Nick Luck and the Bum Notes

The Lincoln meeting is on, but as stinging horizontal snow and savage North Sea gales are rendering the start of the flat season as appetising as a soggy piece of cardboard on a plate, I thought this would be a good time to stick two fingers down the throat of memory and bring up something from last week.

Cheltenham debriefs should always be viewed whilst wearing sceptical glasses; one cool blue lens to filter out the stomach churning joi de vivre of the writer who couldn't stop backing winners; one rosy lens to soften the jagged misery of the loser who spent his week pacing the living room whilst cries of angst and despair echoed mournfully  from the coving.

You may be able to guess which of the two groups of homo sapiens I belonged too, but don't let that put you off reading on. Statistics and bitter experience suggest that whilst the first class of Cheltenham folk may be more vocal, the second is the larger, and so these scribblings might be a form of stress-relieving therapy for those of us who ended the week poorer than we started; like being allowed to take out your frustration on life-size cardboard cut outs of David Cameron, Edward Milliband, and Nicholas Clegg.

I'm going to pass over the racing, since clearly I have no wisdom to impart there, and major on Channel Four's coverage. Let's start with Nick Luck. I know some people regard him as the Tony Blair of racing television, but I like him. The best presenters are like football referees. You don't notice them until you need to, they do their stuff, they let the thing flow. Nick managed all that.

But whilst the Nick Luck Band was made up of a number of solid percussionists, skilled violinists and the occasional dedicated triangle clanger, they were all bashing away independently, frequently hitting bum notes and only occasionally managing to produce a tune.

Clare Balding alternated between brusque matron and simpering sycophant. She should stick to the bracing questions, the commanding tone, and cut out the nonsense about how lovely everything is. I'd like to hear her hosting The Today Programme at some point. Politicians need a dose of Balding. 

She was paired with Mick Fitzgerald, who has clearly studied the BBC pamphlet, 'Racing Cliches and How To Employ Them' and seems to think that being in possession of an Irish accent, an autobiography, and an affable manner will suffice. It will not.  

In the booth, Jim McGrath was Old Father Time to Graham Cunningham's Excited New Boy. Graham clearly knows his onions, but he kept cutting himself off in mid flow in order to end his observations in a punchy fashion, as though forever on the brink of wrapping things up before an ad break, which was Nick's job, not his. And he kept turning around to look at Jim for reassurance.

The practice of waving a microphone on a stick under the noses of jockeys is an enduring ritual, but how did it start? Who thought it was a good idea, and does anyone know why they're still doing it? Do we really need to hear the thoughts of an exhausted, mud-spattered, bruised jockey straight away? Much as I enjoyed hearing for the twenty-seventh time that week that everyone in the yard has worked very hard and that the horse never gave up on him, surely this stuff could wait till later? Or not at all?

But the main problem wasn't so much the band, it was the tune they were trying to play. The whole thing was dripping in honey, and cloying sentimentality was everywhere. Coverage stopped every thirty seconds or so to remind us that Cheltenham is wonderful. There’s nothing quite like Cheltenham. Isn't Cheltenham marvellous. Look at all the people. A lot of them are Irish! How marvellous. 

There was maudlin music, repetitive interviews with trainers in their homes, a truck load of human interest stories in which no-one was interested, since all we wanted to know about were the horses we were considering investing in, and there was Alice Plunkett, giddy as a teenage girl at a One Direction concert, wittering on about how marvellous everything is. 

Cheltenham is a race meeting. I've no problem with a tasteful little monologue at the start, or a lurch into slightly inebriated poetry at the end, but otherwise, I'd prefer it if Channel Four just covered the race meeting without stopping to tell us how marvellous everything is every five minutes. We’ll be the judge of whether it’s marvellous or not.

Cinders

I scribbled something suitably misanthropic about the Ashes at Cricinfo this week, but whenever I am grumpy on this subject, I feel slightly sheepish, as though I have betrayed an important cause. The feeling is hard to describe; its a bit like the guilty pangs you experience at the pit of your stomach when you sneak into McDonalds (although not quite the same as the bowel-troubling pangs you feel having dined at McDonalds) or the creeping embarrassment of being caught watching the X Factor.

Perhaps it's not a principle that I'm betraying when I grumble about all things Burnt-Wood-In-Urn related, but the boy who looked forward to the arrival of the biennial intercontinental cricket confrontation almost as much as Christmas, birthdays, or school holidays. I've tried restarting that part of my brain, but I doubt if even electro-convulsive shock therapy, or several weeks LSD-assisted hypnotherapy would reawaken my Ashes enthusiasm. It's a shame, but there it is.

The question is why should a relatively rational cricket lover, with a long history of enjoying the Anglo-Australian dust-up, take against it so? These are the possibilities:

1. Patriotism I don't really do. I've nothing against people who want to wave flags, daub their faces, or pretend to enjoy that dirge about an alleged deity intervening to safeguard the well-being of an elderly monarch. But it's not for me. Celebrating the place where you were born because you were born there seems as daft to me as celebrating your family because you are related to them. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but then you can say the same thing about tinned sardines, and I don't like those either.

So, as it has dawned on me in adulthood that I am not one of life's patriots, it is a logical extension to assume that I wouldn't care less whether one nation beat another nation at sport. There is a lot of truth here. My disinclination to care about the Ashes coincided with the end of the 2005 version. At some point during the Oval Test, or perhaps during the post-Oval stalemate celebrations in Trafalgar Square, I awoke, as from a vivid dream, and began to notice that there were an awful lot of flags about, that I was beginning to feel slightly nauseous at the opening strains of Jerusalem, and that I didn't really belong at this party.

2. The other possibility is that 2005 changed everything. My first Ashes was 1986/87, but my only recollection of that was my father writing down the score for me and leaving it on the kitchen table before he went to work, and grainy VHS footage of the one day series that followed it, featuring that dramatically naff 1970s style intro, a cartoon duck, and the inimitable Tony Greig and Bill Lawry.

From then on, it was Australian domination, series after series, to the point when it seemed that beating Australia at cricket was as impossible, yet as utterly essential, as beating Stephen Hendry at snooker or knocking down the Berlin Wall. Endless summers of disappointment, beginning in June with fanciful hopes, and ending in August amid recrimination, rebel tours, and five new players per Test, had caused a build up of repressed psychological anguish that would only be released if we beat Australia, Warne and all. After that, anything was going to be an anticlimax.

So it has proved. 2007/07 was a shambolic tribute to England's hilariously dysfunctional tourists of the 1990s. 2009 was a scrappy contest between two awful teams, hyped to the point of absurdity by an Ashes-obsessed cricket media. 2010/11 was the high water mark of Ashes drivel. A well-drilled, well-prepared England team beat one of the worst Australian collections ever to have expectorated on their palms in anger (although not without capitulating completely in Perth) and this was hailed by the English press as though Strauss had successfully returned from a mission to Mars, bringing Elvis and Jesus with him.

And maybe this is a media problem. The endless previews, the compulsion to add the A-word to every cricket feature, the painfully unfunny exchange of Twitter bon mots between former Ashes cricketers, all swirl together in a toxic, tedious cocktail that leaves you with a dull, aching sensation between the ears and the overpowering desire to emigrate to a non-cricket planet for the duration.

Hitting the bar with Mitchell Starc

No, I've never been drinking with Mitchell Starc. Come to think of it, I've haven't imbibed any substance in the company of a professional cricketer. I'm not sure if this is one of those experiences I should add to my 'Things To Put On A List That I Will Almost Certainly Never Get Round To Doing' list. I have been drinking with people who were better cricketers than me, but that is a large section of society, which includes almost everyone between the ages of ten and seventy who has ever played, watched, or thought about cricket.

So, not that kind of bar. This is a metaphorical bar, used by failed and failing gamblers to describe the experience of almost pulling off a superb triumph of wagering, in which the bet becomes a shot at goal (or conceivably, a penalty in rugby) the gambler's hopes are transmogrified into a ball, and the outcome is that said hopes smack firmly against a metaphorical crossbar, causing all who witnessed it to say, "Ooooohhh...." but more significantly, causing no improvement to the situation on the scoreboard.

