January 2010

I spent a productive few hours today trying to find trinkets appropriate for my new shrine to the immortal Harold Larwood. Having read about his prodigious thirst, I thought about getting pumps and barrels fitted to my humble B&Q worktops but I get black looks from the current Mrs T already for my, well, sometimes enthusiastic refuelling habits so I thought better of it. She's of Welsh-American extraction so the Presbyterian-Prohibitionist streak runs strong in that one.

Anyway. I finally found some nice prints online of the great man and hopefully I'll be prostating myself in front of them on a Notts prayer matt sometime soon.

But fark me. There's some utter tosh out there. The usual boss eyed etching of Both circa 1985 and you can't move for the jingoistic rubbish they produced after 2005. However, can this be beaten? http://www.sportsgalleries.com/acatalog/Famous_Cricketers.html - yup, some 'tard thought it a great idea sell prints of Ronnie Irani, former Essex "great". In England gear. Was he even fit to wear the one day shirt, let alone Test garb?

I pity the poor 13 year old lad who got that in his stocking this Xmas. It's not like he's a even the best Essex allrounder - he's no Ian Pont, let alone Barnacle Bailey. Goochie's impression of Bob Willis carried more menace than the donkeydrops the Lancastrian never-was dished up. Reminds you how crap we were in the 90s. Jesus, those days were grim. Good job the whiskey bottle and revolver aren't at hand, I'd end it all now.

Who produces this shite? And have you ever recd such filth from a well-meaning new girlfriend or maiden aunt? A true Sofanista would dump the bitch/disinherit themselves, natch. Is this the next step for the Sofa? Email us your examples!

In a shock statement yesterday Mickey Arthur announced his resignation as South Africa coach citing a difference of opinion over the future of the team.  It then emerged that the entire selection panel had been sacked and all this only days before South Africa leave for their tour of India.  Speculation abounded over the reasons behind the shock move with the focus on Arthur's brutal coaching methods.  As previously revealed exclusively on Test Match Sofa Arthur has been known to whip, beat and physically abuse underperforming players. Today Arthur released the following statement:

"It is with great sadness that I have announced my resignation as coach of the Proteas. Despite the proven success of my coaching methods the spineless pencil pushers at Cricket South Africa have queried my approach. People ask me why I whipped Paul Harris with a belt everytime he took fewer than 5 wickets but I want to know how else could I have motivated a bowler that bad to take even a paltry 79 test wickets in 3 years. The same people who presided over Hansie's match fixing have the audacity to wonder why I pounded AB's toes with the toe of a bat everytime he got stumped and shouted "NOT SO TWINKLED TOED NOW, EH?". I gave five years service to South Africa and made them the best cricket team in the world and they want to talk to me about methods? I'm proud of what I achieved with Graeme [Smith, South African captain] and hope that he can keep the boys motivated in India. To that end I saw him yesterday, gave him my favourite belt and wished him all the best."

Cricket South Africa have insisted that they knew nothing of Arthur's methods until an inside source within the team came forward. We here at The Sofa sympathise with Arthur's desire to beat the shit of the South African team and feel he has been somewhat hard done by.

I wonder if the boyish Alastair Cook managed to catch Gordon Ramsay's latest sojourn in-between evensong and extra Latin prep this week. If he did, hopefully he'll have taken away some valuable lessons on how not to tour the subcontinent this spring.
 
The ghost of Tuffers hung like Banquo over the whole project. Needless to say Gordon  dutifully ticked off both the elephants and the poverty and squeezed in some cooking (sadly no dancing) along the way. His affirmative verbal tick commendably to the fore - "Don't fucking burn the bhajis, sunshine, !YES!" - Gordon single handedly put Anglo-Indian relations back a good 20 years.There was a lot of gratuitous swearing and shouting at the locals, clumsy flirtation with assorted dusky maidens and the usual nobility of poverty bollocks. Beefy's quip about Pakistan being the sort of place you'd want to send the mother-in-law  was a Ban Ki Moon piece of diplomacy compared to this guff.
 
