Harmless

For a few days now, a friend of mine has been saying that England must pick Steve Harmison for Edgbaston. He has been on fire in County cricket, he's saying, and he's a matchwinner. He isn't alone in this - Vic Marks, one of the more astute and engaging cricket writers around, has written two separate articles in the Guardian calling for Harmison's inclusion.
Now, I refresh my Twitter homepage, and here again is my friend, tweeting "They better play Harmless!"
I think they mustn't. Here's why.
In 30 Test matches since the first Test of the 2005 Ashes at 2005, Harmison's figures show that he's been, well, harmless.
He's picked up 94 wickets, at the average of 38.53 and a strike rate of 68.1. Both his five wicket hauls in this period came in the same Test, at Old Trafford against Pakistan just over three years ago. Measure that against an overall average of 31.78 and strike rate of 59.3.
Even in the 2005 Ashes, the supposedly talismanic Harmison's series average and strike rate were behind those of Simon Jones, Andrew Flintoff and Matthew Hoggard - the Matthew Hoggard whose role in that triumph is forgotten against the backdrop of Harmison hitting people on the helmet in a Test England lost.
Let's compare the career trajectories of the two H-men, shall we?
In the period I mentioned above - Harmison's harmless phase - Hoggard took 88 wickets in 26 Tests, averaging 31.98 and striking every 59.9 balls, with two five-wicket hauls. Not much worse than an overall average of 30.50 and strike rate of 56.00.
Even so, after both were dropped after bowling badly in a terrible defeat to New Zealand at Hamilton in March 2008, it was Hoggard who suffered the worse fate, disappearing entirely from the Test side. Harmison, meanwhile, has played four Tests in three series in three different continents, doing nothing to suggest he'll give Australian batsmen nightmares.
Hoggard's 'nip', an intangible quality that he apparently cannot do without, is gone forever, it seems, while Harmison's fiery pace and steep bounce can be summoned up as soon as he breathes the air of Northumberland.
Agreed, Hoggard, at 32 is older than Harmison by two years, but this isn't really a 'bring back Hoggy' blog post. It is, instead, a blog post that has veered entirely out of track, but attempts now to return to what it started out trying to say - no, sorry, Harmison shouldn't play.

Venkatesh Prasad

When I was a kid, a lot of the other kids I played cricket with bowled with Venkatesh Prasad's action, an action both idiosyncratic and robotic, and therefore ideal for a kid to copy and caricature. Except when I tried it, someone pointed out that I jump off the wrong foot.
Prasad's action went like this: an absolutely straight-line run-up, a towel flapping from the waistband of his trousers, and then, as he went into a side-on position, his arms would whirl in a motion that resembled a crankshaft and piston, at the end of which his left arm would drop downwards, and his right arm commence another rotation. As left elbow met hip, his right arm and left leg would form a line exactly perpendicular to the ground. At this point, he would release the ball, inevitably his stock delivery, the leg-cutter.
In the van that took me to school, the back rows discussed cricket. The joke that went around about India's bowling was - Venkatesh Prasad is a leg spinner wrongly labelled right-arm medium-fast, and Anil Kumble a medium pacer wrongly labelled legbreak googly.

Medium-fast

This morning, Star Cricket telecast the highlights of the 1996 World Cup group match between India and Sri Lanka at Ferozeshah Kotla – the match where Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana destroyed Manoj Prabhakar’s international career.
I’ve never seen Manoj Prabhakar bowl well; although I must say that all I’ve seen of his bowling are highlights packages from India’s 1990 tour to England, and now this match. He bowled at about 67 miles per hour, and needed a run-up as long as Waqar Younis or Wes Hall to achieve this speed.
Usually, bowlers who clock 67 miles per hour are placid-looking chaps who, as the cliché goes, know their limitations and bowl stump-to-stump. Manoj Prabhakar instead looked like he wanted to splatter the innards of batsmen all over the sightscreen at the other end and imagined himself easily capable of doing so.
As everyone knows, Manoj Prabhakar ended this match, and his international career, bowling off spin.
Immediately after this match, Star Cricket played the highlights of Sachin Tendulkar's 177 at Trent Bridge a few months after the World Cup. It made me chuckle, because here was another 67mph trundler who seemed to believe himself the spiritual heir to Frank Tyson - Dominic Cork.
Sachin punched Cork off the backfoot repeatedly and clinically, down the ground, through the off side and on. When he got bored, he waited a little while longer and cut him off his stumps, or moved across and whipped him off his legs. Despite all this, Cork continued to run in every ball with the aggression and flared nostrils of a slightly deranged bull.

