cricket with balls

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.

Rudolf Eric Koertzen. A name sufficiently Germanic to strike a tremor in the heart of a batsman, and that is before he set foot on the cricket field.

The thing about Random Rudi is that he always was, well, Random Rudi. You knew exactly what you were going to get with him – the odd decision so brilliant that you thought ‘How the hell did he get that right?’, balanced by the howler that made you think ‘How the hell did he get that wrong?’.

There is a myth that his decision making became increasingly flawed over the years. Yes, he was one of the umpires who cocked up the end of the 2007 World Cup Final, but he was one of four who got that wrong and, frankly, it was utterly hypocritical of the ICC to suspend any of them for a mistake in a tournament which they themselves had so comprehensively buggered in the first place.

Rudi was never a showy umpire like Bowden on Shepherd, but neither was  he a blend-into-the-background type. The closest he came to a trademark was his ’slow death’ finger of dismissal and even then it was no slower than Bucknor’s. In fact, when in recent times he grew a beard, there were many diehard fans who failed to recognise him at all.

Sometimes we expect too much from our umpires. We expect them to be infallible, when we allow the players to be less than that. In an age where umpiring is increasingly scrutinised by technology, it is arguable that Rudi did his reputation no favours by staying on for the last couple of years, allowing his reputation as a fine umpire who was respected by the players to be tarnished. On the other hand, it is to his credit that he didn’t go sooner and submitted himself to that kind of interrogation.

In truth, in the mythical match where you are having to bat for your life, you wouldn’t want to have Rudi at the other end. You’d want someone less likely to give you ought caught off your thigh. Or shoulder. Or teeth. If, on the other hand, you wanted to know that the guy at the far end was utterly unscrutable but quite likely to have a drink with you after the game, Rudi was your man. As we usher in an age where television is increasingly the arbiter and all an umpire needs to do is to count to six, we may never see umpires as good as we have now again. Which it is why it is a shame that any of them – even those you may not be greatly enamoured of – retire. You’ll miss Koertzen more than you think you will.

My lack of responsibility on the cricket pitch borders on the legendary. On one infamous occasion, I managed to turn an easy five wicket win into a narrow one wicket one (we were 132-5 chasing 137 to win) by attempting to hook a high full toss from a leg spinner and somehow edging it to slip, thus exposing a tail which included two complete rabbits and a Frenchman playing his first proper game of cricket. This situation was made all the worse by the fact that I had already hit fours off the previous couple of balls and we had at least four overs left in which to score the necessary five runs.

That was a few years ago. A fortnight ago, playing for a different side, I found myself at the crease with five wickets down, but a reasonable total on the board. The batsman at the other end, battling a hangover so bad that he didn’t dare eat tea, was soon bowled, bringing in a 17-year-old at number 8. Who I promptly ran out, going for a second run off a misfield. The number 9 – aged 16 – lasted two balls and number 10 went first ball. Four wickets for no runs added, only me and the number 11 left and still 7 overs to go. Three balls later the oppositions non-spinning offspinner chucked one up and I slog-swept it down the throat of deep mid-wicket.

To be blunt, I have no self-control on the cricket pitch. The ball is there to be hit, and so long as I hit it I don’t much care where it goes.

Does that remind you of anyone? The sort of person who might slog a quick thirty in a Test match when his side really need a couple of hours of dour defence? The sort of captain who is as likely to slog the ball to long off than nudge a quick single when getting off the mark?

In short, I don’t think that I am any less responsible than Shahid Afridi. So when do I get to captain England?

Take it from me, commentary isn’t easy. You have to know what you are talking about, be able to describe things and think on your feet. And not swear. Not swearing is very important – unless you book Jrod, in which case you ought to know what you are getting and plan to pay the fines accordingly.

And sometimes you just have to keep talking. The stunt that was pulled on Henry Blofeld in his first BBC commentary is now the stuff of legend. I used to do audio commentary for the blind, where you have to keep talking or the audience really do think you’ve buggered off for a pint.

Similarly, I yield to no-one in my admiration for David Lloyd. If anyone has managed to blend insight with humour, wit with intelligence, in cricket commentary, it is Bumble. But tonight, he went too far.

The point of no return was when Bangladeshi wicket-keeper Mushfiqur Rahim managed to get himself smacked in the face by the ball. Now, I can forgive him for omitting to point out that this could only happen to Rahim, who is not only the smallest player I have ever seen in international cricket but possibly the smallest cricketer ever. Keeping wicket without a helmet was, for him, either ridiculously brave or ridiculously stupid. What I can’t forgive is the stick that he then proceeded to give to Rahim’s replacement, batsman Junaid Siddique.

Keeping wicket isn’t a simple job. Just ask Matt Prior. Being asked to do it at a moments notice is even harder, especially if you are not a regular ‘keeper. Junaid (or ‘Zunead’ as he seems to now prefer, which sounds like a Marvel Comics villain to me) was thrown in at the deep end by a management who didn’t think it worth bringing a second keeper on a fortnight’s tour.

I’ve done this stand-in keeper thing once myself, when my then-club’s temperamental Aussie keeper Treacle suddenly decided after 15 overs that he had had enough and wanted a bowl, ripped off his pads and refused to put them on again. It’s the most difficult thing you will do on a cricket pitch, for so many reasons. So when Bumble started laughing when Zunead let through five wides in his first over, I bristled. After all, if the bowler chucks the ball way down the leg side when he knows that he’s not got a regular keeper behind the stumps, where does the blame really lie?

There then followed patronising comment after comment during the rest of his commentary shift, a theme which was picked up by the lesser commentators on the Sky team. It was all extremely unfair to a man doing his level best in difficult circumstances.

Moreover, in the past few years, England have utilised Marcus Trescothick, Vikram Solanki, Paul Collingwood and Eoin Morgan as wicketkeepers in ODIs – the latter two in the same injury circumstances as forced Zunead to take over. I don’t remember the same level of snide commentary being directed at any of their efforts.

In this utterly pointless series, it is going to be hard for anyone to enhance their reputation. But David Lloyd and his colleagues demonstrated tonight that is still going to be easy to sully it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you join us on the opening day of arguably the most pointless and least interesting ODI series since time began, a series in which England will, inevitably, win what Ben Folds called The Battle of Who Could Care Less.

You have to feel sorry for Bangladesh. Not only are they everyone’s favourite whipping boys, they are getting royally buggered about by the fixture planners. Having been in England six weeks ago, they were then sent back to the sub-continent to play some one day games whilst England played some infinitely-more-lucrative-yet-equally-meaningless matches against Australia. Christ, when you look at the international schedule, you just know that the only reasons the ICC haven’t claimed ownership of the hole in the ozone layer is (a) they’ve not found a sponsor for it and (b) it’s not yet as big as the gap in Craig Kieswetter’s defence.

(And shut up at the back, it was a meaningless series and it tells us sod all about the Ashes, not least because the day I see an England Test side with Michael Yardy in it is the day I eat Jrod’s Hat)

Which means that instead of spending some  of the best cricketing days of the summer playing Test cricket, England are forced to noodle around whilst Pakistan finish playing Australia, a series starting later than it should due to a so-meaningless-it-couldn’t-get-a-sponsor set of one day games that was squeezed in by an organisation in no way desperate to make money wherever it can.

In all, England spend amost all of July with no international cricket, then madly cram four Tests into a month, then seven one day games into 17 days, as the weather gets worse and worse.

In other words, all England fans have to look forward to this month is three days of beating up a Bangladesh side who can’t even agree who their captain is supposed to be. I don’t know who arranges the international calendar, but whatever they are drinking, I want some.