T HE I NDEP ENDEN T V O I C E O F CR I C K E T

SPINWWW.SPINCRICKET.COM

BOB WILLISANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

...AND HOW DID AUSTRALIA GET SO BAD?

ENGLAND’S FINAL FRONTIERFull World Cup Guide

WHO REPLACESCOLLY?

REBUILDING HAMPSHIRE

HOW ENGLAND WON THE ASHES...

JAMES FOSTERMIKE HENDRICKWILLIAM PORTERFIELD

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011

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6 LEADING EDGEWith Miles Jupp, Test Match Sofa,

William Porterfield, Gautam Bhimani’s World Cup tour, a brilliant new ’70s West Indies film and George Dobell sticking up for Allen Stanford. Plus inside the life of a professional cricket gambler and much much more.

14 JAMES FOSTEREngland stumper on making his Test

debut at 21 and whether he’ll get another go.

24MIKE HENDRICK Former England pacer on a near-miss

in the 1979 World Cup final – and what he’s been up to since.

28BULLETIN The inside track on county cricket.

This month: Leicestershire, Glamorgan and Worcestershire.

32BOB WILLIS Sky Sports’ gantry nay-sayer on

hypnotherapy, meeting Steve Harmison after dark and whether England weren’t really much cop in the ’80s.

36WHO REPLACES COLLY? Wanted: reliable middle-order batter

who can bowl a bit. Or... do England have other options when it comes to balancing their post-Collingwood XI?

40WHY ENGLAND WON The ten reasons behind this winter’s

glorious Ashes triumph.

46WHY AUSTRALIA LOST The many many reasons (and some

red herrings) behind Australia’s Test slump.

56WORLD CUP PREVIEW Your 14-page instant guide to the

tournament, kicked off by the BBC’s man in India, Rahul Tandon.

68THE ROSE BOWL Rod Bransgrove on the inside story of

the making of a Test ground. Plus can the other eight all survive and prosper?

REGULARS

26 SUBSCRIBE TO SPIN Brilliant offers. No catch. 76 BOOKSDavid Foot on his 60-plus years as a cricket writer.

82 THE THIRD UMPIREFreddie Flintoff’s new extreme sports show. On ITV4. Is it any good? Well, what do you think?

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Welcome to SPIN. This is issue 59 of our magazine but the first to be fully available for digital download – so a particular welcome to you if you are finding us for the first time.In this issue: we explain the background to England’s win in Australia this winter – while, in a wide-ranging and thought-provoking piece, Aussie Jarrod Kimber searches for the roots of the Baggy Greens’ Test failure.

Can England add the 50-over World Cup to last year’s World Twenty20 title? We have a full 14 page team-by-team guide analysing what they are up against.

Join us at spincricket.com and on twitter/spincricket. Enjoy the magazine! Message ends.

SPINISSUE 59

Contents

THE TALE OF THE TAPETHE THIRD UMP’S MONTH IN CRICKET TV

51 Back at the cliffs where, the voiceover reminds us, “one false move could lead to a nasty case of death.” The voiceover is not being done by Bob Willis. But plainly it should be (“One false move could lead to a nasty case of death, Charles.”)

56 The pair are going to build up to jumping off the cliff by jumping off little ledges further down. Fred starts at three metres. “I can go higher,” he says, then does. He goes to ten metres. So does Gough. It still looks insane. Just not 100ft insane.

63 Now I see. Due to insurance reasons, the pair aren’t allowed to go higher! Ah, that’s TV, folks. You didn’t really think they’d jump from the top of a cliff, did you? What are you? 12?

65 ”When you retire you never know if you’re going to feel the same rush again. Today I’ve experienced that ten-fold,” says Fred, looking genuinely emotional.

