I do believe later on this weekend that we’ll be having a piece from The Leg Glance, but in the interim I thought I’d stick up a few more pictures from yesterday.
Weather permitting, and enthusiasm in place, I hope to get to one day of the Easter weekend match at The Oval against Lancashire.
Matthew Engel has penned a piece for The Guardian. While I don’t agree with all of it, Engel remains a clever voice on the sport and it is worth a read.
But cricket gave two great things to civilisation: the idea that the umpire’s decision is final, which has now officially been abolished by the review system; and the delicate interplay of individual and team success that really exists only in cricket and baseball. Neither of these exists in the ECB’s big-city game. Nor will there be any vestige of the sense of tradition and loyalty that has sustained this game through centuries of optimistic spring days like this one.
Engel does get it. The county game is in trouble but…
But it also created internal expectations. The players’ pay exploded; the ECB turned into a vast, impenetrable bureaucracy. Hence the constant revolution: the game cannot maunder on pleasantly; it must keep coming up with ever more eye-catching gimmicks.
The players aren’t being rewarded for achievements etc, they are making the supporters pay more to keep them in clover.
Being Outside Cricket 
Not quite like a day in watching Gujurat Jaguars vs. Royal Kolkatta Kings.
Or something like that.
Good photos btw
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Agreed. It is different :-).
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Lovely photos. How do you get those effects?
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Snapseed. Available on Google Play, certainly for Android.
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Well, Warwickshire may have wished it was a T20 game. Truly staggering collapse going on there.
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Seems like I chose the wrong day to go!
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Well, the collapse was not as bad as Glouchestershire served up today …
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Beautiful forward defensive from Sanga. Well captured.
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“But cricket gave two great things to civilisation: the idea that the umpire’s decision is final, which has now officially been abolished by the review system; and the delicate interplay of individual and team success that really exists only in cricket and baseball. Neither of these exists in the ECB’s big-city game. Nor will there be any vestige of the sense of tradition and loyalty that has sustained this game through centuries of optimistic spring days like this one.”
Engel is a cut above the rest, and on another planet to Selvey, different universe, but I found this conclusion odd.
The finality of the umpires decision is not what comes to mind when I think of cricket. I appreciate it’s attractive and maybe unique, but it doesn’t really define cricket.
Nor does individual vs team interplay belong only to cricket. Don’t football players depend on each others as well as themselves? And Volleyball players? Hockey players?
What defines cricket for me is the long sustained effort required. The number of balls a batsman has to leave or defend before his chance comes. The number of balls a bowler has to bowl before he has sucess, or maybe never does. The number of times a fieldsman has to rise to his toes, even though the ball doesn’t come to him. It’s a waiting game.
The great thing that cricket gives to civilisation is slow contemplation. A test of a mans ability to to work through a conundrum that will take days to unfold.
A test match is 11 players x 2 teams x 5 days = 110. That’s 110 man days to find a winner.
Cricket is the sporting embodiment of consideration and reflection.
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nice 🙂
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Henderson writes something on cricket! Doesn’t happen much these days:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2017/04/09/hunt-money-cricket-moving-ever-place-nations-heart/
It’s a right old tangled mess – anyone want to take it on? I’ll write 5,000 words if I start on it!
(It’s a Premium article – but it can be accessed for free by registering and all you get in return is a few annoying e-mails).
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