cricket with balls

I actually wrote this last night, which is tonight for me.  Or to be technical I wrote it after midnight, so earlier this morning.

I tell you that because the headline says that Bryce McGain took 5 wickets.

Now he may not have.

There is a chance, however slim, that Bryce, in his first game for Essex, did not take 5 wickets.

Life is unpredictable, years ago I kicked random cats, now i kick my own.

So while Bryce is probably going to take a five for in his first bowl ever in county cricket, he may not.

Regardless, I will back him to do this. Sure I didn’t see how he bowled in the match like Sarah did.

But I feel like Bryce and I have an unspoken, unnatural and unreal bond. He probably feels it too.

Bryce has overcome so much in his life, that all he needs is one wicket to complete a well earned (read exxpensive) 5 wicket haul, so he will do it.

Obviously there are some things beyond his control like a declaration, flash flood, or some nasty type digging up the pitch, but other than something like that, Bryce will prevail.

It won’t be a glorious five for.

They won’t talk about it for the ages.

Like most things for Bryce, he will work hard for it, it won’t be given to him, and it will take longer than most, but at 38, he will have his first five wicket haul in county cricket.

Or he won’t, and I’ll delete this post and you’ll never know about it.

Or I’ll leave it up, as a tribute to Bryce, the man who took 4 wickets in his first county match, but bloody well earned them.

I love wicketkeeping.

I don’t know why.  I was never that good at it.

Recently I bought a book about great keepers of the ages.  That makes me one of the great wicket keeping nerds of all time.

Give me a yarn about side stepping and side stepping and I’m all yours.

That is why I feel ill now.

I’ve had to sit and commentate a whole day of Kamran Akmal “keeping”.

That is right, his wicket keeping is now so shit that it can’t even be called keeping, you need the “” there to really explain it.

Akmal has never been a great keeper, but at times he was as serviceable as any batsman with keeping gloves on.

Now he is the very worst of wicket keeping.

Today he missed a stumping that couldn’t have been easier if Collingwood had told him he’d dance down the wicket and miss one on purpose.

He dropped a catch that was so simple that if he was a make shift keeper you’d be furious.

Then was the fact he spent the whole day standing a metre or two further back that he needed to.

Almost every ball bounced before him, yet he never moved up. Never. He stopped most of them, but Morgan edged one when he was on very few, and it didn’t carry.

Kamran couldn’t be surprised, the ball hadn’t reached him all day, there was little bounce in the wicket, and so he just had to move up.  He didn’t and Morgan is over a hundred not out.

But as bad as the dropped catch, the missed stumping and the standing back was, the worst thing I saw was a moment where he just let a ball go past him.

That Kamran has bad hands and no foot work is a given, but this leave was pure laziness.

Asif had come around the wicket to whichever left handed opener was facing and fired one in at the stumps.

It swung in, but it was always going to miss leg stump even if it didn’t swing.

The ball flew down the legside and went to the rope without anyone touching it.

Kamran didn’t even lean over to the legside, his left foot looked like it was still outside off stump when this happened.

He just watched it happen, never moving, or trying to prevent it.

The ball just went by him.

It was as shit as you could get.

If you showed this to Bert Oldfield, George Duckworth and Tiger Smith they’d die again.

I like Kamran Akmal.

Not as a “keeper”, but he seems to have survived so much shit in Pakistan cricket and be their only regular player, that takes something.

But as a keeper he is a puddle of Vomit.

And today I felt like I was covered in that vomit all day.

Oh come on.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

Test cricket, kiddies, shouldn’t be played on pitches they only way you can get a wicket is by producing a knife.

8 wickets in 3 days?

Why even make test bowlers go through this?

Let’s get a bunch of inmates from a local prison, and make them bowl all day long so these soft batsmen can really score at a good rate.

And why bother with fielders?

Let’s just have cardboard cut outs.

Shit, we can make money off it too.  They don’t have to be human sized; we’ll have them as logos of various companies.

“Kumar smashes a four past Adidas at point.” Even Lalit could get behind test cricket then.

Because this isn’t test cricket.  As Dileep said on twitter, “If I wanted to see autopilot batting, I could play a video game.”

I’m not anti-batsmen, actually I am, the greedy little fuckers, taking every last run that is offered to them by cricket boards trying to get that amazing last day of cricket in.  Fuck them.  Bowlers are real cricketers, they don’t wear protection, they don’t get nightfuckenwatchmen, they just go out there and do the job.  The minute the pitch helps the screaming little nancy boy batsmen complain about the pitch.  It’s too fast, it’s too slow, it spins, it seams, the ball is swinging everywhere.

Shut up and bat.

That is job, save the pithy comments for the commentary box.

I hate you all.

Let’s even it up.  Make them try, you know, give them something to conquer, not giving them an escalator up a mountain and then congratulate them for fucking climbing it.

This isn’t a test for batsmen; it’s a free pass.

Look at the number of hundreds in this game, and I’m not just talking about the batsmen, I’m talking about the poor bowlers who have been viciously attacked for so called entertainment.

Entertainment is when Mahela, Kumar, Viru or Sachin make runs when the ball is doing something.  When they have to really bat, not go out and collect runs.

Instead of making stupid fucken mascot competitions, the ICC should start banning test venues for putting in pitches like this.

Actually start doing things.  You know, stop sitting around lazily in first class whinging about falling attendances, and get your hands dirty.

I know it is easier to send out a softly written memo asking cricket nations to prepare pitches that bowlers have a chance on, but if you banned a test venue for continually putting out rubbish batting decks, then you’d see cricket boards change the pitches.

A proactive decision or two could fix things, memos rarely do.

We all know that flat tracks are fawned over by Executives and CEOs the world over.  I am sure they have a day when they all meet up on the flattest pitch they can find and all masturbate all over it.  Ironically, their semen probably gives the pitch more life and the ICC have to warn it for being too bowler friendly in the future.

I forgot what I was talking about, in my head I just had the image of Giles Clarke masturbating while James Sutherland giggled in the background.

Batting pitches are shit.

Burn em.

If this didn’t make sense, hopefully this does.

You remember Samit Patel. Rotund chap of Indian descent. Once took a Michelle in an ODI for England, before he was dropped – not for losing form, but for, well, having too much of a form.

Now, a lot of players would, at this point, have gone off, spent every working minute in the gym, developed an addiction to lettuce and ended up with the kind of torso that makes a golf club look fat.

Not our Samit, though. Even allowing for the fact that I was looking at him on television (which apparently adds pounds, although I thought that was just to Charles Colville’s sunbed fund), he has clearly taken the opposite point of view. In fact, he seems to have agreed with the majority of the cricket-loving population of England that dropping a good player for being a few pies overweight is stupidly daft.

If anything, Samit seems to have gone completely the other way and actually put on weight. And good on him for doing so, for putting his own comfort and happiness ahead of some predetermined idea of what a cricketer looked like. After all, WG Grace, Warwick Armstrong, Mike Gatting, Arjuna Ranatunga and Inzamam may not have been lightning between the wickets, but they were no slouches with a bat either. And at least you knew that the formal buffet would always be eaten.

A new podcast on the Aussies performance against Pakistan with the special guest star.

It would have been longer, but someone rang his door bell.