Nicholas Hogg

Having a baying crowd in your corner can only be a good thing, can't it?

20-Nov-2013

Darren Lehmann effectively let the dogs out by calling for the Australian public to "get stuck into" Stuart Broad until "he cries and goes home". Yet how likely are we to see tears before bedtime? Broad hopes that he'll be barracked because that means, according to his copy of Sir Alex Ferguson's autobiography, that the Aussies respect him. "If the opposition fans are singing about you, then that's a good sign."

Take heart, Mitchell Johnson. After one ODI spell last summer, where he memorably fired out Jonathan Trott for a golden duck, he has graduated from Barmy Army boo boy to a fast bowling badass, threatening throat balls and finger-breaking. He was hardly on the warpath when whanging down wides and inspiring song lyrics, taunts he admitted affected his playing ability. "It's hard not to when that's all you hear," he told Fox Sports. "And the songs are very catchy."

Since the late 19th century, when Norman Triplett observed that cyclists rode faster when cycling with others, the "audience effect" has been well researched. In 1965, Robert Zajonc elaborated the theory by racing cockroaches along a tube. In a straight sprint, with a host of other cockroaches watching, the racers clocked quicker times than when competing alone. However, once the task was complicated by having the insects navigate a maze, Zajonc found that times were slower when the cockroaches were observed (as opposed to isolated).

Full post

What has happened to the art of swing?

If a bowler hits the popping crease with a booming sidewinder that starts outside off and is about to uproot leg stump, not many batsmen are going to try anything fancy

Nicholas Hogg

07-Nov-2013

Duke Ellington composed the seminal jazz standard "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" in 1931, the season for which Hedley Verity was named one of Wisden's cricketers of the year, and the summer in which Harold Larwood took 129 wickets at 12.03 apiece. It may seem unwise to open a blog on the vital skills of swing by noting that a quick bowler grabbed a ton of victims with seam and pace. However, dear Harold was a one-off speedster. He didn't need the weapons of wind and shine to shift the ball sideways because it went straight on with such phenomenal force.

What made Malcolm Marshall and Wasim Akram better than the other pacemen was their ability to swing the ball. And not just in their era but any era: the two icons are often named in all-time XIs.

From the current "kings of of swing", Dale Steyn and Vernon Philander top the ICC table, with Peter Siddle at six and James Anderson at nine.

Full post

Moving past a howler

How do you deal with a costly mistake on the field? By sobbing, praising your opponent's skill, or by using the power of your imagination?

Nicholas Hogg

24-Oct-2013

Last season I was bowling at a former England player - not a common occurrence, I can assure you - when he snicked a late outswinger to first slip. A photographer freeze-famed the moment: hands cupped, the ball about to be grasped. The photographer didn't catch the ricochet off his palms, the head-in-hands aftermath from bowler and fielder. No slip catch is easy, and I felt more sympathy than anger towards my team-mate. I knew that the drop would haunt us both, two amateurs missing a rare chance to bag an ex-international.

Momentary yet lasting, the howler is a lapse of batting, bowling or fielding - and we must add but discuss no further in fear of this article turning into a thesis, the umpire howler - a singular fail that can flush an entire game, or even a series, down the drain. But no one is perfect, and no player wins every battle. Here, NFL coaching icon Vince Lombardi encouragingly reminds us, "It's not whether you get knocked down but whether you get up."

Or, if you're a gifted spin bowler, win the next series.

Full post

Practice makes perfect?

Does a technical, complex sport like cricket contain new tricks that can't be taught to old dogs?

Nicholas Hogg

14-Oct-2013

Sir Geoffrey Boycott, according to his wonderfully illustrated Book for Young Cricketers (1976), perfected his straight bat as a boy by tying a ball to a tree branch and hitting it again and again. Bradman trained his eye by knocking away golf balls with a stump, and West Indian legends Viv Richards and Brian Lara sought the wisdom of cricketing sage Alf Gover at his fabled school in Wandsworth.

This winter, with the learned help of batting and bowling coaches, along with whirring machines designed to fire swinging jaffas or replicate biting spinners like Shane Warne's "Ball of the Century", cricketers both professional and amateur will be working on their technique. Fellow team-mates have made vows - and pledged credit card details to coaches - to start next season as better players. And with the right advice, why wouldn't they enhance their powers? With no disrespect to my experienced comrades, I wonder if cricket, a technical, complex sport requiring an array of motor skills, contains new tricks that can't be taught to old dogs.

Not as reported in a paper published in Neurobiology of Aging (2003), in which researchers compared young (30-35 years) with elderly (63-71 years) in a reaction-time exercise where subjects tracked a moving asterisk across a screen. Veterans will be glad to learn that "age differences in motor skill learning, if any, are very subtle".

Full post

Ladies and gentlemen

Would playing more mixed-sex cricket be an advancement of the sport?

Nicholas Hogg

03-Oct-2013

I'd been out of competitive cricket for nearly a decade when I again picked up a ball and ran in to bowl, last year. This time on an astroturf pitch in the Tokyo Indoor Cricket League. My first delivery was a thing of beauty. Not the tentative dobber lobbed up in fear of my body breaking after a ten-year hiatus from that strange contortion known as the bowling action, but the exquisite cover drive played by a member of the Japan Ladies team.

