The Cricket Thread

[Dr Gloom 21924]

Face doesn't fit. He isn't part of the public school boy clique. The ecb want hammering for this. He's the one batsmen we have that empties bars at grounds, he can take the game away from the opposition and is the wicket opposing bowlers prize the most. Well done ECB - you just sacked our best player, unlike any other his generation has been able to produce.

[RobinRobin 11275]

I understand the comments, but sitting in the brutal sun at the WACA on the fourth day when he slapped the ball down to long-on left me very keen on never seeing the man again!

[Tooj 17]

To me this shows that it's definitely Giles that's going to get the gig as surely the new coach would want to wait first before this decision is made?

 

Pathetic decision all round.

[essembeeofsunderland 811]

If NUFC signed a striker who shot everytime he got the ball he would probably end up top scorer and we would probably get relegated.Like football,cricket is a team game,and you cannot have one player doing what he wants.I cannot comment on his reported disruption in the dressing room as i am not aware what happened.

[Ken 119]

So who do you sorry-arsed chumps play next in a test match? Anyone of high regard?

 

I'm watching us put South Africa to the sword over there now as I post, which makes me ponder... maybe you aren't as bad as you showed here. Umm... no

[essembeeofsunderland 811]

Why didn't you post when you were struggling against South Africa.Are you a makem.

[Ken 119]

Who gloats when there team isn't winning? And yes, yes I am. Now, what are you going to do about it?

[ChezGiven 0]

No one could accuse you of turning up when your side is doing badly Kin.

[Ken 119]

And so they shouldn't, Jizz,

[Ken 119]

Look, is this essembeofsunderland related to you Chezzy? It comes across that way. You've made a comment and this cunt has made multiple comments all over the place. Is he a brother or a cousin of yours? I understand.

Edited February 16, 2014 by Ken

[ChezGiven 0]

[Ken 119]

A general notification - Australia is on the verge of a series victory against South Africa. That is all.

[Dr Gloom 21924]

Makes the England capitulation slightly less embarrassing. To go and win over there is massive. Who'd have thought that the shambles of an Aussie side post warne and McGrath could turn it around so quickly?

 

Grounds for England to be optimistic. Though it's hard to imagine Ashkey Giles having the same impact as Lehman

[Tooj 17]

That was brilliant.

[desmondTUTU 0]

Best game of cricket seen.

[aimaad22 4156]

Best game of cricket seen.

 

Hardly.

 

Remarkable stuff from Morgan and Hayles though. They way they kept their cool when the run rate went over up to 12 and they werent getting too many boundaries. Most people would have panicked.

[desmondTUTU 0]

 

Hardly.

 

Remarkable stuff from Morgan and Hayles though. They way they kept their cool when the run rate went over up to 12 and they werent getting too many boundaries. Most people would have panicked.

 

I fancy england for the tournament!

[Tooj 17]

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/mar/31/michael-carberry-ashley-giles-england-kevin-pietersen-ashes

 

 

Michael Carberry slams treatment by Ashley Giles and the England selectors

Michael Carberry has criticised the managerial qualities of Ashley Giles and expressed his shock at the permanent exclusion of Kevin Pietersen from the England team.

 

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the opening batsman on the recent Ashes tour revealed his anger and disappointment at the way he and other England cricketers have been treated by their coaches and selectors.

 

Carberry, who has not given up hope of playing for England again, defended Pietersen's role during the disastrous tour. He also suggested that Giles, the England limited-overs coach who on Monday watched his team slump to an embarrassing World Twenty20 defeat to the Netherlands, did not communicate openly. "It's that age-old word, man-management," said Carberry, who was England's second-highest run-scorer in the Ashes behind Pietersen.

 

The 33-year-old became so frustrated at being ignored for the one-day series in Australia that he finally sought an explanation from Giles, who coaches the 50-over and Twenty20 teams and who may still be appointed as England's new head coach, despite the humiliation in Chittagong against the Dutch.

"I had a brief chat with Ashley during the fifth ODI in Adelaide," Carberry said. "His response was that he didn't really know. If you don't know mate, I sure as hell won't know."

