Perhaps regular visitors will recall the cricketing and other exploits of Richard Serra recorded here.
The Squire is very excited today to have found tucked in an old score book the above list of useful verbs for batsmen.
The Squire believes these jottings from the boundary may have been the trigger for the artist’s other verb list compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself 1967-1968 reproduced below.
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The English Cricket Board has announced the sale of the movie rights to the present series in India to Whirled’s End Entertainments Limited for an undisclosed sum believed to be in the region of 1 billion green backs.
Gaming and merchandizing rites rights should see this figure swell to the 1.5 billion mark.
Said producer Third Man, “The idea came when Sachin Tendulka was captured on the cameras watching Virat Kohli in the Champion’s League.”
The slow car crash that has been England’s ODI series in India blocked in the plot for him.
“You see, there’s this old coach Andy Flower trying hard to ‘fit-in’ in his young team’s badass world. He’s trying hard to ‘dude-up’ from ‘aiiiyyyo’ to‘yo!’” Third Man trevealed to the assembled press pack.
“While Flower tries every trick in the book to get through to his side, get ‘dude-ified’ and ‘up his coolness quotient’. His squad had given up on him .. just when the coach-team duo hit a deadlock; Flower strikes gold when he designs one hell of a game.. Yo Kriket England.”
“Finally it all starts falling in place … they beat Australian Down Under, Sri Lanka and then India at home as the team scales the top of the world …only to find themselves a couple of months later in the middle of a crash… not just a hard drive crash but a slow motion car crash of a crash that would drive them to a disaster and make their lives go – kaboom!!!”
“All hell breaks loose when the team that was meant to be played with … starts playing them… when they encounter the super heroes Kohl.1, Dhon.1 and … Ra.One NA. … and the fur begins to fly.
Don’t miss it when it comes to a cinema near you.
Commenting on the cash injection that the Board will receive, a beleaguered spokesperson for the ECB said, “Every cloud has a silver lining.”
Or as Third Man explained, “It’s all in the game.”
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The Breaks May Be Off, but it’s unlikely that anyone in the England cricket camp is reading the thoughts of their ebullient off-spinner. They are having enough difficulty reading the games they are playing against India to get to grips (ho,ho) with Swann’s deadly prose. This may come as a surprise but it should not.
A central text in England’s five Test matches in Australia last winter was their ability, thanks in large part to their Antipodean bowling coach David Saker, to read the wickets of his homeland, and for Flower and Strauss, armed with those interpretations, to select the appropriate strategy for the conditions.
This skill is even more important in one day cricket where the side batting first has to construe and continuously revise judgement on a target score and the tactics to use.
It is the ability to read the situation ball by ball, as one would a thriller sentence by sentence, that marks the good sides from the mediocre. And the larger the array of prose styles tactics that a side has at its disposal the better they will be, especially in limited overs cricket.
So, England’s inability in the ODI series that followed the Tests ‘Down Under’ to read the conditions correctly and their sluggishness in responding to those conditions was a large factor in their failure – a failure masked to a large extent by the euphoria induced by their Test successes.
That weakness is again making itself legible two matches into their compressed ODI campaign inIndia.
It did not take much talent for lip-reading to infer the scale of Jonathan Trott’s disappointment and frustration when he edged his 37th ball to Dhoni. Trott with 34 runs already on the board had looked imperious, threading drives to the boundary over a fast outfield. He was batting just as Virat Kohli was to do a few hours later when India were making their reply. And that is high praise, for Kohli batted like a Prince.
Those who bat as Trott and the unselected Bell do (enough said?) dream of being able to express their wonderful talents on such wickets as the one drafted by the groundsman in Delhi, which come rarely even at international level. They hate it when self-inflicted error closes the book on that pleasure.
Trott knew that he had missed out big time. It was one of those wickets on which timing comes easily – in stark contrast to that of the first match. Was that it? Were England still scrutinizing the text from the match in Hyderabad rather than this one ?
On this wicket power was not necessary to score effectively. In fact the use of power induced unnecessary risks.
Cook slashed at his fourth ball from Praveen and was caught in the gully and Kieswetter, when it was already obvious that Vinay Kumar was getting a degree (literally) of away swing, drove with tight hands at a ball just short of a length and was comfortably caught behind to leave England clueless on 0/2.
It was time to adapt and Trott and Pietersen did so. Pietersen, clipping a straight delivery behind square leg for an early boundary, pointed the way that Kohli was later to explore so successfully. Yet England like power crazed addicts persistently attacked the ball as forcefully as they could (excepting Trott). Pietersen copied Kieswetter word for word as a look at the scorebook will reveal.
The Indian bowlers kept up the temptation, very rarely straying onto the stumps and when they did so that tightness of grip made their opponents prone to misread the line.
England’s 3,4,5,6,7 cruised into the thirties and forties, yet blind in these conditions to the superiority of timing over power, none reached fifty.
India in contrast only needed four batsmen to overwhelm their foe’s inadequate 237 in 48.2 overs – two of these scoring 112 and 84.
Kohli and Ghambir’s record breaking 209 run third wicket partnership was pure pleasure for them and for cricket lovers everywhere, but it was aided and abetted by England’s failure to learn from the Indian batsmen who flicked with ease anything straight (and almost everything was) to the legside boundary.
How India bat and what they like in the way of bowling is not a tale of mystery and suspense. How they bowl at England wouldn’t for a minute maintain the attention of a reader of detective fiction. Both could not be more easy to decipher.
It is off to Mohali and a new page for England to try and read, if that is they can get beyond an airport novel.
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Nottingham is justly famous for boots. That is not just for Boots’ the Cash Chemists, but for boots the footwear.
It was back in the 1860s when the Squire first noticed the ease with which young Sam Biddulp kept his footing.
An impertinent batsman, unaware of His Grace’s reputation, had dared to sashay down the wicket to Him.
In response, the Squire directed the delivery down the leg side beyond the reach of the upstart. As quick as a flash, Sam B had stepped to leg and in one flowing movement had taken the ball in his gauntlets and removed a single bail as a skilled surgeon might have removed a diseased testicle.
“Fine work Sam, but how on earth do you keep your feet on such hard ground?”
Hobnails were then state of the art in providing the cricketer with the grip necessary to excel at the game but in fine weather, on baked earth, these often behaved like roller-skates.
Sam had winked in reply, discretely revealing to the Squire a dainty pair of boots made from the finest white Cordovan leather, from the soles of which protruded a bevy of long nails with small flat heads.
“I ‘ad young Sam Foster knock these up to my specifications, Sir. And our blacksmith Tom Towel forged these here special spikey nails.”
As Lilley and Thompson found a hundred years later, it was Foster’s that made an advance in fast over-arm bowling possible.
Since then, the Squire has without fail bought his cricket boots from this self-same Nottinghamshire cordwainer.
These days the annual end of season trip to Foster’s workshop to have His old boots repaired and new ones fitted necessitates a trip in the Type III back in time 150 years to the cordwainer’s establishment in the Nottinghamshire village of Sandiacre.
It is for this reason that Third Man’s observations on the first of the five ODIs between India and England was interrupted when India were in the vulnerable position of 123/4 at approximately the halfway stage of their innings on a wicket of disconcertingly varying bounce.
“Come away from that television, Third Man. They’ll be all out for two-twenty by the time we return,” commanded the Squire.
Booted and kitted, as it were, the Squire and Third Man returned to find India had in fact scored 300/7 in their full quota of 50 overs, the estimable Dhoni having scored 87 not out in 70 balls using to considerable profit that ‘shovelling’ technique uniquely suited to low bounce and anaemic Yorkers that lack their full ration of red blood cells.
Where India on this Hyderabad wicket played pace by getting back and across and straight, and spin late and with the turn, England, full of indignity towards the unpredictable bounce, soon lost patience and persistently playing across the line or against the turn, embarrassed themselves with a faltering reply of 174 all out in 36.1 overs.
The enjoyment of the rout was all too evident on the faces of Ghambir and Raina asEnglandstruggled even to cope with the jesting deliveries of Virat Kohli.
Rebooted India are back home.
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It was just a game of cricket. You know the kind of thing: a few mates getting together and a couple of sides get picked by some settled system. Maybe everyone standing around while the captains take it in turns to choose.
– I’ll have Chris.
– OK, I’ll have Lasith.
The poorest shepherds with time to spare were doing this five hundred years ago on the breezy uplands of Southern England; kids on the village green do it; workers at lunch time.
Two hundred and fifty years ago England was beginning to undergo an industrial revolution. The old aristocracy found their land – and they had lots and lots of it – could be used for other things than farming.
Some of the most worthless wastes had fast running streams that could power the new processes driving industry. Some had coal, black gold, scattered across the fields And there were plenty of trading opportunities secured by a navy that ‘ruled the waves’.
Riches were gained. Others inherited. Gambling was rife. Fortunes won and lost on whether the next man through the door would be wearing a hat or not, or on which raindrop would reach the bottom of the window first.
Cricket proved a perfect vehicle for these gamblers. A bit of fresh air, a lot of fun, the chance to rap your rival on his ankles with a hard ball or watch neighbours barging into each other when one tried to run and other tried to stop him.
So, the ‘Gentry’ or ‘Quality’ as they were known started to form their own teams and put the whole thing on a higher level of organisation.
– My house in the first week of August.
– A bet to make it interesting?
– Sure. How much?
– One point two million dollars?
– A million a man and one for the boss?
– And the loser pays for the fireworks.
– You’re on!
The Royal Challengers Bangalore came to Chennai having chased down a total of over 200 not just once, but twice in a row. In Chris Gayle, Tillakaratne Dilshan and Virat Kohli they had the in-form batsmen.
But that was in Bangalore and those were the quarter and semi-finals.
This was Chennai and a wicket as slow and stubborn as an arthritic mule. This was the final of the Champions’ League. This was cricket.
The Mumbai Indians set a paltry target of 139. For RCB seven an over – little more than a run a ball – would win it.
Yet, as they say, the runs were ‘on the board’.
Pressure makes time accelerate. It erodes the quality of thought. RCB set off in a dash like the hair racing the tortoise in old Aesop’s fable and, after four overs, they were going through the formalities at 38/0.
Then, when Harbhajan with little alternative had deployed his principal weapon for a third consecutive over, Dilshan, gambling, played across the line to Malinga. Now another gamble, as Bhaji pressed into the attack himself.
Gayle in deep concentration played all six balls with caution. But the second delivery had been a wide and with the extra ball the MI captain came around the wicket to the left hander, bowled one that went on with the arm and struck Gayle in front of the stumps. Goliath fell to the sling-shot.
It was at that moment, with the score on 42/2 and 92 runs required from 78 balls (of which Malinga had only 6 left), that RCB needed to change tactics. But they could and they did not.
Pressure and fast running consciousness prevented them from knocking the ones and stealing the twos. They swished and they swiped in vain as if they were still at home in Bangalore. The ball got slower and lower, the target steeper and more distant.
It was any kind of cricket match, it was this special match.
It was the mistake of the least experienced, and made by the most experienced.
It was why cricket continues to entertain, to amuse, to frustrate, to bewilder and to illuminate the human experience.
It was, as it always is, team against team, one against one, you against yourself.
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For Somerset the dream is over. And so is their long, long season. The Mumbai Indians proved a step too far in the 2nd semi-final of the 2011 Champions League T20.
In the end, individual brilliance purchased with millions of dollars – for the game now deals and measures everything in US Greenbacks – won the day.
With the slightly above par score of 160 to defend, the mighty Lasith Malinga in his first spell of two overs for the Indians removed the dangerous pair of Trego for nought and van de Merwe for 10.
Kieswetter and Hildreth sensibly and skilfully reconstructed the innings from these ruins and carefully built a platform from which Somerset could push for victory in the last four overs, but into their deliberate calculations they had always to factor that Malinga would return to bowl two of these.
The Indians’ captain Harhbajan Singh chose to play his ace in the 18th over at the end of which Somerset, despite scoring only 7 from it, needed an obtainable 22 from 12 balls.
At this point Harbhajan of the volcanic ego had to still his mind and make the key tactical decision of the match; who should bowl over 19? He, as captain, and as Super Ego must have felt under enormous pressure to take the responsibility to himself without further thought.
There was also available the hugely experienced Pollard. But as Baji mentally scanned the bowling figures, he would have seen that Franklin’s figures of 2 overs for 9 runs reached up in supplication like a child’s hand in a class room eager to answer. The decision was taken.
This proved the pivotal point of the match – the moment, as Third Man wrote recently, which only Chaos Theory could fully explain. Franklin’s first ball was full and Buttler smeared it towards cow corner for a two or a four. By a millimetre and a nanosecond the four was saved by a frantic, sprawling, sliding Pollard.
His second ball was equally inviting and as it travelled towards Buttler, Franklin, Harbhajan, his team, his dugout and thousands of Mumbai Indian supporters will have closed their eyes and seen behind the lids their chances of remaining in the tournament rapidly recede.
Had they looked they would indeed have seen Buttler slap the ball hard back down the track on its way to the straight boundary where it belonged. No fielder could stop it. But nor could the non-striking Kieswetter get out of its way. It struck the Somerset opener squarely above the elbow, to make it a dot ball. (One day an Umpire will be killed in a similar incident. Could a Billy Bowden duck such a return?)
The counterfactual scoreboard stood at 147/3, with 14 to win from 10 balls. The ‘small difference in initial conditions’ (the minute disparity between a ball missing or hitting Kieswetter) yielded, in the chaotic system which is a cricket match, the widely divergent outcome of Somerset being required to score 20 from those self same deliveries with their major batsman carrying a deadened top arm.
There was no way back through the gate of time for Somerset – a butterfly had beaten its wing somewhere in the world and this was the consequence in Chennai.
Buttler was bowled next ball. The 19th over went for only 7 runs with Compton steadfastly improvising a four from the last ball. But this still left Somerset to make 14 to win (or 13 to gain a super over play off) from a 20th over to be bowled by the immense Malinga.
There would be no further widely divergent outcomes from the six balls that remained. They brought forth only four more runs and entailed two further wickets to leave Somerset 10 runs short – a chasm – and Malinga, with figures of 4 – 20, all clean bowled, the powerful claim to be the best-value player in T20 cricket … bar Gayle or bar none.
Best value? Yes, for that is now the key measure in this form of the game. The difference between winning and losing this match was $800,000. The beaten semi-finalists take home $500,000, the runner up $1.3 million, the winner $2.5 million.
That is a lot of ammunition with which to build a team for next year’s domestic T20 competition and the prospect of another campaign in the Champions League 2012.
The Man Ufication of cricket has begun.
Mumbai Indians 160 – 5 beat Somerset 150 for 7 by 10 runs in the 2nd semi-final.
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The six foot three inch, colossus, Christopher Henry Gayle, his club shaved clean of decals bludgeoned the New South Wales Blues attack until they were cudgled senseless with an innings of 92 in 41 balls brimful of 8 vertiginous 6s and 8 effortless fours.
Gayle was joined in knightly fellowship by the more orthodox but no less merciless sidesman, Virat Kholi, who prefers the long sword to Gayle’s mace with which to dispatch an opponent and who duly pierced ten fours and three sixes in a 49 ball innings of 84 not out.
This strike-force enabled the Royal Challengers Bangalore for a second match in a row to meet the quest to hunt down a score of more than ten runs an over and to do so with nine balls to spare.
Once again, for NSW, the gauntlet had been thrown down by that other clubman, the diminutive 5ft 7in David Warner who commanded an innings of 123 not out with eleven sixes and six fours battered in only 68 balls.
T20 has developed rapidly, but in the shape of Gayle and Warner this order in the chivalry of cricket has surely found its apogee: tiltyard strength that maximizes the combination of bat-speed and weight, a solid base from which to swing as well timed as a golfer and a mental approach that mimics that of the best baseball hitters.
It also brings a new meaning to ‘club cricket’.
CLT20 Ist Semi Final: NSW Blues 203 – 2 lost to RCB 204 – 4 (18.3 overs)
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As untipped as a Senior Serice cigarette, Somerset have upset an apple cart or two by reaching the semi-finals of the 2011 Champions’ League T20 Tournament and they have done so by topping their group and without a single epithet to help them.
Unparallelled, Somerset have shunned the marketing speak that would wish them known as The Somerset Sabres and now compete as free from artifical additives as a Pennard cider apple.
Second in Group B were the double epitheted Royal Challengers Bangalore who, two matches before, had been bottom of the table with zero points.
Group A perhaps more predictably was topped by New South Wales Blues with the Mumbai Indians as runners-up. So NSW will play RCB on the 7th October and MI will play Somerset on the 8th.
Young people of today might describe Somerset, with grudging respect, as ‘Random’ by which they seek to express their recognition and approval of that team’s traditional manifestation of their beloved ‘wad ever’.
But even if the result of a cricket match and especially a T20 match is impossible to predict, is it right to say that it is random?
Back in the Nineteen Eighties, the Squire insisted on inviting Benoit Mandlebrot to guest for him in a match his team was playing in at the small Somerset village of Chewton Mendip.
Mandlebrot’s selection was not without criticism. He was certainly not the ‘quick’ he had been, but the Squire was positive that his unconventional action would still surprise the unwary and the over-sure.
And so it had proved that morning when a young city dealer Down From Town with his bright red braces and infernal new mobile phone the shape of a Stuart Surridge Jumbo, opening for the visitors, had been comprehensibly yorked, believing in, with blind faith until the moment of his utter ruin, his unquestionable ability to forecast the future.
However, the intellect of Mandlebrot was indisputable and when their own openers went out to bat, he and the Squire took a turn round the boundary to speculate on the regular roughness of life.
“Have you ever marvelled, my dear Mandlebrot,” considered the Squire, “that no cricket field is ever actually a circle?”
“I have been working on this recently, your Grace,” replied the mathematician. “Neither for that matter are those darkening clouds above us strictly spheres, nor the Mendip Hills perfect cones nor is apple bark smooth, nor for that matter did that flash of lightning over there travel in a straight line.”
“And neither does a cricket match ever take the expected path,” said the Squire, breaking into a trot to regain the Lodge before the heavens opened.
Those with an obsessive interest in the subject will have recognized that these thoughts were later developed in that important work, The Fractal Geometry of Cricket and their meaning made evident in the set of points explored below.
A cricket match is indeed a chaotic system. Small differences in initial conditions (the hair’s width between a ball missing or hitting the out side of the off-stump) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems such as cricket matches, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.
As the Squire’s librarian and wicket-keeper P. Dia, noted when an early tea was taken, “An arbitrarily small perturbation of the current trajectory (a fine edge to the ‘keeper for instance) may lead to significantly different future behaviour.”
“This happens even though a cricket match is deterministic, by which I mean that its progress is fully determined by its initial conditions, with no random elements involved.”
And so, wad ever, the deterministic nature of a cricket match does not necessarily make them predictable.
You can be sure that whenever and wherever Somerset play, not for the first time nor the last, the words of Dasher Denning will ring out across Chewton Mendip. “It’s bloody chaos out here.”
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Get away from it all - including the cricket. Retreat to the mountains to ski or to chill, to roam or mountain bike. Flights from Stansted to Graz or Klaggenfurt. A 45 minute drive to a place the Austrians keep secretly to themselves: quiet slopes, forest trails, ridge walks, historic towns and 300 days of sunshine. Chalet owned by two cricketing families.
Down At Third Man 