The BBC appear to have done something to their audio feeds so that they only work in Internet Explorer. Idiots.

Today the England & Wales Cricket Board finally made an official announcement about the until-now-mythical English Premier League. The results are something of a mixed bag.
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In comments someone asked me to explain the “follow-on” rule in cricket. As my answer was getting quite long I decided to make a separate post of it. You can find it here.

It is always nice to be able to praise people for a job well done. This is a follow-up to my report on yesterday’s cricket. Today the England and New Zealand cricket boards got together and agreed to allow a reduction in the mid-game break if the situation demanded it, and the ICC quickly rubber-stamped the agreement. It is unfortunate that it took a farce to force action, but the speed of the response is admirable.

Meanwhile Somerset appear to have found a winning formula at last in the Twenty20. The middle order is starting to make some runs, and they are now routinely fielding three spins bowlers: Blackwell, Banks and Suppiah. More importantly, however, they have worked out how to use Alfonso Thomas. In the last two games he has bowled brilliantly at the end of the innings. Against Glamorgan he took 1-21 from 4 overs and kept Herschelle Gibbs quiet to win the match, and tonight he took 4-27 from 4 overs, including the crucial wicket of Grame Hick. If he keeps turning in performances like that we could yet qualify for the quarter-finals.

And one final note: it seems that Shaun Marsh has been called up into the Australian squad for the Twenty20 game against West Indies. I’m delighted for him. He played really well in the IPL and deserves this chance.

Because I have been asked (see, some people do read the cricket posts).

Yesterday should have seen a 50-over-a-side match between England and New Zealand in Birmingham. In practice it rained much of the day. There are rules to cope with this sort of thing. They eventually started play around 3:00pm, and England managed 24 overs of batting. After the break, New Zealand came out knowing they were operating under the infamous Duckworth-Lewis rules for shortened games. They would have less overs to bat than England. A minimum of 23 were possible in the time available, but if the game could be further shortened and the D/L algorithm would decide who won when the game was stopped. The main concern was that at least 20 overs had to be bowled, otherwise the game would be declared abandoned. (Baseball has a similar rule about the minimum number of innings that must be played.)
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Not particularly because I want to go out, or even because I want the cricket at Edgbaston to be played, but simply because it would stop Agnew and his friends from talking nonsense.

This morning we had two new reasons why Twenty20 was a bad thing. They boiled down to:

• Players will be upset if they lose close games
• All of the additional people now coming to watch cricket might not stay forever

And now we have someone, I think Dougie Brown, going on as if no sportsman had ever been paid to play before. All this stuff about team mates falling out over errors on the pitch, or getting angry with managers, or lying about injuries, is just plain ludicrous. Are the Yankees afraid to play in the World Series in case ARod gets paid more than Jetter? Would Alex Ferguson turn down a Champions League final place because he didn’t want to upset some of his players by leaving them out of the side? Does Ron Dennis spend all his time worrying about whether Lewis Hamilton might have a niggle knee injury that he hasn’t told him about? It is just absurd. The only conclusion anyone can take away from this is that while cricketers might have been paid to play before, they have certainly never treated the game like professionals, because they clearly don’t have a clue how to do so and are driven into a gibbering panic by the idea that they might have to.

Today, for the first time ever, I have turned off the BBC’s cricket commentary in disgust; not once, but twice. For goodness sake, BBC, get some people with brains on the program (like the folks at Sky Sports who did a really excellent feature of the Pietersen switch hit this morning).

Alex Massie has been running an intermittent series of posts in which he selects a cricket team from history based on the first letter of the players’ last name. His latest post is the K team, and it includes an American. Bart King played for the Philadelphians and the USA in the early 20th Century and was one of the pioneers of swing bowling. One of his best achievement was a tour of England in 1908 in which he took 87 wickets in only 10 matches at an average of 11.01. If only the USA had players like that these days.

All you baseball fans know what switch hitting is, right? You bat right-handed or left-handed, depending on whether you are facing a right-handed pitcher or a left-handed pitcher. Simple. Cricket is a bit more complicated.

I don’t know of any cricketers who are genuine switch hitters in the baseball sense of the term. However, a standard tactic in the shorter forms of cricket is to place most of your fielders on one side of the field, and bowl the ball in such a way as to make it difficult for the batsman to hit the ball to the side of the field that is open. So today Kevin Pietersen invented (or at least introduced to the international scene) a new batting tactic. While the bowler is delivering the ball, you change your stance, and your grip on the bat, allowing you to easily whack the ball through the less-defended side of the field. He did it twice, both times hitting the ball for 6 (a home run in baseball terms). Awesome.

Update: Sky Sports has a brief highlights clip including one of the switch-hit shots here.

So, suddenly you can earn big money playing cricket. Forget about the Champions’ League and the IPL, the seriously big money is now in the Stanford Super Stars series (or whatever it ends up being called). For those of you not plugged in to cricket news, this will be a five game series between England and the Stanford Super Stars (presumably mainly West Indians, but you never know, Stanford may get serious about winning), each of which carries a $20 million prize purse. That sum is divided as follows: $1m each of the 12 players in the winning team; $1m for the coaches and the rest of the winning squad; and $7m to be divided between the English and West Indies cricket boards. The latter sum will doubtless include salaries for the losing team.

Naturally there has been a certain amount of doom and gloom predicted, most of it for daft reasons such as worrying how the players will cope under the pressure. Presumably if Agnew were reporting on soccer he’d be calling for penalty shoot-outs to be banned because they upset the players. I’m rather more worried about whether the grand plan actually works. The problem looks like this…
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English cricket got a taste of the Lalit Modi effect today as the Commissioner of the IPL weighed into the debate over who plays for who in the Champions League. As some of you may know, the IPL was a panic reaction by Indian cricket to head off the rebel Indian Cricket League. ICL players have been banned from the IPL, and from playing for their countries, which is why the current New Zealand squad is so weak. Now Modi has thrown England’s Twenty20 competition into chaos by announcing that no team that fields an ICL player will be allowed into the Champions League. There are precisely three English counties that don’t have an ICL player on their books: Essex, Middlesex and Somerset. If Modi is right, and squads are not changed, only those three can qualify for the Champions League, regardless of who actually wins the English Twenty20 Cup.

But that’s a big “if”. Modi is known for his grandstanding, and he must know that a) the Champions League rules are still being drawn up, and b) that the English counties have only a day or so to make up their minds what to do. He’ll be enjoying this, especially after some of the things that English commentators have said about his league.

And not content with upsetting English cricket, Modi has aimed a blow at the Australians as well. As you may recall, there is an outstanding issues as to what happens in the Champions League with players who have been part of more than one qualifying team. The big question here is over Michael Hussey, who could play for either Chennai or Western Australia. Modi’s solution is simple: Indian sides always take precedence, though they will graciously agree to pay compensation to teams who are denied key players. Given that Cricket Australia have been given the task of drawing up the competition’s rules, I can’t see that one flying. But again Modi will be enjoying himself. It is fun to watch too.

My congratulations to Shane Watson whose heroic performances for the Rajastahn Royals have seen him called up to the Australian one-day squad in place of the injured Matty Hayden. Go Royals!

Shaun Marsh is doubtless disappointed. He must have thought he had a chance, given that he and Hayden are specialist opening batsmen and Watson is not, but I’m sure that his time will come.

Seven weeks or so of a game every day and it comes down to this. A sell-out crowd of 60,000. An estimated television audience of 99 million. A pre-match show featuring Cirque du Soleil and a collection of Bollywood singing and dancing stars. And two teams of 11 cricketers, many of whom had never been in anything anywhere near this big in their lives before. Two men, however, were no strangers to the pressure. The Chennai Super Kings were led by Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who also captained India’s victorious team in last year’s Twenty20 World Cup. And in charge for the Rajasthan Royals, Shane Warne, who with Australia has won just about every cricketing honor that there is to win. All we needed now, was a titanic struggle, and boy did we get one!
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IPL action continued in Mumbai today with the second semi-final. Yuvraj Singh’s Punjab Kings’ XI finished second in the league, and were favorites to go on to the finals, but against them were MS Dhoni’s Chennai Super Kings. You may remember that the Super Kings had a superb start to the season, thanks in no small part to their Australian batsmen, Matty Hayden and Michael Hussey. When the Aussies had to leave for their tour of the West Indies Chennai faltered, and barely made the semi-finals, but there they were. And they were also secure in the knowledge that they had beaten the Punjab side twice in the regular season.
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And so, after a month and half of pulsating action, the final chapters of the first IPL season are about to be written. The first semi-final is between the league-topping Rajasthan Royals, led as ever by the wily Shane Warne, and the big-hitting Delhi Daredevils, led by the explosive Virender Sehwag. The match is to be played at the neutral venue of Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai in front of a sell-out 45,000 crowd. Having been the class team of the regular season, the Jaipur side were favorites to win, but they can’t have forgotten the 9-wicket hammering they got from Delhi in their first game of the tournament.
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Through some quirk of the scheduling gods, the final regular season match of the IPL was between the two teams most likely to contest the final. Being two games clear, the Royals could not fail to finish on top of the table. They therefore elected to rest a number of key players: Warne, Smith, Asnodkar and Tanvir. The Kings XI, on the other hand, were determined to prove a point in advance of the playoffs. Stand-in captain Shane Watson won the toss and elected to field, and right from the beginning the Royals were up against it. Shaun Marsh led the charge with a magnificent 115 that saw him claim the trophy for the most runs in the regular season, despite having only played 10 matches. He’s averaging over 74. This kid has got to be in the running for the Australian one-day squad.

Yuvraj was also in fine form. Once he got wound up it was big-hitting all the way. At one point he had scored 31 runs off six consecutive balls, though that was spread over 3 overs from different bowlers. He was also on 49 off 16 balls and looking good to set the fastest 50 of the tournament. However, they were in the last over, and he got himself run out off the next ball trying too hard for extra runs.

The Royals made a decent fist of the run chase, but without Smith and Asnodkar to get them off to a good start they were always behind the asking rate. Irfan Pathan was the hero with the ball for Punjab, conceding only 10 runs off his four overs, and taking the valuable wicket of Younis Khan. In the end, a target of 222 was way too much, but the second-string Royals team did manage 180, a score that was beyond many of the teams in the tournament. Yuvraj will be pleased to have beaten his main rivals, but Warne and Snape will doubtless be pointing out to their men that they almost won with one hand tied behind their backs. It remains to be seen which psychological ploy worked the best.

Mumbai Indians ended their season on a high note with a crushing 9-wicket win over Bangalore. Sachin Tendulkar will have enjoyed finishing the match by hitting a couple of fours off Anil Kumble, but he’ll have to look back on the team’s recent results and know that turning just one of those close finishes into a win would have meant that his team was in the finals. Twenty20 is a game of narrow margins, and it is very unforgiving to a team that cracks under pressure.