cricket with balls

When I arrived in the UK i decided to support Surrey.

This was because of two reasons, I don’t hate the colour brown and I live near the Oval.

Now with Surrey in the cess pools of human depravity known as division 2 with a captain i would rather punch that cheer, I have jumped ship.

At first I thought I would just remain team less, like one of those annoying football fans who says, “I don’t support anyone, I just love the game”.

Bollocks to that.

And when I thought of changing teams there was only one side it could have been, Yorkshire.

All the Australian cricket books of my youths made the English out to be a tea sipping team of pansies who wouldn’t get down and dirty for their country.

The one exception in these books was Yorkshire.

Cricketers from Yorkshire were given full warrior treatment, they were manly men not pansy public school boys.

They were, more often than not, good and tough enough to play for Australia according to these books.

This was my early indoctrination, but it went further, my dad was Boycott obsessed.

Not Boycott the man, but Boycott the batsman.

When people asked my dad if they wanted me to bat like Viv Richards he always said no, I want him to bat like Boycott.

I then spent years breaking my dad’s heart by hitting every ball in the air and giving my wicket away to any boy with a cute smile.

On top of all that I think I even read a Fred Trueman book when I was young.

It was all about Yorkshire.

This current Yorkshire team is not quite in that league.

Bresnan can’t take a fat joke, Adil can’t keep himself in the side, their best player is a South African pigeon killer and they appear in division 1 rather than really push for the title.

Yet I am still drawn by that great inbred arrogance.

It reminds me of home.

So it is Yorkshire for me.

Not that long ago Stephen Moore was a English cricket hopeful.

Few people spoke of him, but those who did rarely said anything bad, just that he was a quality batsmen.

Now people speak of him, but generally in mocking terms or negatively.

On the blogs of recent times has been a bit of both.

Mocking care of King Cricket:

It’s littered with comments about how he’s ‘ready’. One of our favourite bits is the following slice of modesty:

“The more people you have got putting pressure on the England side, the better it is for English cricket. I’m thankful that I’m one of those guys.”

Negative care of The Old Batsman:

Stephen Moore: the stats

Age when he flies out to South Africa to join the performance squad: 29

Number of first class hundreds: 15

The men ‘under pressure’: Alastair Cook, 24 years old, 21 hundreds [9 in tests]; Ravi Bopara, 24, 15 hundreds [3]; Ian Bell, 27, 27 hundreds [8]; Jonathan Trott, 28, 20 hundreds [1]; Kevin Pietersen, 29, 38 hundreds [16].

Stephen Moore’s average in the second division in 2008: 55.80

Against the ‘better bowlers’ in the first division, 2009: 27.33

Ready: ‘I’m 100 per cent confident I’ve got it in me’.

When the Stephen Moore’s agent released a press release selling his client like a iAlarm Clock that makes you breakfast I was pissed off.

I know agents are assholes, I have grown to accept this fact, but I don’t like the idea of agents trying to get reporters to push forward their players like that.

If Stephen Moore was good enough the selectors would have already known about him, selling him like a product just seemed wrong.

It seemed more wrong that his batting average for the year was about 30 at the time.

Now he has pissed me off twice in 3 months, and I have decided to put him on the list.

Moore has decided to leave Worcestershire using the relegation clause in his contract.

He is not the only player leaving, the young keeper Davies is also leaving, plus some old bowlers.

Davies was leaving, I assume, for financial and publicity reasons.

Davies averaged 40 with the bat and almost made a thousand runs for the year, on top of being a very handy keeper.

Moore finished the year averaging 27.

27.

Twenty Seven.

If you leave the team at the end of the year because they have been relegated and you have had a good year that is something, but who do you think you are leaving a team when you have average 27 with the bat.

Your failures have to be at least part of the reason, along with the fact none of their bowlers took wickets, that your team was relegated.

In the promotion year Moore made 1400 runs at 55. I think the Worcestershire faithful would have expected alot more than an average of 27 from him this year.

Moores best innings of the year wasn’t even for Worcestershire, it was for the lions against Australia.

To me that shows a question to how much he ever wanted to represent Worcestershire in the first place.

Moore is another South African making his way in English county cricket, I have no idea if he is a mercenary, or just a kid who got his break here, but I don’t like his recent “form” and for that he goes on the list.

“Martin who?” you ask.

“Exactly”, I reply.

You see, Saggers was the perennial ‘nearly’ man of English cricket. A late developer – his career really didn’t take off until he was 30 – he found himself behind not only Caddick and Hoggard in the queue for the national fast medium bowling slot, but a host of others such as James Kirtley, Ed Giddins and even the even-older Martin Bicknell.

Saggers eventually got the chance to play for England when Andrew Flintoff was injured on the 2003 tour of Bangladesh. Called into a squad which also featured such luminaries as Rikki Clarke, Richard Johnson and Gareth Batty, he took 2-29 in his first bowl in international cricket. Sadly, these were to remain his best figures and his Test career ended after just two more games.

That said, Saggers packed two dramatic moments into those six innings. The first was a tremendous backflip to catch Alok Kapali and the second when, recalled to the side against New Zealand in 2004, he dismissed Mark Richardson with his first international ball on home soil.

Saggers was a stalwart of the county cricket circuit. His career began in 1996 with Durham, but really took off after a move to Kent. Injuries dogged him throughout his career, but he finished with 415 first class wickets at a very respectable average of 25. With the bat he was something of a walking wicket, as his Test average of 0.33 suggests, though he did manage two first class fifties.

CWB continues to look at the cricketing lives of those retiring at the end of this month

OK, so Butcher has, technically, gone, beaten into submission by a series of injuries and the shameful decline of the club he has represented man and boy. He is now to be found in the Sky commentary box, where he mixes metaphors with Nick Knight, Ian Ward and the DearGodwhythehellishestillallowedto commentate Charles Colville.

In truth, Butch did well to last as long as he did. Few players would survive an episode as career-buggering as having an affair whilst being married to their captain’s sister, fewer still when that man was (a) captain of club and country and (b) Alec Stewart.

The sad thing for Butcher is that he scored 4288 Test runs but all anyone remembers him for are

(1) That unbeaten 173

(2) Bowling Gary Kirsten with an offbreak just as the latter was about to break the South African record for the highest Test score

(3) Being the least reliable slip fielder of modern times