Category Archives: England

Good riddance: Shane Watson quits

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The vice-captain of Australia’s cricket team, Shane Watson, has stepped down from his post. Not from the team, just the post.

It’s good he did it, because that saves the selectors one job, of sacking him as vice-captain. Watson saw it coming and didn’t want to be humiliated.

But he may earn the ultimate humiliation anyway – he may not be in the team at all, the team that goes to England in June to defend the Ashes.

Watson has failed to deliver on many occasions and in India, as Australia lost a four-Test series 4-0, he did little, apart from walking out when he was dropped from the third Test for not completing an assignment given by the coach.

He returned and had to captain the team in the fourth Test as Michael Clarke, the captain, was suffering with a bad back.

Australia again lost, this time within four days (again), and Watson had little role to play in what little good Australia did.

Watson says he felt no pressure to give up the job. Sure, and I am the owner of the Eiffel Tower.

There is not much in the pipeline after Clarke and thus there is no crowd of people putting up their hands for the job. Someone will have to be groomed but the cupboard is pretty much bare.

Simply put, only Clarke, Peter Siddle and James Pattinson (when he is fit), can be sure of their places in the team. But Australia has never had a bowler as captain – not so far, anyway.

Phillip Hughes rides again

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At times, the manner in which a batsman makes runs provides evidence of his ability. But the reverse is also true: at times, the way a batsman scores is indicative of reasons why he should not be picked.

Phillip Hughes of New South Wales has again been awarded a contract by Cricket Australia. On the tour of India in February and March, Hughes failed repeatedly. He showed an inability to tackle spin – and that was about all that was doled out by the Indian team.

Hughes’ scores in the series were 6, 0, 19, 0, 2, 69, 45 and 6 as Australia was hammered 4-0 in the four-Test series. During the knock of 69, he was like a cat on hot bricks. He survived 166 balls through sheer luck, and zero ability. He was as jumpy as he had been during his previous five innings.

If there was any indication that he needed to be replaced, this innings was it. Usman Khawaja, who is known to be a decent player of spin, should have got a chance in the next Test.

But Khawaja had blown his chances of playing in the third Test by not completing an assignment handed down by the coach. He, and three others, were not considered for that Test.

He was considered for the fourth Test. Or maybe he was not. That he was not picked indicates that Australia’s selectors go by only one criterion – scoring runs. Hughes happens to come from NSW, the state that has the most influence in Australian cricket.

So he has got another chance and a fat contract. Khawaja is again out in the cold. And Australia’s selectors have made it plain that politics is more important in the game than ability.

Hughes will next be seen in action during the Ashes in England. Khawaja is unlikely to be in the touring party given that the selectors are looking to somehow win back the urn. It doesn’t matter if they have to pick batsmen who are on the verge of retirement – there are hints that Chris Rogers and Adam Voges may be picked as they have made plenty of runs in English county cricket.

There is already bad news for Hughes – the lanky Chris Tremlett, who troubled him greatly during the Ashes series played in Australia in 2010-11, is fit again and just returning to the game. If Tremlett gets back in the England side, Hughes will no doubt be haunted by memories of how he failed repeatedly against the big man.

The selectors are looking to save their necks. Not to build a team for the future. And to play their politics right – else when they are shown the door, the next opening in the cricket industry may be a long time coming.

Black money drives the IPL

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Back in 1967, the then Indian finance minister Morarji Desai had the brilliant idea of raising taxes well beyond their existing level; the maximum marginal tax rate was raised as high as 97.75 percent.

Desai, who was better known for drinking his own urine, reasoned that people would pay up and that India’s budgetary problems would be more manageable.

Instead, the reverse happened. India has always had a problem with undeclared wealth, a kind of parallel economy which is called black money. The amount of black money increased by leaps and bounds after Desai’s ridiculous laws were promulgated.

Seven years later, in 1974, the new finance minister Y.B. Chavan brought down rates by some 20 percentage points, but by then the damage had been done. The amount of black money in India today is estimated to be anything from 30 to 100 times the national budget.

No deal of any size in India can be done without paying part of the price under the table. I had great difficulty in 2004 in selling a flat I owned, simply because I wanted all the money paid above the table. And that flat was being sold well below the market rate so that I could complete the deal soon and return home. But without a black money component, nobody wants to do a deal.

Given this background, it is not surprising that the Indian Premier League, a cricket competition that is played every year and which has been in existence since 2008, pays its players – who come from every cricket-playing country – huge sums for a few weeks of Twenty20 cricket. The government pretends to be surprised about this and often vows to investigate the issue but is really not bothered; instead it is happy that black money is being converted to legal tender.

Industrialists own teams and pump their black money into paying the players. They gain a measure of publicity, both for themselves and their companies. And that is something they love. After all, black money is not of much use unless can utilise it.

In India, corruption is a way of life. You have to pay to get anything and everything done, even to get a proper bill for your monthly consumption of electricity. The symbol of one of India’s main political parties, the Congress (I) is the hand; it would be better to make it an outstretched hand because that is what one encounters in India right from the moment one gets off the plane.

Hence for anyone to say that black money has no role in the IPL is akin to saying that people do no need to breathe in order to live.

Brownwash leaves Australia shattered

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Last month, Australia completed a miserable cricket tour of India during which it lost all four Tests, the first time this has happened since 1970.

On that occasion, a strong Australian team went to South Africa and was creamed 4-0; the South Africans were captained by Ali Bacher and included legends of the game like Graeme Pollock, Mike Proctor, Peter Pollock, Barry Richards and Eddie Barlow.

But in India, a weak Australian team came up against opponents who were not that formidable. The one thing that was clearly observable was the fact that the shorter forms of the game have had a bad effect on the Australians’ ability to stay at the crease and grind out the runs.

The contributor to this lack of stickability is Twenty20 cricket. In the one-day game one has plenty of time to build an innings; the highest individual score in this form is 219, by the mercurial Indian, Virender Sehwag, against the West Indies in 2011. Sachin Tendulkar has made a double-century as well, against South Africa in 2010. In Twenty20, one cannot build an innings; one has to start swinging the willow from ball one.

Additionally, Twenty20 games are generally played on placid surfaces to ensure that the batsmen can entertain the crowd. Else, the whole point of the game would be lost. Test cricket is often played on surfaces which try the patience of batsmen and that’s why it has that name – it is a test.

India did not have a top-class bowling attack but the spinners it fielded were enough to bamboozle the Australians who are uncomfortable facing this kind of bowling. Australia’s bowling attack wasn’t all that bad apart from the spin department which was the area that needed to be strong.

For Australia, losing in international cricket is a national shame. The country is crazy about sport, understandably so since it has little else to boast about. The sense of shame will be compounded in mid-year if Australia is unable to win back the Ashes from England. And things will really come to a head if the Australians are beaten again in the reverse Ashes which are to be played during the Australian summer.

Xenophobes in Australia about to choke on their cornflakes

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THE xenophobes in Australia – and that’s a goodly proportion of the population – will find themselves in a difficult position if Fawad Ahmed is granted citizenship and selected to play for Australia in the Ashes cricket series against England later this year.

You see, Ahmed is an asylum-seeker from Pakistan. Asylum-seekers are a class of human beings whom the average Australian, with his/her devotion to a fair go, deems to be sub-human and only deserving of being sent back to their country of origin. Or drowned at sea.

Ahmed applied for permanent residence last year and while he was awaiting a decision, it emerged that he was a more than capable leg-spinner. Australia was a few weeks from taking on South Africa in a Test series and so he was asked to go over and help the Australians in their net practice. South Africa has a spinner of Pakistani origin, Imran Tahir, in its ranks and the Australians needed to play a good spinner to prepare to face Tahir.

After that the authorities intervened and got him his PR pretty fast. Ahmed did well in the nets, landed a contract with the Melbourne Renegades in the annual Twenty20 tournament, and did a pretty good job there too.

Next, he was selected to play for Victoria against Queensland and promptly returned a match-bag of seven wickets. His captain, Cameron Smith, ranks Ahmed as the best spinner he has seen after Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill. That is high praise indeed.

Smith’s observations come at a time when Australia has just been hammered by India in the first Test of a four-match series on a spinning track in Chennai. Australia’s lone spinner was taken for 215 runs in the first innings and ended with 4 wickets for 244 in the game.

And so the talk has turned to how Australia will combat not only India in the remaining Tests, but England in June. This is an English team that defeated India 2-1 in a Test series in India very recently, with two spinners, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, proving to be the trump cards.

Enter Ahmed. There is talk that the immigration minister Brendan O’Connor is now considering his application for citizenship. Australia is a sports-mad country and the Ashes are one of the most popular sporting contests. Australia never forgets that it was initially populated by convicts who were sent from Britain; paying back the mother country is something every Australian loves.

If Ahmed makes it and proves to be some kind of equalising factor in the Ashes, it will be a classic good news story.

But the xenophobes will choke on their cornflakes – after all, how can a brown-skin from a country like Pakistan, ever be considered a good enough person to play cricket for Australia?

When the offenders become the story

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IT COULD only happen in Australia. Two DJs stage a prank call to the hospital where a member of the royal family, Kate Middleton, had been admitted as she was suffering from morning sickness; they pose as Queen Elizabeth and her son, Charles. The call is passed on by an unsuspecting nurse who is doubling as a telephone operator, and her colleague in the ward provides an accurate rundown of Middleton’s condition.

The DJs, from 2Day FM, play the recorded conversation without asking the hospital for its permission as they are required to do by the rules of their own station. The recording was played by several other stations and the nurse involved, Jacintha Saldanha, was made to look like a fool.

A conservative woman from India, she then proceeded to take her own life. The two DJs, Michael Christian and Mel Greig, proceeded to try and spin themselves as innocent, appearing on trash TV shows on two channels. Shedding crocodile tears aplenty, they tried to project themselves as the ones needing sympathy.

Until a week had gone by, there was no thought for the family of this poor nurse, two teenage children and a husband who has been left suddenly bereaved. No thought was given to the possibility that a woman from a conservative part of India could possibly have held the royal family in such esteem that to be duped in this manner and laughed at was the ultimate humiliation.

She was obviously unable to bear the thought of having to face people in the UK and, more importantly, back in Mangalore, her place of origin. This did not strike the people in Australia who tried to make the story about the poor DJs who were said to be emotionally distraught. As well they should be, having caused the death of an innocent woman.

2Day FM has form in the regard; one of its broadcasters, Kyle Sandilands, has once interviewed a 14-year-old girl on air and she ended up confessing that she had been raped. On another occasion, he slagged off a journalist who had criticised a TV show he had made.

Now the radio station boss is coming around to the fact that making a donation to the family would help. He should have twigged to this a long time ago. Once the attempt to make the narrative about the two DJs was not working, he started talking about Saldanha’s family. The DJs are now suspended and the radio station has stopped prank calls which were part of its arsenal to make its offerings attractive.

There is talk of an inquiry by the Australian Media and Communications Authority, a toothless tiger if ever there was one. Six months from now, it will all go back to the status quo and some other poor soul will suffer at the hands of stupid operators like Christian and Greig.

British traders being disadvantaged by pathetic mail service

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BRITAIN’S Royal Mail service is royal no longer. Indeed, one could question whether it is a mail service at all, it takes so long to deliver material for which people have paid. At times deliveries do not take place at all.

This comes at an unfortunate time for a country which was once known for its efficiency. The number of people buying things across borders has soared with the development of the world-wide web and if things are not delivered in time, then traders risk losing customers.

Nobody will come back to a trader who cannot send his goods across in time. This is unlikely to be the fault of the trader but that does not bother the increasingly self-centred customer.

Apart from losing repeat sales, the trader also loses in another way. When the outside date for delivery is crossed, the customer often asks for a refund – and he or she is only willing to wait so long.

It is often the case that the goods turn up at the address they were intended to reach a week or so after the refund is granted. And the trader loses both the goods and the customer.

This happens with all kinds of goods. It has happened to me with books and shoes. In both cases, a week after the outside date for delivery, I wrote to the vendor and he sent me a refund. A few days later the goods landed.

This could well be exploited by an unscrupulous public to obtain goods free.

It is the responsibility of the country to provide a decent mail service and by letting the efficiency of the service go down the drain, Britain is also killing the hopes of traders who hope to join the growing throng of those who sell across borders using the wonders of modern technology.

Anzac Day glorifies war

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IN AUSTRALIA, Anzac Day is a means to promote militarism and nationalism. It marks the day when Australian forces invaded Turkey in 1915, entering World War I.

Sixty thousand Australians were killed in that war and nearly 16 million people died worldwide. It was no event over which to rejoice.

Anzac Day was initially used during the war to recruit people to fight on the other side of the world. In 1916 and 1917, Anzac Day became a means of supporting conscription.

After 1918, there was a long period when people were fed up with what they had exprienced during the war. Economic conditions were not good due to the numerous strikes caused by an increasingly militant workforce. During that time, Anzac Day was hardly celebrated.

Once the league for returned servicemen was formed, the government started supporting it and handed over control of Anzac Day to the league. During the great depression, the league grew in number as it offered unemployment relief.

Class tensions were rife at this time and Anzac Day marchers were told not to march according to rank. This created some kind of a covering of class differences and Anzac Day was promoted as a means of unifying the nation. But as the nation’s anti-war sentiment grew during the Vietnam War, so too did the popularity of Anzac Day.

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating began the current revival of Anzac Day as a nationalist celebration. Social spending was falling and Anzac Day was used as a poultice to project the spirit of nationalism and to hide class distinctions. Hawke brought back the pilgrimage to Gallipoli and Keating spoke long and loud about the sacrifice on the Kokoda Track.

John Howard took this to a new level, invoking Anzac Day and building up a spirit of militarism to justify Australia’s participation in wars in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anzac Day is meant to be a day that recognises the horrors of war. Instead, it has become a day that caters to militarism, imperialism and conservatism.

No soldier would want to glorify the events at Gallipoli. War is not a thing that those who fought in enjoyed. Sensible people should reject this celebration and boycott what happens because all it is doing is making a good and glorious event out of the misery of war.

Some myths about the Australia-India Test series

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EVER since the Indian cricket team was two months away from its current tour of Australia, the media and the PR people have been boosting it as being based on some kind of “traditional” rivalry. This is just one of the many myths that was being spread about this tour in an attempt to draw crowds.

There is no such traditional rivalry. Australian teams have been historically reluctant to tour India, because of the conditions. Indian teams have been similarly reluctant to tour Australia because of the one-sided umpiring. (A good example of this was seen in 1999 when Sachin Tendulkar was given out lbw in the second innings for a duck after a ball from Glenn McGrath hit him on the helmet! The umpire was none other than the corpulent Darryl Hair, the same man who tried to extort money from the ICC after he was embroiled in a row after making Pakistan forfeit a Test in England.)

Yet another myth being spread is that India is a very strong team. Wrong. India’s famed batsmen are all on the verge of retirement. And their bowling attack is not that good either – Zaheer Khan is recovering from an injury, as is Ishant Sharma. The third paceman, Umesh Yadav, is only four Tests old. And the spinner Ravichandran Ashwin is a better batsman than a spin bowler.

After Australia lost a series at home to the West Indies in 1992-93, the next time they lost at home was to South Africa in 2008-09. They were then beaten by England in 2010-11. These three teams were immensely strong in the years when they defeated Australia. In each series, Australia did win one Test. But this is a statistic few will cite for it would hardly bolster the claim everyone has been making, that India had the best chance to win a series in Australia this time. It is extremely difficult to defeat Australia at home.

India has never won a series either in Australia or South Africa, where the wickets are somewhat similar. And they never will until their batsmen are weaned off the Twenty20 diet that is beginning to markedly affect the quality of batsmen turned out by the country.

The mentality of the players who are coming off the Indian treadmill is encapsulated by Ashwin. As the garrulous Indian commentator Harsha Bhogle, a malaprop of no ordinary proportions, put it on ABC radio, Ashwin was trying to “force the pace” when he skied a ball to be last out in India’s second innings at the SCG. What pace was he trying to force? India was trying to save the game and make Australia bat again; it was still 68 runs short of that target when Aswhin lofted the ball unnecessarily.

To make big centuries in Test cricket, you have to either play against a team with a very weak attack or else do what Alastair Cook did during the England tour of 2010-11 – let everything outside the off-stump go by without being tempted; play the ball along the ground and avoid as much as possible hitting aerial shots. Cook scored more than 900 runs in that series, including two double-hundreds.

The flow of myths never stops. When the Australian captain Michael Clarke declared his team’s innings at 4 for 659 with his own score at 329, he was credited with putting the needs of the team before himself. Clarke had only to make six runs to beat the score jointly made by Mark Taylor and Don Bradman; he needed 52 to make the highest Test score by an Australian. The match was only at its halfway point when he declared – an Indian innings had never lasted more than a day in the two Tests to date.

Clarke could easily have gone for the record and, had he got to one, even tried to overtake Brian Lara’s 400 not out, the highest Test score of all time. He declared because he was afraid that if he went on, the media would write him off as being selfish, a charge he has had to fight ever since he became a Test cricketer. He had a fancy car, a model as girlfriend, and was as far away as possible from being the rough, blokey person that cricketers are expected to be. One writer even described him as a tosser. That image is what Clarke has been trying to live down. And that’s why he declared, to try and win respect.

He pulled a bit of spin in the second innings, after he came on to bowl, solely to preserve James Pattinson and Ben Hilfenhaus for the new ball, and, by chance, got the wicket of Tendulkar. It wasn’t planned, it was a fluke. But did he tell the truth? No, Clarke used it as one example of his brilliant captaincy skills.

No commentator pointed out that when he had a lead of 468 runs and India was really under the gun, Clarke set extremely conservative fields. Two slips at best when a team was desperately trying to avoid a second successive loss in Australia and a run of six Test defeats abroad. And when Australia was under the gun in South Africa recently, Clarke was among those who surrendered meekly.

No comment on the series would be complete without some mention of the monkey on Tendulkar’s back. The wisest thing for him to do would have been to play a couple of the one-dayers against the West Indies last year and score his 100th international century. Instead, he sat out all the ODIs against the Windies and now the entire team is hostage to his quest for this elusive hundred.

But other teams should be happy when Tendulkar scores a hundred. Of his 51 Test hundreds, on 20 occasions the team won. On 11 occasions, India lost and on the remaining 20, the games were drawn. If the eight centuries made against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are removed, then of the 43 times he made hundreds, only on 14 occasions did India win.

With his ODI hundreds, it is a similar tale: of his 48 ODI hundreds, 33 were made on occasions when India won. On 13 occasions India lost, and there was one tie and one no-result. But of those 33 hundreds made in a winning cause, nine were made against Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Namibia.

Will India win a single Test? The short answer is no. But the crowds will flock to see the Tests as Indians are crazy about cricket and there are plenty of them in Australia.

Australian cricket continues on its old, merry path

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EARLIER this year, after England sealed a resounding 3-1 win in the Ashes Test series, Australian cricket authorities, apparently all shaken up, launched an inquiry to find out why the team had been beaten, and so comprehensively too.