Sorry, readers: this is, weirdly, must-watch TV, with genuinely dangerous challenges in exotic locations, undercut by Flintoff’s banter and a well-judged Come Dine with Me-ish voiceover. Fred himself is an affable Everyman presence and, so, a TV natural. If you thought Phil Tufnell was ubiquitous, I suspect you ain’t seen nothing yet.www.twitter.com/thethirdumpire

E xtreme sports, readers. Jumping off bridges. Wrestling with sharks. Going to Wetherspoons. Normally the preserve of Antipodeans,

people who are no good at proper games or Trustafarians called ‘Ed’, ‘Jez’, or ‘Olly’, loafing round the world with no apparent purpose in an artfully-scruffy denim bubble that affects classlessness, though oddly enough includes only those who have serious money behind them.

But not now. Not now Freddie Flintoff is undertaking his suicide tour of the Americas in Freddie Flintoff versus the World. When he refused to sign a central contract in 2009, the suggestion was that Fred might want to go bunghee jumping for fun. In fact, it turns out, Fred was looking to risk his life for ITV4.

And why wouldn’t you? You can keep your Sky Atlantic. ITV4 has

cricket highlights! And Minder reruns! And The Professionals! As the rest of TV gets feminised into oblivion, ITV4 is the last remaining bloke ghetto (Sky Sports doesn’t count.) It’s like a warm bath for people who don’t like washing all that much.

The only things about ITV4 that aren’t like a warm bath are the hopeless pretend-geezer stings for Tetleys. And edgy satirist Chris Addison’s edgy and satirical insurance ads. These fill me with ennui, rage and despair. Perhaps that’s the idea.

Anyways. FFVTW sees England’s erstwhile talisman take on sporting ‘legends’ at a series of insane challenges. Who are these legends? Well, there’s Dennis Rodman: he could be styled as a ‘legend’, couldn’t he? Who else? Well, there’s, er, Dennis Wise, Iwan Thomas and ‘top’ yachter Ian Walker.

You be the judge, readers.Fred’s first oppo is Dazzler Darren Gough.

7 mins Mexico City. Sightseeing. “Mexico is like really really old, int’it?” quoth the Dazzler. “It’s not where I’d like to live but I’m sure lots of Mexicans enjoy it.” Then, on reaching a massive square. “Oh, look at this, this is quite impressive. This is more like it. This is impressive. Impressive, this.”

Rest easy, Whicker.

10 Acapulco now. A preview of the show finale, where the pair will apparently jump off 100 ft high cliffs into the choppy water

below. The task looks genuinely insane. “A couple of beers and you’ll be fine,” quips the pair’s trainer. “I don’t think there’s enough beer in Acapulco for me to do that,”says Fred, possibly recalling an early draft of the pitch for the show.

19 Event 1: England’s most celebrated drinkers cricketers will be going head-to-head 6000 ft above Mexico. At Paintball Paragliding. Via POV Freddiecam and Goughiecams, we follow the action. Two overgrown boys shooting pellets at each other miles up in the air. Positively Reithian.

35 Event 2: Wrestling. Flintoff and Gough eyeball-to-eyeball. Flintoff – already, brilliantly, injured – shouting at the Dazzler: “I can’t fight but I’ve got the best wrestler in the whole of Mexico and he’s going to KICK YOUR ASS.”Not words you can hear coming from the mouth of fellow erstwhile ‘New’ ‘Botham’ Derek ‘Pring’ Pringle, certainly.

43 The masked Mexican has his foot on the Dazzler’s throat. Gough soon makes his excuses and exits the ring.

WWW.SPINCRICKET.COM

‘If you think Tufnell is ubiquitous, I

suspect you ain’t seen nothing yet…’

BACK PAGE THE THIRD UMPIRE’S CLUB

A bit camp, Freddie. But who’s going to

tell him?

LEADING EDGE

WHISTLE-BLOWER

As Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir begin their lenghthy bans for spot-fixing and face corruption charges in the UK courts, cricket has much to thank the Pakistani actress Veena Malik for. The former girlfriend of Mohammad Asif spotted him for a wrong ’un early on and has fed much useful info to the ICC which, to that point, had convicted just one player of dodgy dealings in the previous five years. “I had got death threats but I did not care,” said Malik after the verdicts. “I knew, what I did was right. I follow cricket and I follow it very religiously. A lot of my emotions are involved with the game. The corrupt must be exposed and punished. I knew that Asif was neck-deep in corruption and I always tried to expose it.”

