Jon Hotten
Moores and the shadow of the past
His second spell as England coach might be nothing like his first, but memories of it will hover nevertheless
Jon Hotten
24-Apr-2014
The true conspiracy theorist will point out that the new England set-up is not the revenge of the establishment but of the wicketkeepers: Paul Downton, Andy Flower, Peter Moores and Paul Farbrace all spent their playing careers as members of the Secret Society Of Sticksmen.
Conspiracy theorists can see conspiracy everywhere. That's sort of the point. The return of Peter Moores has been something of a lightning rod for speculation - Is he being rewarded for keeping his mouth shut last time? Is he the one candidate certain not to ask for the reinstatement of KP? And yet his time in charge is just as likely to be shaped by the forces of story and narrative.
This week, another sport provided an example of its power in the connected world. The news that David Moyes was to be sacked as the manager of Manchester United was broken online in the early afternoon of Easter Monday by a group of journalists apparently briefed en masse by someone close to the club's decision-makers. Two hours later, the story had such reach and forward momentum that the dismissal had been accepted as fact. Had United wanted to keep Moyes, they may not have been able to - things had travelled too far and too fast for it to be plausible.
Full postYou can't control talent, only channel it
Cricket runs the risk of going down the route of over-coaching, like in some other sports - which is not ideal in a game that is as much about art as about science
Jon Hotten
15-Apr-2014
Bubba Watson won the Masters golf tournament on Sunday, taking his second green jacket in three years. While he isn't quite in the league of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, Watson is - as those two did before him - playing a game with which the rest of golf is unfamiliar; at least at the Augusta National. The distance he hits the ball (with a pink driver) and the extraordinary spins that he applies in order to shape his shots through the air, mean that he attacks the famous course entirely differently to everyone else. He has never had a coach, and what's more he's never had a lesson, which makes him rare among high-end golfers (and most hackers) - it is after all the sport that authored the phrase "paralysis by analysis".
Nicklaus himself was reflecting on this during a commentary stint, and he recalled his own coach, a man named Jack Grout, who would speak to him twice a year, usually in a couple of clipped sentences. "His whole philosophy," Nicklaus said, "was to enable me to correct my own mistakes on the golf course."
One of sport's great archetypes is the aged and taciturn coach, the kind of man who will watch silently for half an hour and then impart, often via a single and devastating sentence, a thought that changes not just how you play the game, but how you see it. When John Jacobs, a golf coach who has been working for 60 years and who is possibly the most influential instructor in the sport, sat down to write his first book, he said: "I remember that the first thing I wrote down on paper was, 'Golf is what the ball does.' That was my breakthrough as a teacher. I look at what the ball's doing, and then I ask, 'Why?'"
Full postWere England complacent?
Giles and Broad used the word to describe the team's performance in the World T20, but what it really describes is the attitude of their bosses
Jon Hotten
02-Apr-2014
Interviewed on television the other night, the novelist Julian Barnes discussed his self-confessed pedantry with regard to the use of language. He chose an interesting example of the kind of thing that riled him - the word "decimate". It has become an alternative to "massacre" when its original meaning refers to the Roman punishment of putting to death one in every ten soldiers in a captured army, something quite different.
Either definition applies quite well to England's cricketers after their defeat by Netherlands. (Which one shall we decimate, or at least drop, or no longer employ? Broad? Giles? Or perhaps just do away with the lot?) Yet no retired writer shoves a microphone under the nose of Barnes as he misses out the Booker - "And how do you feel now, Barnesy? Gutted? Was the book you entered this year really acceptable?" - a fate endured by Ashley Giles and Stuart Broad in Chittagong.
The word that they fell upon to describe England's loss was "complacent". Both seemed to feel it offered suitable amounts of contrition, that it went a little further than the usual robo-pronouncements required by the ECB media training manual, and it yet is an odd choice. For a start, it implies that England, thrashed 5-0 in the Ashes and now eliminated from a world tournament with a record reading W1 L3, actually had something to be complacent about. Is it really possible to be complacent after spending six months being beaten by almost everyone you play against?
Full postCan bowling line-ups collapse?
It's a phenomenon that the T20 game is uniquely geared to produce, as the Ireland-Netherlands clash showed
Jon Hotten
26-Mar-2014
When Mike Brearley went to Alderney to interview John Arlott for the BBC soon after the great commentator's retirement, Arlott confided that his favourite part of the game was the batting collapse. He loved the way that it arrived out of nowhere. He relished its suddenness and the overwhelming implications that it brought to the state of the match.
