I won't say I know how he feels, because I don't. My grandfather drove steam trains; Denis Compton scored hundreds at Lord's. I played a handful of games for Leicestershire CCC Under-17s, quickly realised I wasn't good enough to go any further, while Nick was burdened - if talent can be a burden - with both ability and a stellar family name to live up to from day one.

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Bat, ball and family will sustain cricket

Love of the game can be passed on down the generations, regardless of whether you have satellite TV or not

Nicholas Hogg

14-Jun-2016

Last Bank Holiday weekend I was on a small campsite that had three separate cricket games in progress. Family knockabouts, facilitated by those bargain picnic sets consisting of four stumps - which my ten-year-old niece would later arrange in a single row, so confident of her ability that she baited me with an extra stump target - a tennis ball and a thin bat, roused the campers from their deckchairs. I saw a granny fielding at silly mid-off, and three-year-old tyros swiping length balls over caravans.

Campsite cricket was the Bank Holiday sport of choice: gentle, good-humoured, a cheer for gran pouching a top edge, and for any contact made by the aunt with a bad leg. And in the midst of doom-laden news about declining county game attendances, and the ever-present threat to Test cricket, it seemed like we were partaking in an old-fashioned pastime. With one eye on my niece's six-or-out every ball swing, and another on the nearby ad hoc games, for once I was warmly optimistic about the future for grass-roots cricket.

Football is easier to set up, and anyone can chuck and catch a Frisbee. Yet here we all were doing that difficult thing called cricket. Even when most of the adults had sat down and given in to a cold beer, or lit the barbecue, many of the kids competed in their own mini-Tests until bad light, or a grilled burger, stopped play.

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Who said offspin is the lesser art?

Rather than being the boring nerd of the spinning brethren, maybe it is actually the forgotten genius?

Nicholas Hogg

27-May-2016

Last Sunday, on a typically English and gloomy summer afternoon, with a wet cricket ball flitting across the dark landscape of rain clouds and umber fields, a total of 15 catches were dropped. My team, the Authors Cricket Club, put 11 of those on the turf. Including a spill from the match on Saturday, I've now had five consecutive chances off my spin bowling hit the deck. And although none of these were absolute dollies - certainly not considering the backdrop and the light and the soap-like surface of the sodden leather - the words of Raymond Illingworth rang like a bell: "As a spin bowler you will quickly come to realise how much you need your team-mates."

Illingworth values his fielders so much that he devotes an entire chapter to them ("Support from the team") in his 1979 book, Spin Bowling. He declares that "a good fielding side will turn an average bowler into a successful one", and that as great as his Test comrades Colin Cowdrey, Ken Higgs and Colin Milburn were, replacing them with David Gower and Derek Randall was worth three runs saved an over.

Now, before anyone paints me as the raging bowler doing his best Stuart Broad hands-on-hips double-teapot while bellowing expletives at some poor chap who's nursing a bruised hand, please know I'm not that ogre. Illingworth says he "tried never to get angry at someone for missing a catch" - even in Adelaide in 1963, when he had Neil Harvey put down at slip and then at square leg the very next delivery before Harvey went on to make 154. I might not shout about the dropped catches, but like Illingworth, and elephants, I can't forget.

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Does a winning cricket team have to be a happy one?

Whether the stakes are high or you're just playing a friendly, there is value to the bond between players

Nicholas Hogg

05-May-2016

A few nights ago, in my home town, a small city in the East Midlands, a remarkable sporting success occurred. Leicester City football club, who began the season as favourites to be relegated, won the Premier League. At odds of 5000-1. So ridiculous was the fantasy of them even avoiding relegation, let alone topping the table, few fans bothered to place a wager.

And what magic, we may ask, spelled this victory into reality?

Team spirit is one of the answers put forward by the pundits. Much has been made of the togetherness of the Leicester dressing room, the inference being that with the help of wizardly manager Claudio Ranieri, the 11 who take the pitch perform to a total greater than the sum of its parts.

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Ten things we learned from the World T20 (or knew already)

Kohli is very good; so are England; and so is the art of running twos. Oh, and dew is water

Nicholas Hogg

09-Apr-2016

1. Arise Virat Kohli, Prince of Cricket
The pre-tournament talk was of the master blasters, the willow-wielding barbarians who were going to smash the tournament to pieces. And, well, they did, with Carlos Brathwaite scorching West Indies and poor Ben Stokes into the history books. Yet few would challenge Kohli's prize as player of the tournament. He had a supreme 84.95% control, only bettered by Root's 87.06%; it was immaculate orthodox strokeplay that put these two at the top of the batting stats. Will coaches now spend less time drilling helicopters and Dilscoops, and more practice on that old-fashioned front-foot drive with precision placement? Root played in such a risk-free manner that he could maintain his T20 tempo in longer forms this summer.

2. Talk nah, Mark
Thank you, Mark Nicholas, for reminding all us hacks that what might seem a throwaway phrase could end up being quoted by the cup-winning captain seconds after he lifts the trophy. Darren Sammy took Nicholas' claim that West Indies were "short of brains" in the same manner in which Clive Lloyd used Tony Greig's "make them grovel" as a rallying cry. And, quite nobly, Nicholas came back with a thorough apology (some might describe it with one of those words that Greig once uttered) that might mean he'll be forgiven but not forgotten.

3. Less is more
The bat did indeed dominate the tournament, as predicted, but bowlers vastly improved their game. The canny paceman now has an arsenal of change-ups, and downs - the slower ball, hardly a revolution, considering I recall Jonathan Agnew bowling Chris Broad with one at Grace Road in the 1980s, has become standard fare. And here West Indies varied better than any other attack. A Simon Hughes radio documentary broadcast last year demonstrated that top batsmen played the ball from the hand, rather than simply following it in flight, and deceiving at the point of release proved most effective, disrupting rhythm and bat speed. What once was a long hop is now a dot ball, but whether this strategy will transfer as effectively into other forms, where focus is on playing the delivery on merit, one shall see. England open their Test series against Sri Lanka on May 19, but I imagine fewer slower balls will be bowled in those five days than in a single T20.

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Why today's cricketers are better than their predecessors

Power, innovation, audacity - we're seeing it all in spades now

Nicholas Hogg

18-Mar-2016

In the 1985 film Back to the Future, Marty McFly and the Doc require a DeLorean car to hit 88mph to travel through time. Unfortunately the time-travelling cricketer has yet to construct such a machine - perhaps a heavy roller with a turbocharged engine - so we must use statistics, match reports, the cracked and scarred relics of willow and leather, and try to imagine a different era of the game.

Or, like me, you can return to train with the team you played with in your teens, Barkby United, a Leicestershire Premier Division club I made my debut with over 30 years ago. Back then my comprehensive school was hardly equipped for proper cricket. All we had was a poorly kept square and a coffin of rotting pads, those cloth batting gloves with rubber spikes for protection, and a single razor-edged plastic box that would either fall down your trouser leg, or more terrifyingly, slip and hang like a guillotine over a more tender area. So if I wanted to play, which I really, really did, I had to trek across the cow fields at the back of my estate to the pretty village with the cricket ground.

That first night I turned up to nets, I ran in to bowl wearing blue trainers. Thirty years ago the maverick Ian Botham was still playing. He had a bleached mullet and swung a hefty Duncan Fearnley. Now mullets are an anathema - although Brett Lee and Ishant Sharma have tried their best to bring them back into style - and I can't remember the last time I saw that once-ubiquitous DF brand on a sticker. I didn't have the mullet, but I did have the bat, and like a lot of kids, I tried to hit Bothamesque sixes every other ball. And herein lies the generation gulf between the cricket I played then and now: our coach in the 1980s would send us out of the net to run a lap of the pitch if we lamped one back past the bowler. It wasn't "proper cricket". Proper cricket, at least for the first few overs you faced, was either leaving the ball or playing textbook forward- or backward-defensive shots. Launching the ball, even if you middled it, was a crime against correct batsmanship.

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Let players police their behaviour

The threat of immediate punishment posed by a red- and yellow-card system could make players vigilant about their own and their team-mates' behaviour on the field

Nicholas Hogg

23-Feb-2016

Like love, the spirit of cricket is an ethereal entity, and although it can't be touched, held, or examined under a microscope, few cricketers would doubt its existence. But also, like love, it has different manifestations in different cultures. Those in horror that our game of gentlemen should now require a formal red- and yellow-card system to control errant players are missing the fact that we have moved on from a single, and mostly Victorian, concept of what this mysterious spirit is.

In a time when laws and model behaviour on the cricket field came mostly from a single source - the playing fields of English public schools - we now have a global game that varies from wickets scratched out in Mumbai maidans, car-park games with tennis balls in Bradford, immaculate watered squares in Johannesburg, to an artificial strip at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan.

Different cricketing cultures will interpret this "notion" of good behaviour in various ways. What was okay for me playing working-class cricket in the North Leicestershire league of the 1980s isn't suitable in 2016 during friendlies for an Actors XI in Sussex. I had a gnarly old Leicester skipper who would tell me to beam lidless batsmen coming down the track, and my father regularly played a Nottingham colliery side who painted the crease with a six-inch-wide brush to trick batsmen into stumpings - all these were accepted methods of winning, of playing the game, in the particular cricket of that time and place.

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Reflections of a fast bowler turned leggie

How does one conquer the impulse to switch back to pace when one of your slow ones is clouted to the boundary?

Nicholas Hogg

02-Feb-2016

This is the end and the beginning, a farewell to a faithful companion and a warm welcome to a new comrade at the wicket.

I spent last season doggedly seeing out my 30-year marriage to outswing, a skill I first honed in the school nets with a Reader ball waxed with furniture polish. In three decades of wearing whites and charging in, if the wind blew in the right direction, and the ball shone with the kind of reflection my mother would buff into the dining table, and my usually distracted slip fielders snaffled those flying edges, teams crumpled before my curving deliveries.

And so has my body. In 2015 I wrote a piece about experimenting with legspin in the winter nets, in an effort to gain a new, more subtle ability that would take me gently into cricketing dotage - rather than into surgery for a new pair of knees. By May last season I was tossing up leggies, much to the chagrin of my captain, who was used to setting the field for metronomic outswing rather than for erratic hand grenades.

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