Doyen
The news broke just as I was going to bed last night. It had been foreshadowed earlier in the day and so the shock had been mitigated somewhat. Richie Benaud had passed away, and as I am even more frequently saying these days, so did a little bit of my childhood.
Feel free to read all the obits doing the rounds, many very good, many personal anecdotes and many mentions of how he resonated, how he developed your knowledge and love for the sport, and importantly how brilliantly he moved with the times. I’m not going to try to add to them. There’s no point. As Grenville just said on a recent comment “Damn. Richie Benaud’s dead”.
Add your own tributes below, and I’m sure you will all do a fine job. I don’t feel much more than gratitude. Gratitude for a life where he touched millions, where he showed what could be done with commentary, and where you felt you knew him. A truly inspirational figure. He will be missed. A lot.
RIP Richie Benaud. There will never be another you. I’m popping down to the confectionery store.
Upstairs
The day after the Downton Dismissal and the chaos of yesterday already seems somewhat distant. Few journalists seem to be drawing the dots, with the trail leading up the line to Clarke so obvious it almost appears in neon lights. Clarke was a major player in the appointment of his MD, and yet today he leaves the ECB not to enable him to prosper more fully in his ventures in Colombia and Paraguay, but, er, wait a minute…… he’s been made President!
We knew this stitch up ages ago, but there is something even more unpalatable about it now, the day after his cataclysmic decision to appoint Paul Downton had been shown to be the abject disaster that it was. People who make appointments like that don’t stay long. People don’t generally beg those sort of people to remain on the ledger. Instead they are shunted aside, sometimes with an added gong to keep their mouths shut, and then we can pick apart their legacy at will.
To me, retaining this buffoon as Chairman is a stain on our organisation in this country. You cannot truly clean house, have a fresh start, if you merely move the dead rat from the living room and shut him away in the attic. It’ll still stink. His ICC role is even more of an insult, as the incident at the Wisden dinner appears to show. This man does not seem to be able to hold back when he has been criticised, or even mildly questioned. This isn’t Clarke’s team. This isn’t even Clarke’s organisation. I think Dean Wilson probably summed it up best:
But along the way he has ruled the game as if it were one of his personal businesses and he is a ruthless businessman.
His success in that part of his life has largely come about by doing what he thinks is best. By calling the shots, making the decisions and swatting away anyone who gets in his way. It works in business and for a time it worked in cricket, but the England cricket team and the ECB does not belong to him, and he doesn’t always make the right call, just ask Allen Stanford.
When it comes to sport and to cricket, you can’t just tell people what they want and what they are supposed to like. You can’t tell them that because you like one person over another, they must feel the same way.
You can’t endorse an England captain because he comes from the right sort of family.
That sort of outlook is what makes our great game exclusive when it should be inclusive. It is what shuts people out and makes them angry, so when you next ask them to dip into their pockets and buy a ticket to your show, they will turn their backs and look elsewhere.
I was beginning to worry about Dean, but this hits a nail on the head more than many of his other colleagues have. Instead of making it about KP, which is a major point, yes, but only one, he captures the essence of why I despise Clarke. The arrogance which comes from some sort of superiority that only a weapons grade pig can pull off. Every interview, every appearance and every word I heard from this individual brought one word to mind. No, not that one. The word is “unpleasant”.
Now many may laugh that a blog (and blogger) described as unpleasant by more than one member of the media should get on his high horse. But just like Newman, if you meet me, I’m really, most of the time, pretty nice. I like people who like me, and want people to. Clarke’s one of those I don’t get. He seems to get off on being loathed. Why the ECB couldn’t tell him to shove off, because all words seemed to indicate he was going to lose an election, I won’t know. While they made that decision, there will always be a stain.
I’d also like to approach one other point this evening, and it is the sudden reduction in the role and scope of Paul Downton’s role over night. To this, I’ll pick up on Jonathan Agnew’s piece on the BBC:
Downton had a difficult time of it. He was briefed that his first job must be to get rid of Pietersen. He took responsibility for that, but it was not 100% his call – it was a broader decision.
So perhaps he was an easy person to target with regards to KP. He has taken a lot of flak for that. And likewise he was not directly hands-on with the England team.
You have to question how much responsibility he actually had on England team matters.