 

Carberry's comments will only cast further doubt on the credentials of Giles to take overall charge of England across all three formats of the game. Giles' hopes have been underpinned by his widely-acknowledged decency as a man and approachability as a coach. His results since taking responsibility of the 50-over and Twenty20 teams last summer have been poor, and reached a nadir against the Netherlands, but his conciliatory style was supposed to have been popular. Carberry reiterated that this lack of communication and a sense of some players feeling ostracised continued a familiar trend. Asked if he had been contacted by England's management since the end of the Ashes tour, Carberry said: "No. Nothing – which is disappointing but it's the way they tend to do things. I don't think it's me alone saying this sort of thing. There have been players before me and players now who have felt the same thing."

 

Carberry conceded that, especially if Giles is appointed the head coach, his own Test future is now clouded. "Leaving Adelaide after our brief chat I've got to be honest, it didn't fill me with a great deal of optimism. I feel that this is a question he should have answered. And, OK, if it's not him answering, it should be one of the selectors. But that's the way England like to do things. It disappoints me because I'm quite an approachable guy. Maybe I'm a bit straight-talking but it's the best way to be in this world – say what's on your mind.

 

"I'm sitting here disappointed I'm not involved in the one-day setup. I seem to have been left out for some unknown reason. I don't think it's a cricket reason because my one-day stats speak for themselves over the last few seasons. So I'm disappointed the selectors haven't fronted up and spoken to me."

England's Twenty20 squad fly home from the World T20, having failed to qualify from the group stages. Giles's limited-over team also performed fitfully during a brief tour of the West Indies and did not lift the gloom over the English game after the humiliation of losing 5-0 in the Ashes.

 

"It's obvious that since the [Ashes] tour ended some very, very strange decisions have been made," Carberry said, while underlining his surprise that England had decided never to pick Pietersen again. He described England's best and most gifted cricketer, whom Carberry had played with at Hampshire, as being especially helpful to him in Australia.

 

"It was a big surprise," he said of his former Hampshire team-mate's exclusion, "because I don't think anyone saw that coming. Through the tour, certainly, Kev was very helpful to me. Over the years Kev, as one of the greats of the game, has always been very helpful in talking about the mental side. In England's position you want to retain that knowledge as much as you can. You hope he will still be around the county game for the benefit of the next generation."

 

Asked if he felt he had received more constructive feedback from the opposition than his own team, Carberry said: "Yeah, I would say so. I've played against enough Australians to know they're very cagey with their compliments so I must have shown a glimpse of something for them to say: 'Look, mate, you stood up through some serious spells …'"

 

Carberry expressed doubt that much will change within the England camp – even after the ECB confirms its new head coach in late April. "It's been an ongoing thing for years. I don't think it's something that's going to change immediately. They have a way of doing things.

 

"I've been in the game a long time and you know some guys get given a shorter rope than others. I'm probably going to be a bit controversial here but throughout my England career, even as a schoolboy, I've always had that shorter rope – for some reason. I don't think much has changed now that I've stepped into the Test and one-day arena. I'm not going to hide my emotions. I was bitterly disappointed.

 

"At the age I am, I need straight answers. To be told I'm on the radar or being talked about? All these lip-service cliches don't interest me any more."

[Tooj 17]

 

The Pietersen Affair

 

 

It all b egan with a denial. Andrew Flower denied the suggestion that he had threatened to resign unless Kevin Pietersen was thrown out of the England squad. This week, Paul Downton said in a BBC interview (download interview) that there was a unanimous feeling in the England camp that the time had come to move on from Pietersen. Downton insisted that there was "no smoking gun" in KP's case, echoing a sentiment expressed by Andrew Strauss in a column in the Sunday Times earlier this year. Everything that happened in between has been a concerted demonstration of contempt towards Pietersen.

The point about the smoking gun is worth reflecting on. Strauss's line was that "[t]he media have been searching for a 'smoking gun'. Everyone is looking for disciplinary problems, bust-ups and character clashes, but they are looking for the wrong thing. The smoking gun is the total absence of trust." Michael Vaughan, on the other hand, wanted Pietersen to be appointed vice-captain because "the management group needs fewer ‘yes’ men telling them what they want to hear. It starts with the vice-captaincy. It did not work having Matt Prior do the job. Ian Bell is never a vice-captain and the fact they have not made Stuart Broad Cook’s deputy shows they do not believe he has any kind of leadership role in Test cricket."

