Scott Oliver
Ethics and the 12th man
When a substitute fields for the opposition, he is expected to do his job with commitment. How straightforward is that?
Scott Oliver
03-Aug-2016
For such a peripheral and largely undesirable job, the role of 12th man has at times managed to throw cricket's fabled sense of fair play into question. Take Ricky Ponting, so much a traditionalist that he seemed undressed without his baggy green, on the wrong end of modern Test cricket's most (in) famous act of substitute fielding. You may remember it.
By the fourth instalment of the 2005 Ashes, England's habit of allowing their rotating assembly of quicks to enjoy restorative "comfort breaks" had pierced Punter's flesh and was slurping at his boiling blood, where followed an eruption at what he believed to be, frankly, cheating. Where the substitute had hitherto been provided by the host county, some sprightly young buck on a summer contract and very much an afterthought, the sense was that Gary Pratt, a Durham 2nd XI player, was chosen by the ever-scheming Duncan Fletcher with malice aforethought, a weaponised backup carried around the country like a lucky charm, a provocation.
Pratt's swoop-and-shy earned him a visit to 10 Downing Street and an open-top bus ride through London. Other subs have written themselves into folklore - from a 45-year-old Bob Taylor leaving the sponsor's box to keep wicket in a Lord's Test (thanks to New Zealand's amenability) to Bilal Shafayat's dilatory glove-ferrying in Cardiff - yet the 12th man isn't all glory, nor always a particularly easy ride. In many ways it's a highly stressful situation - imagine shelling Virat Kohli off Jimmy Anderson! - if only because of the griping on social media that your "inferiority" should be reflected in your garb: No Three Lions for you, sonny boy, but if you don't catch that crucial, swirling steepler, you'll be for the stocks!
Full postNo toss is fine, but what about the spinners?
If one of the intentions of doing away with the toss in county cricket is to encourage spin, the visiting captain should also be given the option of batting first
Scott Oliver
11-Jul-2016
Despite the advice of one or two team-mates, I've always felt the toss was a completely random affair, lacking in both technique ("It always falls on the side facing up") or pattern ("Tails never fails"). Even so, the toss was often the start of me being blamed - sometimes for simply losing it, at others for making the wrong decision - so occasionally I'd shift this burden back on to the mouthier players by canvassing opinion and suggesting that since I'd followed their lead, they better bloody get it right.
The significance of the toss is hard to know - enough, evidently, for the odd opposing captain to pick up the coin before I'd had chance to check the outcome - although its weight in club cricket is to a large degree determined by the low quality of the pitches and the format of most Saturday-afternoon games, which necessitate ten second-innings wickets being taken for a win.
As Jon Hotten blogged here a couple of months back, it isn't clear how much of an advantage winning the toss actually comprises. A recent Numbers Game column showed (apropos a suggestion of Darren Lehmann's that the away team should be given the toss in Test cricket) that this eventuality has of late increased the chances of victory in England and Sri Lanka, but not in Australia and India - although one must be wary of drawing causal conclusions from these bare facts, since a team's capacity to exploit the toss is dependent on the bowling resources at their disposal.
Full postThe problem with upholding the umpire's call
The purpose of arriving at correct decisions using the DRS is undermined by the need to not undermine the umpire's authority
Scott Oliver
25-Jun-2016
It took an incorrectly disallowed Frank Lampard "goal" in an England- Germany World Cup knockout match for FIFA president Sepp Blatter's intransigence over goal-line technology to recede. A television audience of hundreds of millions knew the ball was in, yet the officials were powerless to check. The absurdity of the situation was pithily captured by Lampard's uncle, then Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp: "We can put a man on the moon but we can't tell whether a ball has crossed the line…?!"
Blatter's resistance was twofold: first, the technology couldn't be implemented at grass-roots level; second, it would inevitably erode the referee's authority. Soon, he speculated, technology would be extended to all sorts of decisions, breaking the game's flow. Where would you draw the line? With its continuous high-speed entanglement of limbs, football involves constant interpretation regarding foul play, and while technology could be used to aid that interpretation, it rarely provides definitive answers. Expert pundits with countless replays seldom attain consensus. Too many grey areas.
