Tage had worked himself nicely into the innings, having hit 12 off as many balls, before a blunderous straight drive from Shiv ricocheted off the bowler’s boot and into the non-striker’s stumps. Having run out his son, Shiv would proceed to lose his own wicket soon after, and Guyana would go on to lose the game.Next month on The Briefing:
– Unveiling plans for his future political career, David Warner details his pro-literacy “Speak English” policy.- Moeen Ali profoundly concerned for profitability of superhero films: “I mean, has even a single person gone to see ?”- “Shut up, Dad. I don’t need to go to the bathroom before going out to bat.”
Tagenarine’s plea for some space in the dressing room.

His entry might mirror Wasim Akram’s in terms of game-time, but Afridi has been gently lowered into the top level, rather than thrown into the pit

Osman Samiuddin03-Dec-2018It never gets old does it? Throwing someone who would ordinarily be barely out of school into a pit populated by men, gnarled, cynical, seen-it-all men, hardened men who know defeat as a deep wound and triumph as fleeting sensation, and see how they go. What’s the worst that can happen right? They’ll flounder and be gone, not knowing then what they will eventually come to know, that it was too early, or that they weren’t good enough. The best, on the other hand, well that’ll be some life – not just career, but a .No cricket nation has been quite so brazen about this as Pakistan, providers to Test cricket of ten of the 20 youngest players the format has seen. On Monday they threw Shaheen Shah Afridi into this pit, although let’s be real, the Sheikh Zayed stadium, genteel and calm and empty, is hardly a pit.The broadcasters showed a list during play of the least amount of first-class matches played by a Pakistani before Test debut and it was an instructive one. Afridi had only played three before today, and in the first he had taken, spectacularly, 8-39.

Look through the names on that table. Yasir Ali, who literally did not own a pair of cricket boots when he was picked on a wild hunch by Aamir Sohail back in 2003 when Pakistan were sweeping away the 90s generation; or Aamer Nazir, who swung the ball in so big and should’ve had a hat-trick on ODI debut but who still hadn’t figured out his run-up; or Hasan Raza, the bottom line in the worst that does happen when they’re too young.If you expand that list to players who have appeared in four first-class matches before their Test debut, you rope in Shadab Khan and Hanif Mohammad. So two from the ten went on to become bona fide legends, one – Tauseef Ahmed – ended up with a solid career and two are just starting out. The rest – thank you for the reality check.But the list – or at least the presence of Afridi and Shadab in it – is a misleading one. No young or inexperienced pup is into anything anymore. They’re nowadays gently lowered into it, readier for it than ever before. They emerge gleaming, from pathways and age-group cricket, already moving in bubbles, already familiar with their opponents who have arrived in similar manner.It doesn’t mean the same thing anymore that Afridi played just three first-class matches before this Test and Wasim Akram played three first-class matches before his debut. For starters, Afridi’s already appeared in the heat of international competition 13 times, operating right at the coalface of bowling final overs defending not much. He’s played in an U-19 World Cup, in an U-19 Asia Cup, in U-19 ODIs in Australia and New Zealand and he has a whole season of the PSL behind him.He’s arrived ready with standard template answers to media questions, like: “I just focus on what I can do with my bowling and not worry so much about the batsman,” when he was asked today about bowling to Kane Williamson. Akram had one first-class game before his first