Scott Oliver
I saw Footy before he became the real deal
Rookie England left-armer Mark Footitt began as a wayward tearaway in his early years, but he has since blossomed into a wicket-taking bowler
Scott Oliver
03-Dec-2015
Given the thrillingly muscular spectacle provided by left-arm pacemen of late - the Mitchells, Trent Boult, Wahab Riaz, Mohammad Irfan et al - it's somewhat ironic that the man England have picked to fit this template began life bowling with his right arm. Then one day, aged 10, he decided to have a crack in the nets with his left. It came out a lot better, and much faster, so he stuck with it (although to this day he still throws right-handed).
Back then, Mark Footitt was playing for Kimberley Institute CC - a club spawned by the town's Literary Institute in 1878, two miles from where DH Lawrence would be born seven years later - in Nottinghamshire where he was an occasional Under-12s team-mate of another surprise inclusion in the Test squad for South Africa, Samit Patel. After he moved to the idyllic Papplewick and Linby CC just north of Nottingham, it soon became apparent that his exceptional pace was not some physical precocity soon to be clawed back by his peers. This was the real deal.
Of course, nothing sets tongues wagging like pace, and the buzz around "Footy" soon spread, so much so that when he was selected, aged 15, to play for Nottinghamshire U-19 in a practice match against Scotland U-19, the BBC's regional news programme Midlands Today sent a camera crew along. Footitt castled one opener (the bail landing by the pavilion) and bowled the Scotland captain an accidental beamer that scudded into his hand and finished his tour.
Full postThe slow withering of English club cricket
The ECB's drive to improve recreational cricket may have imposed unrealistic expectations on many clubs
Scott Oliver
09-Nov-2015
Gloves, bat and helmet snatched from the dressing room, your spikes would pitter-patter past a full-sized snooker table, through a door and down the shallow steps of a viewing gallery with three long rows of leather-backed seats, then a left turn to the top of a grand, wide old staircase that folded back on itself before disgorging the batsman onto a ballroom floor, which you crossed on a rubber mat before another door threw you down a dozen or so concrete steps, flanked by rows of wooden-slatted concrete benches, then finally into the arena.
This was the Great Chell Cricket Club, nestled in the heart of Stoke-on-Trent, the Lord's of the Potteries, its opulence incongruous with the surroundings. Once upon a time, such a walk would end with the batsman facing Wes Hall or Roy Gilchrist. I only made it once - the result, a 42-ball duck in a 48-run opening stand. The club folded the following year. The ground is now a school.
Great Chell were one of the North Staffordshire and South Cheshire League's 12 founder members in 1963, and of the four Potteries teams, two more have gone the same way. Sneyd, alma mater of former England batsman David Stanley Steele, lay in the shadow of a grassed-over slag heap and disappeared not long after Chell, while Norton - in the early 1960s, the club of Frank Worrell, Garry Sobers and Jim Laker - last year merged with a smaller club on the city's periphery.
Full postHow do you manage a leggie in Asia?
It's an art full of possibilities, and one that reveals much about a captain
Scott Oliver
14-Oct-2015
One of the more futile things I ever did as a Premier League skipper was sit down our pro, Imran Tahir, at a sticky brown pub table with two 20p pieces and 11 filter tips, sliding the latter hither and thither in precisely arranged constellations as we talked through various scenarios, batsmen and fields.
It was futile in two main ways: first, we were playing on such scruffy pitches that even someone as dangerous as Nathan Astle was forced into desperate defence against deliveries that spat like sausage fat from the pockmarked surface; and second, Immy simply didn't bowl to any kind of pattern. He was too steeped in Lahori tape-ball cricket to resist the temptation of running through his repertoire most overs. Not that him bowling three wrong'uns an over to a 6-3 field particularly mattered in club cricket, of course, although his skipper at Titans, Martin van Jaarsveld, eventually grew irate, militantly removing him from the attack if he overdid things.
Not too many England skippers down the years have had to reckon with the joys of setting a field to legspin bowling. However, with the four surviving members of that exotic species - Robin Hobbs, Ian Salisbury, Chris Schofield and Scott Borthwick: 25 Tests, bagging 36 wickets at over 60 - having been joined by a fifth in Adil Rashid, it will be fascinating to see how he's handled by Alastair Cook, who hasn't exactly been overwhelmed with praise for his tactical acumen since he assumed the England captaincy in September 2012. That said, he appears to be improving, overcoming his innate bloody-mindedness, lack of captaincy experience and long exposure to the ideological asceticism of the andocracy. Observing Brendon McCullum at close quarters this summer has been the former Bedford School choirboy's gap year trip to Thailand: suddenly, he's aware of a new way of living, different possibilities for perceiving the world, the infinite permutations of arranging troops in the field.
Full postReliving Gloucestershire's limited-overs glory days
Silverware has eluded the county for more than a decade, but their upcoming one-day final brings back memories of their domination from 1999 to 2004
Scott Oliver
17-Sep-2015
There's probably a half-decent book waiting to be written about all the great pre-T20 domestic sides that would have excelled at the new format: Lancashire's all-conquering one-day team of the 1970s, Transvaal's "Mean Machine", Barbados in the 1970s, Bombay in the 1960s, Queensland Bulls in the 1990s.
The old nostrum about the great sides - the great players - being able to adapt to any era probably holds true, yet the developments ushered in by T20 - developments largely to do with conceptions of what's possible, and which have fed back into 50-over cricket - have rendered the old limited-overs cricket barely recognisable (the inaugural Gillette Cup final in 1963, for instance, featured 25 maidens).
This Saturday's Royal London Cup final between Gloucestershire and Surrey is something of a throwback to a classic, pre-T20, turn-of-the-century rivalry, pitting the swaggering metropolitan plutocrats and unheralded West Country upstarts against one another. Indeed, the 2001 Benson and Hedges Cup final that these two sides contested is the only Lord's final that the Gloucestershire dynasty of 1999 to 2004 didn't manage to win.
Full postHerath's cold summer at Staffs
An unremarkable English league stint in 2009 was hardly an indication of his impending rebirth as an international bowler
Scott Oliver
27-Aug-2015
The United Nations is yet to release the definitive figures on this matter, but there cannot be many countries with a higher per capita average of hours spent smiling each day than Sri Lanka. At the risk of ethnic stereotyping, they are a happy bunch. Not Rangana Herath, though, at least not when he's bowling. At least not when I was fielding to his bowling.
If you were to manufacture a range of international-cricketer teddy bears, Herath Mudiyanselage Rangana Keerthi Bandara Herath would surely be the biggest seller. But don't let those cartoonishly cute and pudgy contours fool you. Herath's on-field manner is that of a prickly, pernickety upcountry bureaucrat, who, for his own barely acknowledged pleasure, is going to keep you occupied for hours doing something of little consequence. Just business, see.
This air of sternness frequently escalated into a full-fledged scowl during his sole, truncated North Staffordshire and South Cheshire League campaign for Moddershall in 2009, when a combination of lacerating Atlantic winds, green pitches and abysmal close catching left him with the unflattering statistics of 112-27-333-14 from eight league outings. That's an average of 23.79. To put that into context, his current Test bowling average in his homeland stands at 24.86.
Full postDo professionals raise the standard of club cricket?
Or does the practice of employing them encourage clubs to take shortcuts?
Scott Oliver
29-Jul-2015
A couple of weeks ago I completed the ECB's National Playing Survey, which offered those involved in recreational cricket the opportunity to offload their accumulated gripes and grievances in one place. After breezing through various sections ascertaining habits and preferences, the final question was open-ended (and I'm paraphrasing here): anything else you want to get off your chest?
Suppressing the urge to have a rant about umpiring, I suggested that it wasn't serving the best interests of the game to allow professionals in the fourth (and lowest) tier of the league, since at that level it should primarily be about having a game - providing a game for people. Participation. Clubs that can't afford to primp their facilities (and perhaps don't have the ambition to move up the divisions), shouldn't be coerced into spending money on pros. Clubs that can afford pros are probably cutting corners, papering over cracks. The lower the level, the more the presence of full-time cricketers distorts the competitiveness of fixtures.
All of this had only recently flickered into view. I had "retired" in 2010 after 22 years' 1st XI cricket predominantly played in the top tier (from 2000, ECB Premier Leagues), but that turned out to be a three-year sabbatical. After slowly falling back in love with the game - accepting the "existential death" of the old me (the young me) - I returned as a diminished player to captain my club's A team in Division 3A. Although this team is to all intents and purposes our 2nd XI, we play exclusively against the 1st XIs of clubs further down the pyramid (or against a couple of other such A teams). While a disadvantage for knockout competitions (players who play for the A team being cup-tied), it provides an excellent platform to develop youngsters for our first team.
Full postThe return of the merciless Mitchells
Even as England are tested by Australia's twin left-arm menaces, they must wonder why they can't regularly produce genuine pacemen themselves
Scott Oliver
27-Jun-2015
What is the collective noun for Mitchells? A menacement? A misanthropy? A malevolence of Mitchells, maybe? Whichever it is, news that Mitchell doesn't make the list of top 100 most popular boy's names in the UK ought to alarm the long-term strategists at the ECB's Performance Centre at Loughborough, since the laws of both averages and magical causality, if not those of technocratic input-output, would suggest that the more Mitchells in the country, the better the chances of producing hostile quicks. Left-arm hostile quicks.
And what a pair they are, Johnson and Starc, that malevolence of Mitchells. Each is the sort of bowler of which a habitually strike-taking opening batsman would be inclined to ask his partner: "Fancy first rock today?" (If England opening bulwark Alastair Cook really is "Ned Flanders", as KP suggested, then he ought to check the stock room at the Leftorium.) If terror is defined as simply a principle of reflection - certainly the stump mic picking up the clunk-thunk-thunking decimation of the batsman's castle, the timbre of the timber, has amplified the threat of fast bowling in the batsmen's imagination - then they might even be considered terrorists.
The Mitchells represent the ghosts of Ashes recent past and near future, the personification of English torment at the hands of the sort of super-aggressive quick bowling, backed with attitude, that Darren Lehmann has pretty much institutionalised after observing the not-quite-so-one-sided series in 2013 (incidentally the English problem with Aussie Mitchells was irrefutably proven by Mitchell Marsh's 5 for 33 in the World Cup, a phantom seamer turned destroyer by nominative voodoo).
Full postPlaying alongside Adam Sanford
Eleven Tests and 30 wickets for West Indies, and a stand at Windsor Park named after him. And he now plays club cricket in the USA
Scott Oliver
25-May-2015
It was a sweltering August afternoon, one for Salvador Dali's watches. "Too hot for cricket," grumbled someone, inevitably. It was 2003, and rehydration was still seen as a take-it-or-leave-it frivolity rather than an obvious necessity, but this was an unambiguous two-drinks-breaker of a day, and our 58-over session in the field felt like a lifetime. When the declaration came and we lugged ourselves off for shade, cigarettes and sandwiches, our West Indian pro, fresh from 18 overs' toil on a featherbed, started to do handstand push-ups against the side of the clubhouse.
Quite a warm-down.
I was minded to think about Adam Sanford while perusing Australia's pre-Ashes Caribbean schedule. I noticed that the first Test is to be played in Dominica, the island from which Sanford hails, the island that many in the Caribbean think the most beautiful of them all. It will be only the fourth Test at the venue.
Full postOnce upon a Caribbean cricket holiday
Twenty years ago, 16 British university students discovered the joys of watching and playing cricket in the West Indies
Scott Oliver
19-Apr-2015
The once mighty West Indies team might well be in terminal decline - in Tests if not in T20, where the incentives are a little more tangible, more easily grasped - but that has done nothing to dull the appeal of cricket in the Caribbean for the hundreds of Brits venturing out there with marble flesh, primped flags and whimpering livers, swapping Andover for Antigua, Grantham for Grenada, and Barnsley for Barbados to take in a Test match or three.
Twenty years ago this month, 16 of us embarked on a university cricket tour and discovered that there's nowhere quite like the West Indies for playing and watching the great game.
Our adventure started in the less exotic climes of Leicester Forest East motorway service station, having managed to bag a short-term contract conducting traffic surveys there to help fund the trip. The idea was to work in three half-hour blocks - main road, slip road, rest - then do the same in the opposite direction, repeating that until the 12-hour shift was done. The reality was a tad more resourceful and "efficient", albeit perhaps at the cost of some accuracy (apologies if this has caused you to sit endlessly in an M1 traffic jam, which is pretty much everyone, ever): we had one man counting both motorway and slip road, and for an hour at a time, so that they could then go and rest for two hours, before repeating southbound.
Full postData-obsessed England need reality check
They are lagging behind in ODIs because their habit of taking refuge in stats to explain defeat has lost its relevance
Scott Oliver
12-Mar-2015
In his bestselling exploration of intuitive "thinking without thinking", Blink, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Paul Van Riper, a legendary ex-US Marine officer and Vietnam veteran selected by the Pentagon in 2000 to play a rogue Gulf-state military commander in the most expensive war game ever staged (what in fact turned out to be a dress-rehearsal for the Iraq War).
The US military's "Blue Team" was furnished with "an unprecedented amount of information and intelligence from every corner of the US government and a methodology that was logical and systematic and rational and rigorous. They had every toy in the Pentagon's arsenal," including software running live simulations modelling the interaction of Van Riper's economic, cultural, diplomatic, social, informational and political systems for patterns of behaviour and vulnerabilities. Both sides were made fully aware of their adversary's capabilities. Preparation lasted two years.
When battle commenced, Blue duly pored over the data from its state-of-the-art decision-making tool - "Operational Net Assessment" - and it deliberated. It then took out Red's communication systems and, with an all-very-conventional show of strength, presented an ultimatum to surrender. But Red had preempted this and, drawing on old-fashioned methods to circulate messages and launch planes, they began an all-out assault on Blue's warships, sinking 16: "Had Millennium Challenge been a real war instead of just an exercise, 20,000 American servicemen and women would have been killed before their own army had even fired a shot." By being "in command and out of control", allowing in-the-field improvisation, Van Riper won a resounding victory. In Gladwell's terms, he had created a "structure for spontaneity".
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