Alan R blogs

I propose a new rule for limited-overs cricket: "offering the light" now means offering to turn on the lights. I didn't have the opportunity to watch any of today's One-Dayer between England and India, but apparently nobody got to see the the exciting conclusion of it for a reason which seems very silly: bad light.

How can we have day-night matches in this format and yet stop an interesting match in its tracks because of bad light? They did not bother to turn on the lights. If its fair to have one side bat in the sunlight and another bat at night under the lights, then why is it unfair to make a side finish its innings under the lights while there's still a bit of sunlight left?

I feel the need to say something about the Bangladesh Cricket Board's decision to ban 13 players for 10 years for playing in the ICL.  There's no justification for any kind of penalty against these players.  All they did was take a side job that doesn't interfere with their oblications to their national team. The BCB is cheating their players and all cricket fans.  And what's the motivation? I have no inside knowledge, but I imagine that certain powers in India put pressure on them to join in their collusion to choke the rebel cricket league out of existence.  This outrageous monopolistic behavior first became apparent with restrictions on which teams could compete in the so-called "Champions League".

According to this article, there are now high school varsity cricket teams in the U.S.!

According to the BBC, the debt of Indian small farmers will be forgiven. This makes me wonder whether these guys below might not have won a match recently:



Update: Apparently it was a good day for Indian cricketers across the board yesterday. Their Under-19's won the world championship, and the big boys beat Australia in the first final match of the ODI tri-series.

Interesting article about cricket on Microsoft's Redmond Campus.

My favorite quotes:

"There are probably more women playing cricket here than in all of India."

On the World Cup: "I can tell you Microsoft saved a lot of work hours because India got knocked out early."

Since I can't get TV coverage of the England/India ODI series (which is looking pretty exciting), the next best thing is cricket-related drama. Here are a couple of interesting videos on YouTube. First is part 1 (there are currently 24 small parts with possibly more to come) of the "Bodyline" mini-series:




Too serious? Well, another look at cricket in that era can be found in this episode of the hilarious "Jeeves and Wooster".

I'm back from my second and final cricket-watching trip of the summer (which was also a fun trip outside of cricket). I watched days 2,3 and 4 of the drawn 3rd test between England and India at the Oval. Overall, it was a fun trip, but it would have been a more interesting match if India had lost the toss (or if the bidding system I described in my last post had been in place). Dravid's India team, leading the series 1-0, labored hard to prevent a result. There was some good quality cricket to watch - excellent batting from Dhoni and Kumble on day 2, good bowling by Sreesanth, Tendulkar and Kumble and good batting by Collingwood and Bell on day 3 things got interesting for a while. Dravid's bizarrely conservative decision not to enforce the follow-on when England was under their thumb opened the door just a crack to a possible England victory after a brave opening spell from James Anderson and Chris Tremlett (taking on extra duty due to the injury to Ryan Sidebottom) left India's second innings in a crisis at 10 for 3. Extremely cautious batting from Dravid, along with a much-needed 50 by Saurav Ganguly, closed the door on England's last realistic hope of victory, but they left England in a position to fight for a draw. I had hoped being at day 4 of a test for the first time, to watch a result in person, but alas I found myself listening to the final few overs on the internet from home in Paris.

One thing I like to do at a cricket match is take photos and, if possible, videos. A test match is especially difficult to capture because the action is far away, and you never know whether the next thing worth photographing/videotaping will happen in 5 seconds or 3 hours. Nevertheless, I made an effort to record the event in photos and video clips. Here's a montage of some of the video clips. It was very difficult to hold the camera steady with a strong zoom, so the video is choppy. The footage below shows a lot of different deliveries and happenings on day 2 and day 3. It includes the wicket of M.S. Dhoni, Kumble's century, bowloing by Monty Panesar, James Anderson, Chris Tremlett, Sachin Tendulkar, and Sreesanth (who seems to be quite an interesting and energetic character), 50's by Cook, Collingwood and Bell, and a few bits of crowd ambiance (including a beer worm rebellion late on day 3):



Enough of the chopiness. Now for some photos:

BBC cricket broadcaster Christopher Martin-Jenkins gave an excellent talk this week, full of good ideas. One of the ideas (not originally his) is the idea that instead of having a toss to determine who bats first, we could instead have the captains bid runs.