ODI. Afridi’s 18 and left-arm and quick and three first-class matches like Akram was, but they’re nothing like each other even in these outlines.You would know way more about Afridi too now, more than you would’ve ever known about Akram, or even Yasir Ali when he debuted. Many of you would’ve seen the best of Afridi’s bowling long before he made his international debut.And so it’s no surprise that his debut lacked that quality of unexpectedness, of not knowing quite what you were going to get with this young kid. He bowled well because we now know he does bowl well. Even he knew he’d be okay. “No, I’ve been playing for three months here now, I’ve been playing ODIs and T20s so I didn’t feel nervous. I knew how I had to bowl, how I have been bowling.”But there was still something refreshing about it because, in the Misbah-ul-Haq years, we got used to this not happening. Three teenagers debuted in Misbah’s long captaincy, the last of whom – Shadab – felt like one of those gambles you make when it doesn’t really matter. The Misbah years were about old, forgotten, rejected men having their day in the sunshine. When Pakistan had to rejig their attack in 2014, for example, after Saeed Ajmal’s action was found to be illegal, the men they picked barely had any Tests between them, but they had hundreds of first-class matches.And also, there is still something very coltish about Afridi. It still doesn’t seem long ago that his brother Riaz was playing the only Test he’d play and taking the only two Test wickets he’d ever take, of Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara; Riaz, who now looks as if he may have eaten three Shaheens for lunch, and who doesn’t feel a figure from that long ago. Shaheen was four years old at the time of that Test, and he says he knows of the Test but of course remembers nothing of it. Riaz, whose dream it has been to see Shaheen play more Tests than he did, was the first person he called on Sunday when he knew he was making his debut. ‘Maintain your lines, lengths and above all, your patience’, he told his kid brother.He is so clearly just a big, gifted kid having the ride of his life, whether he’s taking wickets, seeing catches dropped off his bowling, winning games or just diving around in the field. Even Sarfraz Ahmed, who berates every single one of his bowlers if they miss their length by, say, the skin of an atom, even this Sarfraz gets all gooey like a new father in his handling of Afridi, patiently talking to him, telling him it’s going to be okay, don’t worry about those wides. It makes sense not from calculating that Sarfraz is 13 years older than Afridi, but from understanding that Afridi hadn’t turned six when Sarfraz was doing grown-up things like winning the U-19 World Cup.And for all that we do know about him, it doesn’t take the exhilaration away from his rise. It’s just over a year ago that he made that first-class debut. Now here he is, bowling like he’s been bowling in this side for three years, not three months. He may not feel the nerves on debut, but sometimes when he finds himself alone in a room it hits him just how much has happened in a year and how strange this all is. Ninety-nine percent of us have no idea what that might feel like.Somebody asked him, after his first day of Test cricket, about fame. He was a fast bowler after all, and his surname was Afridi and the other Afridi (not Riaz but the other) had a huge fan following.”I have no fan following, nobody knows me,” he said, already blushing, those deep-set eyes disappearing even further into his own face. “He is Shahid bhai…”And what about all the girls who used to call Shahid bhai, how about that kind of attention…”Please, ask me something else,” he said, blushing even more, smiling and wishing the ground would swallow him whole, looking like a kid the only time this whole day.