Downton is moved from the key man in matters of England international cricket, to a sock puppet who danced to his master’s tune. So it wasn’t his decision to sack KP, but someone else. That someone else is either Andy Flower or Giles Clarke (OK, it could have been David Collier, but he was so far off the radar, he was in deep space). Both pose crucial questions to the future of English cricket. If it was the former, it appears as though we threw a drowning man, one who had been in charge of a team that imploded on the spot, a life raft. KP’s description in his “nasty” book of a man adept at managing upstairs seems appropriate. I am not an anti-Flower blogger. At this time I’m converting a lot of my Ashes DVDs from 2010/11 and enjoy the way we dismantled that team. We were a really decent team. But he’d lost it. That was clear. If it was Clarke, then we were sold the mightiest of pups by our friends rushing out of the door that spring day when Moores was appointed, to crown Downton with aplomb. Both the people who pulled the puppet strings are still employed at the ECB. That’s not symbolic, that’s insulting.
He was an easy target, Jonathan, because he made himself the target. He hid. Pure and simple, after the announcement. Not a peep in a live setting for a couple of months. I knew, as much as I could, then we had a problem. We call it, in our game, red flags. This was so red, it had a Liverpool season ticket. Read the stuff on the other blog. You’ll see what I meant from those early posts. The hilarity when Downton actually spoke for the first time, on a Waitrose ad. The difficult winter and all that….
I don’t want to pick on Aggers, but I’ve seen this theme more and more today. Except for one glorious exception which had me rolling about with laughter.
FEBRUARY 2014
After the Ashes whitewash, Kevin Pietersen and head coach Andy Flower are sacked. After days of silence, the official line on Pietersen’s dismissal is that the ECB wanted to ‘create a culture’ in which captain Alastair Cook had ‘the full support of all players’.
From one he was a puppet master, from another he was upholding Flower’s contention that he sack KP. From this article, he actually sacked Andy Flower. He didn’t. He resigned. That author should know the difference between a sacking (KP) and something not quite the same (Flower – resigned, and moved to a job he courted). I don’t think disingenuous quite covers it.
I’ve gone over a 1000 words, and it is late. More reaction including a look at two of our favourite journo’s work (Brenkers and Selfey) to follow. Good night, and thanks for the support.
Aplomb
So. Where were you when you heard the news? Me? I was outside the Shakespeare’s Head pub in Holborn and my good friend had shown up. He was on the phone when I saw the first blog message. Incredulity struck, but it was true. I reacted, then felt a little guilt. Should I be cheering a man’s sacking, when it meant bad news for someone else? I then had what little joy I might have had ebb away to anger. Anger that we’d had to put up with someone so out of his depth for so long. Anger that he’d had that attitude throughout of unchallenged intellectual superiority and his boderline patronising nature. Anger that he’d been seen through after five minutes by many on here. Anger that we’d been sold a pup by the ECB hierarchy and more importantly to me, by the print media. The print media which lambasts this site, and people like me for indulging in “guesswork”, of not being close to the team, of not following them around professionally. They took the you-know-what out of us. Damn them. Damn all those who looked down their noses at us. We were right. He was not up to it. We are right about Moores. We are right about Whitaker. Most importantly of all, we are right about Andy Flower. Yet there he resides.
Now what? The news appears to be that Downton is being moved on and his post has been removed from the ECB hierarchy to be replaced with something called the Director of Cricket. Lord alone knows what that means, but people seem to be indicating that Whitaker is for the chop tomorrow and a whole new structure will replace him. Shed no tears either for the speak your Gary Ballance machine if he goes, as he’s been a laff-a-lympics when he’s had to front up to anything resembling a sentient questioner. I’m not that impressed with this from Harrison if truth be told because the structure is being used as a fig leaf for two utter failures.
So what now? Downton gone leaves a huge hole for me to fill, but there’s plenty more where he came from. The replacement list is full of holes, but I think we need to know what the role is before people are put forward. I’ve not had time to read this exercise in shifting sands.
Here’s what I do know. We handed the keys to the kingdom to Paul Downton. His first major move was to speak to Andy Flower. Before we knew it, Flower had gone as coach and been shunted into a role he appeared to be lobbying for. Then he sacked Pietersen and entered into a ridiculous confidentiality clause, which he broke a few months later. He held a press conference where he came across to me as a buffoon, but to some of the agape media as a latter day seer. If the warning signs weren’t flashing then, they had to be after his Agnew interview. But no. After a period in hiding, he re-surfaced in a Sky hack-piece, and was then hidden under the stairs. We then had to endure his backing of a lame duck captain, especially in the ODI game, and his disastrous intervention in the ODI series in Sri Lanka was the crowning glory. Or so we thought. Because then came his post-World Cup media blitz, which was staggering. By then, most of the media had seen the light. I say most.
