THE extent of the decline of slow bowling in Australia has been revealed, with figures showing the percentage of deliveries sent down by spinners in the Sheffield Shield competition has almost halved in the past four decades.

The figures were prepared for Cricket Australia and presented to the board’s annual general meeting last week, at which chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch was reappointed for two years, despite the recent Ashes defeat.

Hilditch and his panel have been criticised for sending five spinners through a revolving door to the Test team since Stuart MacGill retired in June last year. But in his report to the AGM, Hilditch said the selectors were placed in the impossible position of having to pluck a spinner, Nathan Hauritz, out of grade ranks for last summer’s Adelaide Test because of the dearth of slow bowlers in first-class cricket.

Australia has had a lack of depth in spin bowling since Shane Warne left the international stage almost three years ago, but the figures expose an alarming decline since the 1960s, when nearly 45 per cent of deliveries were sent down by spinners, compared with 35 per cent in the 1980s, 31 per cent in the ’90s and about 25 per cent this decade. Two of the three leading slow bowlers in last season’s Sheffield Shield - Queensland’s Chris Simpson and South Australia’s Aaron O’Brien - were part-timers, redoubling concerns about the nurturing of specialist spinners in the competition that feeds the national teams.

In five of the past 13 Tests, Australia has not picked a spinner, most controversially leaving Hauritz out of the Ashes decider after mis-reading the pitch at the Oval.

As Bryce McGain said in a recent interview with The Wisden Cricketer magazine, Read more…

Administrator Australia Aaron O'Brien, Adelaide, Andrew Hilditch, Ashes, Australia, Blogs.CMDN.com, Bryce McGain, CA, Chris Simpson, Cricket, Cricket Australia, Cricket Blogs, Greg Chappell, Jason Krejza, Nathan Hauritz, Oval, Sir Donald Bradman, Stuart MacGill

If it was a cunning plan, it certainly worked. Readers, no doubt disgusted with my attempts two weeks ago to banish for good the preamble to the Laws concerning the Spirit of Cricket (and your letters left me in no doubt that you were), are justly toasting me since you have had the pleasure of reading both the Sage of Longparish and CMJ. In the same week, too.

Not much else but the Spirit of Cricket, I suspect, would have pricked these two into action at a quiet cricketing time, but they know more than anyone that one of the advantages of being the incumbent cricket correspondent is The Last Word. In any case, a gauntlet thrown down by the Sage to rewrite the preamble to the Laws of the game, described by me as “well-meaning guff”, is not lightly ignored.

But first, because one of my principal objections to the preamble was that it is impossible to articulate something that means different things to different people, and something that has to be contextualised depending on which part of the world the game is played in, let me encapsulate, briefly, what the spirit of cricket means to me.

You will not be surprised to learn that I don’t think cricket occupies a higher moral plane to other games. Nothing in its history suggests that it does. Its “uniqueness”, as described in the preamble, comes not from the way the game is played but from the game itself. What other sport comes close to matching the ebb and flow of a five-day game, played over two innings, when conditions, over which the participants have no control, play such an integral role?

Anyway, in attempting to articulate what the game means to me, these images were the first that came to mind.

Two photographs, one I know the provenance of and one I do not. When Patrick Eagar was on a “booze cruise” during the tour to the West Indies in 1974, he passed Accra beach, Read more…

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Three o’ clock on a Tuesday morning in January and the streets of New York City are quiet and empty. Businesses are closed, their grates pulled down, rats scurry around looking for food in the chilly winter. It is below freezing outside. However, down in Little Italy, a small bar called Eight Mile Creek is lit up. People are still walking in and the sounds are rowdy. Somewhere inside a man yells, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” a common Australian sporting chant. Tonight, it is being yelled for the Australian cricket team as they take on India on the first day out of five that they will play.

New York City cricket fans come out from all around the city and can be found in the bars at strange hours of the night watching matches being played in sunnier parts of the world. They are a devoted group. For the most part, they have to work hard to find the cricket, as only a handful of places pay for the satellite to air it, usually the bars owned by cricketing nation expatriates.

Cricket, a game that originated in England, is one of the most popular sports in the world but it gets little to no attention in the United States. The major cricketing nations are India, Pakistan, Australia, England, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, South Africa, and New Zealand.

