A Lot to Like

Taunton's well-honed image as a bowlers' graveyard is no longer as justified as it once was. For the last three or four years there's been noticeably more grass and bounce in the pitches, and they reward both skilful bowling and patient, discerning batting. In the old days it was usually a simple question of how many runs a side could make before it became too bored with the ease of it all to go on. Unsurprisingly, Somerset have never won the championship.

Now there is help there, although, as should be the way, you need to bowl well to find it. This season, with few exceptions, Somerset haven't been doing so often enough, and, when coupled with a general lack of form and runs from their batsmen, they currently look as far away from a maiden title as they have ever done.

The main exception has been a nineteen year-old from the north Devon coast called Jamie Overton.

Overton's bowling in Somerset's game against Warwickshire in late April, which was covered on Sky, led both David Lloyd and Mike Atherton to suggest that he could be a contender for next winter's Ashes tour, and Mike Selvey has recently joined this club of slightly breathless admirers. As Overton has played just eight first-class matches and taken 23 wickets, it instinctively feels as though people who should know better are getting just a little carried away.

There is, though, a lot to like about Overton.

For a start, unlike so many bowlers of his age, he doesn't look as though the kind of icy wind which plagues the county grounds of England at this time of year will pick him up and carry him over the nearest sightscreen. Overton is bulky, robust, muscular. In the old-fashioned way, he is built to be a seam bowler. Built for hard labour on capricious English tracks. And, from a well-balanced, high, rhythmical action, he has pace. Mid to high eighties with ease, and the ability to make the ball bounce and move away. He keeps his slips on their toes. Although his Cricinfo profile describes him as a medium pace bowler, he is nothing of the sort.

With any bowler of Overton's age, whatever their potential, the uncertainties of future form and fitness hang as heavily in the air as a lower-order hitter's skyer descending to earth; until their potential is realised or they fade from view, nobody can be certain what will happen.

With Jamie, whose name I've known since he and his twin were tearing up the Devon youth circuit as eleven year-olds, I have a hunch that he's going to be good.

Really, really good.

Danger: Genius at Work

Towards the end of March I saw Jos Buttler at my local rugby ground. The Exeter Chiefs were playing Leicester in the Aviva Premiership and he was standing close to where I can usually be found on Devon winter Saturdays, frequently struggling to retain feeling in my limbs as the estuary winds blow in. He was among a group of lads his age and a couple of older men, one of whom I took to be his father. He was relaxed, happy, smiling. He didn't stand out, other than for the lush appearance of his skin, which spoke of time spent far from the grim, biting greyness of the British winter months.

In many ways, Jos Buttler is characteristic of his cricket background. Somerset players, whatever their gifts - and Marcus Trescothick is the ageless template here - tend to be unpretentious and self-aware, mistrustful of metropolitan slickness and artificiality.

Talk is cheap. It is what you do on the pitch, with bat or ball in hand, that matters.

This is Buttler. When interviewed he is quietly spoken, modest, a little reticent perhaps. He doesn't stand out. Except in the way he uses his bat.

After Sandy Park, my next sighting of Buttler came at Taunton during Somerset's first home Championship match of the season against Warwickshire. He made a fluent, easily commanding 119 not out from number six, putting on a creamy 193 with Alviro Petersen. For Buttler, whose name has largely been made in the limited-over game, this was an important innings, showing as it did the level of restraint and shot selection - though never excessive conservatism or lack of fluency - which he is going to need to regularly display if he is to press his claims to be among England's future plans in Test as well as one-day cricket.

At the wicket Buttler has the stillness and capacity for late movement which distinguishes the very best. With a full slip cordon in place and the ball moving, he can be vulnerable, as the quality of his eye and hands can lead him into unwise temptation and misjudgement. However, such is his class, he can usually ride the danger. As with other players of genius, what is almost certain to be fatally inappropriate to a lesser mortal is usually just the simplest way to accrue runs. The difficult and unwise is, in his hands, made to look easy and prudent.

However, it is in the short-form arena that Buttler's virtuosity has its clearest expression. Here he can do what he does as well as any player on the planet. He can innovate and extemporize, and he can bend any bowling attack to his will. The coruscating innings of 89 from 51 balls which he made for Somerset against Yorkshire at Headingley yesterday was simply the most recent example of his gifts. There were the ramp shots to both sides of the hapless wicket-keeper, played with unnatural consistency of timing - the difficult made to look easy - and there were the lofted on-drives, hit with merciless power. But there was also more: lofted off-drives (though in truth they were more like tennis shots) played with a lazy, elastic whip of the arms, subverting the textbook's imprecations to keep the left elbow high and enabling the ball to be directed to parts of the offside boundary which cannot easily be defended by a captain with only nine fielders at his disposal.

