Hallelujah to the news that MCC is to reject a plan to name Lord’s after a sponsor. Watching England play India in the ToffeeCrispStadium @Lord’s.org would have just felt wrong.

There is a certain poetry to the naming of cricket grounds. For more than a century, Test cricket has been played at Lord’s, Trent Bridge, Edgbaston and Old Trafford without the need to adorn the ground with a sponsor’s name.

Co-naming rights may have been signed for The Oval and Headingley - and how the addition of Brit and Carnegie grates - but nothing jarred quite as much as when the first Test of last summer’s Ashes series was staged at the SWALEC Stadium.

The problem was not that the match was played in Wales. It was that the ground used to have the far more attractive name of Sophia Gardens, until the South Wales electricity board bought a ten-year sponsorship deal in 2008 for £1.5 million. The only plus was the irony that it ambushed a series sponsored by npower, SWALEC’s competitor.

Yet the original name for the Cardiff ground was itself a form of sponsorship. Sophia Gardens was named after the wife of the second Marquess of Bute, who arranged for land in Cardiff to be put aside for sport in the late 1800s.

For that matter, what was the naming of Lord’s in 1787 but an early sponsorship deal? Thomas Lord was a Yorkshire wine merchant who had been approached by Lord Winchilsea, the patron of the Hambledon cricket club in Hampshire, to build a ground in London. Winchilsea said that Lord would be free to stick his own name on the ground as a reward.

Surely that was sponsorship. The only difference is that 200 years of tradition has given the name authenticity. Likewise, modern baseball fans could not imagine the Chicago Cubs playing at a ground named anything but Wrigley Field, although the stadium changed its name Read more…

Administrator England Blogs.CMDN.com, Cardiff, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Edgbaston, Hampshire, Headingley, Lord's, MCC, Old Trafford, Sophia Gardens, South Wales, SWALEC, The Oval, Trent Bridge

The Wall stands as strong as ever after a brilliant but scandalously overlooked century against Sri Lanka

Spare a thought for Rahul Dravid. Even on the day that he made one of his finest Test centuries against Sri Lanka, most of the news headlines were given over to comments made by a cartoonist-turned-right-wing ideologue. But Bal Thackeray’s critical remarks were aimed at Sachin Tendulkar, and nothing gets India into a lather quite like unkind words about its cricketing Peter Pan. So, though Tendulkar’s first innings of a third decade in Test cricket lasted just three balls, Dravid’s magnificent 177, which led the team from the wilderness of 32 for four to 426 and included his 11,000th Test run, became “in other news”.

He’s had enough time to get used to it though. Cults of personality are rare in team sport but when present, they can be especially fanatical. Most people can name only one player from the Argentina team that won football’s World Cup in 1986. With El Diego around, who could spare the time for Jorge Valdano’s finishing or Sergio Batista’s tackling? It was always the No10 and the rest.

In some cases, playing alongside a “living God” can be beneficial. Would Scottie Pippen have been a candidate for Hall of Fame induction without all those years of the opposition having to double-team Michael Jordan? Would Jairzinho have scored in every round of the 1970 World Cup without defences suffering collective paralysis in the presence of Pelé?

There was a time a decade ago when the fall of Dravid’s wicket was celebrated in the stands because it meant that Tendulkar would be walking out in his place. “It’s not easy batting before Sachin, that’s for sure,” he told me the first time I interviewed him. “Most of the crowd are there to watch him – and half the time, I’m waiting to watch him too.”

As the years passed, though, Dravid became just as important to Indian cricket. His nickname may have been The Wall, but in reality, he was the foundation, the rock on which India’s most impressive Test successes were built. Until the home victories against Australia (in Mohali) and England (Chennai) last year, where he was a peripheral figure, Dravid’s batting was Read more…

Administrator Indian Cricket Adelaide, Australia, Blogs.CMDN.com, Brian Lara, Centurion, Chennai, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, England, Headingley, Kolkata, Michael Jordan, Mohali, New Zealand, Perth, Rahul Dravid, Rawalpindi, Sachin Tendulkar, The Oval, World Cup

If you bump into somebody at Wimbledon, you can more or less guarantee that the bumpee will say sorry. Try it: it works, even of you do it on purpose and quite hard. An anthropologist has figures to prove that this is the classic English reaction to being bumped at a railway station. There are certain England batsmen who make the same response after they have creamed a half-volley from an Australia bowler.

I must try making the same experiment at the railway terminus in Sydney. I don’t think I’d get many sorries, not unless the England cricket team and their followers were in town. I’d anticipate something along the lines of “Steady, mite”, or maybe “Easy, mite”. Perfectly acceptable, not at all rude, but not even slightly deferential.