So, young Alastair, take this away with you. Embrace the culture. Get out of the hotel. Get your hands dirty. Be polite and mind your manners. Smile. Enjoy the experience, you and your team are very lucky boys. It's not often playing for England can be compared to an away trip to Streatham and Marlborough in the Surrey league. We make the wearisome trip to an incomprehensible land to play on a dodgy track in front of no one, put up with the oppos odd and occasionally duplicitous ways, tolerate the limp sarnies and drink their pissy eurofizz. On more than a hundred grand a year we'd like you, KP and Mr Prior to do the same.
 
Us Poms spent much of the last 20 years trying to ape Australian ways. I suspect there's another lesson to be learnt here. From Tugga's adoption of an Indian orphanage to Brett Lee starring in Bollywood films, can their success in India be in some way attributed to embracing their Indian hosts, both the good and the bad bits? And as the subcontinent emerges as pre-eminent cricketing power, the England team should be seen to be gracious tourists for both cricketing and political reasons. Hopefully both English averages and our reputation abroad will be assuaged in coming months.

Deep breath. Focus. Find the zone. Begin. In the name of all that's fucked and buggered in the world, did it have to be quite so pitifully limp, as if John Inman had cross bred with a lobotimised Alan Bennett and the resultant foetus had been gang bitten by a particularly sickly swarm of Tsetse fly. It all started so macho. Let's bat. After all, we hadn't tried that before. Let's win the toss and bat. Under cloudy skies. On a juicy wicket specially prepared for Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. Let's finally sodding bat. We're 'ard we are. We're 1-0 up. We're the Daddies. For one ball. Well actually for less than one whole ball. For the run up and briefly before the bat turned in the limp wrist of the French courtesanly Strauss, and the quite brilliant catch at (an admittedly idiosyncratically placed) short leg. No longer the Daddies. And from that point it got worse. 

Much has been said of England's attitude after the Harper caught behind that never was. But we were in mind melt well before then. Trott may not have been ready to bat (if so this displays an astounding lack of imagination or just terrible time keeping), but even that cannot explain his 1st innings (second no better but at least it took a decent ball to be shot of him). It was as if he had got pissed in the green room of some futuristic game show based on Bullseye but now cricket themed in which he had to face 9 balls for charity, and being such a cold eyed bastard (see Chris Mason, or Kevin Painter) he couldn't really give a toss about the Hardwick Hospice and decided he'd try out some trick shots he learned in the nets when doing a session with Gary Player on South African "TV". KP is just plain confused at the moment (and a confused KP is a useless KP. All his power lies in his misplaced self confidence and we must  do nothing to derail this if we want runs - if we want to punish him, surely our time will come, when we have no more use of him, in about 6 years). Even the redoubtable Colly went nuts before lunch, and once you start a collapse it's very difficult to stop it (without a number 7 like Boucher, Gilchrist or Haddin).

South Africa showed how to bat on that pitch, and England inexplicably left out Onions in favour of a man who'd hardly played cricket in six months and was 7 mph slower anyway. Further evidence of England's sudden failure to learn from what they'd achieved hitherto. They stayed in the series by batting second and therefore being in the game for long enough to give them survival options. Obviously a good team would bat first when possible, but England, by comparison with their opponents and on foreign wickets were always second best. Suddenly they thought they were good. Much as they did at Headingley in 2009 and came dreadfully unstuck. Strauss's England is at its best when it knows its place. Then all its character can flourish. But without a proper reliable strike bowler and with Collingwood leading the batting while KP undergoes an intensive 24 session course of Neuro Linguistic Programming, England must look to scrap for as long as possible, which is why batting second allows them to assess the conditions within the confines of the unfolding match. Asked to set the tone, their batting will fall apart.

Yes Harper's decisions were crazy. He's clearly as mad as a mongoose. But in a nice, monstrously stoned way. He can't hear stuff, he can't see stuff. But it's all quite benign. He should obviously be released from the elite panel. Maybe he can umpire at the Paralympics. 

But 1-1. It's not bad. And surely that's the right result. Is it bollocks. The right result would have been another draw with England hanging on but hopefully only 7 down as rained flooded the High Veldt after lunch on the fifth day. South Africa had four notable and consistent batsmen (Smith, Amla, Kallis and Boucher)  and one very good bowler in Steyn. England don't have those resources, but they're canny game players and must always be aware of their limitations if their game sense is to going to win out. That means in this case not dropping Onions and bowling first on winning the toss.

