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Review: On and Off the Field by Ed Smith
(Nicholas Lezard/The Guardian, 30.4.05)

Review of the paperback edition of three-Test wonder Ed Smith’s second book.

Nine live: cricket’s TV blackouts face the axe
(Sydney Morning Herald, 29.4.05)

The SMH is reporting today that the antiquated home city Test TV blackout of the first two sessions of the day might be canned, if Cricket Australia signs up with Channel 9 for another seven years of covering Australian cricket.

While this is good news if it comes off - and brings Australia into line with the rest of the cricketing world - it does nothing to resolve one of the chronic problems with Channel 9’s handling of live coverage. Namely, that the closing stages of the day’s play make way for the 6pm news, or sometimes for the 5.30pm game show.

This problem was alleviated to some degree during the 2004-05 season when CA agreed to move the scheduled start of play half an hour forward to 10.30am, making the scheduled stumps 5.30pm, and under current ICC playing conditions no later than 6pm. Considering that daylight in mid-summer southern Australia continues till 8pm or even later, it’s simply an anti-spectator solution to start play earlier in the morning and ending in mid-afternoon.

At Channel 9, cricket is just one commodity alongside the likes of Eddie Maguire, Backyard Blitz, Eddie Maguire, The Price Is Right, Eddie Maguire and Eddie Maguire. Sadly, no other free-to-air network is likely to be in the bidding.

The middle man and The reincarnation of Merv Hughes
(Lawrence Booth/The Guardian, 26.4.05)

There was a time when The Spin looked suspiciously like a running sheet of the previous week’s new items on my website! But it’s much better than that, and indeed one of the few decent cricket columns in the established media on the net that I enjoy reading these days.

If you’re not subscribed to the free email edition, which Lawrence puts out every Tuesday, here are links to the archives of the rest of this month’s editions.
April 19: Homesickness and Propaganda
April 12: County conundrum and Chinese whispers
April 5: Belief and confidence

First Word: Gutless display of cricket
(Ezra Stuart/Daily Nation Barbados, 25.4.05)

“Depressing, deplorable and a downright disappointing display of Test cricket. Sorry, toothless tiddly-thumbs stuff. It was a massive letdown for followers of Caribbean cricket.” Don’t hold back Ezra!

What’s going on, guys?

I can cope with a draw against Sussex in the County Championship - at least Surrey came out of that game with more points than their opponents. And I can barely cope with the loss of a National League Division Two game on steroids against Yorkshire by the margin of 334 to 291. (Ali Brown 89 from 46 balls, you are still a legend.)

But losing to Bradford and Leeds UCCE by four wickets? At The Oval no less? (Gloating supplied by the Corridor of Uncertainty.) Thank goodness it wasn’t a first-class fixture. Ucc!

And if that wasn’t enough, yesterday in the Totesport League (National League to you) Durham scored 224 for 8, and in reply the mighty Lions assembled a tidy 86. Ali Brown’s four-ball duck was an absolute snail’s pace compared to Ramprakash’s golden quacker.

The National League bowling stats of Mohammad Akram are especially invigorating: 18-0-149-2 for an economy rate of 8.27 runs per over. OK, so it’s better than Rikki Clarke’s 7-1-65-0.

This Wednesday, it’s off to Cardiff to play Glamorgan in the Championship. I’ll be expecting some improvement, guys…

Footnote: The Surrey website allegedly has a video “highlights” section, however all of the links to the video clips are broken - they look like a hybrid of HTML and javascript. It’s gonna be one of those years at Surrey…

Indian selection system outdated: Wright
(IANS via Times of India, 24.4.05)

The outgoing Indian team coach suggests that the world’s wealthiest cricket board should - gasp - pay its national selectors!

Lording it at the home of cricket
(Paul Doyle/The Guardian, 22.4.05)

A sports columnist who seems to have recently joined The Guardian from somewhere outside the UK, Paul Doyle went to his first game of cricket on Thursday - Middlesex v Notts at Lord’s, to be precise. Which makes his naive observations of county cricket all the more amusing.

Cricket hotel hits rare thrasher for six
(BirdLife International, 22.4.05)

Blame the 2007 CWC. A hotel development in St Lucia, which will host Group 3 of the first stage of the 2007 tournament (New Zealand, England, Kenya and a qualifier) could, according to an Environmental Impact Assessment, wipe out a quarter of the world’s population of the White-breasted thrasher.

“I’ve been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years”
- Melvyn Douglas to Greta Garbo, Ninotchka (1939)

It seems only yesterday that the ECB drafted their last sweeping visionary plan for the overhaul of English cricket. (And we all have such fond memories of “Raising the Standard”.) With as much regularity as Olympic Games, general elections and Star Wars sequels, and even less eagerly awaited than the next Harry Potter Encyclopedia, this week we saw the publication of “Building Partnerships” - the ECB’s strategic plan for 2005-2009.

It’s all there in details on the ECB’s Building Partnerships section of their website. The strategic plan is their in HTML format or as a PDF (2.2 Megs), and there is video and audio from the launch which I am yet to trowel through properly. I am impressed with the references to “England captains Michael Vaughan and Clare Connor” on an equal footing.

Among the many objectives of “Building Partnerships”, I find the following most intriguing:

Developing heroes – three England cricket ‘superstars’ known by ten per cent of population by 2009

So how are they performing at the moment? Andrew Flintoff is known by how many English citizens? And do you class Wheelie Bin Giles or Minties Trescothick as “superstars”?

Analysis from Mike Selvey (The Guardian), Paul Hayward (The Telegraph) and Christopher Martin-Jenkins (The Times). And, indeed, the Corridor of Uncertainty.

Cricket’s home moves closer to the money
(Raja M/Asia Times, 22.4.05)

“The ICC cannot afford to pay 30% tax…”
- Inderjit Singh Bindra

Why the ICC moved to a tax haven, in the words of the man who wants to get the BCCI listed on the Indian stock market.