This seems a perfectly logical progression from the Duckworth-Lewis rule, which also uses economic theory to compensate for asymmetric playing conditions. In the case of DL, the asymmetric condition is the number of overs - one team gets more of them, so what's a fair way to adjust the scores in compensation?

Replacing the toss with bids compensates for unequal light, swing conditions, weather and pitch wear. It's particularly relevant in day-night ODI's, where one team clearly has better light to bat in. If it's worth x number of runs to bat first, why not give those runs to the team that bats second? Or vice-versa in some cases.

The original idea for implementing this was to have some sort of interactive multi-round bidding, but the best solution is to have a sealed-bid instant 2nd-price auction (a.k.a. Vickrey Auction). This means that each captain brings an envelope containing his assessment of how many runs it's worth for the choice to bat or field first. The winner is the captain with the higher of the two bids, but the runs awarded to the losing side are what the losing captain bidded. Example: Paul Collingwood bids 40 runs for England and Saurav Ganguly bids 30 for India. Collingwood is awarded the toss, but when India bats, they begin with 30 bonus runs on the board. This is the simplest and fairest type of auction for this, because both sides have the incentive to bid what they think it's worth. If you bid higher than you think it's worth, you might get lucky, but you risk your opponent getting more bonus runs than you think the toss is worth. If you bid lower than it's worth, if you win your lowering the bid does not lower the opponent's run bonus, but if you lose you've lowered your own bonus.

So what happens if both captains bid the same amount (let's say 35 runs)? Then toss a coin and the winner get to choose to bat or field first, and the loser gets the bonus runs which both captains thought the toss was worth (35).

I think this system would be much fairer than the coin toss (especially for limited overs matches), and I applaud CMJ for bringing it to light and cricket coach David Harris of Herefordshire for coming up with the basic concept.

P.S. - One odd side effect of this system would be to introduce the theoretical possibility of an innings defeat to limited overs cricket. If team A is awarded the toss in exchange for 40 bonus runs, and they're bowled out for 38, team B wins by an innings and 2 runs.

Maybe it's just because I'm American, accustomed to sporting events which take less than half a day to end, but, now that I have actually been to an international 20/20 match, I have to say that it's a great format to watch. I was at Friday night's England vs. West Indies match, which was by far my best experience attending an international cricket match in person.

It was an excellent match. It began with muscular, middle-of-the-bat fireworks from Chris Gayle, who scored 33 runs before his batting partner got off his duck. Then the outcome hinged on a couple of key bowling changes. First, when England captain Paul Collingwood put himself in to bowl and got Gayle to sky one he gave himself a chance to win his first victory as captain. Then, when the West Indies fast bowlers had England shackled after eliminating their big-name batsmen, they were forced to put on their slower bowlers, who were subjected to some clever boundaries by man of the match Owais Shah. The key moment was a pre-meditated shovel shot by Shah which dribbled through the wide-open fine leg area to the boundary. This happened while the unfortunate guys next to me had gone out for beer. Before their beer run Shah and Mascarenas had been reduced to nudging for singles with the required rate looking too high, and then suddenly they were in the hunt again after getting something like 14 runs off the over. England won with just 3 balls to spare.

Not coincidentally, this was the first time I had the opportunity to be present at the finish of an international match. Last year's one-day match at Cardiff was rained out, so there was no finish to cheer. I've also gone to two test matches, but in both cases when the match ended I was not even in the same city. 20/20 is a great format for people who have to travel in order to see international cricket. You only need to spend one night in a hotel (in London this is a real issue, given the high prices), and you have time to do a little tourism or shopping, too. In August I plan to watch 3 successive days of test cricket, because I enjoy the strategic complexity and the tactical differences of the long form of the sport, but it will be expensive, and there will be significant lulls in the action to endure.

After the undermining and collapse of the nascent pro cricket league afew years ago, and the failure to win a venue for the 2007 World Cup, after the ICC pulled the plug on Project America because of the Kafkaesque nature of the USACA, I would have said no. But hope springs eternal.

There was a lovely moment at Headingley yesterday, when Michael Vaughan reached 100, showing the naysayers and doubters (and I put myself in this latter category) that despite a series of injuries and frustrations he still merits his place in the England test side. He wasn't the only one happy to see him come back in a big way. Kevin Pietersen (who later went on to get his own 100) was at least as jubilant as Vaughan, and the Barmy Army could be heard singing (to the tune of "Cumbayah") "Michael Vaughan, my Lord, Michael Vaughan..." A few minutes later it all came down to earth when drunken louts threw beer in the stands, and then Vaughan was caught near the boundary to end his knock of 103, but it was a great moment, the kind of moment which makes following the sport worth putting up with all the lesser moments.

I'm just kidding about the "cheat" part, but Sri Lanka has questioned whether it's in the spirit of the game for Australian wicket keeper Adam Gilchrist to have put a squash ball inside one of his batting gloves.

The article says he did it to help his grip. I'm not sure why that would help his grip more than just getting a better glove. I'm thinking it's probably more useful as extra padding or as a shock absorber, and given how hard Gilchrist hit the ball against Sri Lanka, I would think it's probably a good thing.

Squash balls could become all the rage among cricketers now, though for England, at least, there are not too many batsmen who last long enough at the crease these days to justify it.

Is it unfair to stuff a squash ball in the glove? Presumably it expands the volume of the glove slightly, which slightly increases the chance of getting caught behind off the glove. Will it make the ball go farther when hit? I doubt it. I can't think of anywhere to put a squash ball that would make me bat like Gilchrist.

Northern California's best cricket ground, seen via satellite on Google Maps. I never actually had an occasion to go there when I lived in the region. I had heard rumors of its existence but did not know where it was.

Of the 16 teams in this cricket World Cup, at least 8 will be changing coaches (so far we know about England, Pakistan, West Indies, India, Bangladesh, Ireland, Netherlands and Canada).

There are also at least 2 changes in captaincy, with Brian Lara and Inzamam Ul Haq bowing out. The world cup seems to encourage a certain amount of house cleaning.

Yesterday saw the last international cricket match for Brian Lara, and the last match as England coach by Duncan Fletcher. Neither of the two departing men was at the center of yesterday's result, really. Lara was run out for 18, leaving Chris Gayle's blazing 79 off 58 balls as the dominant knock for the Windies. Lara doesn't have to prove anything to anyone, though. He retires as a batting superstar. In contrast, Michael Vaughan did have to prove himself. This match could have been Vaughan's swan song as well, at least in ODI cricket, but he showed that he can add real value to the team. England looked to be in real trouble, but Vaughan came through at the right moments.

I didn't even know Michael Vaughan could bowl at all, but his figures of 3 for 39 in 10 overs were easily the best of the lot and he kept the target from getting completely out of reach. Vaughan also came through with the bat, needing just 10 more balls to match Gayle's 79. Vaughan's contribution alone was not enough, though. It also took a fast 100 by the frequently impressive Pietersen, plus a fighting 38 by keeper Nixon, plus some brief pressure-packed batting for Stuart Broad and even 11th man James Anderson to overhaul the Windies' 300.

So what can we make of this result? England deserves their 5th-place spot. That's not really good enough for their critics, but it's actually a big improvement over their performance in the last World Cup. They one every match they played against teams which were not among the semifinalists, and they came very close to beating Sri Lanka. It was not always pretty, and there's plenty of room for improvement with both bat and ball but if they hadn't managed to rally and win the CB series in Australia this winter, I think the press might consider this 5th-place finish a step in the right direction.

It's been suggested elsewhere that the Aussies are #1 because their fans will accept nothing less. Maybe it's the other way around. It's good to complain about problems that can be addressed (and which are worth addressing), and no one with a competitive attitude will be happy with 5th place, but it's also important to appreciate what you have. Yesterday, Fletcher's England team were able to show that there is something there worth appreciating.