Was the sex of the batsman (yes, "batsman", oddly, is the moniker, even when the "batsman" is in fact a "batswoman") part of this cricketing aesthetic that made me lament my exile from the beautiful - how football has stolen this label from cricket, I don't know - game?

No, it wasn't. It was the grace and timing of her shot, a textbook eloquence, that ascended gender.

Full post

What does it mean to be in the zone?

Some call it a groove, others call it form, but all cricketers know when they're in it

Nicholas Hogg

26-Sep-2013

The Collins American Dictionary defines being "in the zone" as "a state that produces achievement with such an extraordinary, often unlikely, degree of success that it seems to defy purely rational explanation". Google the three magic words and the more prosaic top result is a website inspired by the 2012 Olympics to "discover how our bodies work during sport, activity, movement and rest".

Whether being in the zone is a measurable phenomenon or a mystical trance, all cricketers know when they're in that halcyon space because they're scoring runs or taking wickets.

My first image of a cricketer in total focus is Mike Atherton in Johannesburg, 1995, when along with fighting terrier Jack Russell, he batted for 643 minutes, facing 492 balls and scoring 185 runs to stave off defeat. Chatting to Vic Marks 14 years on, Atherton observed, "Whenever I do see old footage, it feels like a different person out there. It's like an out-of-body experience… as if I'm watching somebody else." He's not the only athlete to remark on an exemplary display as a near dream-like event. When ice-dancing pair Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean recorded 12 perfect sixes (judges' scores, not boundaries) at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, Dean would say, "I don't remember the performance at all. It just happened."

Full post

The long and short of the run-up

The best in the business may say you can achieve a lot from a shortened run-up, but can you forego the power trip a long one gives you?

Nicholas Hogg

12-Sep-2013

Ian Botham galloped "like a shire horse cresting the breeze". Some bowlers skip and some bound. Bob Willis angled into the crease with one arm agog like a wounded heron. Dale Steyn is gun-barrel straight, targeting batsmen from the moment he raises the ball, almost like an officer with a pistol, ready to execute. Nottingham legend says they cut a hole in the hedge for Harold Larwood, that he started his marathon run-up in the adjoining field. And then there was Michael Holding, "Whispering Death", all that lethal force hidden in his languid approach and the feline glide before brute pace thudded into ribs.

According to the 1952 MCC Cricket Coaching Book, "The object of the run-up is to bring the bowler to the bowling crease completely balanced and with the momentum necessary to bowl", and that "its length should be the minimum necessary to provide this momentum".

Therefore, the faster the bowler, the longer the run-up. This would equate to Frank "Typhoon" Tyson's 38-yard charge to deliver the humdingers that compelled Don Bradman to admit he was "the fastest bowler I have ever seen".

Full post

What is it about a six?

There's something primal and thrilling about the shot - one that connects player and audience in more ways than one

Nicholas Hogg

01-Sep-2013

Whatever the stroke, whether it be a crafted drive or a cross-batted hoick, a cricket ball hit, biffed, whacked, cracked, struck, tonked, flayed or spanked over the boundary rope is a moment to be savoured.

Australian Joe Darling was officially the first to hit a six in Test cricket, lifting the ball clean out of the ground - before 1910 only shots exiting the park counted as a six - and with the current T20 hitting frenzy catching on in all forms of the game, one could argue he started a trend that has never since been out of fashion.

Chris Gayle admits he pumps weights to hit the ball as hard and far as he can. And he does: record holder for the fastest century, and the only player to bludgeon the opening ball of a Test match into the crowd. A titan with a bat, he's a hero not because he plays the perfect forward defensive but because he hammers a ball that connects the fan with the player, when the field can't contain the game and it spills into our own, mortal hands.

Full post

Cheating: it's in our blood

Cricket changes because we are inventive and have the capacity for underhand behaviour and self-deception. As we evolve, the rules must too

Nicholas Hogg

22-Aug-2013

We are built to cheat. Our DNA demands that we take the opportunities that increase our chance of survival. In Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is the bone-wielding apes who viciously club the unarmed apes. No lingering guilt about what is fair inhibits their bloody victory. But these are primates fighting over territory in a tooth-and-claw scrabble without values to impinge their survival instincts, distant cousins of refined cricketers imbued with a sense of moral duty to a sport that has long been elevated above other recreation as a bastion of fair play.

However, it is the codified rules, empirical rather than moral, that ultimately define a sport. In football you cannot touch the ball with your hands, in rugby football you can. Bereft of guidelines a sporting contest debases back to the savannah. Medieval, unruly versions of the beautiful game involved neighbouring villages fighting to move a ball from one field to another. These riotous matches, with surging mobs hacking, wrestling and lurching back and forth across muddied fields - much like a Five Nations clash from the 1980s - were banned in 1314 by an Edward II Royal Decree that declared "hustling over large balls" as an act "from which many evils may arrive."

Cricket, conversely, has often been taught in an effort to instil morality and sportsmanship. The phrase "It's just not cricket" has been popularised to describe underhand behaviour in wider society. The MCC, the owner of the Laws of Cricket since the 18th century, included a Preamble on this "Spirit of Cricket" in its updated 2000 code: "Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game. Any action which is seen to abuse this Spirit causes injury to the game itself."

Full post

3 4 5 6 7

Showing 61 - 69 of 69