Cricket, on the other hand, is an almost entirely black-and-white game from an officiating point of view (post-Hawk-Eye, only "obstructing the field" requires expert interpretation), yet its administrators have somehow muddied the umpiring waters - and for that same innately conservative buttressing of authority, as Blatter expressed.
Full postOut in the cold with Chris Lewis
The day the former England allrounder turned out for a club side to bowl 30 overs in a beanie
Scott Oliver
05-Jun-2016
Despite the fact that cricket's age of T20 expansion has seen an array of teams named after extreme weather - Hobart Hurricanes, Perth Scorchers, Sydney Thunder and Brisbane Heat in the Big Bash League alone - the game itself is restricted to a fairly narrow band of climatic conditions. (At least, it is if it's to be played comfortably, without people needing to go on a saline drip after batting all day, or having fingers too numb to grip the ball.)
Rain tends to be a spoiler, a bit of a wet blanket on things, although us clubbies are fairly optimistic when faced with precipitation. Not long ago I tried to persuade the umpires that the droplets of water we could feel round about us weren't rain, which league rules stated had to stop completely before you could resume play, but low cloud, about which there was no such provision specified.
Wind is also never hugely pleasant (although the Fremantle Doctor has a palliative effect at the WACA), while snow generally inconveniences the game, as it did in a famous county match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton in June 1975. After the middle day was snowed off, the third day's thaw gave a soft top to a previously bone-hard pitch and Derbyshire replied to Lancashire's 477 for 5 declared with 42 and 87.
Full postPlayers and umpires need to get along better
If the two parties can each have more trust and empathy for the other, it would reduce the number of incidents of bad behaviour in club cricket
Scott Oliver
09-May-2016
There comes a point in everyone's life when you have to accept the march of time, to let go of your childhood dreams.
Aged 42, with eyesight and motivation ebbing, the body stiff in all the wrong places, never having played a first-class match or held a professional contract, and with the England middle order looking in reasonable fettle, it's time to face the harsh reality: if I'm ever going to play Test cricket, it will now almost certainly have to be as a spinner.
There are, I think, grounds for optimism: John Traicos, Clarrie Grimmett and John Emburey all played Tests at an age more advanced than mine. On the flip side, I don't really bowl spin (yet) - although, as captain, I could probably sell it as "leading from the front".
Full postWhy team spirit is no illusion
It may be fashionable to dismiss it as a figment of hindsight, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist
Scott Oliver
15-Apr-2016
As the fourth six sailed deep into the Kolkata night and on into legend, Ben Stokes fell to one knee, bereft, it seemed, and devastatingly, brutally alone, as West Indies charged and cavorted deliriously, spurred on to glory, their captain told us, by journalistic slights and high-handed administrators.
Was this team spirit like in the fabled days when from the disparate islands a greater collective was forged? And what about England: did they fold back into their own private thoughts, their own thwarted ambitions, just a collection of individuals thrown together by their jobs?
It would be all too facile and predictable to trot out that dog-eared adage of former Spurs and Barcelona footballer Steve Archibald: "Team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory."
Full postHow do you counter T20's negative impact on spin?
The format has forced the game to evolve at every level, but not all of it has been for the better
Scott Oliver
25-Mar-2016
Socrates and his young friend Plato enjoyed a natter. One of the things the old master liked talking about was talking, about how the spoken word was superior to this new-fangled writing lark, which, far from providing "a recipe for wisdom and memory" as its proponents suggested, actually leads to its opposite, causing forgetfulness as people came to rely on the crutch of "external marks". We know all this, of course, because Plato wrote it down. As Umberto Eco remarked, Socrates expresses "an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful, something that represents a value in itself, and a deeply spiritual one".
Conversation around the effect T20 has had - is having - on cricket, particularly its venerable form (its Platonic essence?) of Test matches, often has a similarly future-phobic tenor. However, between the out-and-out sceptics steadfastly maintaining that T20 is somehow "not proper" and the evangelists zealously and uncritically espousing T20's dynamism as the sport's panacea, there are a range of more nuanced positions.