Many fates are caught up in a batting collapse. They are a brutal reminder of the fragility of the game. As a poet, a man who appreciated cadence, Arlott savoured their thrilling rhythm.
Any follower of English cricket is well acquainted with them, of course. They are a brand of collective madness in which uncertainty leaps from one mind to another with a strange kind of psychic connectivity. It's easy to tie the mental state of a batting collapse to something that Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast And Slow, called the Availability Heuristic: our perceptions of what is happening are usually guided by the most easily recalled piece of information. If that information is overwhelmingly present - in the faces of the despondent batsmen trooping from the crease, the jubilant opposition, the jittery dressing room - then it becomes almost unignorable, whatever counter-arguments your experience and talent might advance.
Full postCoached by Goochie
How many of us can claim to have attended a masterclass with England's most prolific run scorer?
Jon Hotten
18-Mar-2014
Halfway through the television interview he gave to Sky last Sunday, Jonathan Trott reflected on some of the outrageous fortune he had had during his time in the game.
"I mean, if you'd told me when I was a kid that Graham Gooch would be my batting coach…" he paused, still a little awed, "I'd have laughed at you."
Well, a couple of weeks ago, for one happy afternoon, he was my batting coach too - sort of. We were at the indoor nets at Lord's, less than a hundred yards from the scene of his most famous feat, innings of 333 and 123 against India in 1990, still the highest aggregate of runs in a single Test match. That mighty achievement should be enough for any lifetime, but Gooch holds an even more singular record: with 67,057 runs across all formats, he is the most prolific batsman in the history of the game. He has scored more than Tendulkar, more than Hobbs, more even than Grace. He's 60 years old now, and steely grey on top, but that bear-like shuffle is as familiar as ever. There is something about him, though, that mitigates against stardom. Perhaps it's his strict adherence to his Essex roots or his legendary distrust of the limelight, but he carries none of the aura of a Boycott or a Richards. He is just completely at home when surrounded by cricket - the nets might as well be his front room.
Full postCan Flower bring art to the science of coaching?
Great coaches understand the fluidity of technique, the role of imagination, the constant forward momentum of the game
Jon Hotten
04-Mar-2014
A long time ago now, my dad and me were in a junk shop, where he came upon a copy of Ranjitsinhji's Jubilee Book Of Cricket, first published in 1897. It's a wonderful edition, and as well as being a beautiful object, it's a time-traveller's dream. It's so close to the origins of the game that it has an almost haunting depth to it. Here was how the Victorian psyche saw the practice of cricket.
It's funny, too, in places: there's one wonderful plate captioned "a player illustrating a doubtful delivery", in which a glowering giant with a lantern jaw has a 45-degree break in his elbow. Darrell Hair would have loved him.
The fledgling development of the camera meant that every image had to be posed for some minutes, and there's a stillness to them that makes the era look more studied than it must have been (the plate of Ranji hooking looks more like he's about to put up a parasol on Brighton beach), and yet here is one of the very first times that the techniques of batting and bowling were recorded and described.
Full postThe psychological dominance of Mitchell Johnson
The hold he has is not just on batsmen, it is on the collective imagination of everyone watching him bow
Jon Hotten
20-Feb-2014
How do you stop Mitchell Johnson?
Beginning a post with that question naturally implies there is now going to be some kind of an answer. Well, there won't be one here, beyond the obvious, and that is that time will stop him, as time stops them all. He bowls with the ghosts of Larwood and Thommo and Holding and all of the other terrors behind him. (My own personal nightmare? Sylvester Clarke, the brooding Grendel of The Oval, who would come and knock on the hotel room doors of opposing batsmen to let them know exactly what he was about to do.) Johnson has, in a few short months, entered the realm of men who have exerted a strange psychological dominance with the overwhelming pace of their bowling.
The compelling aspects of the Johnson story lie there, because the hold he has is not just on batsmen, it is on the collective imagination of everyone watching him bowl. As Russell Jackson observed in the Guardian newspaper this week, each Johnson spell has become event television. The thrilling news the Centurion Test brought with it was that the Ashes was no one-off: if Johnson could do his thing away from home against Test cricket's best team, then it can happen anywhere to anyone. After a single game, there are echoes of what he did to England, which was to induce a kind of deep-rooted demoralisation that extended beyond the field and into the psyche (he was not playing alone, of course, but he was a spearhead). It was as if he had pulled out a pin that held the team and organisation together, and the unit just sprang apart - injury, illness, retirement, disharmony all had their way.
