Crucket

God I love test cricket. Maybe I’m just caught up in the euphoria of the moment, but that feels like one of the special New Zealand wins. Certainly of recent times. Of course, in recent times any test win is special – we haven’t had a decent test win for a year and half.

But seriously, it was a good win. We put 100 runs on Pakistan after the 1st half of the match, then managed to hold on to our lead despite an embarrassing batting collapse in the second half. Mostly though, the match was special for the fight shown in the 4th innings. The guys just kept on trying even though there were several times when it looked like Pakistan were going to get away.

I rode quite a roller coaster today. I wasn’t feeling too confident with a target of only 250. It’s not a bad target to defend, but recent performances had left me lacking in optimism. The two early wickets in the Pakistan innings evened things up though, and from then it was several hours of fluctuating emotions as the game ebbed and flowed.

It looked to me like Umar Akmal and Shoaib Malik were going to steal the match. They got to within 100 and I could easily see them sticking around to the end or near enough to the end. We have seen New Zealand deflate in the 4th innings so often. So Malik’s wicket was important; it brought the game back within reach. However, it was Umar Akmal’s wicket, c&b Shane Bond, that was crucial. Getting rid of Umar before he could build another partnership was the winning of the match.

While that wicket was crucial, it was Bond’s overall performance that gave us the match. 8 wickets at a strike rate of 37. It is fantastic to have him back in the team. We are a different team with Bond leading our attack.

But that is such a troubling thought. That we should be so reliant on one player. We came no where near replacing him in the two years he was away and there are no firm prospects on the horizon.

But enough pessimism. At the moment I just want to glory in the win.

Kenny Rogers & The First Edition:

New Zealand are currently 147/8. Not good. This position is only saved by the fact that we had a 97 run lead after the Pakistan first innings. This gives us a lead of about 250. This isn’t likely to be pushed up by much, so that is the likely target for Pakistan to chase tomorrow.

At home New Zealand have set targets of 250+ 21 times. Most of those have lead to draws.  Of the rest, New Zealand have defended the total 6 times and lost 3 times. Which sounds favourable, but a couple of the successful defences included complete cop-outs by the opposition (WI rolled for 77 in ’56 and Eng for 110 in ’08), so should probably be discounted as outliers. The record then is 4-3 and doesn’t look nearly as promising.

Most ominously, a notable example of a team reaching a 250+ target is Pakistan when they last toured in ’03, getting 277/3 in Wellington after NZ lead by 170 going into the 3rd innings.

Yesterday’s cricket in Dunedin was a day of tempered disappointments and achievements. Early wickets tempered by a strong comeback tempered by Taylor’s failure to get a hundred. A middle order collapse tempered by a lower-middle order recovery. Rather a frustrating day. New Zealand did barely enough to stay in the match, but at least the match is alive.

In Kanpur things were about as different as they could get. India, scoring 417/2 in one day, have taken a stranglehold on the match. In fact, they have probably already choked the match to death.

Ryder’s abusive rant revealed says the headline.

I’m sorry, but informing us that Jesse said “F*** off, you stupid old ****,” reveals nothing. I could have guessed that he did at least that much. Or is the revelation that he only said that? Because really, that isn’t even a rant. What I’m doing now is more of a rant than telling some old **** to f*** off.

If you really want to reveal something, remove the *s from “****”. Just how pottymouthed is our Jesse?

Why isn’t Shoaib Akhtar touring New Zealand? It’s rather hard to keep up with the endless series of speedhumps Akhtar hits in his career. I rather have the suspicion that it is merely an injury that is keeping him out of the team this time, not chucking or drugs or fighting or insubordination or genital warts.

However, Shoaib’s mundane fitness excuse wasn’t going to last for that much longer, so he had to contrive something new. In a seemingly desperate attempt to miss the tour to Australia, he got himself some liposuction. Seriously. Secretly too, though I don’t know how he was going to disguise the fact that he had lost 12 kg overnight.

Really, no one could have dreamed this up except Shaoib himself. It’s hard to even comment on it, in my case because I am laughing so much I can barely type, Cricket with Balls can’t do the story justice, the Bored Indians have to say it without words.

It’s going to take him 5 months to recover but the PCB are so incensed that he did it without informing them that his chances of every playing again are slim. He will be missed for everything he has brought to cricket.

So the test leg of the series against Pakistan is underway. I’ve added the tests to my schedule. If you scroll up a bit to the limited over matches, it looks like a normal tour, except for the jump from Dubai to Queenstown. I’m certainly considering all the matches against Pakistan as being part of a single series. As it is a rescheduling of the tour to Pakistan by New Zealand, I’ve been thinking of this series as a ‘home’ series for Pakistan that just happens to be taking place in away venues. Apparently Pakistan got to prepare the grounds in UAE and I also seem to recall that Pakistan will get the revenue from the series, as is normal for the home team.