This was the third time that Tasmania’s Ricky Ponting had led the national team to a loss in the Ashes series; Ponting lost twice in England, in 2005 and 2009. The Ashes is the series that matters most to Australia as England is historically the enemy.

When the inquiry reported back and recommended sweeping changes, there was hope that things would look different this summer. Of course, the captain had to go – of that there was little doubt. But despite a lot of talk, much promise of change, one finds that with the summer cricket season nearly a third over, things are pretty much the same.

Australia has a new bunch of selectors but they follow the same methods as their predecessors. Before the two-Test series against New Zealand began, the selectors had the chance to get rid of some of the older members of the squad, people like Mike Hussey and Ponting, usher in some youngsters and start the process of rebuilding.

Two Tests were played in South Africa before the series against New Zealand but the same old faces were seen in action. On returning from that country, some changes forced themselves on the selectors – a fairly large number of players had sustained injuries. Opener Shane Watson was one. The selectors’ reaction was the same as that of those who have gone before them – bring in an opener from New South Wales, the state that is the most influential in cricket in the country. It doesn’t matter that the man, David Warner, is not suited to the role.

The other opener, Phillip Hughes, was retained despite a very shaky showing in South Africa. He got two scores of 9 in the first Test, and 88 and 11 in the second and showed, as he had against England last year, that he is still susceptible to the moving ball early in the innings. But he is from New South Wales. Hence he stayed put.

Hughes got 10 and 7 in the first Test against New Zealand. He has stayed on to open in the second Test too. His first innings effort in the second Test is done – all of 4 runs, again caught at slip. But I’m willing to bet that when India lines up against Australia on Boxing Day in Melbourne – that is the next Test of the summer season – Hughes will still be there.

Shaun Marsh was another player injured after the South African Tests. He is still on the mend and may be fit to play against India. But who will be moved out to make way for him? Ponting? Hussey? Or will he be sacrificed as an opener, the most difficult job in Test cricket, so that the two old men can save their jobs?

When it came to the bowlers, the selectors had to ring some changes. Mitchell Johnson, after another erratic tour, was injured. So too Ryan Harris. Two new men had to be brought in. The selectors picked James Pattinson and Mitchell Starc. Judging from the way the previous bunch of selectors handled the debut of Patrick Cummins in the second Test in South Africa – the man has sustained a serious heel injury and is unlikely to play again this summer – one has to wait and see how Pattinson and Starc pull up after the Tests against New Zealand.

Given the appearance of Pattinson and Starc, the selectors loudly proclaimed that young blood was being infused; in other words, they, the selectors, were taking bold, new steps. But, pray, if someone had not been brought in to replace the injured bowlers, how would the 11 have been made up?

Ponting failed in South Africa. He made one score of 60-plus; anyone who saw him make that score would have concluded that it was time for him to quit. It was a painful innings from a man who is widely acknowledged as the second best batsman produced by Australia, after Sir Donald Bradman. But he is allowed to stay on.

Hussey got 15 in the first Test against New Zealand. In South Africa, he scored 1, 0, 20 and 39. He is still in the team despite being 36 and blocking the entry of some promising youngster. He will be there for the series against India too, have no fear.

The argument used by the selectors will be that you need some experience in the ranks; after all, they can point to their opponents, India, as an example. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, V.V.S. Laxman and Virender Sehwag, the nucleus of the Indian batting, are all above 30. Tendulkar is 38. The difference is that they are all scoring and scoring heavily. Just yesterday, Sehwag hammered the highest score in one-day cricket, 219, against the West Indies. Ponting, by contrast, has not scored a hundred for something like 18 Tests.

But the Australian selectors are too scared to make changes; they want to please all the little cliques in cricket circles and are unwilling to rock the boat. Anyone who cares about Australian cricket would have to hope and pray that India wins the series and overwhelmingly too. Then we might see some dramatic change.