Straight bat, high left elbow

Table cricket games, I guess, have different names in different parts of the world. In India, it was (is?) called 'Gold Cup'.
The playing surface was a square of green cloth with a pitch, fielding positions, and concentric ellipses marked on it. When you hit the ball beyond the first ellipse, you got one run, the next one two, and so forth, until the last ellipse - the boundary, bounded by a plastic fence.
The bowler rolled a ball bearing down a slide, the slope of which he or she could steepen or make more gradual to vary the speed. You were out either if you were bowled, or if a fielder caught you - that is, when the ball rolled into a V-shaped gap in its base.
The batsman had a choice of bats. The simpler implement was a little bat-shaped bat that gave you a pretty decent range of shots. If you wanted power, however, you chose the mechanical contraption thingy, which ensured a perfectly straight bat and a gloriously smooth transition from backlift to follow-through. On the rare occasion you hit the ball using this device, the ball flew to the boundary, and once, a friend smashed a six over long off.

That's a bat, not a duck-billed platypus

What prompted me to explain all this in so much detail?
Well, this morning, Thilan Samaraweera scored 73, with 11 boundaries. His best shot was a cover drive off Umar Gul - he went down on one knee, and held his pose as the ball sped away. His bat was so straight, and his left elbow so high, that the first thing I thought upon watching the replay was - Whoa! that's a shot straight out of 'Gold Cup', and the sweetest, meatiest spot of the mechanical contraption bat.

Lara, Chanderpaul and alternate universes

Does anyone have a smaller percentage of not out innings (apart, of course, from batsmen who've never been not out) than Brian Lara? Six not outs in 232 innings. Interestingly, within the six not outs are contained two of Test cricket's immortal innings - the 153 and the 400.
Even without statistics, no one would deny the claim that Lara has played in some pretty underwhelming sides. Statistics sharpen this picture, and starken (does this word even exist?) the contrast with batsmen from other teams.
Number of not outs is a reasonable measure of the effect playing for a good or bad team can have on a batsman. But it isn't foolproof; for instance, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who has played alongside Lara for much of his career, has 32 not outs in 121 Tests.
On the other hand, number of declarations is a direct measure of a team's batting strength. During Lara's 131-Test career, West Indies declared fifteen times.
Let's apply the same measures to two other batting greats, who averaged over 50 like him, and whose careers ran parallel to his:
Sachin Tendulkar has played 147 Tests so far, and has 27 not outs in 261 innings. In those 147 Tests, India has declared 47 innings closed.
Steve Waugh played 168 Tests, batted 260 times, was not out 46 times, and Australia declared 65 times during his career.
What might have happened if fate had stuck Lara in the Indian or Australian line-up?
Nobody can say with any degree of certainty that batsman A would bat the same way if he were part of team X instead of team Y. It's still an intriguing thought.
Something tells me Lara would have averaged over 60 in a better batting line-up. Everything about his game - his method, his personality, his range of shots - would have ensured him top dog status in any line-up.
That leads me to another intriguing thought: Would Chanderpaul average as much, and be as hard to dismiss, if he was Indian or Australian?
The answer, I think, is yes - provided the selectors pick someone of his aesthetic otherness. He'd love being away from the limelight, he'd be the perfect guy for domineering types to bat in partnership with, and he has so much hunger for runs that it wouldn't diminish one bit even if he was batting in a team where every other batsman was Bradman.
What do you think?

Sri Lanka versus Pakistan, third Test, day three

This afternoon, Misbah Ul Haq and Shoaib Malik inched Pakistan's lead towards 200 at the Sinhalese Sports Club.
From one end, Rangana Herath got the ball to loop and dip, and both batsmen played watchfully late. From the other, Chaminda Vaas, bowling in his last Test - left arm over, pitching middle and off, teasing the batsmen to reach out. No clouds, no swing; even so, 10-5-14-0.
Between deliveries, the TV cameras panned the crowd, contemplating the cricket as it consumed ice lollies.
A group of kids, led by Percy Abeysekara, Sri Lankan cricket's most exuberant fan, sang 'Happy birthday to you,' prompting Nuwan Kulasekara, 27 years and 0 days old, fielding on the boundary, to break into the biggest grin ever seen on a cricket field.

How do you beat Pakistan?

Simple. Bowl badly when Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf are batting together.Younis's second-wicket partnership of 200 with Fawad Alam in the second Test against Sri Lanka at the P. Sara Oval was his third 200-plus partnership in a losing cause. The only other batsman in Test history to figure in three losing 200-plus stands? Mohammad Yousuf.
Younis and Yousuf are the only pair to figure twice on the list of losing 200-plus stands. The highest partnership ever in a lost Test? Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf, 363 for the third wicket against England at Headingley in 2006.

Background music

Not too long ago, Andrew Flintoff walked in to bat during England's first innings at Cardiff. As he marked his guard, a bugler in the crowd bugled the Flintstones tune.

... Let's ride with the family down the street,
Through the courtesy of Fred's two feet...

Perfect.