Downton's claim about unanimous feeling fails the smell test. At least three players have publicly said that they didn't think Pietersen was particularly a problem. To make matters worse, Paul Collingwood and Ashley Giles, two former England cricketers who have now assumed coaching roles for England seemed to suggest that KP was an exceptionally valuable cricketer. Graeme Swann wrote that he was baffled by England's decision to sack Kevin Pietersen. This, even though in Swann's view, Pietersen could be "childish", and that "he does upset people wherever he goes". Australian fast bowler Peter Siddle said he was glad England had decided not to pick Pietersen. He went on to describe his approach against Pietersen, which was to try and bore the England batsman. It is the highest compliment that can be paid to a Test batsman. Another England bowler who Australia were always worried about (Steve Waugh has said that Australia preferred to face seam bowlers rather than out and out fast bowlers who could get steep bounce, and gave the specific example of Harmison while doing so), gave an example of the ECB's impersonal corporate methods and expressed his support for Pietersen.

In what is perhaps the most substantive reported account of the proximal cause of the Pietersen Affair, David Hopps describes a "clear-the-air" team meeting called by the England players with the knowledge of the team management (Andrew McGlashan reports that Flower did not know about this meeting beforehand) on the final day of the Melbourne Test. Only the players were present. This was meant to allow the players to speak freely. Pietersen did. What he said amounted to "an anti-Flower rant".

The contents of this team meeting were reported back the team management, not in the form of a well-organized set of ideas which the players collectively offered as their input from the meeting, but most probably in the form of what the individual opinions were. What is also clear is that while the management agreed to a "clear-the-air" meeting of just the players, the view that some members of the management (Flower) were doing a poor job, was not an acceptable finding.

That the outcome of the team meeting appears to have found its way back to Flower and his assistants piecemeal, is a failure on the part of the organizers of the meeting. Of all the things Cook should have expected at the meeting, disagreement among members of the team should have been the most obvious. That Pietersen, who was reportedly a known critic of Flower's methods would bring such a thing up, should also have been obvious.

If it is in fact true that (1) the meeting was supposed to be for players only so that the players could speak their mind, and (2) what individual players said at the meeting was reported back to the team management including Flower; them it is difficult to see how the organizers of the meeting (Cook and Prior according to David Hopps) had not betrayed their teammates.

Rhetorical rudeness is always penalized more strongly than substantive disrespect (which Cook and Prior demonstrated towards their teammates, if Hopps' account is accurate) and betrayal, provided the latter is carried out with rhetorical politeness. It is one of the more disgusting aspects of the white collar corporate world. But such it is. On the basis of Hopps' account, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Pietersen was betrayed by his captain.

Hopps' account of Pietersen's behavior flies in the face of Downton's understanding of Pietersen's behavior in the Sydney Test. Does a passionate tirade against a coach's methods sound like disengagement? Does the disengagement (which Downton apparently saw on the field) at Sydney surprise you given the fact and consequences of the meeting described above?

It has also been interesting to see how Pietersen's tenure as an England player has been described. Andrew Strauss, Pietersen's former captain, wrote that "[h]is relationship with English cricket has been like an illicit affair. Full of thrills and excitement but destined to end in tears." Mark Nicholas called it "the Pietersen Project" in an essay in which he places Robin Smith's failings against slow bowling, Allan Lamb's love of partying and Tony Greig's decision to play for Kerry Packer as comparable peculiarities about these "men from Southern Africa". The fact of playing for England without being "English", as Nicholas puts it, is not irrelevant to Pietersen Affair.

All this leaves one with the impression that England have thrown away their finest batsman in the last 40 years because other, lesser players, and his team management were not mature enough to put up with his idiosyncracies. Had there been genuine examples of egregious conduct (beyond being rhetorically rude - things like lying, backstabbing, being difficult with a younger player etc.), its inconceivable that the ECB would have held back about it. More importantly, England's massive support staff and corporate leadership are behaving like corporate bosses managing a sport. They are responding to a loss in a sporting contest in the way corporate management might react to an accident in a soap factory. It doesn't help, in this outsider's eyes, that there are journeymen-turned-investment-bankers making these decisions in the very first days of their job, and justifying them with hearsay.

