Jon Hotten
Anderson, greatness and England's lost generation
Over the course of England's next series, James Anderson should become the 26th bowler to take 300 Test wickets. That no Englishman has reached 400 - or 10,000 runs with the bat - is indicative of how the record books left them behind
Jon Hotten
03-Apr-2013
Barring injury and other disasters, James Anderson will, at some point next month, become the 26th bowler in the history of Test match cricket to take 300 wickets. He will be only the fourth Englishman to pass the mark, which, considering that Fred Trueman was the first to do so in 1964, puts him in elite company as far as the three lions go.
Trueman's landmark will be fifty years old come next summer. When he walked off the field at the Oval having taken the defining wicket of Neil Hawke, Fred was asked if he thought anyone would beat his record. "I don't know," he replied, "but they'll be bloody knackered if they do." To Trueman in 1964, the thought of 400 Test wickets was a distant Everest. The notion of a man taking 800 might have been enough to leave even Fred temporarily wordless, and he didn't quite live to see it done.
Ian Botham retired with the English record of 383 wickets in 1992 but 11 bowlers have gone on past 400: three from India, two from West Indies, two from Australia, and one each from Sri Lanka, New Zealand, South Africa and Pakistan. Or, put another way, at least one player from each of the other seven major Test nations has achieved something that no English bowler has.
Full postThe incredible legacy of WG Grace
In the space of eight days in 1876, WG Grace scored 839 runs, including two triple hundreds. He shaped the game we know today, inventing technique and influencing bowling
Jon Hotten
25-Mar-2013
"He has ability with the bat. He has two first-class triple hundreds." As back-handed compliments go, that's not a bad one. It came from Ravi Shastri as Ravindra Jadeja made a sweetly struck 40-odd at the Feroz Shah Kotla during India's first innings in the fourth Test. What Shastri didn't say was that Jadeja's feat is actually more extraordinary than that. Along with having another, older triple century that slipped Shastri's mind, Jadeja this year became one of just four players to have made two triple hundreds in the same season, and he is in august company: the others were Donald Bradman, Bill Ponsford and WG Grace.
Bill Ponsford got his in 1927-8, The Don eight years later in 1935-6. WG, though, beat the world to the punch, as he so often did. He made his 344 for MCC against Kent and 318 not out for Gloucester against Yorkshire over the course of three innings in eight days in August 1876, and the knock in the middle of them was the little matter of 177 against Notts - 839 runs, and not a bad week's work. During that fleeting summer heat wave, WG became, perhaps, the first cricketer to enter the zone.
The image may be utterly familiar, but in so many ways, Grace is impossibly distant from us. 1876 was the year that Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, Custer died at the Battle of Little Bighorn and Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Benjamin Disraeli was the British prime minister, Winston Churchill was 18 months old and overarm bowling had been legal for 12 seasons.
Full postIn name and deed?
Modern bat manufacturers seem to be going to increasingly absurd lengths in coming up with exotic nouns in which batsmen can attempt to locate idealised versions of themselves
Jon Hotten
18-Mar-2013
It hardly needs saying that a bat is more than the physical line of defence; it's a symbol, a totem, invested with dreams, subject to the forces of superstition and luck, the single prop for the vulnerable, suggestible psyche of the batsman.
For much of the history of the game, batmakers were behind the curve on this. The hints were there - WG wrote to Gray-Nicolls to congratulate them on one of his blades, a sweet longing evident between the lines of his simple postcard - yet the psychology only began to be exploited with the defining bats of the 1970s and early '80s: the Jumbo, the Scoop, the V12.
Now, though, with the epic re-invention of the object itself, the supercharged, hyper-tooled, bigger, deeper, thicker bats of the new century, the marketing has roared into areas that flick the switch of those male synapses: sex, technology, power.
Full postBarry Richards, sporting tragedy and human suffering
Although he only played in four Tests prior to the sporting boycott of South Africa, Barry Richards still managed to confirm his greatness. However, the tragedy of his lost international career must be set in the context of a far greater struggle
Jon Hotten
04-Mar-2013
As the great Charles Bukowski once wrote, the days run away like wild horses over the hills. Barry Richards is 67 years old now. His last professional appearance came in 1983, his fourth and final Test match was played 43 years ago, and yet for those of us who saw him bat, however fleetingly, he lives indelibly in the mind's eye: a legend, a wizard, a true star.
Tales of his talent are legion. Mine is this. When I was a young blade - Under-13 or so - Richards came to our club with Hampshire for a benefit game. It was a golden summer's afternoon. He drove down the laneway in a sponsored car, and from the boot he drew his shimmering Excalibur, a slender Gray-Nicolls with its deep red stripe down the spine.
Hampshire went in first. Barry took guard. Opening the bowling was Dinger Bell, a PE teacher at the nearby school, biblically bearded and in off his long run, a sight that had terrified many a local bat. Richards left the first ball. "Blimey," I thought. "Maybe even Barry Richards thinks Dinger Bell is quick…"
Full postT20 vulnerable to Performance Enhancing Drugs
The game's shortest format can learn lessons from baseball in particular when it comes to the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs
Jon Hotten
27-Feb-2013
On 8 September 1998, Mark McGwire of the St Louis Cardinals struck a pitch from Steve Trachsel over the left field wall of the Busch stadium and broke one of American sport's most cherished records, most home runs in a single season. The mark belonged to Roger Maris and had stood for 37 years, and before Maris broke it in 1961, for 34 years. Amazingly, in that same 1998 season, another slugger, Sammy Sosa, also went past Maris' record and finished with 66 home runs to McGwire's 70. Sosa bettered Maris' 61 homers in two of the next three seasons, and then, in 2001, Barry Bonds hit 73, beating McGwire.
In 2010, Mark McGwire admitted the use of steroids throughout his career. Barry Bonds was implicated in the BALCO scandal of 2003, and in 2009, the New York Times reported that Sammy Sosa was on a list of players who had failed a test for performance enhancing drugs in 2003. Bonds and Sosa deny the allegations. Despite their eligibility, McGwire, Bonds and Sosa are yet to be elected into the sport's Hall Of Fame. The records of McGwire and Bonds appear in the annals of the game with an asterisk next to them.
It may seem odd to begin a column on cricket and Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) with a story about baseball, but the sports are kissing cousins and there is a tendency when discussing the subject to imagine that there's always another game that has it worse. In the case of cricket, it's true too. It has avoided the damning exposures of baseball, running and cycling, but that means nothing as the future comes rushing towards it.
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