Because some still don’t. We know their names, we know why they don’t. Their enemy’s enemy has always been their friend. Pietersen was banished by this man. For many this seems enough. They get to keep stirring the pot, getting the clicks on their website, yet still get to be the offended patron at KP’s misdemeanours. If any of them actually think a man who didn’t have a clue what social media was when he took on the job (his words) is still a fit and proper man to be in charge of our team, well….
I hope Harrison undertakes a review of ALL his key decisions. The appointment of Moores actually being more of a priority than Pietersen. The maintenance of a role for Flower arguably being more than that. To sack a man after a year indicates you have no confidence in him at all. So look at his key decisions and act on them.
In tabloid style let me go through some of Downton’s best moments:
- Sacking KP. Oh yes. For reasons unclear, but something to do with being disconnected. You make a big decision like that, you need to explain yourself. Constantly avoiding the question makes you look a fool.
- Outside cricket. Given he used that phrase in a 1985 Q&A for Cricketer’s Who’s Who, it seemed to be something he would have said. Way to get a meme started.
- Difficult Winter – Oh yes. Losing 12 out of 13 to your main foe is just “difficult”
- The press conference – Alastair Cook being told that he wasn’t strong enough to captain KP seemed rather amusing. Of course that was our spin. Other saw aplomb.
- The interview – SO good I got multiple posts out of it. Where do you start? Read this. The read this. Then read this. And then there is this. Once you’ve done that, read my conclusion.
- Who can forget his interview round in Sri Lanka. Backing the captain, then presiding over his sacking a few days later, all the while refusing to answer any questions on KP. Good lord.
- Then there was the side to be reckoned with going into the World Cup. That went well.
- Then the media blitz post elimination which struck all the wrong notes, had him wondering how T20 cricket had impacted, and played “it weren’t my fault” cards all over the place.
There’s enough for this evening. No background research, no looking at other things, just an instant reaction. Have your say, read Maxie over at TFT, read the papers/online news columns, and we’ll reconvene.
Speak tomorrow.
Wisdom
It’s that day again. The release of the latest version of cricket’s bible. I have copies dating back to 1970 and will do my usual – try to pick it up cheaply from a source in September – but it has been hard to miss the reports coming out on Lawrence Booth’s Editor’s Notes today. The ECB get a good kicking and so does KP. You take what you want from it – some will hone in on the criticism of Pietersen to reinforce what looks more and more like an editorial line (or personal vendetta – both of which are reprehensible), while others will focus on the kicking of the ECB and care less about the book and things. The newspapers have long since been the source of record in this sorry affair.
The KP issue still gets the blood pumping. Hearing that the book is reviewed by Patrick Collins saddened me. He was given free rein to give KP everything in previous editions, and lo and behold, he gets another opportunity. I’ve not read the review but Newman’s given us the flavour in another spectacularly typical article.
Now sadly, because I’m writing this on the tablet and in my lunch break I cannot do a proper fisking of that Newman article. It deserves it. However, I’ll hold that one back a few days as I have a real life outside of here to handle, which includes a meeting with my legal mate tonight. However a phrase or two requires comment. I can’t cut and paste so you will have to rely on my memory.
“a decision on which they had right on their side”
Newman is amazed that after 15 months sacking a player who had a lot of fans in this country, and a lot of enemies, having top scored in a disastrous tour (an inconvenient fact that you can’t brush away) was the one to be sacked and yet the ECB lost the media war. That this was done without a proper explanation to the fans, was accompanied by unattributable, off the record briefing in the aftermath of Sydney, and with further leakage and gossip along the way, really doesn’t resonate. When the supporters of KP, and others keeping in mind this treatment might be dished out to others (see, to a degree, Cook in Sri Lanka), had the gall not to take our beloved press corps word for it, and raised legitimate, unanswered questions, most notably about their willingness to receive leaks yet not get the ECB to state the case properly, he is mystified how the cause was lost. The message is in there, Paul. Don’t spend too long thinking about it.
“a decision supported by those who follow the team around professionally”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. It’s not all there is it? Because you are so damned close, and yet so damned reluctant to press these duplicitious swine, is the reason we take your view so sceptically. You don’t have a bloody scooby, do you? Your constant vitriolic, yes, the same word that is used against me, campaign against a man with over 100 caps, allying yourself with the idiots given a shoeing in Wisden today by one of your colleagues, a piece you should have written months ago (and not just after Cook got fired, but before it), is the reason this blogger and, given comments I see elsewhere, many others can’t take you seriously. The Daily Mail is our first stop for a laugh, frankly.
I need to follow the team professionally to have an informed view. There’s the bobby right there. If that doesn’t contrast with the “England team belongs to us all” line in Lawrence’s piece, I don’t know what does.
No complaints over the Five Cricketers of the Year, although I’d have been tempted to consider Brendon McCullum because they can go outside the domestic season if they please, albeit rarely and for special cases (sure they have done). Let’s hope he does enough this summer to get in. I’ve seen some complaints about Moeen Ali, and I do feel there’s a bit of symbolism there, but it’s fair enough. He’s a ray of hope. Ballance, Angelo Mathews and Adam Lyth wrote themselves, and Jeetan Patel is also very deserving.
An absolute ton of work goes into this book, and I would thank Lawrence Booth for the efforts. One of the benefits of speaking to him offline is appreciating the co-ordination required to bring this together. It’s not me going soft. It’s me not being a total curmudgeon.
I’m not commenting on anything else at the moment, until I’ve seen what’s written. Couldn’t Lawrence have sent me a review copy too?
Duplicity
I’ve followed the debate on here as best I can and once again the same points are being raised. I’m not moaning because they’ve never been answered, but Cook’s travails are always going to be an issue. To me it doesn’t matter if he scores buckets of runs, because it has not proved the selectors right to persist with him. He’s been given the luxury of time that has not been given to a Compton, Carberry or Robson. He’s been treated as the prodigal son, the one to be kept at all costs. Never forget what Downton said in his infamous interview with Aggers when asked about whether the genius MD had considered changing captains. “Not seriously, no” was the reply. I think it was then I lost it….
Cook has also had the front, it seems, to get arsey over his treatment in losing the ODI captaincy when we were losing and he was a liability at the top of the order. There were the interviews where despite his “nice” persona he made it clear what he thought of the decision and then there has been several bits of reporting indicating his thoughts on all matters including whether KP should come back.
I contrast this decision making, those actions and interpretation, not just with the treatment of KP, but with those of Compton and Robson in particular. Cook’s past, as he confesses in his latest interview, does not matter, because he needs to score runs. This is hilarious as it is this “past” that is keeping him in the team. The hope he recaptures that elusive form. The hope he makes regular hundreds at the top of the order. The hope his technical flaws are ameliorated. All these are in the past. But it gives him the rope while the other failures hang themselves. These technical flaws are not espoused in the print media the way Compton’s stodginess and intensity, and Robson’s feet movement and quietness in the field were.
I can go on, and probably will, but if the likes of Derek and Selfey think this is “wearisome” as they stick doggedly to Tyers Twitter Tendency, then I have news. I’m not weary of pointing this matter out. It’s your haughty arrogance combined with this lack of rigour that cheeses us off. I’m not here calling them dishonest, but good grief, they are hard to love, ain’t they?
Which brings me to the duplicity. This KP thing is a charade. A total charade. It doesn’t matter what runs he scores or how England do. They won’t pick him. No chance. The thing is, if the ECB (and Graves) thinks they are being clever by getting him to play, and close the door on him for reasons of revenge or whatever, then they are fools if they think the public will fall for it. They will only buy it if this team beats Australia, and all the batsmen fire. KP, on form and fit (a big if that last one), walks into THIS England team. The line this lot are taking is that if this were Lara or Tendulkar sitting on the outside now, they wouldn’t make the team because there is no vacancy. Hogwash. He’s not in the team because the establishment excluded him, and every day that lack of form canard is put forward, and every day I want to bash those proponents of it with a Punch and Judy stick.
The ECB are pulling our plonkers, and the picking of the team on merit that we all want to see is being made a joke of. It’s not being tackled at all. We keep being told “nothing has changed”, and that equates to “moving on from Kevin Pietersen, who we wish well for the future.” There was nothing about county form last year when he was sacked. In the aftermath of Sydney, when the ECB were leaking like the Titanic on a bad iceberg night, and Newman was receiving more gifts than a one-year old at an extended family christmas, it wasn’t about KP giving it loads to Glamorgan or Leicestershire. So stop bullshitting and let’s have a clear, unambiguous statement. KP is eligible for selection, and will be considered if he makes runs. Anything else is duplicity.
Midnight City
Nothing much from me this weekend. Been busy getting stuff ready for my holiday in a few weeks, had lots of little jobs to do, and getting my sport dvd database in as good a way as I can. Have a fair bit of cricket…
I’m thankful you all found things to talk about over the weekend, and must admit I’m writing this with little in mind. It’s a short ramble before I go to bed.
One has to question an opposition that gets skittled for 59 and then allows England to make 180 odd for 1. I mean, really? It takes me back to the last 40 over game I ever played. We played it on a wicket used a couple of days before for a county game at Southgate, and we were playing a team we knew were massively stronger than us. Said to the skipper “win the toss, bat first, and we can have this over with in short order”. I’m a realist. He lost the toss. They batted. Their opener made 189 not out, they got 360 in their 40 overs, and to be fair to the bully, he never made a lot of it, but still. What pleasure can you derive from smashing muppets?
Lots more important stuff will be on the way for next week, so I’ll see what I can do. Cheers for all the words….
Ribs
No laughing at the back.
Sorry all. Been busy. But had to stop for that little beauty.
Furtherance
Not a full post at this stage, but some interesting links out there. Here’s Stuart Broad on Alastair Cook…
http://www.trentbridge.co.uk/news/2015/april/broad-west-indies-a-tough-opposition.html
There’s a lot in there to chew over, especially the contention that Alastair Cook is England’s greatest ever batsman.
Of course, you’ve probably all seen Boycott’s piece:
It’s the usual sort of stuff from Geoffrey but ramped up a little. I can’t help get the feeling that he’s really, especially, pissed off with this team and their attitude. I might do a reverse fisking of that a bit later on, but I have the spare room to deal with today.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/west-indies-v-england-2015/content/story/858327.html
According to this the arch data miner and captain plonker haven’t discussed one of the fundamental positions. I’m with James for TFT:
I’ll add more as the day goes on, so keep checking back if you feel like it, or follow my rants on Twitter.
The Colo(u)r Of Money
Many of you have already picked up on the wonderful exchange between Hughes and Newman, after the Bogfather had kindly showed them the way to the Dirty Dozen.
If you haven’t, here it is….
I hope that shows Hughes’s comment above (just checked and it does).
Many of you have taken this as a complete dismissal of the words of the people on this blog, which we shouldn’t be surprised about. It’s not as if the great unwashed have been given a say so far, so why change now. But it is something that we still see coming through their writing and other appearances, and is what is now going to be known as the TTT. This stands for Tyers Twitter Tendency.
Readers for a while know exactly what I am on about, as it derives from a tweet by Alan Tyers in February 2014:
https://twitter.com/alantyers/status/430783842535108609
This can be summed up best by the fantastic tweets from Simon Hughes, aka the analyst, in his responses to The Bogfather:
We’ve done this tweet already, on the post “Quietly”. He just jumped on a list containing JAMES BRAYSHAW and thought I was only going on about culprits. Want strange? Read one of his “editorials” in The Cricketer.
Classic TTT. “Ooooooh, I know who the real cuplrits are, and you don’t…. because I’m an insider and you aren’t……”
So when challenged to put up…
“Can’t tell you”. Why not, big man? You subject to a confidentiality clause as well? Worried anything that disturbs Downton will mean less of your puff piece interviews in The Cricketer? No. I call bullshit. If there were culprits, as he puts it, then shame them, with evidence, not hearsay and innuendo like he does with Pietersen. Don’t hide behind this change from within stuff.
How interesting though that Newman reacted to the list. Now, as you know, Paul Newman doesn’t like my stuff. He’s never said so in print, but he has said so by blocking me on Twitter. Wonder how I can still link your stuff, sir? It’s not hard. I can understand being cheesed off being told you are a shill for the ECB decision makers (until one came along) and the most anti-KP presence on the new circuit, but blocking me for questioning why this is so? Do leave off.
He got one thing right on those tweets. I’m not important as one person. But as a blog with quite a decent hit rate, along with the Full Toss, we have a small voice that is growing, and has caught some attention. One press guy described the blog to me as the best one holding the press and decision makers to account. That was nice. But I’m not here for the ego, I’m here because I enjoy it (most of the time). And what I enjoy most is fisking articles like this.
Frustration was clear in the voices of Peter Moores and Alastair Cook as they fended off repeated enquiries about Kevin Pietersen’s future more than a year after he had seemingly been banished from international cricket for good.
Getting worried, Paul? Getting worried that a person with a test hundred since your beloved captain made one might get back into the team? And hang about, weren’t you banging on about how rubbish Moores had been at the World Cup? Do you want to stay consistent on that? Oh, you’ll claim this a factual representation of what happened, but Moore especially, needs to feel the heat. Cook, well, I’ve given up with you lot ever challenging his lamentable record over the past two years in all formats. Seems he’s a protected species.
Well, there is only one person to blame — and that is Colin Graves. The incoming ECB chairman has been responsible for the mixed messages that leave the England team in as big a state of turmoil and internal rebellion as ever.
Well, I’d humbly suggest that Colin Graves wasn’t the architect of England’s brilliant World Cup campaign, and if we’d done well in that, the clamour, for what it is worth, would have been a great deal less. After all, your constant line is that the only way to shut people up is for England to keep winning. So there isn’t only one person to blame for doing, as Tickers says:
Graves has forged an excellent reputation in English cricket as chairman of Yorkshire for the way he bankrolled and transformed the club, but his initial forays into the international game have been little short of an embarrassment.
I’m not embarrased? Anyone else think he is embarrassing? Are you embarrassed not because of this, but because he may be attacking your casus belli, Mr Newman (the persecution and exclusion of Pietersen)? Really? OK, some of his and Tom whatisnames ideas are a bit off beam, but as you will say later on, you agree with one of the most controversial. All of his forays into the international game are an embarrassment, but one that could potentially bankrupt the counties isn’t? Way to pick and choose, sir.
He has become the loose cannon of English cricket — and he has yet to take up office.
He’s yet to take up office. Of course, he’s the deputy to Clarke at the moment, so he is in office, which is why us refuseniks are greeting all this with scepticism and a great deal of care. You’re worried because if KP makes a comeback, your fox (and all those that made the decision) has been shot. So while you call this man the loose cannon of English cricket, you save your powder on Paul “outside cricket” Downton and Giles “right kind of family” Clarke. We know you can’t include James “Gary Ballance” Whitaker because he’s tight as a drum when it comes to talking. He’s about as much a loose cannon as a speak your weight machine.
It all started on March 1 when he gave an interview to Garry Richardson of the BBC, who is known for his persistence and admirable success in coaxing ear-catching sound bites from interviewees.
Dacre won’t like you praising someone at the BBC. Also, note. Garry Richardson got someone to say something interesting. A lesson for you lot, maybe? See also, BBC employee Pat Murphy.
So when Graves said that Pietersen — exiled for valid reasons after the last Ashes debacle before producing a nasty autobiography that only supported the ECB’s decision — had to be playing county cricket to earn an England recall, it was put down to Yorkshire straight-talking.
A nasty autobiography. Your paper has the rights to the definition of nasty. I don’t think the book did Pietersen any favours, but on the first part, we are all still waiting on these “valid reasons” that you cling to like a piece of driftwood. It’s a clash of personalities with Andy Flower mainly, and we can’t be having someone who might make test hundreds playing because he cheesed off one of the officer class. What a load of cack. Keep rolling on with this nonsense.
Yet subsequently, most importantly in a phone conversation with Pietersen, Graves has done little to play down the 34-year-old’s chances — even if privately the chairman is said to be perplexed at the media’s ‘spin’ on his apparent opening of the England door.
The “picking the team on merit” ethos, which we want, which any country seems to want, goes out the window if it means picking someone who won’t keep his gob shut and might make 8181 runs at an average in the high 40s, who may have a couple of years left and may, just may, be BETTER than those currently playing, including a captain who can’t buy a century at the moment. But hey, you keep on keeping on. Graves may, or may not, be playing a game. We don’t know, and evidently, nor do you.
If Graves, who has apparently assured senior figures that he does not want Pietersen back, really had no intention of encouraging the maverick, then he has made a right old mess of it.
These the same senior figures who told you Surrey hated his guts and never wanted him to darken their door again. Called that one right, sunshine. Remind me, who is piling on the guesswork here, John? Me or you lot?
For he has created a soap opera that will run and run now Pietersen has rejoined Surrey and put huge pressure on a fledgling England middle order who made significant Test progress last summer.
How dare Pietersen still want to play at the highest level. How dare he be cheesed off he’s escluded. How dare the poor little darlings in the test team now have an excuse to fail. How dare there be pressure on them to perform.
Not to mention completely undermining managing director Paul Downton and national selector James Whitaker, who have repeatedly clarified England’s stance on the batsman over the last 14 months.
If I’m nailing my credibility to these two, I’m bang in trouble. Downton is a joke. Everyone on here, most on Twitter and all those who see him in action, including the vast majority, I reckon, of your press corps colleagues think he’s totally and utterly out of his depth. Also Whitaker doesn’t do press conferences, and has spoken around three times that I can recall in public (that is three occasions he has spoken to multiple outlets). You let out one of your off the record sources there, sir?
And if Graves disagreed with the original decision to axe Pietersen, then he had a duty as deputy chairman of the ECB to say so then, not wait until he had taken over from Giles Clarke.
He might have. I don’t know. But note, earlier he doesn’t take office so he shouldn’t be saying anything. But now because he has an office, he should. This is belting stuff.
That is not all. Since his Pietersen outburst, Graves has said that there will be an inquiry if England do not beat a ‘mediocre’ West Indies in the upcoming three-Test series.
Well. most of us were calling for this after the Ashes last year. And also, although I love West Indies cricket, even their own people think this is a mediocre team. Come on. So do you. So stop pretending like he’s offended the lorded classes with this comment. If they lose this series, heads should roll.
This prompted the respected Barbadian commentator Tony Cozier to liken the comments to Tony Greig’s infamous intention in 1976 to make the West Indies ‘grovel’.
Because “mediocre” has all the racial connotations of a white South African telling a black team that he intended to make them grovel. I mean, seriously. This is nonsense from Cozier and it is nonsense from Newman to repeat it. Put it more alongside the “worst Australian team ever to tour here” comments of 1989, or “can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field” from one of our own at Ashes 1986-7.
Then Graves came out with the ridiculous notion of reducing Test matches to four days. This would be achieved by introducing the unrealistic target of playing 105 overs a day — a move that would destroy the primacy of the ultimate game.
I don’t agree with it, but it’s not ridiculous, and it’s not speaking the unspeakable. The guff that came with it about corporates and families was nonsense, and the thought that we might get 105 overs in a day is unrealistic in a world where TV demands a five minute break every hour, and there’s no real disincentive not to slow the game down. But there’s something to work around.
If Graves wants to make himself useful, then he should concentrate on his supposed main aim of introducing a 10-team English Premier League franchise Twenty20 competition. Everybody bar a few myopic counties wants that.
This isn’t ridiculous because Paul agrees with it. Tremendous. Nice to see “a few myopic counties” there as well to reinforce his view that he’s in step and everyone who disagrees is myopic or ridiculous.
He could also do something about a crippling fixture list that will see England play 17 Tests in the next 10 months — a key factor in why they have fallen so far behind in the 50-over game and just endured the worst World Cup in their history.
Some of us mentioned this around two years ago. Nice to see you join us here. However, hard to see how a future fixture list meant we cocked up the World Cup. We had a very light winter of cricket, playing just 12 days of cricket between October and January. And we were crap. Care to explain how fixture congestion caused this? Should we not play in our summer? Also, not sure it is in Graves’ gift to cancel our tours, given he’s not in office yet, Paul.
There is much for the ECB’s new regime — which includes new chief executive Tom Harrison and communications director Chris Haynes — to do, but all the new chairman has done so far is make things worse.
We share your scepticism on this front. I don’t trust Graves as he has been part of the furniture, and if England falter and KP is scoring runs, the cry will be for him to come in, and if we are told there is no place for him, the alienation will be complete. Betrayal of the worst kind is raising hopes to dash them. You seem to want to finish KP’s career and take glee in it. If Cook can’t lump it, then he’s the one with the issue and needs to get over himself, but you are never going to write that. Unless there’s blatant insubordination which we’ve not been told about. But also, I have a healthy mistrust of all authority and I don’t like people telling me someone is great before they’ve proved it. Indeed if they have to rely on that testimony, then they probably aren’t.
I am worried Tom Harrison hasn’t shown his face. He’s becoming a bit Downton-esque on this front as again, we are being told how great he was before he spoke and disproved that notion. The new press officer can hardly do worse than Colin Gibson and his entourage.
Colin Graves should think very carefully in future before he speaks.
Or Paul will block you on Twitter.
Being Outside Cricket 