Mark Nicholas concludes his essay with the prediction that one day Pietersen "will wonder why on earth he was so contrary". Perhaps he will. But this is a relatively minor aspect in the matter. What is substantially more significant is the question of the ambitions which drive a sporting organization like the ECB to fire a player for the reasons that Pietersen was fired. Not a single fan who pays the cable or internet subscription to watch cricket, or buys a ticket at the cricket ground, does so to watch Paul Downton or Andrew Flower or any of their 100 or so non-playing subordinates. Neither do fans do it to follow rhetorically polite private team meetings. The fans watch because players like Pietersen play. The ECB and the ICC arguably exist because human beings can play cricket like Kevin Pietersen.

It has been widely reported that a confidentiality agreement exists until October between the ECB and Pietersen, and that this applies to both parties. Downton appears to have violated this agreement at least twice. He commented on the Pietersen situation when Peter Moores was announced as England's new coach, and now he has done so again in a lengthy interview to the BBC. Pietersen has said little so far. His statement in response to Downton's BBC interview has been measured and factual.

Keeping these facts and events in mind, it is hard to avoid the impression that the ECB has been systematically disrespectful and contemptuous of Pietersen. This could be because this is how they genuinely feel about him, or it could be how their behavior, which is motivated by the bad publicity that has come their way as a result of their decision about Pietersen, comes across publicly. Former England captains, current England players and the current ECB chief have all not been shy of commenting about various aspects of Pietersen's conduct, secure in the knowledge that Pietersen would not risk breaking the confidentiality agreement.

This is not surprising given the basic asymmetry in the relationship between employer and employee. The surprising thing in the Pietersen Affair is that there was no disciplinary action against Pietersen during the 5 Test series in Australia. It is not uncommon for teams to discipline errant players. There are well established procedures for doing so. That this was not done in Pietersen's case reflects poorly on the management.

The Pietersen Affair shows up Andy Flower and Alastair Cook in a poor light. They failed to manage their best batsman. This is what they have to answer for. And this is what Paul Downton has to answer for. His decision to fire Pietersen in his first days in the job has been described by David Hopps as bold and controversial. The last four months have shown that it was a bungled decision. What did Downton think was likely to happen if he fired a top player without giving a single reason? Why did he agree to this confidentiality agreement? And why does he systematically disregard it and offer amateurish analyses of Pietersen's batting in the process? On a different substantive note, if Andrew Flower was about to leave, why were his views about Pietersen taken so seriously?

We have heard, and will continue to hear plenty about the standards of conduct that Pietersen fell short of. But what about the standards of conduct that the ECB fell short of? And continues to fall short of? Will there be an accounting of those? Who will provide it? We have heard plenty about Pietersen's allegedly massive ego. What of the ECB's utterly fragile ego, that it has effectively hidden behind Pietersen's teammates to justify its decision to fire Pietersen.

The ECB, in its corporate myopia, has hurt cricket by discarding one of the most accomplished talents of the age in his prime. They have done so by using the sly, underhanded method of using a confidentiality agreement to avoid having to explain anything, and then ignoring this agreement in order to systematically discuss Pietersen's conduct and character without having to account for their own. For this, they ought not to be forgiven. In fact, the Pietersen Affair ought to be about them, and not about Kevin Pietersen.

 

 

http://cricketingview.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-pietersen-affair.html?m=1

[Gemmill 44881]

Strauss has accidentally called Pietersen an "absolute cunt" on TV in Australia. Apparently only UK Sky were on an ad break but he didn't realise.

[Ken 119]

A very unfortunate faux pas

[Tooj 17]

Class stuff from Root and Anderson earlier on.

[Tooj 17]

Class bit during today's lunch break on TMS about the dhoosra and how we over here are loathe to embrace anything non conformist.

[Dr Gloom 21924]

Cook needs a break. He could do with going back to Essex and getting back to basics. Shame there's no county game for weeks or I'd have dropped him.

 

Shame Bell is second in line, the sherminator doesn't strike me as captain material.

 

Either way the king of twitter twats Piers Morgan is being proved right. The ECB backed the wrong player and got rid of our best batsman.

[David Kelly 1245]

Cook and Prior are both looking like they need dropping now (Prior possibly for good as he doesn't look as fit behind the wickets now and in Butler there's a more obvious replacement).

I'm not sure we'd be in any better state with Pietersen mind. He's done pretty much fuck all since being dropped and wasn't looking great in the test team before that.

The whole of senior team let us down over this latest test though. Root, Ali, Ballance, Plunket have all looked like they're in pretty decent touch for at least part of it whereas Cook, Prior, Bell and even Broad and Anderson haven't really performed.