It appeared, after Cardiff, that there would be little to pique my interest in this particular Ashes series. All the signs suggested Australia would steam-roll their way to another facile triumph. Instead, the home side's first win in 75 years over the old enemy at Lord's, heartily cheered by neutrals around the cricketing globe, has rekindled interest.
England's search for a worthy successor to Ian Botham had been long and largely fruitless until Andrew 'Freddie' Flintoff came along a decade ago. Frequent injuries, often caused by his knees having to bear the brunt and grunt of a naturally large frame that wasn't exactly trimmed by off-field activities, have marred what should have been a far more brilliant career than we've witnessed. Over the past decade, only the now-retired Glenn McGrath has matched the sustained hostility allied with nagging accuracy that Flintoff can consistently produce over a 5-to-6 over spell. There is no more dangerous bowler in the game today. What a pity that this is going to be his last Test series!
Flintoff also has the knack of rising to occasions - the 2006-07 disaster in Oz can be considered an anomaly, albeit a hugely embarrassing one for the then skipper. However well Michael Clarke and batsman-wicketkeeper Brad Haddin had done to revive Aussie hopes on Day 4, the feeling persisted that Freddie would have the final say on the last day. England will be able to cover the loss of his batsmanship, not least due to the presence of another batsman-'keeper in Matt Prior, but who are they going to turn to for that badly-needed breakthrough when they're toiling in the field?
The umpiring at Lord's was quite abysmal. Cricketers can usually accept genuine mistakes but it's hard to fathom the reasoning behind Billy Doctrove's decision to uphold Andrew Strauss' non-catch in the slips from his own vantage point at square-leg. 'Catches' picked up that close to the turf are difficult for even the fielder in question to be completely confident about. With near fool-proof technology on offer as backup, why wouldn't Doctrove avail of it? His performance made the mercifully-retired Darrell Hair look a half-decent umpire, something I thought I'd never ever come close to suggesting!
Having hinted at the fast-diminishing standards of wicket-keeping at Test level, it's worth looking at captaincy levels, which haven't quite been on the rise either.
I'm as big a fan of Ricky Ponting the batsman as anyone else, having 'discovered' him before he made his Test debut back in the mid-nineties. As a skipper, though, he has flattered to deceive. That decision to bowl his part-timers to speed up the over-rate in a Test in India last year, seemingly to prevent the prospect of himself being consequently banned from a home Test against New Zealand, even if it was to be at the cost of the Test he was actually playing at the time, was one of the most perplexing in Test history. Can you imagine the likes of Ian Chappell, Mike Brearley or Clive Lloyd even contemplating something like that in their worst possible nightmares? Whilst Ponting's extremely dubious performance in Nagpur could be explained by the basest instinct of self-preservation, it's hard to fathom why he employed similar tactics towards the end of the Cardiff Test, when all Australia needed was the scalp of either No.10 or No.11. No wonder James Anderson and Monty Panesar were reported to have whooped for joy when they saw Marcus North was going to start turning his arm over!
Ponting isn't quite Crusoe in terms of modern captains, mind you. Apart from Stephen Fleming and Michael Vaughan, whose performance in 2005 was Brearleyesque, I can't think of any Test captain in recent times who would've been fit to lace the boots of Messrs Chappelli, Brearley and Lloyd.
Has the surfeit of limited-overs so-called cricket, with the limited demands it makes on cricketing skill but which is lapped up nevertheless by the modern generation whose calling card appears to be its own limited attention span, succeeded in dulling the antennae of modern captains?
Will we ever see another Test captain possessing the innovative guile of Ian Chappell, the tactical acumen of Mike Brearley or the dignified leadership of Clive Lloyd?
Hello Skipper! Is there anybody out there?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment