Monthly Archives: July 2010

Quiz: I am the captain of which country?

Posted on
Reply

A little puzzler for you. Below is an excerpt from an article on captaining a certain country:

Unreasonable expectations are placed on you and unreasonable requests made of you. Effigies are burnt, stones and abuses hurled the way of you and your house. Within your team there is constant intrigue. Secret oaths are taken by players against you, players write letters to the board and press, threatening they will quit rather than play under you.

And here is the question:

This is the captain’s job description of …online survey

Easy, huh?

You can read the full job description at wisdencricketer.com.

The iPad is not for cricket fans

Posted on
2

I am no Apple fanboy, but I do love the iPad. I got to take one home with me from work for a few days (testing purposes! ;) ) and I think it is a wonderful product.

However, there is one problem with it. A really big one if you ask me. You can not watch cricket livestreams on the iPad.

It is technically possible off course. We do it all the time where I work. But as far as I can tell, there are no companies out there who offer cricket livestreaming suited for the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

The ones I know offer livestreaming in Flash, Silverlight or good old Windows Media but none of these will work on one of Apple’s mobile devices (laptops excluded).

Maybe this is something worth emailing Steve Jobs about?

One more step to make Test cricket better

Posted on
1

Alex Bowden – best know for his excellent blog King Cricket – made a very good point about Test pitches on the Wisden Cricketer website:

In the highly unlikely event that Test cricket pitches were consistently made a little more challenging for batsmen, maybe people would be five times as interested in each day’s play.

Of course that’s a deliberately ludicrous statement, but is it massively untrue? I do think that there is at least an outside chance that there would be a sufficient rise in interest to make up for the loss of a great many fifth days. Who needs day five? A Test never ends in a draw on any of the first four days.

I think he is right. National boards and cricket ground owners seem to have forgotten that five days for a Test match is a maximum, not a requirement.

Test cricket is better of producing more exciting matches. It such an obvious point to make that it is easily forgotten.

  • Test cricket pitches should produce more results

Not anymore though, now that I added it to the list of improvements for Test cricket.

Be careful on Twitter says England-skipper Strauss

Posted on
Reply

On the day Kevin Pietersen started tweeting, young Yorkshire spinner Azeem Rafiq was dropped from the England Under-19 squad because of “inappropriate conduct”.

He did not take the news well:

When told of his punishment by team coach John Abrahams, Rafiq responded with a disgusting tirade on the social networking site.

He tweeted: “What a f***ing farsee… John Abrahams is a useless c**t… ECB prove it again what incompetent people are working for them!! John Abrahams is a useless w****r.”

Rafiq deleted the posts and claimed he did not realise other people could read his thoughts.

It is the second time a England player misbehaves on Twitter. Tim Bresnan – also a Yorkshireman – swore on his account last year.

Today, Andrew Strauss warns his teammates on using social media: “Players should be aware that what they write is going to be seen by people they might not want it to be seen by”.

The advice came too late for Rafiq, but then again, do you believe he really did not know his account was publicly accessible?

Promotion and relegation in Test cricket, and setting up the divisions

Posted on
1

I you are a regular visitor, you probably read one of my posts on how Test cricket should look in 2020. And I am not done yet. ;)

Today, a short post as an addendum on The case for a second division in Test cricket in which I want focus on two things:

  1. Promotion and relegation
  2. Setting up the divisions

Promotion and relegation

So why does Test cricket need divisions and promotion/relegation play-offs? Because it brings something extra to the game. Being on top in the rankings doesn’t account for anything real now, nor does being at the bottom.

But if there is a chance on promotion, teams in the lower divisions will have an actual price to play for. Being the best in your division will actually amount to something. It gives teams a real goal to focus on.

Likewise for teams at the bottom of their division, if with a slightly different motivation.

It will make Test cricket all the more interesting.

And what’s in it for the team topping the first division? Well, it just so happens the ICC already thought about that: a Test championship tournament between the top four of the division.

Setting up the divisions

In 5 Steps to make Test cricket better I claimed it was easy to set up three divisions with Full and the Top Associate/Affiliate Members  based on the current rankings. It is, and the result looks great:

Division 1

  1. India
  2. South Africa
  3. Australia
  4. Sri Lanka
  5. England
  6. Pakistan

Division 2

  1. New Zealand
  2. West Indies
  3. Bangladesh
  4. Zimbabwe
  5. Ireland

Division 3

  1. Kenya
  2. Netherlands
  3. Afghanistan
  4. Scotland
  5. Canada

Three competitions that would have some great games and create quite a bit of excitement, don’t you think? :)

Stop elitism and let more countries play Test cricket

Posted on
Reply

One of my suggested 5 steps to make Test cricket better is to give more games Test status. In this post more on why I think this would be good for Test cricket.

Lets start with some questions: Why not let Ireland play Bangladesh in a five-day game and call it a Test? Or when the Netherlands play Kenya?

Bangladesh, why do they deserve to be one of the Test-playing nations? What makes a country a Test-playing one?

And why will Zimbabwe regain Test status in 2011 after being stripped of it in 2004? Has Zimbabwe improved beyond recognition recently and returned to their playing level of the 1990′s?

Are both Bangladesh or Zimbabwe currently that much better than Ireland?

A bunch of questions and if you ask me, there are no clear answers. Test cricket seems to be more about the power inside the ICC  (Full Members have a bigger say in matters than Associate and Affiliate Members) then concerns about the quality of cricket being played.  If not, why is Zimbabwe restored to Test status?

To be clear: I am not saying “promote more countries to Full Members” (that would probably be to much for the power-hungry national boards anyway), just let them play Test cricket.

The five-day game is the biggest challenge for cricketers. Letting Associate Members play Test matches  means more players will experience this challenge and they will become better players by doing so. And if these players get better, it will be good for cricket in general.

Combined with a multi-tier competition structure having more Test-playing nations will give Test cricket a huge boost.

The game matters, traditions do not

So why not just let the Associate Members play five-day games and not call it Tests? Because that would be silly.

A international game of cricket played over five days is a Test match. It is that simple. There really is no good reason to differentiate between matches played by Full Members and Associate Members.

No, not even because of tradition. I am all for traditions, but not when they are holding back countries, players and cricket in general to develop.

Eoin Morgan and Ed Joyce choose England because they wanted to play Test cricket, not because they felt really English all of a sudden of wanted to play for a Full Member. Had Ireland been able to play Tests against the Associates Members and occasionally a Full Member they would not have switched allegiance.

Ask yourselves this last question: who is the winner in the current system? Cricket certainly is not.