Full postCricket's constantly unfolding narrative
It may feel as though the game is at the peak of its evolution but it's only a matter of time before current events seem dated
Jon Hotten
13-Feb-2014
My friend Simon Massey was a terrific cricketer and a man with the game in his soul. After he passed away cruelly at the end of 2011, his mum and dad gave me a bundle of his old cricket magazines, and I pulled one out at random today: Wisden Cricket Monthly, December 1997, cover price £2.60. On the front is a full-face (and what a full face it is, boom boom…) image of youthful blond bombshell Shane Warne along with a cut-out of Steve James, Glamorgan daffodil centred on his helmet and playing an on-drive with his trusty Stuart Surridge blade. "One of these two is our man of the season," runs the cover line. "Guess who?"
Inside it's a freeze-frame cornucopia of detail that, if not yet period, feels generationally different and undoubtedly more innocent (despite the three-page dissection of the Shakoor Rana affair and a letter, name withheld, from a former professional cricketer admitting to smoking dope). That letters page carries no email address, Brian Lara appears in a small ad for the limited edition, leather-bound 1997 Almanack, Geoffrey Boycott extols the virtues of the Notts Sports Non-Turf Pitch. The Christmas Gift Guide ("64 Ideas For Xmas") includes Jack Potter's Bowling Training Strap for £9 and - a stroke of genius this, bring it back - the Hunts Custom Batmaking Kit: for £120 you get a "top-grade pressed splice, rough shaped blade, turned handle and a comprehensive instruction leaflet".
More telling are two intimations of the future. The four-page Alan Lee Report is on "The England Teem", pun most definitely intended, an examination of coach David Lloyd's support system. "The national side has begun to resemble a job-creation scheme. What's going on?" Lee asks, before revealing that the ECB now has an office staff of 44 (what did they all do?). He notes the arrival of a press officer, a logistics officer, a fitness consultant and a young technical director by the name of Hugh Morris. The seeds of 80 pages of cous cous recipes are here.
Full postOf Boycott, KP, and the ECB's alienation
The two are unalike as batsmen, but they share a tendency to speak plainly, have complex, sensitive personalities, and have found themselves made scapegoats at times
Jon Hotten
07-Feb-2014
On 13 August 1983, Geoffrey Boycott made a century for Yorkshire against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham. He stayed in all day, scoring 140 from 347 deliveries and angered his captain Raymond Illingworth by running out the free-scoring Kevin Sharp, who'd made a much faster hundred, while trying to keep the strike, and refusing to raise his own scoring rate.
Illingworth reported the incident to the Yorkshire committee and set in motion one of the most extraordinary uprisings in the history of English cricket. The committee issued a statement rebuking Boycott for batting that was "not in the best interests of the side", and was met with a furious response - from Boycott himself, who went on radio to deny that he had been officially reprimanded; from his friend Brian Clough, who used his Daily Mirror column to defend Boycott's batting; and from Sid Fielden, who led a group of reformers that would become central to the story.
On 3 October, the committee voted unanimously not to offer Boycott a contract for the 1984 season. The Reform Group swung into action. More than 400 people attended a meeting in a hotel in Ossett, and the committee was forced to vote again on the issue. The sacking was upheld via a statement that stressed the need to encourage younger players without the "dissension and discord that creates a lack of confidence".
Full postJust how bad was England's ODI series loss?
England abroad are almost always outgunned. This defeat was more or less inevitable, and that makes it hard to take
Jon Hotten
29-Jan-2014
Which was England's worst defeat of the winter, the Ashes or the ODI series? Oh for the ego, for the soul, for the statisticians and for the careers of some of the participants, the Ashes of course. Yet the urn ultimately depends on exchange for the great and rolling drama of its storylines, and England's problems are essentially cyclical too.
The ODI series gave rise to the usual low-level despair at a format that for England has been forever star-crossed - a repository for wasted hope and lost opportunity. It has never chimed well with the national cricketing psyche. Here are the real ruins.
I first watched England play the one-day game in 1979 at Lord's, the World Cup final against West Indies (it was the second edition of the tournament, a big deal but not yet that big a deal). A 60-over match, both sides in whites (the authorities still too stung by Packer to have yet yielded to his innovations). West Indies were reigning champions and naturals at the format. They had no need to change their Test side and yet they had: Collis King played a key innings alongside Viv Richards, out-blasting the master blaster. England opened with Brearley and Boycott. Given West Indies' attack it was not an illogical move, but it was essentially a defensive one, a response designed to mitigate the opposition rather than accentuate internal strength.
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