Faf du Plessis’ team is all about breaking stereotypes, and if that means going into a Cape Town Test without a spinner for only the third time in 25 years, so be it

Liam Brickhill in Cape Town03-Jan-2019Castle Lager picked up the sponsor’s tab for this Test series against Pakistan, and the outfield at Newlands is adorned with the beer company’s #SmashTheLabel campaign ads. The gist is to break down the stereotypes South Africa’s disparate groups and peoples have created for each other, and using the hashtag you can nominate someone on social media to win a free ticket to the cricket, provided they’ve never been to a match before.Castle, and Cricket South Africa, are trying to attract people other than the stereotypical cricket fan to the ground. The common or garden Capetonian is pigeonholed as a laidback, dope-smoking, driving-slowly-in-the-fast-lane-on-the-way-to-the-beach, knocking-off-at-3-o’clock-on a-Friday-to-go-surfing, cooler-than-thou hipster. An afternoon stroll around the ground showed that a lot of the people attending this match still fit the cliche. But a whole lot didn’t, and South African cricket is slowly but surely stretching beyond its traditional boundaries. The recent
Mzansi Super League was a signifier of that transformation, and South African cricket crowds – Newlands included – are increasingly diverse.That wasn’t the only label smashed today. The stereotypical Newlands track has a bit of wobble and a five-for for Vernon Philander in it, and starts to turn on day four. Three quicks and a spinner is the standard arrangement for both visiting and hosting teams here, and examples of any deviation from that formula are few and far between. South Africa had no specialist spinner in their XI here five years ago against Australia, but that plan backfired as JP Duminy and Dean Elgar bowled a combined 61 overs in that game, and South Africa lost by 245 runs.You’d have to go back to well before the turn of the millennium to find another Newlands Test that South Africa played without a specialist spinner – or someone like Nicky Boje or Robin Peterson, who perhaps weren’t quite ‘specialist’ in the truest sense, but were the next best thing in the South African context. So conducive can the Newlands track be to spin that Paul Adams once opened the bowling here, against England way back in 2000. Paul Harris won a Player-of-the-Match award here, for goodness sake.South Africa thus broke down a major stereotype at this ground when they decided on four fast bowlers this morning, which is a combination normally reserved for the Wanderers or Centurion. Indeed, Philander has played 55 of his 56 Tests with either Dale Steyn or Kagiso Rabada to share the new ball with, but day one at Newlands was only the seventh time all three had operated together, and the very first time that they had all been together in an attack wholly centered around pace.Dale Steyn made the opening incision•AFPThe decision to go against the grain in selection clearly worked. Steyn and Philander. Rabada and Olivier. Rabada and Steyn. Philander and Olivier. No matter which way South Africa’s four quicks were combined, there was no let-up in the pressure exerted on Pakistan, and they were blasted out by tea.Philander is regarded as the undisputed King of Cape Town, but perhaps that’s not a label that fits either: Steyn, Makhaya Ntini and Shaun Pollock have all taken more wickets here. Or maybe it does: Philander took his 50th wicket in his 10th Newlands Test this morning, while Pollock took 51 in 11 and Ntini 53 in 13. Steyn has 70 but has played five more Tests than Philander here, and Philander has, by far, the best strike rate of the four, taking a wicket every 35.7 balls under the mountain.Philander is part of a South African squad that is embracing change, and smashing labels along the way. Indeed, they’ve come a long way since the aloof, burly-man clique of the noughties that had a reputation for making the team rookie feel like a fuzzy-lipped 13-year-old being hazed into his first day of big school.Things have changed. The world has moved on. And the label no longer fits. Current captain Faf du Plessis welcomed the uncapped Zubayr Hamza to the Test squad with an invite to come and stand in the slips if he gets a chance to take the field as 12th man.”I’m looking forward to him coming on to the field as 12th man and getting one of those high ones that just test you as a youngster, just to see where you are with a bit of swirl in the wind here in Cape Town,” du Plessis said of Hamza. “Hopefully he takes it. He’s a good fielder. I made a joke with him yesterday, to say is he ready to come and field in the slips there with the big boys. And he said yes, he’ll come, he’s ready for it.”One doesn’t like to stereotype, but it’s hard to imagine the Smith-Kallis-de Villiers cordon inviting a fresh-out-the-box greenhorn into the slips with them.But I digress. Life is different under Faf. As a captain, he is not above a bit of 21st century PDA to thank his players for a good performance, as when he said he’d give Steyn a kiss on the cheek to congratulate him on the Test bowling record, or when he enveloped Dean Elgar – lying prone having held a blinder at third slip – with a bear hug this morning.Tabraiz Shamsi, who was not at Newlands but was clearly watching, tweeted: “U will know you’ve found ur soul mate when u find somebody who hugs u the way @faf1307 hugs his bowlers when they take an important wicket lol.” Du Plessis is willing to experiment, smash labels, and be different. Hell, he’ll even play four quicks on a pitch that traditionally has something for the spinners if he needs to.

Every venue has been injected with a bit of oomph to pull crowds and make some noise, but it’s slightly different in rugby country