Many of Buttler's early games for England were characterized by an air of diffidence which is never apparent when he is playing for his county. Until he made 32 not out off 10 balls in a T20 game (which was reduced to 11 overs per side) against South Africa at Edgbaston last September, there was a sense that he was wondering to himself whether he was good enough. Since then he has appeared more confident and has been marginally more influential, although, as Bob Willis, who, in his mad Uncle sort of way has become Buttler's greatest champion, has said, he needs to bat higher in the order.

Buttler is a one-day player in the modern idiom. As everyone knows, in modern limited-over cricket, reputations are won and lost in the IPL. Because Buttler has never played in the IPL there are wide swathes of the cricket world who don't yet know how good he is. At Headingley yesterday the applause he received when he left the field was hesitant. While this can be attributed at least partly to partisanship, you can be forced to conclude that it is not just on the Indian sub-continent that people are yet to really grasp how good Buttler is.

Before long, you can be sure, they will.

Read It and Weep

I've never made much of it here before but for many years my day job ('What do you do in real life?' Matthew Engel asked me the other week) involved looking after archives. These days I spend more time encouraging others to value them, but I still pass most of my days surrounded by registers, by maps, by deeds, by wills, by letters. I like it, and I can get days off to watch cricket.

We value the things we look after and we try not to let them get eaten by insects. This, at the most basic level, is part of our ethos.

Because of this, and perhaps because I've been reading and thinking about Wisden and the game's rich written heritage more than usual recently, I was truly shocked by this, which Aakash Chopra, the former Indian Test batsman, was good enough to post on Twitter yesterday.

As my friend Chris Smith, of Declaration Game, has suggested, the sad state of the Kanga Memorial Library could be regarded as a metaphor for Indian cricket; that beneath the gleaming facade of the IPL, or in this case the redeveloped Wankhede Stadium, the infrastructure of the game, or the fabric of its history, has been left to wither.

It's hard to know what to do. This is a library I've never visited in a country I've never visited. But, at the moment, I feel as though I ought to do something.

I'm going to explore a few avenues and report back.

In the meantime, read it and weep.

The Wisden Experience

In the first chapter of Rain Men, A Matter of Faith, Marcus Berkmann likens cricket to fundamentalist religion:

'...Cricket is a matter of faith. Either you believe or you don't believe. There is no rational explanation...We have the devilishly complex theology, whose baroque byways confuse even the most dedicated adherents. We have the curious vestments, for white is a holy colour in many religions. We have our holy book, published each April in both hardback and paperback editions.'

In what is possibly my favourite part of a great book, Berkmann is both persuasive and hilarious. However, questions arise. If Wisden is cricket's holy book, what is the status of the editor? Cricket's Archbishop of Canterbury? Its Pope? Or someone more senior?

Like any self-respecting cricket tragic (and, I suspect, plenty with no self respect whatsoever), I've been reading Wisden since I was a lad and I always liked the idea of writing something which would appear in it. Until last year, I wasn't really sure how I was going to do it. A bit like the many cricketers with glorious futures behind them who ply their trade on the country's club grounds on the increasingly rare British days when it isn't raining, I probably felt that the opportunity to taste the big time (like the chance to open the batting for England at Lord's) had passed me by.

I could have been a contender.

Then came the Wisden Writing Competition. I wrote something and sent it in, just ahead of the deadline. For the next couple of months I largely forgot about it. My father became ill and subsequently died. Life, in the shadow of the longest British winter of modern times, went on.

One office-bound morning at the end of January, while I was trying to decide which of a thousand competing demands on my time I was going to tackle first, I noticed that I'd received an e-mail from the Editor of Wisden, Lawrence Booth. He was telling me that I'd won the competition, inviting me to the Wisden Dinner and asking me to keep the news to myself 'for the time being'.

This was it. A message from cricket's Archbishop of Canterbury. Or perhaps it was more akin to a missive from the monarch. Every year, when people (some of them cricketers) receive OBEs or Knighthoods, they mention the fact that they were told to keep the news secret.

'Oh, it was difficult', they say. And they're right.

In the end, people are told, sartorial advice (for a Black Tie virgin) sought and my bank account left reeling. April comes, and I find myself in the Long Room Bar at Lord's, drinking champagne.

Life can be tough sometimes.

Then a barely audible fire alarm sounds, quickly followed by a man telling us to evacuate the building. Within minutes I'm standing outside the pavilion in the murky drizzle, surrounded by the pride of the British cricket media and one or two people who've even made the odd Test match run.

Life can be interesting sometimes.

The cause of the alarm is rapidly dealt with and we return to more important matters, such as eating, drinking and congratulating people. Toasts are proposed and drunk, leather-bound Wisdens are presented to deserving candidates, and speeches are delivered with appropriateness and sensitivity. Nick Compton talks of his first encounter with English cricket, in the company of his grandfather and Peter Parfitt (who is sitting nearby), while Michael Palin expertly evokes the atmosphere of backyard Test matches in 1950s Sheffield and concludes by reciting a classic Monty Python sketch. Everywhere there is reminiscence and the exchange of the seasoned anecdote. I speak to various well-known people, none of whom have any idea who I am.

In many ways it is like a journey through the adolescence of a cricketing child of the 1970s and 1980s, who may well have spent more time with his nose among the covers of a chocolate and yellow book than is strictly healthy. Selvey is here, Brearley is there, Agnew and Marks are somewhere else. John Woodcock surveys proceedings with the air of a benign éminence grise. David Gower relishes the speeches, laughs in all the right places and finishes the evening in the bar with a few representatives of the press. He may look a little old for his years but to those of us of a certain age he will always be the man who made Test match batting look like the easiest thing in the world.

Unusually, I leave Lord's in darkness. The County Championship season began today, and, of course, it is raining steadily.

A Prior Engagement

Things have been quiet here recently. As ever, too much going on and too little inspiration. However, in the aftermath of the Auckland Test, I wrote this, which subsequently appeared, in slightly edited form, on Cricinfo. I think I got a little carried away, but Matt Prior does that to me.

Anyone who has watched sport for a long time, supported teams, will know what it feels like. From time to time players come along who, to you, are simply better, more captivating, than the rest, often for reasons which can be hard to define and may not be apparent to others. It is a little like falling in love.

To me, Matthew Prior, now at the absolute summit of his powers, is such a player. Here, from personal experience, are some reasons why.

Scene One: Lord's Cricket Ground, Friday 18th May 2007.

It is the afternoon of the second day of the first Test Match between England and the West Indies. By mid-afternoon the piercing early sunshine has faded to haze and the vapid West Indian attack is fading too. England, superior and confident, are 363 for 5 when Matthew Prior of Sussex comes to the wicket. This will be his first innings in Test cricket. We feel we know Prior a little; he has been around England's one-day team for a year or two, opening the batting, achieving little. Now, though, he is the latest person to assume the status of wicket-keeper-batsman in England's Test team, a role which has not been convincingly occupied by anyone - though Geraint Jones has tried hard and briefly flourished - since Alec Stewart retired four years ago. He is a short, muscular man of 25, a product of Sussex, with his shaven head hidden beneath a blue England helmet, proudly worn. He exudes intent and instinctive, unapologetic confidence.

Barely more than two hours later he has made a century, striking at 98 runs per 100 balls. At the day's close the crowd leaves the ground and takes to London's dusty streets in a state of noisy excitement. For once, after a long day at Lord's, this excitement is not exclusively induced by alcohol. We are yet to see Prior keep wicket, but we like what we have seen of his batting. We feel - because, when players start careers like this, you always do - that we could be watching him for many years to come.

Scene Two: Lord's Cricket Ground, Sunday 19th July 2009.

England, after a period of stagnation caused by Kevin Pietersen attempting to bat when he can barely run, require quick runs to enable them to declare and bowl at Australia. Once more, Prior comes to the wicket with the warm July sun on his back against a listing, vulnerable attack. There is a sense among the packed crowd that the tempo of the cricket is about to soar. We now know more of Prior and we expect him to do things like this.