This afternoon, Mohammad Yousuf repeatedly eased threes through the leg side on a slow Sinhalese Sports Club outfield. As usual, there was a brass band in the background, belting out not baila but Bollywood, and

Ye shaam mastani, madhosh kiye jaaye...

Just the right kind of tune for Yousuf's languid style.

Soft batsmen, or average bowlers?

India's batsmen, historically, have scored a greater proportion of 'soft' runs than batsmen from anywhere else.

I base this statement on numbers. Dodgy they may be, and liable to scornful ripping apart by statisticians, but numbers, nevertheless. And there's an eerie pattern to all this as well.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Let me describe how I arrived at my conclusion.
First, I made a lot of assumptions, based solely on intuition.
My first assumption: drawn matches = batting-friendly conditions. Historically, I assumed, bat-a-thon draws numerically overwhelm rain-affected draws and games saved on spiteful wickets by tremendous batting.
So drawn Tests = batting-friendly wickets, and result Tests = sporting, or bowler-friendly wickets.
Runs scored in result matches, therefore, equate to hard-fought runs. This, obviously, ignores knocks played with a 'what the hell, we've lost; let me bash it around a bit' mindset.
Once I made these assumptions, I calculated (on June 16 2009, so recent series like the Ashes and Sri Lanka-Pakistan don't figure), for the eight major Test teams in history - Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies - the ratio of centuries scored to number of Tests played.
I then calculated the centuries per Test ratio for each country, ignoring drawn Tests.
I subtracted the second ratio from the first.
And discovered that India has had, through Test history, the biggest difference between centuries per match and centuries per result match. That is, in result Tests, Indian batsmen have suffered the steepest drop in century-production from their average rate than batsmen from any other team.
Here's the table (click on the image to see a bigger, more readable table):
This either means that Indian batsmen have scored a lot of soft runs in helpful conditions, or it means that India's bowlers have let Tests drift into draws in conditions where bowlers from other teams have bowled match-winning spells.
Look at the averages of India's great bowlers - Mankad, Gupte, Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna, Kapil Dev, Kumble, Srinath - high 20s or low 30s without exception. India hasn't had anyone with a Jason Gillespie-esque mid-20s average, leave alone someone with an average approaching Curtly Ambrose or Sydney Barnes. Is Gillespie a greater bowler than Anil Kumble? No. Has he been part of better bowling attacks? Most definitely.
So I decided to do the same calculation for this century - the 2000s. India has regularly won Test matches abroad in this period, a period that's included a number of memorable matchwinning centuries, and seen the emergence of a pretty decent bunch of bowlers.
Here then is the eerie pattern I referred to before. India has done no better or worse in this period than through its history, and the clinching number is exactly the same as in the previous table:
0.24, the most significant number in the history of Indian cricket.

...and one who loves it passionately

From a lovely Gideon Haigh article that materialised today on Cricinfo :

"Murali's greatness rests only partly on his capacity to set the ball in motion: there is his accuracy, his keen grasp of batting weakness, his encyclopaedic knowledge of opponents, his unflagging love for a game that has on occasion treated him pretty unkindly. In his affable autobiography, Bully For You, Oscar (2000), Ian Austin, provides a lovely vignette of Murali's assimilation at Lancashire.

I've never known anyone who knew so much about cricket - or anyone who could talk about the game for so long. There's a hell of a lot of international cricket being played all year round these days, but Murali knew all about it. He knew more about Lancashire's record than Lancashire players themselves. We'd be sitting in the dressing room or in the bar in the evening at an away game and he'd suddenly start talking about one of our games from years back. He'd know all the facts and figures and couldn't believe that the rest of us didn't remember every last dot and comma of the game he was talking about."

Cricketers who don't love cricket

When Chris Gayle said he wouldn't really mind if Test cricket died, he showed himself to be the kind of person that makes me flail my arms wildly, look imploringly at the ceiling, and shed fat tears while sniffling noisily - the kind of person who's gifted at sport but doesn't really love sport.
And Chris Gayle, sadly, isn't the only example of that kind of person in the universe.
Accompanying me right through my schooldays, sitting next to me in class and walking down corridors alongside me, were guys, in not insubstantial numbers, who had far more natural sporting talent than me but cared more for, as the years went by, the Backstreet Boys, Joey Tribbiani and Quentin Tarantino than Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid.
This, I'm sure you'll agree, is like being slapped repeatedly in the face by a sodden wicketkeeping glove, for a sports-tragic who never managed to find a place in his school's cricket team. I don't mind people who merely have a lukewarm interest in cricket. I resent people who have a lukewarm interest in cricket and swat insouciant sixes.
Chris Gayle strikes me as falling into this category of cricketer, the category of cricketer that would find poring through old scorecards at Cricket Archive late at night, marveling at P.G. Wodehouse's all-round talent, a daft thing to do.
I suspect, sadly, that most gifted cricketers are like that.