Only T20, but at last a title for South Australia

South Australia 2 /155 (17.3 ov, C Borgas 62*, D Harris 48*) def New South Wales 8/153 (20 ov, D Smith 43, M Henriques 41, K Richardson 3-31) by 8 wickets: T20 Big Bash final at Adelaide Oval. SA won title.

On Offsiders today Gideon Haigh pooh-poohed both the T20 competition and South Australia but the fact remains that last night 27000+ (including me) turned up at Adelaide Oval hoping that the Redbacks wouldn't choke (as they'd done in the final last year). And they didn't.

Sure it's not the Sheffield Shield, but it is a type of cricket and does require some cricket-related skills. NSW started well, lost too many wickets in the latter part of their innings and then the captain Stuart Clark clutched at too many straws by using 7 bowlers in the first 13 overs, with varying - mostly modest - degrees of success. They took only two wickets as Daniel Harris 48/59b (2x6, 2x4) and Cameron Borgas 62/39b (2x6, 3x4) accelerated, particularly in overs 15 and 17 (no names no packdrill) to see the Redbacks easily home, to the relief (and. yes, delight of their supporters).

Now let's hope for some improved performances in the two other formats.

Scorecard

Fox Sports report inc link to video highlights.

"It's the death of one-day cricket"

Malcolm Conn in today's Australian doesn't think much of Cricket Australia's proposed changes to the limited overs games

Cricket Australia will attempt to sign the death warrant of the traditional one-day game this week by making its domestic competition another version of the booming Twenty20 game.

Terrified that 50-over cricket will be irrelevant when Australia and New Zealand host the 2015 World Cup, CA is hoping its radical new concept will be taken up internationally in the next two years.

Friday's board meeting will consider a detailed proposal to introduce a 40-over, two-innings competition at state level next season as a first step to taking it global.

"The public has been quite clear to us in its communication through extensive research and the strong message has been that we are at peril if we sit on our hands and don't listen to the public message around reviewing and refreshing the format," a CA spokesman told The Australian last night.

I'm not quite sure how this will all pan out. I don't have a problem with reducing the domestic OneDay matches to 40 overs a side (divided perhaps into 2 x 20 over sessions/segments) though I'd be disappointed to see the International version trimmed similarly.

Most first class matches around the world nowadays are of 4 days' duration (though 3 is the minimum requirement) while Test cricket days is invariably scheduled over 5 days.

It's also ironic that as Cricinfo recently reported

In its quest to maintain India's No.1 Test ranking the BCCI has sent a proposal to Cricket Australia to convert the seven-match ODI series in October to two Tests and three ODIs.

How long ago was it that India was an increasingly reluctant Test playing country? And of course we can be sure that its dismal performance (admittedly fielding a second string team) in the ODI triangular series in Zimbabwe has had nothing to do with BCCI's request to CA.

Although CA didn't solicit my views during its "extensive research" I shall await further and better particulars before confirming my initial scepticism of its proposals.

West Indies make captain's ODI series prediction look shaky

Now that the Pakistan tour is over with the visitors failing to win a match, though they came close in the T20 International, the West Indies have returned for the short form leg of their visit.

Chris Gayle's prediction of a 4-1 ODI series result to his team looks shaky, very shaky, after a professional Australia won ODI#1 by 113 runs in Melbourne: 8/256 from 50 ov v 143 from only 34.2 ov . West Indies seem to lack the depth to be able to challenge the home team for more than a few overs. Of course many of us thought the same after the First Test.

There has been some media comment about the small crowd of 25,000 or so, and comparisons have been drawn wirth the 60,000 who attended the T20 game v Pakistan on Friday. Yes, a big difference, but a good total, and in any event what do you expect when two internationals are scheduled at the same ground a day apart?

It will be interesting to see how many turn up here in Adelaide tomorrow for ODI#2: it's a working day and hot weather is forecast.

Batting meltdown but Redbacks beat Tigers & gain place on international T20 stage

South Australia have won a place in the T20 Champions League and the right to host the Big Bash final. .

They did so by beating Tasmania 131 (18 ov) to 9/108 (20 ov) in a low scoring match, one in which their batting after a promising start collapsed losing 6/4 (that's 6 wickets for 4 runs) precipitated by a hat trick (nos 6,7 & 8) by Rana Naved-ul-Hasan.

Fortunately the Redbacks bowlers once again rose to the challenge: Shaun Tait took wickets from the first two balls of the Tasmanian innings and Aaron O'Brien, Dan Christian and Shahid Afridi maintained sufficient pressure to keep the Tigers well and truly caged, even they didn't undergo a Redbacks type meltdown.

Now there's one more minor round game to play in the Big Bash comp followed by the final at home then, whatever happens from now on, off to India. T20 may not be my preferred form of the game (though I did go to the 91 run trouncing of Victoria last week ) but you can be sure I'll be, like many other South Australians, barracking for the Redbacks as they take those next steps.

Exhibition T20 match belated reminder of cricket season

The televising of the exhibition T20 game from the Gabba on Channel 9 was a belated reminder to Australian cricket followers who aren't pay TV subscribers that the local season is underway.

The match itself appeared to attract a reasonable, though well short of capacity, crowd to the ground. This was probably due more to the presence of some recently retired greats than to any resurgence of interest in the game (though Shane Warne batting himself at no11 indicated that it wasn't being played for sheep stations).


How attractive the Tests against the West Indies and then Pakistan will be remains to be seen. A related question is whether the decline of Test cricket elsewhere, as manifested by minute crowd numbers and diminishing TV audiences, will continue here. I expect that it will, at least for this season when neither of the touring teams have much Test match crowd pulling potential. Without abandoning my preference for the long form of the game I hope that the ODIs, where over and fielding restrictions even things up a bit, continue to pull in reasonable numbers of spectators and viewers. I'll certainly be glued to the TV this and at the Adelaide Oval next week.

T20 grows in Brooklyn

The New York Times isn't noted for its coverage of cricket but occasionally it finds room for a piece about the game. This week Simon Akam writes about a New York Police Department attempt to engage with local immigrant communities:

The Gateway Cricket Ground in Brooklyn is a spartan place — a grass oval tucked in by the Belt Parkway, in the shadows of the towers of Starrett City and beneath the flight path of Kennedy International Airport.

But on Tuesday morning it was crowded with players, some toting paddlelike bats, and filled with the sound of leather balls struck by wood.

The sport they were playing is as ancient as it is baffling to most Americans, yet the New York Police Department has chosen cricket as a way to foster relationships with newer immigrant communities.

The Police Department established a cricket competition for young men in the city last summer; the project was a success, and on Tuesday, play began for another season. Interest has expanded, with 10 teams and 170 players involved this year, compared with 6 teams last year.

Mr Akam makes a pretty reasonable fist of rendering the game intelligible to his fellow New Yorkers:

A cricket match can last as long as five days and still end in a tie. However, the Police Department has adopted a shorter form of the game, called Twenty20 — in this form, a match lasts around three hours. The shorter form encourages big, crowd-pleasing hitting.

Twenty20 cricket has a serious international following, but John L. Aaron, the executive secretary of the USA Cricket Association, believes this abbreviated form is particularly suited to the mind-set on this side of the Atlantic.

“The sports psyche of the average American is: get home from work, see a game and get the kids to school in the morning,” he said.

The police have also had to make other adaptations to cricket to fit New York conditions. For example, a strip of rolled and immaculately trimmed grass is normally used as the playing surface on which a ball bounces before it is struck by a batsman. But that strip is expensive and rare in this country. So the league’s matches, played at Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn and Kissena Park in Queens, use a substitute: a heavy, fibrous mat that is staked to the ground before a game.


All this reminds me of Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland, which was favourably reviewed by the NYT when it was published last year. The Times has also made the novel's first chapter available online. O'Neill's description of a (real) cricket ground on Staten Island is magnificent:

By the standards I brought to it, Walker Park was a very poor place for cricket. The playing area was, and I am sure still is, half the size of a regulation cricket field. The outfield is uneven and always overgrown, even when cut (once, chasing a ball, I nearly tripped over a hidden and, to cricketers, ominous duck), and whereas proper cricket, as some might call it, is played on a grass wicket, the pitch at Walker Park is made of clay, not turf, and must be covered with coconut matting; moreover the clay is pale sandy baseball clay, not red cricket clay, and its bounce cannot be counted on to stay true for long; and to the extent that it is true, it lacks variety and complexity. (Wickets consisting of earth and grass are rich with possibility: only they can fully challenge and reward a bowler's repertoire of cutters and spinners and bouncers and seamers, and only these, in turn, can bring out and fully test a batsman's repertoire of defensive and attacking strokes, not to mention his mental powers.) There is another problem. Large trees — pin oaks, red oaks, sweetgums, and American linden trees — clutter the fringes of Walker Park. Any part of these trees, even the smallest hanging leaf, must be treated as part of the boundary, and this brings randomness into the game. Often a ball will roll between the tree trunks, and the fielder running after it will partially disappear, so that when he reemerges, ball in hand, a shouting match will start up about exactly what happened.


A few lines later the cricket playing narrator says that Don Bradman and Garfield Sobers have played there. I'm not sure about this though the NYC Parks & Rec website ,apart from confirming that the park is named after a prominent local cricketer who died in WW1 (very Australian that), lists Bradman and W G Grace among those who have played there.

Update 2 July

Don Bradman did play at Walker Park in three one day matches for the 1932 Australians against "All New York" on 17, 18 and 19 July 1932.

These followed three one dayers against the "New York West Indians" at another New York ground on 14 , 15 and 16 July. Six days of cricket without a break! Wouldn't happen nowadays.

Pakistan and England World T20 champs

Congratulations to the Pakistan men's and England women's teams for winning their respective World T20 championships.

I didn't expect to but, as with the IPL, I watched quite a lot of the men's tournament and much of the small amount of the women's which Sky/ Foxtel showed.

Some observations

# Great to see spin bowlers, eg Ajanta Mendis, play such an often positive part in many matches.

# Also good to see some excellent wicketkeeping on show, notably James Foster of England with an honourable mention to the feisty Irishman Niall O'Brien. Some excellent catches were also taken in the field.

# The Duckworth-Lewis method is inappropriate for these ultra short matches, especially when one team has an absurdly low number of overs and 10 wickets to chase a modest score. I thought that West Indies beat England in what the D/L rules turned into a walkover.

# Without seeking to detract from the winners' achievements (or to excuse Australia's early exit from the men's tournament) it must be acknowledged that upsets are more likely when there are fewer overs bowled.

# The Sky/ Foxtel TV coverage was generally good, though some commentators in the women's matches, eg Ian Chappell and David "Bumble" Lloyd, at times forgot (eg "man on the boundary", "batsman") that they were not describing the men's game.

Trivia

Which player appeared with a black eye?
Answer here .

Cricinfo summaries

Men's

Women's

Brief Australian encounter with World T20

In the ICC World T20 Australia lost its first game to an unfancied West Indies

Next Sri Lanka defeated Australia and thereby eliminated them from the tournament.

As Ricky Ponting said after the game Australia have now lost five international T20 fixtures on the trot . Well short of world champion standard.

No excuses: it's clear that our national team just hasn't adapted to the new format which even purists like me have to acknowledge has its own appeal. The 20 over a side format means that upsets (eg England's loss to the Netherlands ) are more frequent but class should still trump good luck most of the time (even if Ireland seem to have ridden their luck and that of their draw well enough to move on to the next stage).

Results from Cricinfo.

One player's priorities right...but in future?

Steve Harmison has stated that winning the Ashes in 2009 is the highest priority for him.

"This is going to be an exciting and intense 12 months of cricket and I cannot wait. People will go on about the Stanford series and the money that is on offer, but every single Englishman knows the Ashes series against Australia is the one to really win," Harmison told the Journal. "The money on offer for the Stanford tournament is a lot, but you've got to win it first. We are going out there to represent our country, just as we will do in India and the West Indies this winter. "

Good to see a current player saying this, yet I wonder what effects the explosion of T20 cricket might have in the next few years. Already the international calendar is straining to accommodate all the competitions.

Test cricket, the purist's (ie my) preferred form of the game, is becoming, if not endangered, then vulnerable to the huge financial honeypots of the IPL and its clones. Players like Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist are able to extend their careers while some like Andrew Symonds who are (more or less) in their prime are able to keep themselves in the public eye without playing for their country.

The current Australian tour of India is unusual in that there are no ODI or T20 matches in the program. It would not surprise me if it turned out to be the last four Test series between the two countries, at least in India. The England tour which follows hard on the heels of the Australian one comprises seven ODIs and two tests. Substitute T20s for some (or all the?) ODIs and do we have the template for many future tours?

IPL

I must be the last blogger with even the slightest interest in cricket to post about the IPL, but here goes.

Like many others in these parts I've kept awake longer than I should have to watch the matches, or some of them, or parts of some of them. Channel Ten hasn't helped by delaying the telecasts of many matches (some not even being screened until they are over). Why this is so is beyond me.

Enough for now about that.

Here are some (very general) observations:

• The League is a competition of high standard but some way below international standard
• That said some of the non-international players have performed very well
• While the main batting performances have come from established (if not all top drawer eg Brendon McCullum) international players the bowling achievements - economy rates as well as averages and wickets - have been spread more evenly across the spectrum of experience
• There have been more low scoring games than I expected, partly because of some poor pitches though also because of good bowling.