Americans have never understood cricket. One of the things that baffles Americans about cricket, those that have heard of the sport that is, is the idea that it is a game that lasts for five days and could still end in a tie. There are certain characteristics of the sport that don’t sit well with Americans and our need for over-the-top, “the bigger the better”-type theatrics in sport. For instance, in test cricket, all of the players on both teams wear all white uniforms. This tradition is said to suggest that there are no outside judgments once you walk out onto the field. No matter what your class, country, or color everyone is given a fair and equal shot.

The most common question Americans ask is, Isn’t it like baseball? There are similarities, like the fact that you swing a bat to hit a ball being thrown at you in order to score runs, Read more…

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Cricket is working hard to not lose its place in the sun.

THE faithful are sticking to a time-honoured line - ”cricket is the sound of summer” - but even in Jolimont there is recognition that, more than ever, the traditional staple faces an unprecedented challenge to make itself heard.

A scan of the sporting landscape in the months ahead does little to quell the suspicion there will be louder noises heard than willow striking leather.

Omnipresent football and racing’s spring carnival have already overshadowed Australia’s progression to the Champion’s Trophy final in South Africa, and the horses’ hooves will be thundering by the time Ricky Ponting and friends arrive in India later this month for seven one-day internationals, the form of the game that is struggling most to hold a capricious audience’s attention.

The promoters of Australia’s sprinkling of annual golf tournaments, who a year ago recruited John Daly in the hope of attracting some car-wreck style voyeurism, won’t need smoke and mirrors this time around. Having Tiger Woods on the bill for next month’s Masters at Kingston Heath guarantees an almighty moment in the sun.

The Australian Open has become such a crowd-pulling force that organisers need do little more than string a net between two poles to fill Melbourne Park, an enviable situation that’s not about to change in January, given the backdrop this time around. Think defending champion Serena Williams, post her US Open meltdown; Juan Martin Del Potro taking it up to Federer and Nadal; comeback queens Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin; Jelena Dokic and Bernard Tomic, Read more…

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One of the most irritating complaints heard from some Australians this summer has been about Andrew Strauss’s ethnicity. “Aw, mate, he’s just a Saffer like Pietersen,” they say, ignoring the fact that you could not find a more stereotypical plummy-voiced product of the British public school system than Radley-educated Strauss.

Sure, he was born in Jo’burg, but his mother is English and he has lived here since he was 6. Strauss is so English that he sips Earl Grey with pinky extended while watching his team bat from the Lord’s pavilion. He is so typically Pom that his upper lip starts to quiver whenever he hears Elgar. He enjoys queuing (heck, he told my colleague John Westerby today that he was thinking up strategies for Edgbaston in the queue at Legoland). He has English teeth.

Strauss is as English as Andrew Symonds, that Birmingham-born, heavy-drinking, wild pig-wrestling, zinc warpaint-wearer, is Australian.

He was, however, born outside England. I will concede that. In fact, we have had England captains hail from nine countries other than England, including Peru (Freddie Brown), Italy (Ted Dexter) and Trinidad (Pelham Warner). We’re just a multicultural nation with tentacles Read more…

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The cricket ground were ranked from one to five. Property Week has used the information to list every Ashes’ ground in order of the cricketers’ preference by percentage. Drivers Jonas also asked the players’ their thoughts on the controversial decision to have the opening test at Sophia Gardens.

1.) Lords – 89.4%

Unsurprisingly, ‘the home of cricket’ ranked highest in the Drivers Jonas poll. Thirty-one of the 45 cricketers said Lords was their first choice Ashes venue. A further nine said it was their second choice and the remaining five said it was their third choice. Lord’s is set for £400m of further improvements with the Marylebone Cricket Club currently working through plans for a major redevelopment of the ground. Last year Herzog & de Meuron, the architects behind the Bird’s Nest stadium at the 2008 Olympics, were appointed to draw up a masterplan for the redeveloped stadium.

2.) Edgbaston – 72.2%

Warwickshire’s Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham is also not resting on its laurels after achieving the second highest score. Plans for a £30m redevelopment were submitted at the end of last year. A 90,000 sq ft hotel, 150,000 sq ft of offices, 254 homes, 49,000 sq ft of Read more…

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