Everybody has been trying to pinpoint what has been amiss with the England middle order in this series. I have the answer: it is that the England middle order is too Wimbledon, too Victoria, too Waterloo. It’s been ever so slightly apologetic. The problem with Nos 3, 4 and 5 is diffidence.

In fact, the trouble with the England cricket team has almost always been diffidence, at least when they play Australia. Every now and then, diffidence is set aside, but in the three centuries in which the two nations have played each other at cricket, more often than not, when Read more…

Administrator Ashes Ashes, Australia, Bell, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, England, Headingley, Jonathan Trott, Paul Collingwood

Thanks to some great cricket from Australia and not so great stuff from England, I managed to grab a couple of extra days off last week. It gave me time to think about where we are going with the game as a whole. I think cricket is in pretty good health overall, but this is my six-point plan to make sure we keep moving in the right direction:

1. Fast-track umpires and raise their wages The standard of umpiring is as low as I’ve known it in 20 years. Yes, it is a difficult job and technology exposes any mistakes, but some of the performances in the Ashes series so far have been pretty ordinary. Players will accept that the odd bad decision gets through now and again. At the moment, there are just too many.

Of the present panel, Asad Rauf is pretty good and Simon Taufel isn’t bad. Rudi Koertzen has been a good umpire, but unfortunately his time has passed. Billy Bowden is inconsistent, which we saw at Headingley. I think Billy can be very good, but sometimes he gets a bit carried away.

Their attitude is crucial. Talking to players and having a friendly nature is imperative, not the “I’m the boss” schoolteacher approach of Daryl Harper — who is unpopular with players — and the attitude that they never make an error. Billy is another who cannot admit a Read more…

Administrator Ashes, Australia, England Asad Rauf, Ashes, Australia, Billy Bowden, Daryl Harper, England, Headingley, Neil Mallender, Paul Reiffel, Peter Willey, Richard Kettleborough, Rod Tucker, Rudi Koertzen, Simon Taufel, Twenty20

In the course of my travels over the last couple of days, I’ve watched Ravi Bopara and Alastair Cook get out for one and four respectively at Lord’s, seen Kent skipper Rob Key score an assured 90 only to miss out on a ton when he was lbw to a straight one at Northampton, and called in at The Oval to sit in on an interview with Mark Ramprakash, to hear him say he’d definitely play for England again, if asked.

What a week this is turning into for speculation, counter-speculation and player watching.

Once Bopara and Cook were dismissed at Lord’s, England selector James Whitaker sat in the media centre, glued to the television, awaiting news of Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott from Trent Bridge.

The skies were leaden and it wasn’t a good day for batting. Who’d be an England selector?

Wholesale changes aren’t needed for the Oval. Yes, England had a horrendous time at Headingley, batted and bowled abysmally, but you don’t become a terrible side overnight (or even in two-and-a-half days as the case may be). Read more…

Administrator Ashes Alastair Cook, Ashes, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Edgbaston, England, Headingley, Ian Bell, Jonathan Trott, Kent, Kevin Pietersen, Leeds, Lord's, Mark Ramprakash, Ravi Bopara, Rob Key, The Oval, Trent Bridge

The dilemma over whether Mark Ramprakash should be recalled to the England XI for the final Ashes Test next week comes down to whether you believe that people can change and grow and become better over time. Those who do not think he should come back watched him try and fail too often in the 1990s. They saw a temperament problem that overshadowed his undoubted talent. After 52 Tests and a feeble record, their argument goes that he has had his chances, lots of them, and it would be a waste of a batting place to try him again.

Yet the fact that his last Test was more than seven years ago stands in his favour. It allows his supporters to claim that he has reformed. No one can say for certain that this is the same Ramprakash who failed before. It has simply been too long since his last chance.

His county form - averaging 91 over the past four years - is not just good, it is awesome. Yes, he is scoring runs against weaker attacks than the Australia XI, but he is not just scoring runs, he is scoring heaps and heaps of runs. Every other century is 150+ and a fifth of his past 30 hundreds have been more than 200. To reject him is to say that county form means nothing. If a former England bowler - Matthew Hoggard, say - was taking 100 wickets every season for four years, there would be a huge clamour to get him back in the side. Read more…

Administrator Ashes, England Ashes, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, England, Headingley, Katich, Mark Ramprakash, Matthew Hoggard, Ponting, Ravi Bopara, Winston Churchill

Despite such an emphatic defeat, England should not panic. All they need is a result pitch, a returning hero, and a miracle

There was fun and frolics to be had on the final morning at Headingley Carnegie, but the last laugh belonged to Australia. This was a crushing victory and the final flourish provided by Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann had no more effect on the punishment dished out than the student who flicks a “V” at the headmaster once his back is turned.