Cricinfo however is treating the limited over and test legs as different series, Pakistan v NZ and NZ v Pakistan.

Also, surely the home team gets to choose the schedule. Now if I was writing the schedule, I’d start off with a warm-up in Queenstown, sure. However, there’s no way I would schedule the first test in Dunedin, with an average temperature of 12° in November, especially if I was from a country that typically averages in the 20s.

New Zealand tried two approaches in the 20-20 against Pakistan.

In the first, they went for the fire cracker approach. After the first couple of overs of their chase of 162 it looked like they’d get there in 10 overs. But, as happens when you burn brightly, they burnt out fast. In the end, they would have needed an extra 10 overs to get to the target. Actually, they would have needed an extra 10 batsmen.

In the second, they tried the slow smoulder. Starting slow and building. But in the end they built too slowly.

Pakistan, having lost the ODI series to New Zealand, are doing all they can to ensure they win the mantle of most messed up team. New Zealand were ahead by a nose, coming into this series with no coach or vice-captain. But Younis Khan has stolen a march by quitting as captain. It was only a matter of time really, but this time it looks like he was forced out by disgruntled team members (who, get this, Khan thinks might have thrown the 3rd ODI, just to spite him).

I don’t feel so bad about our coaching controversies now.

In the broader scheme of things, being shunted off the world circuit because of terrorism fears is another whole level of messed upedness. I’m not sure whether that gives Pakistan the crown over Zimbabwe, who are still in  exile from test cricket. The West Indies and their contract dispute would be a not too distant third.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Crucket, given the near total absence of any description of physical cricket here, that I do not watch a lot of live cricket. I catch a bit here and there – at the Basin, at my mate’s place, at hotels when I’m travelling – but I don’t have Sky at home. It has always been an expense too far, a luxury.

The other day, I was offered a very good deal over the regular cost of Sky. Free installation and a basic+sports+movies plan for about $10 a week for 6 out of 12 months. I think that comes out to be about half price for those 6 months.

Now, if there was a good home season of cricket (including 3 tests against Australia say), I might pay $10 a week to be able to see it if that was the only option. But to then have to keep my subscription for another 6 months off-season at the full rate largely cancels out that first 6 months of discount.

And the thing is, I don’t like television. I’m not being snooty about it, I actually really love some television (The Wire, say, or Outrageous Fortune or The Simpsons or Deadwood – great stuff!); it’s the endless stream of crud padding out the good bits that I hate, as well as the fact that you have no control over when the good stuff shows. And Sky looks like a metric ton of crud. It offers 49 channels in the basic package (though I note that many of them are free to air anyway and many others are actually radio stations, again free to air). And you must pay for those channels, including Fashion TV, Fox News, and Crime and Investigation, to say nothing of the Christian channel, if you want to get sport. Not only do I not want to have to pay for all that, I don’t want to have it on my TV.

It’s a scam, right? There isn’t a single Sky subscriber in New Zealand who gets something from all 49 channels and there isn’t a single sports fan in New Zealand who would watch Fashion TV (okay, maybe Haydn Green). I suppose you can think of those 49 channels as freebies that you get with the basic subscription, but that subscription would be much lower if there were less freebies.

On the spectrum of sports fans I would consider myself an ‘enthusiast’, not a nut. If I was a sports nut, I’d get Sky at whatever cost. But as a mere enthusiast, I’m not inclined to. And sport on TV should be reasonably available to sports enthusiasts (even snooty too-good-for-TV ones), not just sports nuts and TV nuts and the rich. That’s a fair point of view isn’t it? The fans are a critical part of sport, so shutting some of them out is bad. And it has to be bad for the sports themselves. I mean, perhaps if New Zealand cricket got wider exposure it wouldn’t have such difficulty finding a sponsor.

I was making this post to try to get some advice on whether I should take up this Sky deal, but I feel that in writing it I have convinced myself not to. But if you think you can reveal something about the Sky experience that I might like apart from the cricket, something that would justify the cost, please tell me, help me change my mind.

Thank the heavens!

New Zealand beats Pakistan by 7 runs in the final match of the series. A narrow escape by New Zealand in defending 211, and very, very welcome; it would have been hard to stomach a loss after having the Pakistanis at 101/9.

I had thought the game lost when I was following it over my breakfast. With 5 overs to go and number 10 and 11, Mohammad Aamer and Saeed Ajmal, quite happily knocking the ball around at around about the required run rate, I was cursing Aamer and Ajmal. But once Ajmal fell in the last over, I was able to be more charitable and appreciate their partnership and what they had very nearly achieved. Together they scored more than half their team’s runs and individually ended with Pakistan’s two highest scores. All this while facing three of the world’s top 10 ODI bowlers. Aamer was well deserving of his man of the match.

But kudos to the Black Caps. Having failed to both bat and bowl in the first ODI, in the next two they showed they could BAT! and BOWL! Defending 211, in this age of batting power plays, is a fine achievement.

Thomas Coffey: