Who will win the Ashes from here?

With England up 1-0 after 2 Tests, can Australia fight back? Or is the momentum now against them? They fought back from 1-0 down in 1997 in England, but that was a vastly different team. Have a vote in our poll - we'll shut it down just before the 3rd Test to capture what people are thinking at this stage of the series.

Test Retirement

There was a time when players used to retire from cricket at the end of their career. However a new concept has begun to raise it’s ugly head; “Test retirement”. The second announcement in a week of a prominent cricketer came today when Chaminda Vaas announced that he was retiring from test cricket to focus on Twenty20 and Limited Overs cricket. This coming of course, off the back of the much publicised announcement from Andrew Flintoff of exactly the same thing.

It comes as little surprise for this generation of players. Test cricket is a long cruelling game of stamina and can quite easily take it’s toll on the body, so it’s natural to understand why players like Flintoff who has struggled with injuries throughout his career would clearly look to find a way of extending it. Having a long career in cricket can be very lucrative these days, with all the money from the IPL it has never been a better time to play cricket.

In fact, the pay difference between playing test cricket and Twenty20 cricket is so great, that it’s getting to a point where Test cricket is actually becoming a bit of liability.

Look at the recent turmoil currently taking place with West Indian cricket. Pay is the central problem at the moment in the dispute – one can easily speculate the catalyst for this dispute, or at the very least one of the major pain points for some of the high profile players. The Test series between England and the West Indies. It was not part of the Future Tours Program, and the Windies had just recently defeated the English on home soil in a war of attrition 1-0 series. With Sri Lanka pulling out because of their players commitments to the IPL, the Windies were a last minute replacement, and the impact of this meant that star players like Chris Gayle were suddenly out of pocket, significantly.

The reality of the situation is that, unless you’re Australian, playing Test cricket can actually cost you money. Only Australian’s have voluntarily omitted themselves from playing in the IPL, this year Ricky Ponting, Michael Hussey, Michael Clarke and Mitchell Johnson were all high profile players that chose to make themselves unavailable for this competition – in fact Clarke and Johnson have steadfastly avoided even being a part of the draft process entirely. Is it really just a coincidence that these players are actually the top 4  money earners under lucrative Cricket Australia contracts?

It’s because they’re just about the only players who can afford it.

How did they ever invent the game?

With my 18 month sabbatical to the motherland almost over, I will go home to Australia with only one regret - that I never got to play a game of cricket.

However, this is not through lack of trying. I had games booked in for various Cambridge, London and other shire teams. But it was not to be. Six from six games were rained out. That's a 100% strike rate. It got to the stage of knowing that if I had a game of cricket planned, I should take my umbrella.

How did England ever invent this game? No wonder they have to import half their players from countries where there is some actual sun!

Want to start your own Champions League?

Have a few million dollars lying around? Love cricket? Then why not start your own Twenty20 Champions League? Or just create your own competition with big prize money for the winner. You can watch it, as the owner, whilst being fanned by topless women with palm leaves (that's what I would do anyway...)

This week we have had the revelation of 2 separate Champions Leagues cashing in on the popularity of the newest form of the game, to go with a number of new national Twenty20 competitions and the Sanford competitions.

They wont all survive.

I have said on this blog previously that I love lots of cricket being played, and compared the situation to football where there is almost a game everyday in the UK and no one tires of it. But the difference between the current Twenty20 situation and that of football is that all the cricket competitions are largely meaningless and the result of international cricket board fights. When football is on every night, the competitions are well recognised, prestigious tournaments. Tournaments created out of thin air tend to fail, or strong teams don't show up (world club championship, various intercontinental cups and friendlies, for example).

We have known about the BCCI backed Champions League for some time. This year it will involve 2 IPL teams, 2 teams from Australia, 2 from South Africa, 2 from Pakiston and originally 2 from England. There are plans to expand with teams from more countries. But because some Kent players played in the ICL, the BCCI is not allowing them to play. It's not surprising really, the BCCI are on a crusade to control the game. You can make any argument you like about how they are protecting their financial investment - well, why not just ban the players, why the whole team? Some of the blame should also lie with the ECB, who obviously haven't given the best information to their county players and clubs.

So the ECB did what they had to do and set up their own Champions League. The England and Wales Cricket Board announced this week that it has secured a £750m deal over 10 years for a rival Twenty20 Champions League, in which of course its teams will qualify along with teams from every other senior test playing country.

The ECB's event is backed by Middle Eastern investors and will take place in Dubai or Sharjah in October. The ECB has also recently been involved in setting up the Stanford Super Series series involving England, an All Star team sponsored by Texas billionaire Sir Allen Stanford, Caribbean Twenty20 champions Trinidad & Tobago and bizarrely, Middlesex.

Let's have a look at what is happening over the next year in Twenty20 - it's a packed schedule!

Champions League
29 September to 8 October
Venue: Jaipur, New Delhi, Mohali
Teams: 2 from Australia, England, India, Pakistan, South Africa
Cash: Approx £2.5m per team

ECB Champions League
Early October
Venue: Dubai or Sharjah, UAE
Teams: 2 from the IPL, South Africa, Australia and Middlesex and Kent
Cash: £750m over 10 years

India Cricket League Invitation Cup
Sep / Oct
Venue: India
Teams: Eight franchises
Cash: Unknown

Stanford Super Series
25-28 October
Venue: Antigua
Teams: England, Stanford Super Stars, Trinidad and Tobago, Middlesex
Cash: £50,000 to Trinidad and Tobago, Middlesex, plus £100,000 for winner of their match

Stanford Super Series Winner-takes-all
1 November
Venue: Antigua
Teams: Stanford Super Stars v England
Cash: £10m

ICL Twenty20 Indian Championship
Nov / Dec
Venue: India
Teams: Eight franchises
Cash: Unknown

Indian Premier League
10 April- 29 May 2009
Venue: India-wide
Teams: Eight franchises
Cash: £500m over 10 years

ICC World Twenty20 Championship
June, 2009
Venue: Various venues across England
Teams: Nine Test playing teams (Zimbabwe excluded) plus three qualifiers
Cash: £1m (£300,000 to the winners)

My prediction is that although the burgeoning middle class of India love their cricket and are largely funding these new competitions, the IPL and ICL will not both survive. The World Twenty20 Championship will survive but I can't see how two Champions Leagues can. Indeed, I can't say I care much about either. At least this year, international Australian players will miss out on the BCCI comp, and Indian players will miss the ECB one. And do I care about cheering for Victoria and WA against created franchises from India, for which one will include Shane Warne (not playing for his native Victoria)?

This will not last. Think about other sports where capitalism has gone crazy. Super League and the ARL eventually merged in Australia to form the National Rubgy League; the Grand Slam Cup was merged with the ATP World Championship to form the Tennis Masters Cup; there are countless examples. Sanford may have changed cricket in England, perhaps the world, forever but even when Kerry Packer did something similar, eventually it sorted itself out. The good thing for Australia is that because we're good, we get invited to all competitions striving for respectability!

I just hope this doesn't take away from Test cricket. I view it like this: Test cricket is like the very hard working and highly intelligent academic working away on his research. Truly the smartest and best people go down this route, changing the world with little recognition. 50 over cricket is like the fast talking business graduate - a dime a dozen, self important but with some skills and paid well. You do need them from time to time. Twenty20 is the cat walk - very high earning, good looking with a skill set but often superficial. I love Twenty20 (as I love good-looking models) but I have a deep respect for academics. Test matches are still the pinacle. I hope that the money spinning from the short game channels into Tests.

It may be some time till we all work out which Twenty20 competitions are important and which are flash-in-the-pan. All we know now is that the cricketers will get richer.

Read more about this in The Independent

What a weird week

It has been a weird week for cricket in the British Isles. There have been two rather strange games - the record breaking New Zealand vs. Ireland ODI, and the controversial ODI between England and New Zealand.

Let's deal with the first game. There was a time when records in cricket were hard-earned and represented the highest achievements in the game. No more. New Zealand's 290 run win was the biggest ever win in a ODI. Taking a look at the list of biggest wins by runs, you have to look down to Australia's 232 run win against Sri Lanka in 1985 to find a game between 2 genuinely competitive teams. This result lies 8th on the list. India's 256 run victory over Hong Kong this week also lies above it. If you look at the list of victories by ball remaining, you have to go down further than 8th to find a genuine contest between quality teams.

When did it become so easy to break records like this? When did the ICC start handing out official status to these exhibition games? With all due respect to Ireland who performed outstandingly in the last World Cup, any team whose players are forced to play county cricket over their national team can't really be respected as a fully fledged international team.

So what do we do? Allow more mismatched games like this so to spread the word of cricket? Or only allow quality teams to play in official games? Anyone who follows HTB or my science blog will know I'm a stats nerd, and I like my numbers clean. Games like these make our stats useless. Is New Zealand the most outstanding team in world ODI cricket ever? I think official status should only be granted to these games in the World Cup.