Sharda Ugra in Cardiff31-May-2019Every venue opener at the World Cup has been injected with a bit of oomph to pull crowds and make some noise. The Oval had England and South Africa, Nottingham was given Pakistan and West Indies, Bristol is where Australia show up, Southampton will host India’s first game and Manchester opens with India-Pakistan.In that regard, Cardiff could complain. Its opening fixture – New Zealand vs Sri Lanka – can only politely be described as an undercard to the rest of the event unfurling in a panorama of runs, wickets, sixes, beastly bouncers and freaky catches across England. The least they could have done for Cardiff for New Zealand-Sri Lanka was turn on the lights. The tournament’s first day-night fixture will be played on Saturday, but not here. That will be in Bristol, 25-odd miles east as the crow flies, between Australia and Afghanistan.Well, humph. Cardiff, we must remember, happens to be the capital of another country in the United Kingdom. Wales could cite the scheduling of their World Cup coming-out party as reason enough to leave the Union if they could be bothered. The Welsh are a generous people, though, currently revelling in their rugby success (unbeaten in the Six Nations, No. 2 in the world) and World Cup city initiatives have involved as many famous Welsh people as could be roped in. Rugby legend Shane Williams, most recently famous for captaining a team at the world’s highest altitude touch rugby match near Everest Base Camp, has been involved in fronting events welcoming the Cup to Cardiff.To be fair, on the record sheet, outside of India and Australia, it is New Zealand and Sri Lanka that are cricket’s two most consistent teams across this millennium’s World Cups. Sri Lanka have made two finals out of four as well as a semi-final spot in South Africa 2003, while New Zealand made two semi-finals and the 2015 final.But New Zealand are doing what New Zealand always do in big competitions, flying under the radar, self-deprecatory in performance before things get serious. In the World Cup warm-ups, they shot out pre-tournament favourites India for 179 and then conceded 400+ against the West Indies and got to within 90 in the chase.Yes, they are ranked No. 4 with respectable tournament odds that reflect their capabilities. In terms of being the sentimental favourites, the New Zealanders have been displaced by the New West Indies, who are stirring up old memories. Kane Williamson does not bristle, and when asked to respond about the low expectations around his team and, added with a smile, “some people may be saying something about us. I’m not sure. We’re talking about us.”IDI via Getty ImagesThe issue around Saturday’s match is not about New Zealand generating far too little clamour in the run-up to their World Cup. It is their opposition who are the underwhelming half of the Saturday undercard.Between the 2015 World Cup final and today, Sri Lanka have won four out of 20 series played (against West Indies, Bangladesh, Ireland and Zimbabwe), lost 55 out of 85 ODI matches and been through six captains. They are now onto their seventh in Dimuth Karunaratne, who must lead three of those deposed captains, Angelo Mathews, Lasith Malinga and Thisara Perera in the squad.Sri Lanka’s team manager Ashantha De Mel is also its chief selector, a man who has stripped the coach Chandika Hathurasingha of having any say in the final XI. Please, Sri Lanka are the oldest team in the World Cup, only six of the 15-member squad played in Sri Lanka’s last ODI series, against South Africa in March. In the same chaotic interim, the Sri Lankans – their Test team that is – pulled off the greatest performance by an Asian team in South Africa, winning the Test series 2-0; they were led by Karunaratne, who was rewarded with a return into the ODI squad after four years – as captain.The absurdity of it all led a Sri Lankan journalist to confidently say that his team could most certainly hope to win the prize for the World Cup’s best, and most ecologically-conscious, team jersey. With turtles. The worry that remains, though, is that Sri Lanka will struggle to make an impression in the event with a motley crew of oldish players, with scratchy records and with doomsday propositions being made about wooden spoons.Karunaratne admitted it “was not easy” being in his role as opener and captain after having played very little limited overs cricket (he had signed a county deal with Hampshire before being named World Cup captain) but saw his team’s World Cup mash-up as a “positive thing.” “You need to prove yourself. Every time, you have to be hungry. The new faces (in the team) they want to do well to perform, to stay in the team. Everyone wants to do well… I have lots of experienced guys who played World Cup before, and I think these are the key factors.”Whatever they do on the field in the competition, Sri Lanka have certainly confused their opposition. When England captain Eoin Morgan was asked about the surprise package of the competition he said, “Sri Lanka have got ten new members – don’t they? Sri Lanka have picked a couple of guys who I haven’t played and I’ve been playing for ten years. I think that’s the surprise for me.”It was Williamson who put Saturday into perspective “I don’t know how much the past really counts as we come into a tournament. It is on the day… We know the Sri Lankan side is a little bit different to the one we played at home, but we have no doubt they’re a tough side.” Even if Williamson was saying so to keep things on even keel, all that Cardiff’s World Cup needs from Saturday is for boats to be rocked or shots fired.

Another selection crisis on the eve of a major campaign, but would the ECB have acted had the news not broken?

Andrew Miller29-Apr-2019Perhaps, for Alex Hales, this is the bucket of cold water over the head that his career has been begging for for years. Glory should have been there to be grasped this summer, but Hales’ idiocy has seen to it that he’ll be wracked only with regret while his team-mates take centre stage in May, June and July.Leaving aside for a moment the wider implications for England’s World Cup bid, the situation is a personal tragedy for Hales, the circumstances of which will lean ever more heavily into the “duty of care” aspect of the ECB’s policy regarding recreational drugs.If, as has been suggested, Hales has been struggling since the Bristol trial, amid the divulgence of both his unsavoury role in the night’s proceedings, and of details of his personal life that would not have come to light but for that new-found notoriety, then the punitive nature of the ECB’s decision will do little to aid his state of mind.He will therefore need close monitoring and support – from the PCA, from Nottinghamshire, and from the England team from which he has been so summarily drop-kicked – to ensure that the slippery slope, on which his two positive drugs tests already indicate he has stepped, does not become exponentially steeper in the coming weeks.But, as England’s director of cricket Ashley Giles implied in coming to his decision on Hales, such personal issues are – frankly – an irrelevance hereon in. The only things that really matter to the ECB right now – in these final, squeaky-bum moments before four years of hard planning are put to the test – are the “best interests of the team, to ensure they are free from any distractions and able to focus on being successful on the pitch”.Well, in that respect, England were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t – stick with Hales and risk contagion, with the summer’s agenda hijacked by off-field issues, or take the hard line, and plough themselves once again into selection chaos on the eve of their biggest forthcoming campaign.This , after all, is how England World Cup campaigns are meant to pan out – amid rising panic and a fusillade of knee-jerks, whether that be (and this is but a limited sample) the ditching of Nick Knight for Nasser Hussain on the eve of the 1999 tournament, the carpeting of Andrew Flintoff post-pedalo in 2007, or the ditching of Alastair Cook just weeks before the ill-fated 2015 event.It’s another ballsy call from Giles, a man who has cultivated an improbably hard image in his brief tenure as England’s managing director. In his very first press conference at Lord’s, he decided that the team’s love of playing football as a warm-up needed to come under scrutiny – a strange hill to choose to die on, if the overseeing of a contented squad is one of your primary aims. Soon after that, and in far more serious circumstances, he was ordering the last-minute withdrawal of Joe Clarke and Tom Kohler-Cadmore from Lions duty following revelations in the Alex Hepburn rape trial.And it was also Giles who sanctioned the early departure of Paul Farbrace as England assistant coach – a decision that was seen to be “less disruptive” than having him move on to Warwickshire after the Ashes, as originally planned. One wonders whether the England squad might have appreciated Farbrace’s avuncular good cheer in and around the dressing room as the pressure begins to ramp up this summer.Either way, in a season that has been billed as a carnival of cricket, and in which England’s players are being talked up as role models by a board who are desperate to put their sport’s best foot forward in their most significant home campaign of all time, another vital veneer of joy has been sucked from their preparations.That, incidentally, is not a call for the ECB to sanction idiocy, or illegality for that matter. But given that there appear to be protocols in place to tackle the sort of societal issues to which Hales has succumbed, it seems a big call to reach for a punishment beyond the 21-day ban that he is already serving – or indeed to ignore the other measure at their disposal, the four-match suspended ban that still hangs over Hales from the CDC hearing.In a case of curious timing, Hales had been due to link up with England’s World Cup squad for a get-together in Cardiff this past weekend, an event that was sandwiched by the news of his drugs ban breaking on Friday afternoon, and now his sacking from the squad on Monday morning. This makes Giles’ decision seem particularly reactive – the ECB cannot legally sack him, but would they have taken such drastic action had it not been for the story becoming headline news? Surely not. And that begs questions of an entirely different nature.This all has shades of England’s Ashes campaign two winters ago, when Stokes’ removal from that tour, in similarly unilateral circumstances, transformed a long-shot of a tour to a no-hoper.It is not quite the same scenario – Hales is not even in the first XI, after all – but his banishment does appear to be the latest in a series of hairline cracks in the fabric of England’s World Cup squad. There’s no guarantee that they will undermine a structure that, until a fortnight ago, seemed to be the best-prepared England cricket team since the 2010-11 Ashes tourists (another side that recognised the integral value of bench-strength), but the mere knowledge of their existence is a weakness in itself, and one that a plethora of hungry opponents will be eager to exploit.There is, however, one potential up-side to this chaos. After all the squawking in recent weeks from England’s under-pressure seamers, there is now an official vacancy for Jofra Archer in the 15-man World Cup squad, and even if he is not a like-for-like replacement, he is an injection of all-round excellence that England cannot, and surely will not, take for granted anymore.Others will be marching into the spotlight in the coming six ODIs against Ireland and Pakistan – James Vince, fresh from a career-best 190 for Hampshire against Gloucestershire, has been catapulted to the top of the tree, especially now that Sam Billings has been ruled out for the season with a dislocated shoulder.But given that the narrative of the past 12 months has been one of stability and steady progress, Hales’ banishment gives the selectors far more leeway to judge their players on current form rather than past reputation. Their World Cup ambitions are suddenly all up for grabs, for better and undoubtedly for worse.

The way the World Cup final ended highlighted the deep sense of New Zealand’s loss and the cruelty of it all

Osman Samiuddin at Lord's 14-Jul-2019Kane Williamson is a beautiful man, we are all agreed on this. He is also, possibly, not human. Who knows how long it was after the end of a World Cup final that he and his side didn’t lose, twice, that he turned up to try and make sense of a game that may never make sense to anybody, not those who played it, not those who witnessed it, and not those tasked to document it? But he tried, which is what makes him not human.Because if he was like you and I, he may not have turned up for a start. Why would you when you have not lost a World Cup final and are still not the world champions? Forget the boundary rule that deemed England to be world champions because that came long after all the things that happened meant New Zealand didn’t win the match outright. No, he turned up, smiling, and refused once to use the word most responsible for New Zealand not being world champions. He played all around the word, like he almost never does a ball with bat in hand. He went this way, by calling it “the uncontrollable”. He went that way with “thin margins”.”Just one of those things.””One of those days.””Reeling from those thin margins.””It’s a fickle game, parts where as hard as you try, cards don’t fall your way.””You have small margins like that, other human decisions that can go one way or another. Number of other parts in that match that could’ve snuck our way.”One of those things, Kane? One of those things? The word he didn’t use was ‘luck’ and luck is really the only reason Williamson and New Zealand are not world champions right now. Because, if it isn’t luck that a little white leather globe no more than nine inches in circumference thrown from the deep midwicket boundary 60 to 70 metres away hits a moving piece of willow that may be no more than 38 inches in length and no more than 4.25 inches wide held by a human being diving to the ground and deflects off it, with enough speed, to an area of the field that is not patrolled by one of 11 men and goes for four, then what really is luck? And if it turns out that it should’ve been five runs instead of six because one umpire interpreted a rule concerning precisely such acts incorrectly? What is it?

You can plan, analyse, mine crazy data that helps you understand so much more but you can’t do jack about luck. Luck happens to you, you don’t happen to it. The harder I practice the luckier I get? Tell that to New Zealand tonight and see how much weight it holds

That doesn’t happen, and England need seven off two to win and not three off two. This is a massive planet, and there’s a hell of a lot of sports played out there and a hell of a lot more moments of luck that go into deciding contests within those sports. But if there has occurred a single bigger slice of luck to decisively change the fortune of such a massive game, in a global tournament, so late in the game, then it didn’t occur on this planet. Or this universe. Or this galaxy.If ever there was a day to believe in the randomness of life, that things just happen and they don’t necessarily happen for a reason, this was that day. S*** happens and, at the end of it, it’s lucky for someone and unlucky for someone else, and sometimes it’s nothing for nobody and passes by unnoticed.We make sense of it – we simplify it as much as we can actually – by doing the only thing we can, which is to articulate it in words and call it luck. And luck is not discerning. It is random. We strive most of our lives to eliminate luck from it. Professional sport is actually a collective and organised pursuit basically of eliminating luck and this pursuit is carried out knowing it is impossible, ultimately, to eliminate it totally.Athletes prepare their entire lives to be elite. Those hours in the gym, those hours away from family, those broken bones and pulled muscles and those hours – all of this is to eliminate luck as much as possible.So near yet so far for Kane Williamson and New Zealand•Getty ImagesYou can analyse events down to their minutest detail. This happened because he did this and he did that and next time he did this and he did that and something else happened. You can plan, analyse, mine crazy data that helps you understand so much more but you can’t do jack about luck. Luck happens to you, you don’t happen to it. The harder I practice the luckier I get? Tell that to New Zealand tonight and see how much weight it holds.Tell that to New Zealand about the umpires call from Marius Erasmus that didn’t go their way off the very first ball of the innings they bowled. Or about the incorrect call by the same umpire that saw the back of Ross Taylor.Tell that to Matt Henry for those magnificent opening overs of his, in which he beat the bat repeatedly but only found an edge that carried to the wicketkeeper once because it is luck that separates an edge found from an edge missed. Another day, Shaheen Shah Afridi beat the bat nearly as often against New Zealand and found the edge thrice. Another day, semi-final day in fact, Henry beat the bat as often and found the edge multiple times.Tell that to Jimmy Neesham and Lockie Ferguson, whose slower balls lobbed up in the air off the bats of Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler, without control, but landed in areas between two fielders. Tell that to the entire New Zealand attack who found the inside edge or inside half of English bats at least six times but found that inside edge to hit the stumps just once.You know who did use that word? Eoin Morgan, in his very first response. It meant everything to his team and everybody who had been planned to win the tournament, the planning, the hard work, the dedication, the commitment. “and the little bit of luck today really did get us over the line”.After the win, Adil Rashid told Morgan that Allah was with them. Morgan said it was the rub of the green, which, primarily, underlines the happy diversity in that dressing room. And it takes nothing away from England’s triumph, but only underscores the deep sense of New Zealand’s loss and the cruelty of it all. That and also that the beneficiaries of luck have the luxury of calling it whatever they want.