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COSMETI C CHANGEAs we’ve seen from London’s recruitment drive for the 2012 Olympics, major sports events have a way of sucking in the local population. Except, perhaps, in Bangladesh, where ahead of the World Cup, local authorities in Chittagong were paying the city’s beggars money to get out of town. The 300 disabled indigents are being paid £1.20 a day to be compensated for loss of ‘earnings’ as the council ships them out to make things lovely for visiting cricket fans. The deal, which included an offer to stay in out-of-town rehab centres, was struck after talks with beggars’ representatives. Beggars’ representatives!

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011 SPIN 21

this month’s biggest…

TRIPEngland spent the post-Ashes one-day series in some kind of a daze, but the decision to fly in Liam Plunklett from the Lions tour in the Caribbean for the final, dead, ODI at Perth seemed like a sledgehammer to crack a nut by anyone’s standards. Arriving via Miami and Hong Kong, Pudsey bolstered an injury-plagued squad that was down to the bare bones. He opened the bowling, took 2/49 and made 20 in a routinely doomed run chase, in his first ODI in nearly a year. And then went home. Well, how far would YOU go for your big chance?

COMEBACKLesser men would have given up ages ago, their reputation as one of England’s best performers secure. But Simon Jones, whose last international appearance was in the fourth Test of the 2005 Ashes, is plainly not a man to die wondering, or to hobble away with a head full of what-ifs and if-onlys. Written off so many times after a succession of injuries, his latest comeback came in the Caribbean T20. Jones was joint leading wicket-taker in the tournament with 12 at 10.25 and an economy rate of 5.59, helping Hampshire to the final where they lost to T20 specialists Trinidad & Tobago. What price an England T20 call this summer?

SLAP-DOWNWas Shane Warne one of the great lost Test captains, his cricket brain denied thanks to off-field indiscretions? Longtime team-mate, Big Fish Matty Hayden reckons not. In his new book, the Fish says that Warne, though a great strategist, would not have done better than Steve Waugh or Ricky Ponting, as his disregard for team rules would have stopped him building team spirit. Haydos recalled the pre-2006 Ashes bootcamp, when Warne turned up with a load of cigarettes. “Warnie said, ‘They are medicinal. I will do whatever you want me to do, but if these don’t go, the King is not going’. The King got his way. “I laughed at the incident ... great talent often comes with a bit of rebelliousness. Deep down, I had mixed feelings about it.”

SLAP IN THE FACENot since the Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs mocked Slipper of the Yard by 1) escaping to Brazil for 30 years and 2) making a record with the Sex Pistols has the miscreant/showbiz crossover been more eyebrow-raising. Fresh from being banned from playing cricket for ten years, ex-Pakistan skip Salman Butt was snapped up by Pakistan’s Channel 5 TV to provide punditry on the World Cup. “I got a good offer and since I am doing nothing I thought this would allow me to test a new area in cricket,” said Butt. Hmmm.

INDIA EXPECTS

WORLD CUP LETTER FROM INDIA

Cricket is coming home. Lord’s may be the spiritual home of the gentleman’s game but India now runs it. This World

Cup will last 45 days. Some, like Kevin Pietersen, think it’s too long. But there’s a few hundred million cricket fans here who disagree. India is about to go cricket crazy and when MS Dhoni leads his players on to the pitch it will come to a standstill. If you are trying to get through to an Indian call centre when Sachin is batting… my advice to you is to put the phone down. In the cities, tools will be downed and in villages all over this vast country hundreds of people will huddle around a single TV set to watch their favourite son.

In the cities, India’s new cash rich young middle class will watch him on their state-of-the-art 3G phones. Even Bollywood is shutting down for the duration of the tournament. If you go to an Indian multiplex during the World Cup you will find Sachin and Viru on the big screen rather than Shahrukh Khan or Ashwariya Ray.There is no other country on this planet that is as obsessed with a sport the way that India is with cricket.

India’s journey to financial domination of the game began with the team’s victory in the 1983 World Cup. Minutes after Mohinder Amanarth had trapped Michael Holding in front of his stumps, Kapil Dev was spraying everyone with champagne whilst Srikkanth threw convention to the winds and puffed merrily on a cigarette from the Lord’s balcony. Cricket would never be the same again. The team returned home as unexpected heroes. A concert featuring India’s most famous

singer Lata Mangashekar was organised to try and raise money to reward the players. The man in charge of the show was one Jagmohan Dalmiya. Over the next few years, the construction magnate would emerge as the strongman of Indian cricket. His aim was simple: to shift the centre of power of world cricket to the East. It was not a difficult task. Indians quickly fell in love with the limited overs form of the sport. Millions watched it on television and cricket became a way into one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The sport was transformed.

It is impossible to ignore the World Cup in India. Politicians here are no longer quizzed about corruption; instead they are asked how far India will go in the tournament. Everyone wants tickets. It

can be dangerous trying to get them. At the Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai a number of people were injured after a wall collapsed as fans scrambled to get tickets for the India-West Indies match.

But most Indians will ty at home to watch the game and the endless hours of analysis on the hundreds of Indian news channels. Bollywood stars will be among the experts. In the run up to the tournament there seems to be a promotional event every hour. At each one someone from the Indian team promises to win the tournament for Sachin. Time for new lines and time for the cricket to start.

But while the world’s largest democracy goes mad over its team, will

English fans and players may already be feeling fixture fatigue but, reports the BBC’s man in India Rahul Tandon, on the sub-continent the World Cup is set to traffic-stoppingly massive

Indian fans welcome MS Dhoni’s team after their world T20 triumph in 2007. Top of page: Kapil Dev,

whose side’s win in 1983 changed cricket forever

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the fans turn out to watch Holland play Ireland or even England against South Africa? Ticket prices are high so we may see some small crowds. But as long as the millions keep watching the cricket between the ads on television the money will continue to pour into the sport . Why do you think India are playing six group matches before their almost guaranteed place in the quarter finals ? The World Cup needs India to do well.

So can this Indian team lift the trophy? Will this World Cup be the beginning of an era where they dominate cricket on and off the field? The team has the talent. Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag are match winners.Virat Kohli looks set to be the next Indian batting great whilst Yusuf Pathan could be the man to fill the all-rounder slot left vacant by his brother Irfan. Much though will rest on the broad shoulders of Zaheer Khan now that Praveen Kumar has been ruled out of the tournament . Could Kumar’s replacement – the bad boy of Indian cricket Sreesanth emerge as an unlikely hero ? His colleagues will be hoping that he bowls better than he sings. His latest tune in which he urges his team-mates to fight the battle like a tiger is up there with the worst sports records of all time.

But the key to India’s success will be how captain MS Dhoni shields his players from the pressure. Dhoni knows how unforgiving the India public are. His house

was attacked by more than 200 fans after India lost by five wickets to Bangladesh in the last World Cup. I can still vividly recall a shaken Sachin Tendulkar in Harare appealing for calm after India made a poor start to the 2003 tournament. I have this horrible feeling that the weight of expectation will see this team implode during the knockout stage. Expect to see a number of the Indian team making a quick gateway to England if that happens. Maybe we will see another cricketer seeking political asylum .

But this tournament will pose bigger questions for the sport, beyond India’s success or failure. The ICC need a

successful tournament. Most people remember the last World Cup for the death of Bob Woolmer rather than the action on the field . It was a tournament where Detective Mark Shields’ investigations got more attention than Matthew Hayden’s brilliance at the crease. This time it is being held under the shadow of match- fixing. It may be illegal but billions of pounds will be bet on the matches here. Senior police officers have told me that they believe that politicians and the underworld in India are still trying to influence results.

Cricket and the World Cup need India to

wield its growing financial power with a bit more dignity. The early signs though are not good . The inability to get Eden Gardens ready for the India-England match is an indication of the staggering lack of professionalism in cricket administration here. One senior official jokingly told me before the decision to move the match that nothing would happen as the ICC is really the Indian Cricket Council. India’s most charismatic cricket administrator in recent times has been Lalit Modi. But the man who established the IPL is currently in London – consulting with his lawyers as he fights corruption charges. The time has come

for ex-cricketers to run the game in India, not politicians or businessman. Anil Kumble’s brave and surprising decision to enter cricket

administration could be the best thing to happen to the game here in a decade .

But for the next few weeks let’s hope we are talking about the action on the field. Enjoying the brilliance of Tendulkar , Ponting and Muralitharan at their last World Cup, watching the cornered tigers of Pakistan confounding expectations – maybe England lifting it for the first time. The 50-over form of the sport must show that it is still a relevant format in the face of the growing popularity of T20 .The cricket World Cup is coming to its new home – more than a billion people will be hoping it will stay for the next four years.

‘The World Cup needs India to do well. But I have a horrible feeling that the weight of expectation will see the team implode’

Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh: just two of the players out to do it for Sachin

(right) in (possibly) his last World Cup

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011 SPIN 55

The giant-haired demon fast bowler, Ashes hero and England captain, now equally well known for his fearless nay-saying in the Sky gantry, answers readers’ enquiries

B ob Willis has had less opportunity of late to berate the England team from the Sky studio than in days of yore.

Once, his voice cracking with rage and exasperation, Willis could lay into Freddie Flintoff (“batting like a blind man, unfortunately”), Steve Harmison (“if you don’t like going abroad, you’re in the wrong job, mate”) or the inadequacies of the game’s powers that be, more generally (“Heads will roll!”). His sad reflection on a Peter Moores interview after defeat in New Zealand in 2008 should surely go straight into dictionaries of quotations. “How many times did we hear the word, ‘disappointing’? But it’s not disappointing , Charles, it’s unsatisfactory.”

So much has Willis found his late-career niche as the pundit who tells it like it is that younger viewers may not fully appreciate exactly how great a player he was. Good enough to make his England debut aged just 21, on the victorious 1970/71 Ashes tour under Ray Illingworth, Willis did not play the last of his 90 Tests until 1984: remarkable longevity for a fast bowler, especially one who endured career-threatening surgery on both knees in 1975. Willis won back-to-back championships with different counties (Surrey in 1971; Warwickshire in 1972) but his pinnacle, of course, was to come in the 1981 Ashes : at Headingley, his ire-fuelled 8/43 skittling Australia for 111 and finishing off the comeback started by Ian Botham.

Willis’ tally of 325 wickets for England at

WILLIS BOB

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25 apiece has, still, only been bettered only by his Sky colleague Botham. He captained England 18 times, too, between 1982 and 1984. A longtime advocate of reform within the English game, Willis’ views off-air are as trenchant as on – though delivered with a little less of the vaudevillian deadpan.

Does England’s Ashes win prove that the Championship is of a higher quality than the Sheffield Shield, after all? Daniel Mitchell[Chuckles]. Erm... I think that’s a little bit of a simplification. I think that two divisions has certainly help the county programme and the first division has some very strong cricket these days. I was doing some work during the Ashes with Steve Harmison and he said that the standard of the first division is pretty high now. But the second division isn’t.

My plan has always been to have a concentration of the best players within a few teams. Three divisions of six would be the way I would go. The standard of first division county cricket has gone up and certainly the standard of Sheffield Shield cricket has gone down. Australia’s national team have suffered from all their players getting old together and retiring over the space of a couple of years. So I wouldn’t entirely agree. I would say England’s success is more down to central contracts than the county championship.