Prior is instantly into his stride, driving Siddle repeatedly for four and then turning his attention more subtly and inventively to Hauritz and Clarke. He defends well when necessary, head still and level, hands and feet in all the right places, but he is the type of player who, you sense, always sees a defensive stroke as a kind of defeat. He is strongest on the off side but anything short or full directed towards leg stump will go for runs. And he runs between the wickets with the low-slung speed of a breaking scrum-half, his lucid blue eyes holding a steely gaze which betrays the intensity of his competitive desire.

In the two years which have elapsed since we first saw him he has spent time out of the team because of weaknesses in his wicket-keeping. Now, though, he has played a vital part in putting England in a position to beat Australia at Lord's for the first time since 1934. He is here to stay.

Scene Three: Lord's Cricket Ground, Sunday 24th July 2011.

This is an afternoon of Lord's afternoons. Once again England are ahead and chasing runs but they have been briefly shocked into unease by a burst of wickets. There is a slight sense of déjà vu as Stuart Broad joins Prior in a vibrant partnership which will go far towards defining the match's outcome.

By English standards it is an unusually clear and warm day, and, as the sun fades and shadow intrudes, the packed grandstand is a vital, hypnotic sight. There is, as always at Lord's, conversation and frequent laughter, but nobody's attention strays far from the play as Prior bends the attack to his will. He faces a range of bowlers - the talented but inconsistent Ishant, the aggressive but fading Harbhajan, the subtle, unpredictable, Praveen Kumar, the lost Suresh Raina - but all come alike as he eases through his concordance of cuts and drives, adjusting the shape of his body to steer the ball to a different part of the boundary. It is off-side batting from the Gods, based on technical proficiency, pin-sharp reflexes and crisp, decisive execution. But it is never hurried, or messy or inappropriate. It is batting to fall in love with, to become obsessed by.

Scene Four: Eden Park, Auckland, New Zealand, Tuesday 26th March 2013.

Matthew Prior plays forward, defensively, to Trent Boult. He fails to score but he is not dismissed. He raises his arms in the air to salute England's draw. This isn't normally Prior's style - ostentatious emotion, celebrating drawn matches - but it fits the moment. Thousands upon thousands of miles away, in dark, cold, Britain, sleep-deprived people celebrate with him.

To borrow from and paraphrase John Moynihan, from his classic work on the first twenty years of post-war English football, The Soccer Syndrome:

Is this not why we watch cricket?

Homework

I wasn't sure what to think or believe about this week's crisis in Australian cricket. (This isn't to say that there's a crisis every week, although, at the moment, it might seem like it.)

My initial reaction was that Arthur and Clarke had been heavy-handed, although Brydon Coverdale's nail on head piece on Cricinfo, led me to re-consider my initial view. It seems, from comments made later by Clarke, that the failure of the four players to 'hand in their homework' on time was the straw that broke the camel's back. And James Pattinson, in an admirable display of contrition which I'm naive enough to believe was genuine, appeared to have learned a lesson of sorts, although, as the team's best bowler, he was always destined to return to the side at the earliest opportunity. For Watson, who high-tailed it back to Australia to be with his pregnant wife while muttering about the injustice of it all, and Khawaja, and Johnson, the future is a deal more uncertain. All are cricketers of talent, that much is beyond dispute, but all have histories of under-performance, and, in at least Khawaja's case, this apparently wasn't the first time they'd failed to meet their disciplinary obligations.

For all of them, time will tell. This is about something bigger.

It is trite and obvious to say that this wouldn't have happened a few years ago, when Australian were one of the greatest teams in the game's history. For one thing, individual and collective navel-gazing is less likely to be demanded when sides are winning, and, if it is, players are more likely to respond positively. They will be happier and more relaxed because they are winning and they are likely to be more conscious of the need to preserve their place among a privileged elite. It would be a surprise if the Australian cricket team, beaten from pillar to post by Dhoni, Pujara and the rest over the past few weeks, currently feels much like an elite.

In an extension of this, one of the earliest and least surprising reflex reactions to the news came from people asking whether the likes of Viv Richards or Shane Warne would have come up with their three suggestions for improvement in the prescribed manner. Well, no, they probably wouldn't. In fact, in Warne's case, he definitely wouldn't, even if he's recently developed the waning, raging, retiree's addiction to putting the world (or at least his country's cricket system) to rights. Things were different then, and, if John Buchanan had asked Warne to do such a thing, the reaction would doubtless have been short and not particularly sweet. And he would still have been picked for the next Test.