This was the stuff of men against boys. The fresh-faced, almost angelic-looking Broad and the cheeky chappie Swann throwing the blade with abandon and grinning cheerfully, as Australia became ever more ragged, provided some amusement, even solace for a short time.

But when Graham Onions was bowled to give Australia their victory by an innings and 80 runs, the realisation dawned quickly that England had been so utterly outplayed, that the momentum shift was so complete, that hopes of a revival at the Brit Oval are nothing more than mere fancy.

If, before the series began, England had been offered a level scoreline before the final Test, they might well have taken it. But that hypothetical fails to take into consideration Read more…

Administrator Ashes, England Andrew Flintoff, Ashes, Australia, Bill Gordon, Blogs.CMDN.com, Brit Oval, Cook, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Edgbaston, England, Graham Onions, Headingley, Ian Bell, Jonathan Trott, Lord’s, Marcus Trescothick, Mark Ramprakash, Mitchell Johnson, Old Trafford, Owais Shah, Paul Collingwood, Ravi Bopara, Ricky Ponting, Strauss

199 (that’s one delivery short of 200 for the mathematically challenged) legitimate balls were all that were needed to wipe out England on the first day of the 4th Ashes Test. And it all boils down to the power hungry IPL commissioner Lalit Modi and his ilk of money grabbing, infinitely arrogant sychophants.

If it were not for the money making soul less machine called the IPL, our dear old boys Freddie and KP would be strutting around the pitch, tonking the bowlers to all parts of the Headingley pitch. Collingwood and Bopara would play more watchfully if they hadn’t been throwing their bats around for the Delhi Dare Devils earlier in the year. So what if they never played a single match.

Alas even the umpires have been so blinded by the money thrown around by the IPL that they fail to notice bowlers over stepping, ball hitting the arm guard instead of the bat. And the Aussies who didn’t play the IPL (well most of them) reaped the benefits of not doing so.

There was so much class distinction between the haves and the havenots (players playing the IPL v/s players who were not a part of any IPL team) in the England team that team spirit suffered. Read more…

Administrator Ashes, IPL BCCI, Bopara, Collingwood, Headingley, IPL, Lalit Modi

Security has been tightened for the fourth npower Test at Headingley Carnegie this week as English cricket seeks to halt growing criticism of unruly crowd behaviour during the Ashes series.

Concerns about crowd conduct during the third Test at Edgbaston are likely to intensify at Headingley, where drunken elements in the West Stand have been a significant problem in recent years.

When England played South Africa at Headingley last year, 81 people were ejected from the ground during the first three days of the Test match.

Much of the criticism of crowd conduct at Edgbaston has focused on the Barmy Army, the supporters’ group that prides itself on its vociferous support of the England team. The organisation was granted a block of 500 seats at Edgbaston. At Headingley, its area will be restricted to 200 seats, while Vic Flowers, its so-called leader and Jimmy Savile lookalike, and Bill Cooper, the trumpeter, have been discouraged from attending. Read more…

Administrator Ashes Ashes, Barmy Army, Bill Cooper, Blogs.CMDN.com, Carnegie, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Edgbaston, English cricket, Headingley, Mike Atherton, Ricky Ponting, South Africa, Vic Flowers, Yorkshire

Tickets for a day at a Lord’s Test can cost £100 – about six times as much as you would pay in Australia or India where the biggest venues are three times the size of the ‘home of cricket’

Lord’s was a 28,000 sell-out for the first four days of the second Test and more than three-quarters full for Monday’s play, which finished before lunch. Being there was a privilege, though, that cost the cricket lover an eye-watering £100, a price the England and Wales Cricket Board felt able to charge because of unanswerable demand.

The ECB say that a minimum of 50,000 tickets could have been sold for each of the opening three days at Lord’s, Cardiff’s Swalec Stadium for the first Test, or Edgbaston, Headingley and The Oval, the five grounds where the 2009 Ashes will be decided. But the ECB are unable to satisfy demand because English Test grounds are too small. While Lord’s is the largest international ground in this country, it will still be only the 16th largest regular Test venue in the world even when its proposed redevelopment is completed.

Wembley and Twickenham, the national football and rugby stadiums, are the wrong dimensions to convert into temporary grounds – unlike, say, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where 100,000 spectators can be packed in for cricket or Australian rules football. The MCG stages nearly 50 matches a year.

In 1953, 549,650 watched England win a five-match Ashes series 1-0, a record for the contest. Five years earlier, 158,000 saw Don Bradman’s Invincibles defeat England at Read more…

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