Yesterday England had a chance to rise above mediocrity and sneak into the semifinals of the World Cup. Instead, they suffered a humiliating thrashing at the hands of South Africa. It was, as Jonathan Agnew described, England cricket "laid bare".

An amazing thing happens, though, when England's cricketers break the hearts of their supporters. It unleashes the brilliance of English sarcasm. While the match was pretty dismal cricket by all accounts, the BBC text narration (credited to Tom Fordyce) and associated comments were sometimes amusing. Here's a gem from the 7th over of England's innings:

Kaboom! Vaughan gets off the mark after a mere 20 deliveries, getting a thick edge through gully for one. You can't defend against those sort of fireworks. Bell does the same, and England are rampant.

I also like Fordyce's summary of the rivalry:

In case you're unaware of the history behind this particular showdown, Pietersen left his homeland for England because of the quota system - South African rules state that no team can field more than three massive egos in any one match.

The user comments were sometimes fun, too, such as one spectator who found a unique way of coping with the frustration of watching England's opening batsmen:

Why can I not shrug off the Benny Hill theme tune currently ringing in my ears?

The sarcasm only got sharper after a Mr. Rhodes complained about the negativity of the narration. This inspired some positive spin of the circumstances:

Rhodes version: "Huge, huge improvement from Mahmood - nine fewer runs off this over than his last one."


Unfortuately, Sajid Mahmoud was a pretty easy target. On a good day he can be a very fine bowler, but yesterday, and probably too many other days in this World Cup, that was not the case. Even his fielding was grist for the mill:

Mahmood then produces a sublime moment on the point boundary by jogging across to Kallis's gentle cut and booting it accidentally over the rope for four, in the manner of a clown entertaining children.

England still have one more match to go, but they can look forward to facing more sarcasm and bitterness, as well as calls for change which are hard to dispute at this point. If you had asked me before the tournament whether it was reasonable to expect England to finish 5th or 6th, I'd have said "yes" without hesitation, but with the manner in which the batting crawled along and then collapsed against South Africa, a reasonable result has become a humiliation. It seems their style of play in one-day matches works well against the minnows but only work against the big boys when KP ignites, or if a couple of tailenders bat exceptionally well. Even in those cases, - when England batted well against Sri Lanka and Australia, for example - it wasn't always enough. England will leave this tournament having lost to all four of the semifinalists.

Cricket's a difficult sport to film, since the camera crew is usually pretty far away from the action, and the most interesting things happen suddenly and unpredictably. So it's worth taking a look, if you haven't already seen it, of this lovely slowed-down footage from the 2005 Ashes:

England will likely have to live with some what-ifs. Against Sri Lanka and against Australia some great individual performances were wasted. I actually got to see them bat against Australia yesterday. I braved the second-hand smoke of an English pub with a Sky box. Kevin Pietersen was amazing, hitting his first one-day century with rather limited support from partners. Ian Bell deserves credit for an excellent, if somewhat slow 77 in his new role as opener. And Bopara batted well in the tail. You'd think a 50+ from an opener, a century from your middle-order star and a fighting 21 from a tailender would be enough to win, but this is England vs. Australia, and other than those 3, plus some of Andrew Flintoff's usual quality bowling, England was pretty bereft.

England has a hole in the batting lineup. A big hole which was not filled at all by Vaughan and Strauss, who made similar mistakes. Flintoff's dismissal was perhaps the worst, though. Bradd Hogg simply out-thought Flintoff, and it seems like maybe that's not such a big accomplishment these days. On one ball Hogg nearly pulled Flintoff into a stumping, and the next ball landed just a bit further out and did pull him out of his ground for the stumping.

On the bowling side, Flintoff has been excellent, and the others have been inconsistent at best. Mahmoud had a fine match against Sri Lanka. If he'd had a fine match against Austrlia England would have won, but he didn't. He didn't get much support from the pitch or the other bowlers, though (Flintoff aside).

Now England will have to fight for what's left of their hopes in this tournament against a Bangladesh team celebrating its shocking demolition of the world's top-ranked one-day side.