The majority of these recognise the immense interest (and value) created by T20's hothousing of skills - not least the way they have fed back into the Test game, largely eradicating the bore draw, and unquestionably improving batting and fielding. Yet the fence-sitters share the sceptics' justifiable concerns that the proliferation of T20 will lead, if not to the obsolescence of the Test game, then certainly to irreversible changes, not all of them for the better.
Full postMy Ottis files
When Ottis Gibson arrived in Staffordshire for a club stint in the late '90s, he won hearts with his down-to-earth nature and kudos for his cricketing nous
Scott Oliver
27-Feb-2016
Arguably the greatest ever (unsuccessful) hat-trick ball was that bowled by Ottis Gibson in the Friends Provident Trophy final at Lord's in August 2007, his last year as a professional cricketer. Durham, still trophy-less 16 years after moving up from the minor counties, had posted a daunting 312, though Hampshire would no doubt have fancied their chances, if only because they were captained by Shane Warne. And Warnie, as we know, believes anything is possible.
First ball of Hampshire's reply, the 38-year-old Gibson, eschewing the traditional loosener, is bang on the money, pitching on off, angling across Michael Lumb, who nicks to second slip: 0 for 1. In comes another leftie, Sean Ervine. Gibson bowls the same ball, gets the same result. 0 for 2 off 0.2 overs. Sensational.
Into the swelling catastrophe bounds Kevin Pietersen, barely having had time to neck his Red Bull. Lord's is abuzz. Hat-trick ball! Having waited for KP to attend to his rituals, Ottis steams in and bowls… a bouncer! And not even a straight bouncer. A high bouncer, two feet outside off! An ego-ball. A ball for KP, who, being KP, takes it on, mistiming a pull wide of mid-on. Just. A delivery of genius.
Full postWhen entertainment becomes intrusion
Broadcasters' desire to get in players' heads for the sake of good TV is beginning to affect game play
Scott Oliver
30-Jan-2016
Wimbledon, some time in the future: Young Dougal Murray is serving. It's championship point. He bounces the ball three, four, five times, and readies himself. Suddenly, in his earpiece, he hears the voice of an old Swiss master: "Hey Dougal, Roger here. Tell us, what are you thinking right now? Tactics, I mean, not emotions…"
Laconic at the best of times, Dougal mumbles back: "Don't really know, Rog. Slice down the middle, three-quarter speed…?" He bounces the ball, 11, 12, 13 times.
Atavistic competitive fires stirring, Federer scoffs: "Really?!" He unfurls some data about the Serbian opponent's behaviour at match point down on the ad court, chucks in a Gladwellian hunch, and hey presto, junior Murray serves himself to a Slam.
Full postT20's spiritual brother
Darts and cricket have plenty in common, and darts owes cricketers a tiny bit for its unexpected popularity as a televised spectator sport
Scott Oliver
09-Jan-2016
And so to news that the Benaud-sized void in Australian cricket commentary has been filled, with Andrew Flintoff pounding away at the late doyen's maxim about not speaking unless you can add to the pictures with all the relentlessness he once applied to dismissing Adam Gilchrist.
Flintoff's custard-pie commentary turn at the Big Bash has run the full tonal gamut, from bewildered astonishment at his earnest sidekick Ricky Ponting's prescient ability to second-guess what type of delivery might be bowled given the field (rather confirming the impression that appointing Fred skipper for the 2006-07 Ashes was not such a judicious call), to goofy amazement at portly men taking catches in the bleachers, each greeted with the sort of breathless verbal outpouring you'd expect from a man learning his death sentence had just been repealed. Those not sated should hunt down the latest addition to Flintoff's burgeoning celebrity portfolio: darts commentator on the Sky TV game show One Hundred and Eighty.
The show was filmed at Blackpool's iconic darting amphitheatre, the Winter Gardens, where Fred's guest commentary stint at the World Matchplay in July 2012 coincided with current darting kingpin Michael van Gerwen hitting a hallowed nine-darter, the 31st in televised history and doubtless the first to be called by a man with 3000 Test runs. Although he didn't know it then, this was Flintoff's informal audition for One Hundred and Eighty, which in turn, it now appears, was finishing school for the BBL banterthon.
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