The second game that caught my attention this week was the final ODI between New Zealand and England, which NZ thankfully won despite their number 11 Mark Gillespie missing 4 balls in a row in the final over when only 2 runs were need for victory. That they won on an overthrow on the last ball, when all England needed was a cool head to lob the ball back to the bowler, was justice after the controversial runout of Grant Elliot. If you haven't seen it, watch the clip below and make up your own mind on whether Collingwood should have recalled Elliot after he collided with Sidebottom. In my opinion, yes! But if it had been at a crucial moment in the World Cup final, I'm really not so sure. It was unlucky and there was no unfair play, but the spirit of cricket, something so trodden upon by India and Australia recently, should come into play. It was good to see the nicest man in world cricket, Daniel Vettori, win the series as captain. They are dark horses for the World Twenty20.

Bring on the Twenty20

I am officially a convert to Twenty20. If we ignore what money will do to the game of cricket, possibly devaluing Test cricket and all the rest, there is one very good thing about Twenty20 - you can wander down after work and watch a full game of exciting play. The days are long enough in England that you don't even need to turn the ground lights on - not that many of the grounds have lights anyway. And the teams play lots of games so there is a game on most nights of the week.

This week I saw Hampshire play Surrey at The Oval, and it was fantastic. When Twenty20 was first played in Australia, it seemed the side that batted first always won, but the county teams have sorted the game out, and nearly every game in this year's Twenty20 Cup has gone down to the last over with run rates of more than 8 an over. The game I saw was no different, with the bizarrely named Surrey Brown Caps failing to defend 175 against the Hampshire Hawks, with Hampshire winning with 6 balls to spare.

The funny thing about cricket though is that it is not like football or rugby. No matter how much you condense the game, the spurts of action are still very short and you spend a lot of the time talking to your mates, reading the paper, drinking beer and simply soaking up the atmosphere. You don't watch it like you watch football. This means you end up missing some of the action. and whilst there is a lot of action in Twenty20, the game is so short that if you blink or go grab a drink, you can miss 50 runs. I remember the first game of Twenty20 I saw at North Sydney Oval (with one Mr Nick Scott actually); Brad Hodge scored a century and I can barely remember it, yet 100 in a Twenty20 game is astounding!

I still prefer the intrigue and mental clashes of a Test match, but any form of cricket whereby I can drop by after work and watch some high class play is good by me. We really must have a debate about the various forms of cricket (why is there a county 40 over competition? That's simply weird), but that topic is for another day. It is worth noting that now there is lots of money available in Twenty20, no one seems to be whinging about playing too much any more. Funny that...

Lord's Test, England vs New Zealand 2008

There is no greater experience for a cricket lover than watching a Test match at the home of cricket, Lord's. Whereas watching cricket in Sydney is synonymous with sunstroke, sunburn and body odour, a day at Lord's is all picnics, boater hats and polite applause. Even when you see very little cricket because of bad light, as we did, it is still a nice day out.

Part of this may be the fact that it is quite upper class and the ground only holds around 25000 people. For the first time ever, I actually heard someone say "What-ho old man". It was a special occasion for us (my birthday), so we were happy to pay the £60 ticket price each ($AU 130 and falling...), but these were the cheapest tickets on offer. Most of the crowd were in suits, and walking to dinner through the rather exclusive St John's Wood (Kate Moss lives there), these same chaps could be seen letting their hair down with their chums at Gordon Ramsay's gastropub - you could tell as they had taken their ties off. Much of the crowd had prearranged picnic baskets containing Veuve Clicquot and the best French cheese, which they ate in the shadow of the WG Grace statue whilst on the phone to their fund manager. There is something quite wonderful about the whole upper-class-ness of it all - and something a bit wrong. The Lord's tradition of mustard-striped ties and plummy accents makes it very special, but also very out-of-reach for most of us. The class system is nowhere near dead in England!

Anyway, to the cricket, and whilst I normally think that it is a privilege to see top class cricketers in action, when the cheapest ticket on offer is £60, they can play in some poor light! I looked out the window of the restaurant at 9pm and thought to myself that I would play in the light on offer at that time, and have done, let alone how light it was when they went off countless times throughout the day. Given that the English were wearing their new bleached bright white outfits, surely the batsmen could see the red ball with that as background! The new uniforms made the kiwi creams look dirty. Apparently it is so the ECB can sell more Test shirts on the high street - white is more fashionable than cream I take it.

Sidebottom bowled really well, and Vettori batted with guts - until for some reason he left a straight ball that took out his middle stump. Cook and Strauss looked very comfortable against the Kiwi opening bowlers - they were very rarely troubled, so I don't know why they accepted the offer of poor light from the umpires. Given the bad light, and that Vettori cleaned up the English batting line-up the following day, it would have been great if Vettori had brought himself on a bit earlier. We may have seen more play and more action.