Sod it. Harumph. So annoying. But it could yet be a high water mark. I've seen Sakib ul Hassan and Mushifiqur Rahim against India. My advice? Bowl first and hope for the Chittagong sea fret to save us.

It's three days after the 8 hours of agony before, and I've just about managed to sew my legs back together. Only functioning on one kidney, though. Which is better than many of our listeners who have variously complained that being forced to remain stock still from the moment South Africa took the new ball after lunch to Onions' final act of heroism (leaving a regulation delivery from Morkel drifting harmlessly 18 inches past his off stump) has resulted in melted adrenal glands, burst bladders, total physical organ failure (chap on an exercise bike non stop for 5 hours) and uncontrollable sobbing.

All of you have taken the credit for England's draw-that-is-really-a-win and frankly you all deserve it more than Bell, Colly and Onions who by comparison emerged pretty much unscathed. But who should take the credit for England's late evening mini collapse that ensured that Onions would get the credit? Credit for that must go to co-commentator Manny who had been unavoidably delayed until the beginning of the last hour. All credit to him, he saw the game was meandering to an easy draw and within 96 seconds Colly was on his way, deceived by Duminy (and credit to Manny again for spotting that Duminy deserved the credit for being the only South African who spins the ball). Huge credit, though, to the sofa's quick thinking commentary team that dislodged Manny from the ball by ball attack immediately, which at least had the credit of slowing England's collapse. But when Bell departed to the first ball of Morkel's last spell (and credit where it's due; an inspired change by Muppet Captain Smith), England were staring down the barrel with the very last of their credit almost spent. But, and it takes a big man to do this, real credit has to go to Manny for leaving the sitting room and pacing round the kitchen with his lucky portable radio listening to our over-excitable proteges on the BBC, only to emerge when he'd seen the job through and left that final Morkel delivery.

However, amid all the pandemonium that spewed forth in those last desperate moments, an injustice of immense proportions was narrowly avoided thanks to the intervention of that rarest of breeds; the competent on field umpire. To the penultimate ball of the final over, Onions backed away, tucked his bat just inside the line and the ball feathered his right sleeve at the elbow. South Africa appealed, but in a game of shocking howlers, for once the umpire got it right. What if he hadn't? What if it had been given and inevitably referred? We have seen in this series that the absence of a snickometer and Hot Spot cameras has meant that decisions given either way have only a small chance of being overturned on appeal owing to the lack of incontrovertible evidence from the straight on cameras. England would have lost a test match and Manny would have been denied the credit that is his due.

During the course of day four at Cape Town, we on the sofa investigated the absence of Hot Spot in some detail following an email from listener and blogger Paddle Sweep (paddlesweep.in) that implied the cost must run into millions (of what, more anon). To give Paddlesweep his credit, it was a fair assumption. After all, if only the England and Australian broadcasters have use of them, they must be rare and expensive, you would think. But think again. The full story is covered in impressive detail by Paddle Sweep on his own blog, but suffice to say that after calling the manufacturers, we on Test Match Sofa were assured that you could pick one of these  cameras up for £20,000. You need four to be totally effective (the side on cameras getting the really faint nicks), so a total of £80,000 is required. Given there are only 7 test playing nations without them, £560,000 is required to kit out the entire world of test cricket. A massive sum of course, for the likes of the ICC which recorded operating profits of a measly £20m in 2007, or indeed the BCCI which is barely staying afloat with its £61m of profit from the IPL alone.

So, in an act of Getty-esque generosity, and again big credit to us boys (and girl) at Test Match Sofa, we are starting a campaign which has already raised £92 of credit. £50 from every listener and we'll hit our target. We shall then donate the cameras to each test playing nation's board on the proviso that all Hot Spot referral decisions (now to be called Test Match Sofa Moments of Destiny) are referred not to the off field third umpire but rather to whoever is on commentary on the Test Match sofa at the time. It's a small price for the cash poor world of international cricket to pay to the people who really deserve the credit for the revival of test match cricket, and Manny in particular.

Listen to Last Over 3rd Test In Full.

Listen to 3rd Test, Cape Town, 5th Day Highlights.