Barney Ronay has an interview with Jonathan Trott.
Interesting quote near the end:
Was it simply a case of too much cricket for a famously immersive player? “Maybe a bit.” And the atmosphere? That toxic dressing room? The mood hoover? The Big Cheese and all the rest of it? “Maybe it did contribute a little bit,” Trott admits. “It became very serious and disciplined. There wasn’t much laughter going on.”
Chin scratched. Interest piqued.
Being Outside Cricket 
“When you’re on tour you have sport psychologists but they don’t try to fix the problem. They try and sticky tape it up so you can go out and perform.” Hmmm. Cortisone injections for the psyche, kind of thing?
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It would be interesting to know if it has changed
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Thanks for the subscription button. 🙂
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I liked your comment, more to see if I could than anything else. Swanky new features around here, eh!..
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🙂
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That seems to be at least a dig at Flower where he said, “It became very serious and disciplined”.
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… and he iss not exactly denying any of those accusations ….
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It’s a good interview, I think, Barney Ronay trying to convey Trott’s particular blend of intensity and – you can’t say lovableness exactly, but he’s a player who inspires great loyalty somehow.
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That’s a very interesting little penultimate paragraph indeed.
(the new place looks nice & shiny…)
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Unrelated, but Ireland beat Bangladesh, while Scotland threw away the game against West Indies, to lose by just a few runs. Hopefully they’ll be spared such chokes in the tournament.
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What has Cook fanboi/apologist, Paul Newman written about Eoin Morgan? It seems to have someone riled?
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Let’s play Daily Mail Top Trumps:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/cricket/article-2949937/England-won-1992-World-Cup-not-denied-key-wicket-Derek-Pringle.html
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So at the Daily Mail you now have 2 ***** for the price of one!
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What ifs … especially selectively applied what ifs. If something changes in the past, that would have changed a lot of other things, that are contingent upon that change. It is not like Pakistan could only have scored 0 runs in 80 balls or so (or however many balls Javed’s innings went on after that).
It was the last wicket pair in the last innings (that is just about the only case in cricket where a “what if” does not come with a ton of caveats) of a match. Maybe Pakistan would have folded for 180. Maybe England would have crashed to all out for 125. Or they could have chased it in 20 overs. Who knows.
The tourney would have developed completely different if DRS had been in place for the duration of the entire tourney. You can’t tell me that that is the only debatable decision in the entire tourney. Pakistan might have ended up playing South Africa, with England crashing out in the other semi-final. Who knows.
If the rain rules had been more sensible (say D/L), chances are the match with South Africa in the semis would have developed differently as well. Likewise if the South Africans had understood the rain rules a bit better. Who knows.
England might also have won if the Dutch had not messed up the Football World Cup of 1978. The Falklands war might never have happened then, or have happened a few years earlier. Who knows.
Statistically it is possible the entire team could have been hijacked by Mexican bandits in tutus as well, if DRS had been in place. Ever so unlikely, but possible. Who knows.
But it seems Mr. Pringle has long since refused to talk about reality, and prefers to bore his readers with ramblings how the world ought to be / have been ….
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D’Arthez
Counterfactuals really are a pet hate of mine, but the absolute nadir is anyone (usually, though not exclusively, Australian) who comes out with “England wouldn’t have won the 2005 Ashes if DRS had been in play at Edgbaston because Kasprowicz would have been given not out.”
What about the rest of the match, then? What about the lbw appeal against the same man 50 runs earlier? Conversely, what about Warne having SP Jones stone dead late in England’s second innings? What about Pietersen’s possible first-baller in the second innings, versus his dodgy dismissal later? Given some of the useless applications of DRS we have seen, how do you know which of those (if any) would actually have been given by the man in the box? Would either side have had sufficient reviews left anyway? What about all the other debatable decisions in the series (personally, I think the most crucial howler by far was Katich’s lbw at Trent Bridge, and I would still be smarting about that one if I were Australian)?
Grrrr.
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Ah Pringle, different paper but still writing about what he thought happened instead of what actually happened.
Truly a first class journalist of the utmost integrity.
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Off topic, but I can’t be arsed to post at The G, too toxic over there.
Latest warm up.
Once again we see how the England brains trust have no clue how to use warm ups, with Ballance and Hales thrown in for a single game and likely to be judged on it. Note Selvey’s snide “Hales produced a Cook like innings.”
I have no great belief in Bopara or Tredwell on these pitches, but they likewise, without real game bowling time, have had no chance to work out how best to bowl for this tournament.
This matters, because both Anderson and Broad have to be considered injury risks for this tournament.
(As an aside, anyone considered that the stresses and strains of trying to carry England at this WC will affect Broad and Anderson when the Tests come around?)
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I wouldn’t be surprised if at least 1 if not both of them don’t travel to the Windies and are ‘saved’ for the home summer. There may be a few other players spared that trip too.
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“Off topic, but I can’t be arsed to post at The G, too toxic over there.”
I have posted twice since full Beta, neither time on cricket. I very much doubt I’ll be going back.
I have failed in my attempts to boycott the site completely, but my hits must be way down. Reading the latest England piece only increases my resolve. Life really is too short to wade through a load of posts from the likes of wctt and softlysoftly, accusing the “KP lovers” of arguing that the removal of Cook would solve all of England’s ODI problems. It’s utter bollocks. People like that just don’t want to engage with the more nuanced arguments that have been put forward all year. And they’re *still* banging on as if we all think Pietersen was some kind of demigod, and this invalidates anything we have to say on him, on Cook, or on England’s progress since (the Nash gambit). It’s made worse by the fact that one snide remark from Selvey re Hales emboldens them all, as if those last two or three innings Cook played against Senanayake weren’t an excruciating bloody train wreck. I just don’t have quebecer’s patience any more.
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Let them play, Cook’s time will come around again in the summer. Even if his batting somehow improves, his captaincy won’t.
There is a lot of management in team ECB but precious little leadership and that will tell when things start to go wrong this summer.
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Quebecer is one of my favourite BTL people, and I do love it when he decides to be astonishingly rude to wctt.
Up till recently, I felt I had to keep on commenting on the G because otherwise those people would feel they’d succeeded in driving the likes of me away. Which is clearly their intention.
But now I’m just defeated by the ****** beta format, which crashes my browser all the time, doesn’t seem to have a ‘page back’ capability, and generally seems designed to discourage BTL comments altogether and get the clicks from frantic readers trying to get out.
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I have long since stopped commenting BTL at the Guardian. Life’s too short to spend time thinking through and writing what one hopes is a relatively thoughtful comment for it to be modded by over-zealous censors seeking to protect the ATL author from any kind of criticism. The irony seems lost on them that an institution famed for championing free expression should so easily suppress challenging comments from its readers.
I get the impression that the authors or BTLers are using the “report” button as a means of “cleansing” the discussion board of intelligent thought and dissident ideas.
The Guardian will be left with the commentariat it deserves.
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I haven’t commented at the Guardian for several months. It’s not due to the new design (although that is certainly troublesome) but because I do not like hypocrisy and repeated lies above or below the line. Selvey left the honest path a few years ago but recently Marks and Bull have also lost the way.
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It’s a shame lot of peope have left the comments on the Guardian cricket content, as it does seem to be devoid of the interesting range of opinions that used to characterise it. Now it seems it just like any other comments section full of people largely screaming into the void.
I think I must be the only person who likes the re-designed site, think it looks a lot slicker, works better on my phone and loads a lot quicker. But then again I do work there, so I would say that wouldn’t I
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I’m a bit late to this discussion, after a busy week, but I also quite like the Beta format. However, most of my browsing is on my old phone, and ever since they went full beta, I can’t get the comments except on a separate page which lists them unnested, and I can’t comment either. Technologically disenfranchised. Most of the people I respect are here, mind, except quebecer and rdnm (in small doses).
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