One interesting thing I learnt about the NZ team was about their opener Aaron Redmond, who was making his debut. His father Rodney played one test, in which he scored 107 and 56. He couldn't adapt to wearing contact lenses and retired. Aaron scored a duck...

So, even though we only saw 50-odd overs play, we read 3 newspapers, the programs, had one bottle of champagne, too many chips, a whole chicken, a bottle of dry ginger ale and a little sleep in the afternoon. A perfect day at the cricket! And certainly it's about time Lord's got some floodlights and the cricket authorities worked out how to play cricket in bad light. Pink balls, flood lights, day-night tests, it doesn't matter. Let's just get some more game-time. It was strange that the players were going off in the light they did.

You can see my photos from the day on my flickr site.

Shannon Noll, the voice of English cricket

It's 28 degrees outside, the cricket is just about to start, the days are long, and people are finally talking about bat-pads and third men instead of goals and defenders. Folks are flocking to the beach, the tabloids now have cricketers' wives on page 3, the national wicket-keeper is a big-hitting batsman with a broad Australian accent, and the dulcet tones of Shannon Noll are advertising the test television coverage.

Are we in Australia?

No, we are in England. Whilst Tim Ambrose is a pretty good player, our finest export to English cricket this summer is the runner up from Australian Idol 2003, Shannon Noll. Channel Five is using Noll's song "Shine"as part of their cricket coverage, so even on the other side of the world, you can not escape his rocky nasally voice.

Finally, the English cricket season is upon us

Finally in London we are about to enter that beautiful window where no football is played. After the FA Cup final next week, football (soccer to us southerners) finally goes into its off-season - all two months of it...

And in this little summer opening, cricket takes it's worthy spot atop the English sporting tree.

The press here seem to take delight in pummeling the team when they do not do well, which has been quite often since the 2005 Ashes. But they're not such a bad team. If Flintoff comes back (and Justin Langer, who is still going around for Somerset, thinks he is the best bowler in the world) then they will look much stronger than they did last year.

The selectors made an interesting decision last year to persist with Strauss, and he rewarded them with his highest score of 177 in the final test versus New Zealand. However, he scored less than 100 runs in total in his other 5 innings that tour, so still has a big question-mark hanging over him. As does Vaughan, who has yet to shine in the early county games and averaged only 20 against New Zealand. People say he is worth his place through his captaincy alone, and as a Mark Taylor fan I can't argue that logic. Vaughan does have something not many recent English captains have, and that's an Ashes series win. But Collingwood would make a very able replacement, and England have longer term prospects in Pietersen and Cook, so Vaughan needs to impress.

The man that England really should have gone for, but for whom I fear the boat has left, is Mark Ramprakash. Although his test record was pretty poor before they dropped him (averaging 27), one day a couple of summers ago he awoke to be a completely different player, easily topping the county averages, averaging 101 in 2007 and 103 in 2006. At the moment in 2008, he is already averaging 99. I think they should have picked him to bolster their batting after the 2005 Ashes series when everyone got injured. Probably would have made a good captain for their Ashes campaign of 06/07 too.

Such numbers are difficult to ignore, but it has happened before. Ramps seems to have done a Michael Bevan or a Dean Jones. At some stage he must have done something to someone, and now he will never be picked again. Bevan only stumbled a couple of times at Test level and never got another go - even though he was the best batsman in the country, possible the world, especially in one-dayers. Who knows what Jones did, but he was discarded averaging 44 in the test team after only 50-odd tests.

But at least Ramprakash can console himself with the fact he won Strictly Come Dancing.

I am going to be living the dream on my birthday by going to Lords to see the 2nd day of the England / New Zealand test match (well, not quite the dream, that would be an Ashes test, but this is still pretty good!) England are expected to win, but with Brendan McCullum set to be the next Gilchrist, especially after his heroics in the IPL, and Daniel Vettori keen to impress as captain, the Kiwis should not be written off. As an Aussie, I can't really go for either team, so I'll adopt the concept of the IPL and support individual players. I expect McCullum and Vettori to do well for the Kiwis, and I think Sidebottom should continue his fine form for the Poms. I'd like to see Hoggard back, but think we might have seen the last of Harmison. Cook should accumulate the most runs on either side. The Kiwis will miss Shane Bond who has been inexplicably banned from playing for them as he chose the wrong Indian Twenty20 competition. I think they will struggle to bowl out the English, and Vettori will do a lot of bowling, if fit.

Now the sun has finally arrived, let the cricket season begin!