And this time, it's all Mitchell Starc's fault. After a week of watching bewilderingly unpredictable quadrupeds galloping around a patch of muddy countryside in Gloucestershire, whilst hurling angry remarks in the direction of Channel Four's racing coverage (of which more in future posts) I was in need of gambling medicine. What better tonic than to scoop up my winnings from the Australian First Innings Top Scorer market. Steven Smith, the reinvented Caractacus of Cameo, was batting at five, which, adjusting for the presence of Phil Hughes, effectively meant he was batting at four. Smith was 12/1 to top score with a bookmaker who shall remain nameless and at Friday bedtime, was on 58, poised to gobble up Ed Cowan's leading score of 86, like a praying mantis looming over a vulnerable bluebottle.

I woke early, as though the God of Gambling had given me a nudge. I scrambled for my phone. There it was: Steven Smith, 92. At that moment, I noticed the sun, I heard the call of an early morning blue tit and everything was fine and lovely. Then I happened to glance across at the other Australian name mentioned. Starc. Oh, I remember him, he was on 22 yesterday, plucky no-hoper. I wonder what he got. Oh, 99.

Mitchell Starc. One run short of his maiden Test century. Good. Serves him right.

This is the trouble with gambling; it can make you bitter and twisted. On the other hand, it gives you a different perspective on a sport. For millions of non-Australians, Mitchell Starc is just one of that gang of interchangeable new fast bowlers who isn't Peter Siddle. But for me, he's the man who ruined my breakfast with his ultimately futile but plucky piece of completely unnecessary tail end tomfoolery. I am coming to realise that cricketers, like horses, are distressingly unpredictable creatures.

Tea

Life in fourteenth century Italy was unpleasant. Cricket had not yet been invented. Toilet facilities were rudimentary. People were hemmed in on all sides by plague, famine, war, and the wretched twanging of mandolins. Then there was the threat of being burnt at the stake, a popular pastime in the Middle Ages. (Had it not been for the persistent drizzle in these parts, the barbeque would surely have been credited to European civilisation.)      

But there was one area of life in which the people of pre-Renaissance Italy had the advantage over us twenty-first century types: the complete absence of advertising. It is only this accident of history that explains why Dante left marketing executives out of The Divine Comedy. If there is a divine authority, She will surely find a circle of hell especially for these characters, perhaps just down the corridor from the spin doctors and the talk show hosts.

Too harsh? I think not. Language is our most precious invention, a tool of immense power and infinite creativity. If you employ it to tell half-truths about car insurance, you abuse it, as surely as if you’d used the Mona Lisa to prop open your kitchen door in order to better hear the ping that signals the readiness of your microwave pizza.

Advertising speak is language stripped of irony, joy, and meaning. It describes a sterile mockery of reality, in which every man, woman and child is a walking embodiment of a targeted demographic, and the word-play of the seven year old stands in for wit.                     

I give you Exhibit Z: the Yorkshire Tea break. Having sold all the tangible assets of English cricket, the ECB is now auctioning off parcels of time. There is, apparently, a company called Yorkshire Tea. Tea is also the first word of tea break. See what they did there?

That isn’t the worst of it. We learn that every tea break at English Test matches:

“…will be made fun and engaging for the many fans of the game.”

An organisation that specialises in filling little paper bags with bits of leaves has taken it upon itself to arrange for our late afternoon entertainment, whether we like it or not.  

Cricket lovers aren’t naïve hippies. We know that the wheels of the trans-global cricket juggernaut need to be oiled with a little currency. We’ve made our pact with the underworld, but it should be made clear that we didn’t exactly sell our souls, so much as lease them out.

So are entitled to say there is a limit, and that limit is reached when it is no longer possible to avoid the advertising, when your hamper is searched at the gates lest you smuggle in a rival brand of herbal hot water grit, when you can’t even enjoy a relaxed tea interval without some grinning, caffeine-fuelled inanity in a bright T-shirt getting in your face and insisting that you’re going to have some fun, dammit.

Therefore I suggest that, for the duration of this crass commercial exercise, every single cricket fan in England switch to an alternative source of interval refreshment, and share pictures of themselves pointedly not enjoying a cup of the ECB-approved beverage. Hot chocolate, cocoa, mint and jasmine infusion: the choice is yours; although I find that a pint of gin very often hits the spot (particularly if Cook is batting).   

Gotterdammerung

Jimi Hendrix first set light to his guitar at the end of a gig in March 1967. The crowd loved it so much he started to do it regularly. It soon became such a part of his act that if he didn’t take a cigarette lighter to his Stratocaster, the paying public felt short-changed. Now maybe it is the wild hair, the earring or the outrageous talent, but Tillakaratne Dilshan is starting to remind me of Hendrix. Yes, yes, yes, we were all thinking, as he nudged and tapped his first few balls around today, that’s all very well, but when’s he going to do the funny down-on-one-knee scoopy thingy? That’s what we’ve paid our money for. But when he finally pulled out the party piece, it proved his undoing. So is he going to feel obliged to do it every time? Or could he come up with another gimmick to trump the Scoop. Maybe he could set fire to his bat?

Dilshan couldn’t save Delhi today and nor could Virender Sehwag, despite some trademark carnage which, as ever, was either going to end in a new batting record or a catch on the boundary. After forty-seven effortless runs, he holed out and so the sole remaining IPL franchise crashed out of the Champions League. In fact, the evening game was something of a cricketing Gotterdammerung in which the last two Indian teams failed to do the sensible thing, instead taking one another down like two stubborn elephants squabbling over a bag of peanuts whilst the rope bridge they are both standing on starts to fray.

It may have come as a surprise to the cynically minded, but it appeared that Bangalore really wanted to win, despite being effectively dumped out of the tournament by Victoria’s defeat earlier in the day. Little Roelof van der Merwe spent most of his time in the field either covering his face with his hands in disbelief or roaring like a ten year old doing his fiercest African lion impression. A made up team? Only in it for the money? Don’t you believe it.

The afternoon match was a more frenetic event. Maybe it was the delayed start, the shortened number of overs, the doubts over the team line-ups or the two wickets in the first over, but I soon felt exhausted. It was like one of those mornings when you are late for work, the phone is ringing, you can’t find your keys and everything is a rush. For three-quarters of the thirty-three overs it was a thunderous, ugly but exhilarating tussle. The Cobras won and were the better team but somehow Victoria made more of an impression. There is nothing half-hearted about them. They bat like butchers playing golf and in Siddle and Harwood they have two red-blooded and slightly frightening grunters.

And a word about the crowd. The warmth, excitement and sheer noise generated by those attending the Chinnaswamy Stadium made this the best day’s viewing of the tournament thus far for the armchair cricket connoisseur. The festival exuberance, the fireworks and the chanting for Sehwag and for birthday-boy Kumble turned the occasion into an intoxicating blend of carnival and political rally. It was quite a show. Let’s hope next Friday’s final can match it.

Happy Diwali. And Happy Birthday Jumbo.

The Not So Super Over

So, the Sharks of Sussex are out of the world’s finest international-club-versus-franchise jamboree. Their elimination on Tuesday night raised many questions. What were they doing there? What time is the flight home? When will they get their money? Additionally, the manner of their exit led some to question the legitimacy of the super over as a method of settling a match. Surely, it was a violation of Rory Hamilton-Brown’s human rights for him to be embarrassed twice in the same match. Isn’t there a better way? Indeed there is. Here, for your thoughtful consideration are four proposals for ensuring a swift and compassionate end to proceedings on those occasions when the participants have been too inept to sort it out for themselves.

The Coin Toss

Before we consider the ridiculous, let us contemplate the sublime. The coin is in fact an elegant and unimpeachable arbiter and many of us have made some of our most important life decisions after flinging a bit of currency into the air. Indeed, I know of one particular High Court judge who would simply be unable to dispense justice as efficiently as he does without recourse to the coin toss. If it is good enough to decide upon prison sentences, marriage proposals, job offers and where to go for lunch, it ought to be good enough to settle the outcome of a Twenty20 game.

The Percentometer

Cricketers love statistics but are notoriously unreliable. When Ravi Bopara says he gave it 110%, how can we be sure that this is an accurate estimate? For all we know, he might only have given it 106% or 99%. Fortunately, scientists at the Adelaide Institute of Silly Studies have developed the Percentometer, a device that can measure how hard a team have tried in percentage terms by correlating sweat volumes, profanity output and steely glares. In the event of a tie, the team with the highest Percentometer readings will win the game.

The Bank-Off

These days, business goes with cricket like a parasitic green algae goes with an ornamental pond. So why not bring some of the features of the corporate world into our great sport. In the event of a stalemate, accountants dressed in team colours will make their way to the middle of the pitch and at specially built desks will proceed to audit the opposition team’s accounts. The franchise with the fewest accounting errors will be declared the winner. The only disadvantage with this suggestion is that it could take several hours but this will allow plenty of time for television commercials.

The Dance-Off

For reasons that are not immediately apparent, watching people dance badly on television has become very popular in certain parts of the world. What better way to cash in on this trend than by introducing a ballroom dance competition to settle tied cricket matches. Each team will choose one pair of players to dress up in spangly suits and silly grins and perform in front of a celebrity panel of dance floor dynamos, including Ravi ‘Rumba’ Shastri and Sunny ‘Samba’ Gavaskar. Watch out for Kolkata’s fabulous couple of captivating captains, Sourav Ganguly and Brendon McCullum. Their foxtrot is something to behold.

Beware The Benaud

It all started at breakfast. I had just poured out my customary bowl of chocolate googlies and was about to add a dash of the semi-skimmed when I noticed that the cocoa flavoured shapes had formed themselves into the image of Richie Benaud gazing sadly into the middle distance.

Now, students of cricket-lore will know that the breakfast-time manifestation of a former Australian cricketer is a portent of some significance. For example, if your egg yolk takes on the shape of David Boon, your health check-up is overdue; if your buttered toast looks a bit like Kim Hughes, you should keep an eye on your work colleagues and if you see Glen McGrath in your tea leaves, you are probably Mike Atherton.

But what, I wondered, could Richie be trying to tell me? The answer became clear at a little after six forty-five this evening. As Rory Hamilton-Brown failed utterly to defend his wooden castle, I finally understood. Besides being everyone’s favourite decommissioned Australian captain, retired wrist-swiveller and microphone jockey, Richie Benaud is a betting shaman. He had taken on cereal form in order to warn me.

For I am afraid dear reader, I had succumbed to the gambler’s curse. I couldn’t let a tournament like this go by without a modest wager and I had chosen to place my money on the Sharks of Sussex. My reasons were plentiful, if not particularly convincing. They are, it must be said, the best hit and giggle troupe in England. They wear a particularly fetching shade of sky blue. And they are called the Sharks. Powerful, swift, killing machines, always on the move. How could they lose? Easily, it transpired.

Under the Delhi floodlights, Sussex toyed with the emotions of the desperate gambler as though they didn’t even care that I had backed them at 16-1 in the upstairs back room of a discrete Soho establishment a week last Wednesday. Like a tedious relative who tells the same joke at every family gathering, Luke Wright ran through his usual repertoire of boundary-boundary-boundary-oopsy daisy and the subsequent exhibition of recklessness by his batting chums was more reminiscent of Lemmings than Sharks.

But all hope was not extinguished. Piyush Chawla, my favourite promising spinner of the pre-Mendis era, span a web of silken subtlety to tie the Eagles down. A dozen to get off the last over and a glorious penultimate yorker from Yasir Arafat – surely the game was won? Alas, no. A heartless, clubbing blow from Ryan Mclaren and we were into a super-duper-sudden-death-knock-out eliminator. By the time Rory of the Hamilton-Browns failed, I was spent, a limp rag of a man lying stretched out on the chaise longue, with a bottle of gin in my hand and a wet flannel over my face.

The moral of the story should be obvious by now, dear reader. Clearly, the game was fixed. I have already written a letter to Sussex County Council asking them to instigate an immediate enquiry and I expect to be reading of the resignation of Michael Yardy in Sunday’s Times. In the circumstances, it is the least he could do.