Here you go:
How to measure a year in cricket? In this final column of 2014, is it runs and wickets, victories and defeats that we should be reflecting upon? Or something deeper? The way the sport is run, the language permeating through it and, if this is not too grandiose, the effect it has on people’s lives?
Either way, it has been a grim year for English cricket. On the field, calamity and confusion reigned. The year began with a surrender in Sydney and a Test team in meltdown; it ended with capitulation in Colombo, the flaccidness of the cricket played by the one-day international team being exaggerated by conditions in which England have rarely shone. All told, 33 players were used in various formats, evidence of the uncertainty throughout.
Off the field, the ECB had a chance at the beginning of the year to make a stand for the noble ideal of a game run for the greater good and to the benefit of all. Instead, it chose to side with India (and Australia) and was party to a manoeuvre whereby extraordinary financial and political power was granted to these three boards at the expense of the “smaller” nations. A chance was missed to show true leadership.
It was not a story that gained much attention at the time — although it was covered in these pages fully — but it was important. Sport will always produce moments that transcend anything — football flourishes with Fifa after all — but everything flows from the way a game is run. The principles and the priorities. Why is the game played? To fill the coffers and soothe the egos of self-important men or provide great sport?
That the sport was adrift from its moorings was apparent in any number of ways. A six-month confidentiality clause negotiated by the lawyers for the ECB and Kevin Pietersen upon the latter’s sacking was extraordinary and unique. Is cricket really that important? When James Anderson and Ravindra Jadeja aimed handbags at each other at Trent Bridge midsummer, lawyers were summoned again at great expense and a hearing sought from a judge in Australia. Was this really necessary?
In India, the Supreme Court was engaged at length to clean up the Indian Premier League and, in so doing, raise pertinent questions of egregious conflicts of interest from those who run the game there (and globally). Nor were players immune from nonsensical behaviour. In India, Dwayne Bravo, the West Indies all-rounder and captain, inspired a players’ walkout over pay from some already well-remunerated cricketers.
In English cricket, in between the bookending defeats in Sydney and Sri Lanka there were two outbreaks of civil war, involving Pietersen and his supporters and the ECB initially, then, after the publication of his autobiography, some of his former team-mates. It was hard to recall a nastier episode, from which few emerged with any credit.
It was a nastiness that spilt over into conversations permeating the game. That there was a sense of deep disillusionment among (at least some) supporters was evident by the vicious language employed in blogs and tweets throughout the year. It was hard to remember a time when an England captain, the focus of the discontent for much of the time, had to endure such a level of vitriol. That Alastair Cook survived said much for his stubbornness and for the remarkable institutional support he has enjoyed.
The sense of upheaval was highlighted by the number of key figures in English cricket the year before who departed the scene. Gone was Andy Flower by the end of January, undone by the Ashes, as most England coaches have been, and gone was Ashley Giles, undone by the fallout from the Pietersen affair. From nowhere, in came Peter Moores from the cold, and Paul Farbrace from the heat of Sri Lanka and left-field. The jury is out on the effectiveness of the pairing, but options were thin on the ground.
Pietersen’s sacking in February and Matt Prior’s injury and loss of form meant that the fine team propelled to No 1 in the rankings and Ashes glory under Andrew Strauss had finally broken up. Anderson, Stuart Broad, Ian Bell and Cook remained but a new era was well and truly under way, albeit stutteringly.
What then for 2015? The year’s defining image came from Macksville, Australia, where the life of a young cricketer, prematurely cut down, was celebrated. In the immediate days either side of Phillip Hughes’s funeral, it was possible to glimpse the best face of cricket, as hostilities were put aside. Towards a kinder, gentler game, wrote Martin Crowe, the former New Zealand batsman, knowing, as most former players do, that such an approach need not temper the necessity for the spark of conflict that often ignites great sport. Administrators could listen to Crowe’s plea as well.
Cryptically, Pietersen recently talked of changes within the English game that might allow him back into the team. Eden Dubai, Pietersen’s latest beachfront business project, will freeze over before that happens, but there are likely to be some significant changes within the ECB, with Colin Graves, Yorkshire’s financial saviour, favoured to bring some northern common sense and straight-talking to the ECB as chairman, along with Tom Harrison, the recently appointed bright, young chief executive.
There is likely to be more stability on the field, with those young players who were bedded in during 2014 given a chance to blossom. With 17 Tests between March and the end of the South Africa tour in early 2016, there are bound to be injuries, though, and a need to draw from a deep pool of players. Those keen to play all cricket will spend more than 300 nights away from home, and it is difficult to see how one man will be physically able to captain both forms of the game.
As one of only two dissenting voices against Cook’s elevation to the one-day captaincy three years ago (Mike Selvey of The Guardian was the other), there is no reason to repeat the argument now, but England’s one-day cricket has stalled, even though the focus on Cook is shielding others from their deficiencies. When a new one-day captain is appointed, England’s selectors should seize the chance to move away from the template of picking a leader through the prism of Test cricket.
There will be plenty of cricket for a man who emerged from his cricketing chrysalis this year. Moeen Ali established himself in both Test and one-day teams in 2014 as a free-flowing, attractive batsman to watch, and as a cricketer with an ability to learn on his feet, given how quickly his off spin improved. His hundred at Headingley against Sri Lanka was, technically and temperamentally, the innings of the summer, and nothing was more surprising than his bundle of wickets against India.
It was more than that, though: there was calmness and serenity in his play and thought and wisdom in his public pronouncements, both of which served as a welcome antidote to the boorishness and shrillness that pervaded the summer. He was booed, disgracefully, during a one-day international at Edgbaston in his home city towards the end of the season. That summed up the kind of petty, vindictive year it was for the most part in cricket in England; Ali’s measured response marked him out as well.
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Topic: Paul Downton new MD of English cricket. (Read 2821 times)