You often played for us at Warwickshire the day after a five-day Test had finished. How do you think central contracts would have helped your own career?Paul Smith [ex-Warwickshire team-mate]I think anybody would have benefitted from having a central contract. I think Imran Khan was the first person to say it was impossible to bowl fast seven days a week. And the intensity of the county programme then and, indeed, now, is overwhelming. The fact that England players can now be rested from the grind of day-to-day county cricket would certainly have benefited me. [SPIN: Did that grind contribute to your injuries?] No, I think the injuries early in my career were because I wasn’t fit enough and my body wasn’t resilient enough to the demands fast bowling put on it . When I got myself fit, from 1977 onwards, I had far fewer injuries. So getting fit was the most important ingredient for me.

How far did you used to run in the close season to build your leg strength?Paul FrameI used to run about five miles a day. Every day throughout the winter.

You once said county cricket supporters were “trainspotting misfits.” I am neither. Do you regret saying that now? Jane Hyatt Yes, I’m afraid I did say that, in the company

of David Graveney, possibly before central contracts came in. We were talking about the priority county cricket was given but I think the county members are sometimes too pampered by the way that cricket is put together: the counties always baulk at making changes to the fixtures that are going to benefit the England team. So the fixtures are put together for the benefit of county members and there ends up being far too much cricket and it’s dotted around like pebbledash and nobody knows when matches start.

SPIN: don’t members want fewer, more meaningful games, though?

I don’t know. Some seem to want wall-to-wall Twenty20, others seem to want county cricket on a Saturday… it’s difficult to know. There’s clearly a war between the first-class game and the one-day game.

SPIN: What feedback did you get on those comments when you met county members?

Quite a lot of them approached me and told me I’d got it wrong, that they were the lifeblood of cricket. But when I hear comments from Stephen Coverdale, the then-chief executive of Northants, saying that he’d rather Northants won the Championship than England won the Ashes, that underlines

where people have got their priorities wrong.

Does the 6-1 defeat in the one-dayers prove that England still don’t take ODI cricket seriously?David PritchardWell, I think they certainly take it seriously. I think the programme was a pretty bad one and a bit of an anti-climax for the guys after the Ashes. But we don’t seem to be able to grasp one-day cricket at international level. Certainly the batting part of it. I think since Marcus Trescothick retired from international

READERS QUESTIONS BOB WILLIS

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ANALYSIS WHY ENGLAND WON

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ASHESENGLANDwon the

England had not won the Ashes Down Under for 25 years – yet this winter they romped home 3-1, thanks to three innings defeats of Australia. How?WORDS George Dobell and Gemma Wright

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010 SPIN 37

SelectionRemember those grim years when the England selectors changed the team so often that even they couldn’t remember all the names? Ted Dexter mistakenly calling Devon Malcolm, ‘Malcolm Devon’ springs to mind. But, whereas England used 29 players during the drubbing of 1989 and 24 in 1993, they used only 13 players this time. And that’s despite an injury to Stuart Broad.

That policy of continuity of selection has allowed the team to play with confidence and relax in the knowledge that they are not always fighting to save their careers. It’s played a huge role in

England’s resurgence. If only Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash had enjoyed such treatment.

The best example on this occasion came in the form of Alastair Cook. England’s opening batsman had endured a tough time before the Ashes. He had passed 29 just once in 10 Test innings and, by his own admission, “couldn’t hit a beach ball.” But it seems Cook’s place was never in doubt. According to Ashley Giles – one of the England selection panel – Cook would have been assured of his place in the Ashes squad even if he had not scored a Test century against Pakistan in the third Test at the Oval last August. While England may well have taken an

extra opener had Cook not made that ton, Giles insists that the management’s faith in Cook mental strength – and their belief that such a quality was vital in the abrasive atmosphere of an Ashes tour – never wavered.

The selectors also did well to identify many of the better players in county cricket. Many had given up on Chris Tremlett, but the selectors – and England’s bowling coach, David Saker – noted his improved form after moving to Surrey from Hampshire last summer and were fully vindicated for showing faith in him.

The decision to drop Steve Finn after Perth was also justified. But if the move seemed controversial at the time – Finn