Last week's affair had as much to do with a national cricket culture's confusion and uncertainty about what to do in the face of decline as the errant actions of a few individuals. When your cricket team has been as fecund and impregnable a source of national pride and cultural identity as Australia's was a few short years ago, people start scrambling for excuses and solutions once the inevitable regression and decline sets in. And a relatively new, foreign, coach, will feel the dead weight of past glories all the more and consequently try harder to free himself and his charges from the pressure imposed by the hand of history. And things can seem even worse when your hopes have been raised by illusory and often facile successes which led you to think you were making progress. Cleaning up Sri Lanka in home conditions is one thing, meeting India under roasting skies with a hand of inadequate spinners and floundering batsmen, and with twin Ashes series against better equipped opponents on the horizon, is very much another.

This is an uncertain time for Australian cricket, and Australian sport. The customary narrative, which a generation or more of Australians has grown up with, is that Australia is good at sport. When it comes to cricket, they are among the best. In fact, they have often been the best. Now they are not, and with every fresh stroke of Shikar Dhawan's bat, or each time Phil Hughes is dismissed in clumsy circumstances, renewed doubts and uncertainties raise their heads.

It will take more than three bullet pointed ideas to put them to rest.

Searching for an Identity

On the front cover of Christian Ryan's book Australia: Story of a Cricket Country there is a photograph taken by Patrick Eagar at Edgbaston in 1975. It shows the Australian side after the dismissal of one of the England batsmen in a match which Australia won easily. Both the Chappell brothers are there, as are Lillee, Walker, Mallett and Edwards. Thomson and Marsh are out of shot but the implicit message is clear. We are Australia, we hunt as a pack and we mean business. Most of us may be smiling but we don't mess around. We are as one, and, if you're Mike Denness's England, we will crush you into the ground as quickly as we will look at you.

Almost thirty-eight years later Cricinfo carries a photo of the Australian fielders during their recent match against India A. The effect isn't quite so intimidating. Cowan is there, and Watson, and Lyon and Wade, but they don't look as hard. Like their 1975 forebears they are happy, as they have just claimed a wicket, but they also look younger and more fragile. Partly this is because we know what the 1975 side was capable of, but it is also because it is a realistic appraisal of where the Australian team is at this moment in time.

It is a side in transition and it is searching for an identity. And their current opponents, India, are doing just the same.

These are similarities, but there are also differences. The Australian team identity tends towards the collective: there are stars, whether they be the Chappells, or Lillee, or Thomson, or Warne, or Ponting, or Gilchrist, but the team is the thing. Get above yourself and you will quickly be dragged back into the pack.

This works. No team in Test history has won as many Test matches as Australia. At times - and those of us who've followed international cricket over the last fifteen years remember the best of these - Australian teams have strode the world like a colossus.

For a range of reasons, India has never done this, and the best Indian sides have relied far more on the brilliance of a few individuals than collective competence and iron competitive will puctuated with excellence.

In Chennai, India's victory was founded on the rediscovery of Tendulkar's equlibrium, the savage elegance of Kohli and the dominant brilliance of Dhoni, while Ashwin issued a reminder that he can bowl as well as bat like a clone of another man of the Indian south who preferred to be known by his initials alone.

Australia still have the same collective desire and competitive edge they always had - indeed it is hard-wired into their players' DNA - but they lack the experience of the particular challenges which sub-continental Test cricket presents, and they lack real era-defining quality of the type which India have in spades, even if the eras being defined have, in at least two cases, passed. Clarke is a very, very good - possibly great - batsman. If he can overcome his fitness problems there is every chance that James Pattinson could become a great fast bowler. Mitchell Starc, too, will have plenty of days in the sun if he sticks around. David Warner, you suspect, has a few more surprises up his sleeve. Perhaps Philip Hughes does too. But the majority of the side will finish their career as footnotes in their country's rich cricket lineage in a way that Tendulkar, and Dhoni, and Sehwag, and almost certainly Kohli and Pujara (though their greatest days lie ahead), simply won't.

However, there is no blueprint for success in Test cricket. In some matches and circumstances collective endeavour will triumph over sporadic brilliance. At other times the reverse will be true. This series is fascinating for many reasons; prior to its start the perception was that the sides were quite evenly matched and this idea shouldn't be abandoned completely.

India, playing at home and one up, appear to hold all the cards. However, people said that after the first Test of their last home series just three short months ago, and look what happened then.