Category: Test Cricket

Sooner or later, I knew it would come to this.  I knew that someday there would be a test match that I was highly interested in, was available for legal viewing online, and was on in the middle of the night.

And that day…err…night…has finally come.

The second day of Pakistan versus England starts in one hour and 40 minutes.  It is 20 minutes after 10 o’clock here in the Midwest, I have to be at the office at eight am.  In other words: the match is happening during the exact same eight hour window when I am usually sleeping.

And, yet, here I am, typing away on a blog post, drinking tea, biding my time, fully committed to making it at least to the lunch break.

This is the life of American cricket fan.

Nah, that’s inappropriately arrogant.

England fans suffer through a similar loopy schedule when England visiting Australia, just as one example.  Lunchtime in Melbourne is 2am in London.

Cricket fans everywhere suffer for their sport, sacrificing sleep like no other group of sports fans.

Maybe that’s why Stuart Robertson invented Twenty20? He was sick of not getting eight hours a night.

I had debated maybe going to bed extremely early and then getting up extremely early (like, say, 4am-ish), but I decided instead to take a quick power nap after getting home from work and then fortify myself with caffeine and a James Ellroy novel to pass the time.

I will probably try the early riser option next test – although I have found that it is always easier to stay up late then to get up early.

Honestly, I think if the match had taken a different turn yesterday, I might have decided just to see what the scores were when I got up in the morning; I really don’t need to see Jonathon Trott scratching away for session after session…again…

But the match is wonderfully poised.  England need wickets today – and that need should make for entertaining viewing.

And, really, I am excited to finally suffer for my sport.

Getting up at 6:15am to watch Arsenal play is gong to feel easy after this.

Hopefully, Twitter is alive and kicking with Brits up early for the match, and hopefully Willow TV will still be showing the game – nothing but love for Cricinfo’s ball-by-ball, but I am not going to sacrifice quality sack time unless I have a proper video stream.

All right, one hour and twenty minutes to go, time to make a sandwich.

Until next time.

Been a weird day in the world of cricket (just ask the proprietor of Deep Backward Point): I woke up to see the spot fixing story making front page news on Twitter, as well as a vague story on the Australian squad having some sort of booze fueled romp on the Perth wicket (or something.)

Not to mention the fact that the ECB was meeting behind closed doors to decide the future of County Cricket, and that Australia and India were set to play the pivotal third test in their series (well, pivotal for India, anyway).

And, finally, I had a post I had written on the Associates (a favorite topic of mine) posted over on The Sight Screen.  Check it out.

So, really, I had a ton of ideas for today’s blog.  A review of the Morgan report, putting the spot fixing in to a wider sport context, some notes on athletes and booze, or maybe simply link to the article above and call it a night.

I’ve decided to save the first three topics for another day, and go with number four: please do check out the link above, read the story, and let me know your thoughts.

The Associates are a huge part of the cricket playing world, so hopefully the ICC will sooner or later sort out how exactly to handle them.

Before signing off, a few quick notes on India v Australia:

1.  Australia won the toss and elected to field: and promptly took Sehwag’s wicket rather cheaply.

However Gambhir is looking quite comfortable tonight (finally) and Dravid looks his usual calm and collected self.

So despite Sehwag, there is hope that this test might at the very least be competitive for the entire five days.

I am a confirmed neutral, of course, but right now I am firmly in India’s corner.   Give us a match. will ya?

2.  Perth is such an impressive stadium, what a great setting for sport.  It seats almost 25,000 and just like yesterday in Paarl, most of those seats are filled – always great to see.

3.  I found myself looking forward to this match all day. Despite the fact that it very well could be an uneventful five days, despite the fact that I support neither country, despite all of the bad news in the world of cricket, despite the fact that I had just a simply terribly day at the office.

Nothing makes everything else disappear quite like a test match.

And with that: until tomorrow.

Okay, so I guess it is finally time that I say something about that Wright Thompson piece for ESPN on test cricket.

Now I have complained about Mr. Thompson before, this was back in the summer when I heard him interviewed by The Two Chucks during the first England v India test – that match also happens to be the central storyline in the essay above.

For a lot of reasons, I find Mr. Thompson annoying.  First of all, I think he is stealing my schtick: I am the American that loves cricket, I should be the one telling Americans all about the sport: its trials, its tribulations, its heroes.  Not you, Wright, the ignoramus ESPN.com writer.  (Truth be told, however, I am stealing Mark Marqusee’s schtick, so whatever.)

Secondly, I am annoyed by the fish-out-of-water, babe-in-the-woods routine he employs in his approach to the sport.  “Hey, I am a big dumb American tell me about your craaaaazzzy game there, Mr. Foreigner!”

Generally, I feel that he is encroaching on what I want to do, which is write about cricket from a unique, American perspective, and I feel like he has already cornered that market without even really trying, and I find that annoying.

So when I had heard that his article for ESPN on the 2,000th test match had finally been published, I initially decided to ignore it.  And then last night @testingtimesXI tweeted that folks should be reading the story and I grew even more agitated – in fact, I was in a generally annoyed state of mind last night for a good three hours.  Whenever I would think about this blog, I would feel this burn in my gut: THIS FUCKING SOUTHERN NITWIT WRIGHT THOMPSON GUY IS STEALING MY ACT!

And, of course, that is stupid.  Mr. Thompson is an accomplished and gifted writer, for reals.  He has a knack both with the pen and with people. I am more often than not in awe of his words.

And, of course, he works for the Worldwide Leader, so he has power of all that Mickey Mouse money behind him – and really it’s not his fault that the machine sent him to London to watch cricket, and honestly in the interview above he did sound legitimately humbled and excited to be at Lord’s.

And, of course, I was being a little bit xenophobic and insular, in a backwards sort of way.  Who cares what a writer’s nationality is?  I read dozens of articles a week about test cricket from writers around the globe, so why should I thumb my nose at this one just because it was written by a fellow American?  Isn’t that just the kind of stereotyping that I should be campaigning against?

Therefore, this morning, I read his piece over oatmeal and tea.  And here are my thoughts, summarized from my scribbled notes on the back of an envelope:

It’s long. Very long. Topping out at almost 10,000 words.  Though I bet even Mr. Thompson would tell you that there is a bit of filler in there.

And, well, I liked it. It was very well written, I saw myself in a lot of what he said, and by the end of the article he really seemed to “get” test cricket – that it wasn’t really one five day match, that it was hundreds of mini-matches spread out over five days.

I liked his notes about the weather, about how all us cricket fans go nuts about rain and humidity and dryness and cloud cover.

And I liked his main point, which was the status of test cricket in the modern world.  He comments on how the brains of younger people have been reprogrammed and simply cannot connect to this longer form of the game, that it would be like telling them to breathe helium instead of oxygen (my words, not his.)

In that same vein, later on he mentions a fact that I knew intellectually but one that I never really thought about.  I had always assumed that cricket was a hold over from the pastoral days of pre-industrial England, but the first test match was played in 1877 – right smack dab in the middle of the Industrial Revolution.  The author sums it best: “When Marqusee describes the pleasure of attending a Test match, he lingers on the way he’s able to think. In the white spaces. I think about the silence at Lord’s, and I understand. Test cricket is different from the rest of the world because it was designed to be.”

He later mentions that due to its birth date, cricket has always been dying, always been struggling against time, against technology, against progress.  And I found that thought quite comforting, as maybe we really all don’t need to be worrying about the future of test cricket, as it knows perfectly well the uphill battles it faces, as it has been facing them for seven generations.

Finally, he sums it all up by saying that this just might finally be test cricket’s time to shine: as the world will sooner or later need to slow time down, and there are movements around the world already attempting to do so: slow food, knitting, urban farming. Yoga.  Maybe test cricket will be the sport that fits into that movement: as “a sport existing outside the tyranny of money and time.”

Again, I took great comfort in his notions.  And I am glad I took the time to read them.

What didn’t I like?  Well, as I mentioned, there were a lot of unnecessary words (pot, meet kettle.  Kettle, pot.)  And the article seemed at some points to be less about cricket, and more about Wright.  And he seemed to steal directly from his previous long-form article on the game, the one about the 2011 World Cup.

And really, I thought he gave the Lord’s establishment a bit too hard of a time.

But those were all easily forgivable mistakes.

In the end, I liked it, and I recommend it.

My favorite part of the entire article was this paragraph, as it reminded me of me, when I first fell in love with cricket:

“The English fielding strategy, I hear, contains three slips and a gully. A silly point. I’m not sure what that means, but the words are pleasing to hear. Just the sound of them.”

Amen, Mr. Thompson.

Until next time.

I talk a great deal about test cricket on this blog. A great deal more than I ever expected to, actually.

This is the story of I how I fell in love with test cricket.  Some other time, I will write about my love affair with the sport overall…

When I first started following the game, it was during the 2007 World Cup, and so I was an ODI man through and through.  I thought it was a modern form of an archaic sport, a way out of the cricketing middle ages.  And I thought for sure that it was cricket in its most exciting form, as how could a four or five day match possibly be more exciting than one that is decided in one day – and one which always gives you a winner?

Please forgive me.

Then, shortly after, very shortly after, I discovered Twenty20 cricket, and the American in me sprung to life: this is it, I thought, this is what will bring Americans into the game. It’s three hours, there are penalties for slow over rates, the crowds are big and loud and the atmosphere is thick with tension.

I found myself following a great deal many one day series that first year: there was the t20 World Cup, there was India’s seven ODIs in England, and so on.

But more and more, beginning in 2008, I started to drift toward the longer forms of the game.  In County Cricket, after first only really following the one day tournaments, I was starting to only watch highlights of first-class matches.  And while I still enjoyed big ODIs, and followed along with the knockout stages of the County one-dayers, and while I thought the IPL was great entertainment, I was slowly but surely being consumed by test cricket.

For me, just like for most folks, it seems, test cricket was the true test of team sporting endurance.  And more than any other sport, test matches told a story:  there was drama, and villains, and heroes.  Plot lines that stretch for days, batsmen who bat for days, and twists that come from nowhere.  And like most I enjoy a well spun yarn.

I was blown away by the fact that one delivery, ONE, could turn an entire five day match on its head.

Now, I am not going too much time waxing poetic here, as so many that have come before me have done it far better than I ever could.  But for my American readers, you must know, there is something quite magical about a sporting event that lasts for more than three hours.  You cannot think of it like an NFL game, where three hours can feel interminable, as it is something completely different.  You drift in and out, checking the scores when you can, watching entire two hour sessions when possible, keeping it in the back of your mind all the rest of the time.  It is its own animal, it transcends the traditional “game” and honestly, is the only contest that can fairly be called a “match”.

All of that said, however, up until recently, my love for test cricket was on somewhat equal standing with other major sporting events that I enjoyed.  The Tour de France, the World Series, the Champions League Final, football’s World Cup…etc.

I felt this way even after subscribing to Willow.tv which allowed me to watch the England-India test series.

But then, and goodness I hate to keep harping on this, but then I watched the Boxing Day test at the MCG, and everything changed.  I realized that test cricket stood alone, not always, but on its biggest stages, it was on a pedestal where no other sports could be placed.  Not the bloated Super Bowl, not the niche sport Olympics, not even the World Cup.  Test match cricket existed all on its own, and in my 30 years as a sports fan, I had found my personal mountain top of sporting spectacle.

I have been to Emirates Stadium, been to NFL games, been to an Michigan v Ohio State football game, been to an MLB playoff game…but nothing matches what I felt those first few nights watching Australia-India at cricket’s giant virtual bar on my silly little computer in a quiet room on the other side of the earth.

Nothing involving sport, of course, mind you.

And I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life enjoying match after match.

I linked to @Legsidelizzy‘s blog this morning, and I feel like I have to do it again here.  In this post, she says:

“I continue to search for the elusive thing that is happiness and contentment.  That may never happen but quite frankly, I don’t know where I’d be without cricket. Lost – totally lost.”

Now, I don’t think I would be lost without cricket, but this blog and this sport have brought a great deal of happiness over the last year, and for that I am very thankful.

One last note: I know that waxing poetic about test cricket is like shooting fish in a barrel, and I know that I repeated myself a lot in this post, and I do appreciate you humoring me by reading this.  I promise to not do either too often.

Until next time.